Clarion West Write-a-thon: Back on Track

So, yeah, I got derailed in the second week of the Write-a-thon by PAIN.  And spent a lot of time icing and stretching and researching and going to medical appointments and making up work hours to cover that.  And now my leg is becoming functional and the piriformis is considering becoming less angry.  Work is still a bear.

I was getting reorganized.  Then I got food poisoning, yay.  At least it's all given me a lot of time to consider my projects, as well as the fragility of the body and mortality and bunk like that...

I will do six weeks of the original goals from next week on.  June and early July are not my most productive period anyway.  I know, I know... Excuses, excuses...

I did get a chance to focus on research that is much needed, and to rethink the big story problems I've been wrangling with in the novel project.  Weak as an excuse for not writing, but nonetheless needed work.

So, write on...  Redux.

Geek Girl seeks rights from the Brethren

"The relationship that may usher in a new era for gay rights began in a typical way one evening in Greenwich Village. The year was 1963, the restaurant Portofino—a fashionable Friday-night spot for women, and about the only place a white-collar lesbian could be out and at ease. Edith Schlain Windsor (GSAS ’57)—Monroe-esque, cherubic cheeked, and her hair in a perfect flip—was an NYU-trained mathematician and fast-rising IBM programmer, just back from a fellowship at Harvard University. She was tired of being single and past ready to jettison the “therapy” meant to make her straight. ..."

More by Jill Hamburg Coplan here from the NYU alumni mag.  More info than the recent coverage of her seeking to come in early at the SCt in this lawsuit. 

A bit of not-uncommon history: "Thea was more experienced, having been expelled from Sarah Lawrence College for kissing an older woman." ...and, ah, those mafia-owned bars.  The fifties were so cool like in Grease, weren't they?

How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe

I finally got ahold of Charles Yu's book, as an ebook.  So far it's pretty interesting, despite the laconic wordiness that originally made me hesitant.  It's growing on me...  It's kind of zippy and laconic at the same time.  Figuring out how to use Overdrive wasted time I could have spent reading, but it's not bad for phone reading.

"If you see yourself coming out of a time machine, run."  The best line so far.

I'm also reading Game of Thrones, because the GF had it lying around, and then bought it for me when she had to turn the library copy in...  Intensely readable.  It's rare that I truly like high fantasy, but Martin has the right touch to keep me plowing through 800+ pages without noticing the time.  In my youth we read all the Sword of Shannara bools again and again, and this feels like that- what the heck is gonna happen next?  How can things get any worse? 

Writing rule #1: Have the characters make the worst possible choices, every time.  Making this believable is the tough part... But if you can, gold...

Line of Beauty

"Well, it'll soon be over."

"What?  Oh, the election."  Catherine stared out into the drizzle.  "The 80s are going on for ever."

What an awesome photo...

From:   Atenacius.  Very nice.

The Line of Beauty

I'm reading the novel for which Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker prize in 2004.  I read his first novel last year, but I'm finding this one much more readable.

From a review: "At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else."

Yep.  It's the subtle Jamesian social observations channeled through a somewhat naive, self-centered, and ethically unmoored character that make it fascinating.

Hollinghurst wrote of it:

"In the case of The Line of Beauty, the narrative germ was accompanied by a dreamlike perspective of Kensington Park Gardens, a street that, when I first lived in London in 1981, I walked along several times a week on my way to swim at a local baths, and whose imposing houses, rather scruffier then than now, made me wonder about the lives led in them –it was all a part of my romantic sense of London as a scene of infinite possibilities, both real and fictional."

In this discussion of his work, he also discusses the impact of AIDS on the writing of The Swimming Pool Library from 1984 through 1987 (just as ACT UP was forming in NY).  In The Line of Beauty, the protagonist, Nick, comes of age as a gay man starting in 1983, and what the the reader knows about AIDS casts a shadow on his choices.  Sex, drugs, politics, class, race, and even gender in a more subtle way (with Nick very focused on observing men), it's all tightly entwined.

Hollinghurst also wrote, "My whole instinct was to work by irony, and to make the world of money and power that young Nick Guest is drawn to absorb him and then expel him, as if from some phony paradise.  Nick was to be an unpolitical person in an age reconfigured by a political revolution."

This jibes with an astute online review that labeled TLOB a reverse bildungsroman similar to Maurice, where coming of age as a gay man leads to exclusion from society.  In other words, a ghetto novel in the disguise of a study of the ruling class from a gay POV.  Or something.  An interesting angle, definitely, with very compelling prose.

More 80s retrospectives

This old lady got to give a little history lesson to some very nice young gay men today.  One was asking about Bowers v. Hardwick and I started laughing a little, because it made me feel old.  It was the basis for my first arrest at barely 18 and a paper I wrote for 12th grade Civics class.

The visiting-the-Walker show  This Will Have Been Art has some great pieces in it, and certainly evokes the era in style and political content.  It made me want to see more than one Basquait, Weems,or Kruger, but the chance to see Gregg Bordowitz' "Fast Trip, Long Drop" and Gran Fury posters and Marlon Riggs getting some attention again was worth the trek to Free Thursday.  I may have to go back to see Nan Goldin's slideshow.

The series of shots of Keith Haring putting up his signature pieces in the NY subways was very cool.  And "Wild Style," wow...  Memories of kids toting linoleum or rug pieces and tearing it up, with non-saggy pants and those MJ style jackets...

Reviews and reading

This Strange Horizons review of Rebecca Ore's second Vel book makes me feel better about feeling this way about the first book, despite the high wow factor of the concept.

I'm reading another Aqueduct Press book right now, Brit Mandelo's analysis of Joanna Russ, We Wuz Pushed.  It's quite interesting, with lots of quotes that both enhance the points being made and jog my memory of the books. 

The focus is on truth-telling as Russ's project, which rings true to me.  That's part of why I balk at the concept of the Heiresses of Russ anthology series.  Lesbian protagonists I'm all for, but that was not really the point or primary contribution of Russ, as far as I can tell.  Stories with scalpel blade analysis and finely pointed rage, yes...  Truth telling in this day and age, where we know so much and yet so little about other people, takes...  I dunno. 

I have to read that book before critiquing, but the title has been kind of a put-off.  Who can live up to *that* expectation?

Two exciting new documentaries

Two documentaries about ACT UP are playing festivals.  I'm half tempted to go to LA for part of Outfest to catch them.  If it weren't for the work thang...  well, and the cost.

Gonna have to talk to someone about bringing some of these movies here.  After several years of blah, suddenly there's a panoply of queer movies that sound well-made and fascinating in subject matter and narrative style.

Here's a very in-depth interview with activist Peter Staley from Treatment Action Group/ACT UP and David France, the director of How to survive a plague .  The interviewer in a video on a different site reminded me too much of the interviewer of James Whale in "Gods and Monsters." 

The lengths France went to get footage random individuals shot at demos and meetings is pretty amazing alone.  And Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard collected a whole other ton of archival material and interviews for their film, United in Anger.  Must-sees for me, with what I'm trying to remember to write about that era and ACT UP.

TC Boom

The best half I never ran...

No one did.  They demoted it to a 5 mile, what with 85 degrees plus at 5 a.m. and a dew point now at 76.  92, feels like 100+.  And not that dry heat, like Tucson used to be until they planted olive trees and people put in lawns and golf courses...

I have been sidelined by back pain, treated by my chiropractor, and then straining/spraining my left calf and ankle.  Massive ball of pain through Sunday, when some online research paid off and I found piriformis stretches that eased the butt, hip, and thigh pain and stopped it radiating down to the ankle.  Now I'm just icing, taking ibuprofen, massaging,and slowly working on stretches to loosen up my angry calf.

The GF's swag above, though at least I got a t-shirt and glass...  I can't say I'm jealous.  I hate running in heat.  I was hoping to do my first half marathon, but now will have to start all over again.  :(.

I can't complain about the heat, though, because my brother's family in DC was without power in that sweltering mess for several days.  Reading all day about horrible diseases and their progression puts acute injuries into perspective, too...

Any way.  Happy 4th, or protest day, depending on which tack you take.  Stay cool, if you can.