The comment brouhaha for this review of watching Aliens with kids in 2015 should make my mom feel better about getting tricked by my brother into taling a bunch of 13yrolds to Risky Business back in the day (before Saturday morning TV was way more racy): Vasquez still rocks the house.
Andre Holleran interviews Larry Kramer on his tome, many years in the making, The American People, Volume 1: Chutzpah in motion. Great photos. Interesting comments, too.
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Another interesting interview of Felice Picano, who has been involved in so many gay/ LGBetc (hx being what it was, as he says) things they can't be neatly listed: at Lambda Lit. Now seeing how I fell behind in my reading of his work, by only looking at the fiction shelves...
The mark of a great writer/memoirist:
”It is the job of a writer to convey a world that is gone. There are so many different types of people, some well-known and some not known at all. All are good subjects, and all the people who have been around us define who we are. I find them fascinating. I’m the dullest of them."
"I am a citizen of a nation that has only ever existed in the future, a nation where nationalism dies of confusion."
I really enjoyed this essay: Girl by Alexander Chee, from Guernica magazine. His essay in MFA vs. NYC too. There's other good stuff in the gender issue of Guernica, but I haven't gotten through it yet...
Cuban science fiction, a long and interesting story reminiscent of a lot of 70s sf: A Planet for Rent
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| Love that Gaitskill chill |
I'm reading some books I got off the Diverse YA and other end of year lists, to think about Hugo voting. But I'm also reading Tom Disch's The Dreams Our Things Are Made Of, a past take on the worlds of SF, and MFA vs ,NYC, about the split worlds of Lit'r'ture.
They're actually quite complementary and a way to see past the walls between these genres but also maybe grok why they exist to the benefit if eternal dismay of the ones deemed "genre." I've been reading various people's grousing about "No respect" in the lit world, but MFA vs. NYC really begs the question of why would you want that. Watch what you wish for type of thing. Goodies come with tethers.
Speaking of which, what I want to get to next is Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, which jumped off the shelf at me when I was looking for something else. This old review makes me want to read it more. This too.
One of the highlights of the one poetry class I've taken was being introduced to Levine's work.
"Nothing epic,” he told the Paris Review in 1988. “Just the small heroics of getting through the day … getting through the world with as much dignity as you can pull together from the tiny resources left to you.”
From "Gin":
"...Ahead lay cigarettes, the futility of guaranteed programs of exercise, the elaborate lies of conquest no one believed, forms of sexual torture and rejection undreamed of. Ahead lay our fifteenth birthdays, acne, deodorants, crabs, salves, butch haircuts, draft registration, the military and political victories of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us Richard Nixon with wife and dog. Any wonder we tried gin."
