Guess I better get this book

Fight AIDS, Act Up!

I'm on the cover.  Was just looking for info about a book my uncle wrote...

Posted via Blogaway

Crap

Meghan Galbraith playing her heart out

I get so tired of the truly great folks dying young:  RIP, Meghan. 

8 Inch Betsy rocked, and her guitar, vocals and songwriting were incendiary.

Posted via Blogaway

On TD

I've been looking around at what people have written about Tom Disch.  This convinces me his work is still timely, and was prescient long before the field caught up about the political climate and its trajectories:  One of the more thorough reviews I've found. 

"Disch, though, was ahead of his time. The American heartland of his novels, contemporary or future, now seems eerily prescient. It’s not that these trends weren’t visible in the 60s and 70s, but Disch foresaw their eventual impact in the post-Cold War age that his peers mostly did not. Frequently evoking the American grotesques of Poe and Lovecraft, he brought out the ghastly ignorance that increasingly defines American political life. He exaggerates, but the uncanny familiarity of the caricature is scary."

Yup.

Posted via Blogaway

Some interesting discussions

These are random.  I'm researching several disparate things at once, and pretty much use my blog as a way to capture odds and ends I find on the interwebs, to keep my bookmark MB count down...

A Claudia Rankine and Lauren Berlant  conversation about art, identity, theory...

And there was gonna be more theory, but I got distracted by music.  Here's a good recording of Jake Bugg on KCRW's The Morning Becomes Eclectic.  I want to be annoyed by him (maybe more his local fans), but then he plays a solo or does an amazing cover like the one here of "Folsom Prison Blues." I watched this after a bunch of Joy Division, and it worked...

A Smiths video by Derek Jarman:  The Queen is Dead 

An acoustic song by Nirvana is that could easily segue into the current trad hipster scene:  Where did you sleep last night? 

One of the upsides of that scene is the bouying of Shovels and Rope's career: Live on the radio, KEXP Seattle.  Their self-titled doco is awesome, BTW.  The clear-voiced First Aid Kit.

Locals Doomtree in the same studio kicking it.   

Alabama Shakes.  And, leading into Monday, Nina Simone on "M...i" states, among others. A sobering  interview with her on BBC's Hart Talk, 1999, and of course,  The King of Love Is Dead. 

Making me think of Kenneth (Kenny) Saffold, who moved up here to MN and carried on the work as a leader in the Twin Cities legal community as well as his church and the larger community.  I was lucky enough to get to work with and be inspired by him, especially as he fought metastasizing cancer.  The packed house at his memorial service was a real testimonial to the breadth of his impact on people and how powerfully he touched their lives.  Anyway, missing you, Kenny...

I know, too serious.  Have some  Lizzo.  And Lizzo at Glam Doll Donuts and at the State Fair.  Yes.

Later now, I watching Almost Famous cos I want to see Philip Seymour Hoffman and I can't watch Capote again yet.  Plus the opening is killer. 

"Simon and Garfunkel is poetry." "Yes, it is poetry.  It is the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex.  Honey..." Pointing at their eyes suggestively. "...they're on pot." ..."You do hate her,  you just don't know it yet.  ...This is a house of lies!". The kids combing their moustaches and beards and then tiny William...  "Who put such a high premium of being typical?" Frances McDormand is too good at playing the wacky hippie mom.  And Kate Hudson, etc.

But Hoffman as Lester Bangs really kills it.  "Ah, you made friends with him, didn't you?  ...I have seen you.  And you...are NOT cool.". Anyway...

Posted via Blogaway

Posted via Blogaway

Yes, that Harold Bloom

Here is the book I am grappling with today.  Other than his intro, it's excerpts from lit critics closer to the material, but in frustratingly short segments.  Thoughts are provoked here and there, nonetheless.  And the cover is Romaine Brooks' painting, La Baronne D'Emile D'Erlanger, ca. 1924.  Et chat.

Dorothy Allison: " (As a dedicated politico of the era...) Flirting and sex had nothing to do with writing, however, nothing to do with remaking the world.  ...But everything is connected, Bertha Harris announced to us at the opening of one of her classes, and 'Literature is not made by good girls.' ..."

A reminder that things have changed, that so many very recent cultural shifts are taken for granted too easily now.

I read a fantasy story about Stonewall that was very good until it kicked me out with a character saying something I never heard before the new millenium and certainly not in the early 70s.  I grant that we all had less exposure to speech patterns from other places back in the day, but I was exposed regularly to all types of NY and east coast speakers, especially African American.  My friend who grew up in Harlem in the 50s and went to school in Da Bronx, as she says, did not hear it either. 

Colloquialisms, especially swearing and epithets are dangerous in historical stories.  I finished it anyway, and it was good, but the magic had dissipated...

Posted via Blogaway

More Pix

Betty Howls Like A Wolf Too

The view

Made in Finland!

NW MN.  Did not get a good shot of the full moon, but it was big and bright and slightly haloed.  Saw sun dogs on the way up, too.

Posted via Blogaway

A momentary break

I actually took a vacation.  They made me.  Well, peer pressure and "use it or lose it" leave did.  I even took two extra days off for lounging after we traveled.  I NEVER do that. 

Yes, I am a vacation hoarder, according to the latest Style page article on the subject.  That and we get told every day what the pendings and goals are and how critical they are to people's lives, even though we are all just freeloading incompetent slackers to those who should know...

Anyway, it took a jump to go and a jump to get back and the air never got above 3 degrees with -17 as an average night sans windchill, but it was fun. 

Despite the bitter cold and being in northwestern Minnesota, there was only a tiny bit of snow and the forecasted snow did not manifest.  However, the guy who owns the place we went dug up snow from the frozen lake with his Bobcat and trucked and shoveled it onto the trails where they were getting thin.  We got to classic ski on several trails easy enough for me (except for one hill with a turn where I fell badly and bruised my buttbone).  I got to learn how to skate ski on the lake, during a brief reprieve from wind. 

The sauna was not working- a Scandinavian crime! But the twenty foot long hot tub was good enough to put feeling back in the butt and limbs...

We stayed in an old repurposed train caboose (see pic), which was very cold on the metal floor but kept warm enough for good sleeping bags with a space heater for the bathroom plumbing and a baseboard heater for the small room.  I was glad we did not stay in the tiny wood cabin heated only by a woodstove this time...

A neck gaiter/balaclava was required at all times outdoors and got all frozen.  I found out the "warmest" gloves were not, and my old discount ones worked better.  Ditto for old school union-suit type long underwear vs. the new synthetics.  (Bulk pays after a certain point, within my price range.)

We saw a bald eagle flying around their treetop lake overlook roost.  Not so many wolves howling this time, but a few and the resident border collies and Shepherd mix kept busy barking at something. 

The dogs sherpaed us on one long ski round, looking back occasionally to make sure we were keeping up as they made relentless forward progress despite constant dog wrestling matches and frequent stops for smells and marking.  The old Border Collie with stiff hips made especially sure I kept up...

Kudos to South High's Nordic ski team for being reasonably well behaved in the gas station as they headed out and we headed in. (But Ski Boy's team will kick your butts in the slopes, sorry.)  I was reminded throughout our trip that increased LGBT cultural visibility does help sometimes...

I finished Armistead Maupin's The Night Listener in the caboose loft.  Reading Eminent Outlaws' discussion of it made me curious.  It is an odd, fictionalized yet based on true story but fascinating.  I also read Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which was pretty funny and truthful despite the protag narrator trying really hard to be quirky.  Good indoor in frigid weather reads.

Now I'm cruising through Moth Smoke, by Mohsin Hamid, which is funny and horrifying at turns.  The irresponsible poor rich boy protag, who lurches between Lahore's high society twentysomethings and the criminal underground, makes some terrible choices, but of course that keeps it interesting and is not unrealistic...

Posted via Blogaway

Some inspiring filmmaking

It's nice to see people finding more independent routes to getting their films made, despite Hollywood's ever-narrowing interests.

Jennifer Phang used Kickstarter to fund a full-length version of her short, Advantageous. A full-on scifi film about uploading minds with a feminist bent, starring and co-written by Jacqueline Kim!  Here's another substantive interview. 

Also, I had not realized how Selma was made by director Ava DuVernay until I started paying
attention to Hollywood and The Biz again recently.  Great interview on KCRW's The Business:Here. 

Posted via Blogaway

I needed a good laugh

Go Naomi:  Kritzer story in Clarkesworld.

Posted via Blogaway

A little history will do you good

A little more on the true story behind the movie Pride. 

Today I'm reading about Thomas Disch, because I found a blithe comparison of him to another Heinlein white male icon of the Science Fiction monolith, by someone who does not appear to know much about his life or work, to be somewhat galling.  It made me want to think about Disch more, to understand more about his contradictions and also make up a little for the lack of effort and interest in the genre's history that lay behind that casual yet sharp criticism.

Here's an interesting discussion of his poetry, by Dana Gioia, with an excerpt from one of his better-known poems: Advice that is not at all dated. 

"So sell it, and don’t feel ashamed.
If the world, in the form
Of critic or poet, asks who we are
And why our wages are higher than his
(If they are), answer his question politely
And say..."

That review links to Gioia's memorial for Disch, which includes this:

"Tom Disch was one of the few people I’ve ever met whom I considered a genius. Not that genius did him much good. He had a superabundance of invention, an often startling clarity of perception, and a preternaturally quick mastery of literary technique. At the same time he had little ability to handle the ordinary challenges of daily life. If he possessed the fertile imagination of a brilliant child, he also had a child’s social awkwardness and vulnerability. A connoisseur of self-loathing, he never understood how much his friends adored him. He was enormously good company—endlessly funny, intelligent, and genuinely sweet—except when he fell into a rage or depression. He could be difficult but he was never, never dull."

And this: " Disch loved to outrage respectable opinion—not just middle-class opinion, the easy target of most writers. He also mocked proper liberal opinion and habitually violated even the most flexible limits of good taste. This eagerness to outrage would have been tiresome if he had not been so consistently funny and insightful." Which strikes me as very gay in terms of sensibility and in particular his era. 

Knowing that at least one sibling still lives here in the Twin Cities, because I was at Dreamhaven one time when he was selling Tom's books, I'm tempted to think about interviewing people with an eye to a biography.  Time being, of course, the problem with that idea.  Still... There would be a lot of contradictions as well as anecdotes to make a bio worthwhile, if one could pull it off.

Posted via Blogaway

Time and Identities

I was digging around in my bookshelf looking for In A Queer Place and Time, after reading an argument about it.  I came upon the book of Michelle M. Wright,Becoming Black, and went to search the interwebs for anything new by her, as she was a high school friend and is a scorching hot thinker with very wide-ranging interests.

I noticed again that internet searches today are so much more fruitful than over three years ago, the last time I did such a search.  Much more schtuff is all over, in this case particularly full text scholarly reviews and articles, not just abstracts.

It turns out Dr./Professor Wright (this makes my h.s. French class self squee) is doing some really intriguing work on time and identity formation/conception, referencing physics, time travel, etc.  She also has some fascinating articles available on the web about racism and technology and she edited an anthology about cyberfeminism.  I'm writing on my phone, which is old and limited, so I include only two links unearthed by a google of her name.

Here is an interview.  Here is  an article about how we think about technology. I'm going to have to spend some time reading her work in 2015, as it clearly has direct links to science fiction.  She always was f'n brilliant, and erudite, in multiple languages...

Posted via Blogaway