Babes in Bookland

Something light for a change, even trivial. I've been reading Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: the Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006). an interesting and possibly important scholarly attempt to reconstruct the role of eyewitnesses in the formation of the Jesus tradition. Bauckham tries to build a solid case that the four gospels rely more or less directly on the testimony of Jesus' original disciples. I don't think he succeeds (and I intend to write quite a bit more about that soon), but it's a challenging attempt, worth the attention of anyone who's interested in the question. For one thing, Bauckham, who has several earlier books to his credit, shows that conservative (even fundamentalist?) scholars can make serious contributions to New Testament studies, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the field but may surprise many, Christian or atheist, who think of fundamentalists as a bunch of subliterate hicks. Many are, but so are many liberal Christians.

Eerdmans has published a number of serious scholarly works that have earned my respect over the years I've been reading on this subject; they even published a very effective critique of fundamentalist icon C. S. Lewis's religious philosophy, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by the philosopher John Beversluis, in 1985. (I just learned that a new edition of that book was published in 2007 by the secular-humanist house Prometheus Books, which tells you how much of a stretch it was for Eerdmans to publish such a thing a quarter-century ago.)

But I'm getting heavier here than I intended. While reading Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I remembered a book I read in the 1980s when I was studying Christian apologetics and scholarship for a writing project of my own. The book was Clumsy Construction in Mark's Gospel: A Critique of Form- and Redaktiongeschichte, by John C. Meagher, published in 1979 by the Edwin Mellen Press. Since Form and Redaction Criticism are Bauckham's principal targets, and I'd enjoyed Meagher's book when I read it before, I decided it was time to have another look at it. To my surprise, it was checked out of the university library, so I found a used copy (it's long out of print, of course) online at a decent price and ordered it.

Used books are often interesting objects in themselves, and this copy was a good example. Usually the interest lies in signs of a previous owner's use of the book -- marginal notes and such; this one is the opposite. Meagher's book was originally issued in paperback, and like many such books this copy had been rebound in hardcover for its previous owner, a Catholic seminary. It still had the pocket and check-out card that the library used to track it in those pre-computerized days. And, I realized, it had never been checked out in all the time they owned it. (It has no note of its acquisition date nor the date it was discarded, but the bindery stamp says January 1981, so it must have been purchased around then.) The copy is essentially pristine, then. It's no big deal, but I found that interesting, especially since someone considered the book significant enough to borrow it from my university's library. Even though this copy is around 30 years old, it was basically new.

Playing the Queer Card

I'm thankful to Ishmael Reed for his article attacking the movie Precious at Counterpunch this week, because I had more to say about the matter of white gay racism and African-American antigay bigotry. I'd touched on Reed in an earlier post on the Henry Louis Gates Jr. controversy last July, but never finished the further post I began at the time, so I'm incorporating it here. Also on Counterpunch, Reed attacked Gates for, among other things, courting the support of white feminists and gays. (Not all of Gates's feminist and gay allies are white, of course; but that would complicate things too much.) He attacks Precious for not being friendly enough to black men, which is not an invalid complaint in itself, but also for being defended by "young black women professors ... the types who are using the university curriculum to get even with their fathers and teach courses in black women's literature, but can't identify more than three." Erm, three what? I suppose he means "black women writers", and even so I suspect he's exaggerating just a tad.

Armchair psychoanalysis of one's political opponents is good cheap fun, but it can backfire. Who's Reed trying to get even with, for example, aside from the people he lashes out at? This complaining about younger women colleagues is not just a black thing, for example; white men of a certain age are also given to griping about insubordinate wimmin. This guy, for example, my near contemporary, who explains (no permalink, dammit, but it's his first comment in the thread) in defense of his critique of a white female author that "many of the educated American women I know who came of age from about 1965 to 1980 showed signs of indoctrination. They often had unrealistic expectations about their relationships with men, what sorts of careers they should pursue, how well they could raise children, and in some cases they showed signs of narcissism, which they misinterpreted as empowerment."

Precious is based on the novel Push by Sapphire, which I read and found unimpressive, a sort of second-tier Color Purple knockoff. I loved the novel The Color Purple and hated Stephen Spielberg's movie version of it as I've hated very few movies in my life. Reed tries to hide behind the fact that Walker herself disliked Spielberg's movie, as did other black women writers. But Reed was one of the male African-American writers who attacked the novel itself for ascribing "criminal sexual offenses committed against women and children by some black men to the majority of or to all black men." This is an interesting falsehood, since most of the male characters in the book are depicted as supportive of women, good with children, hardworking family men -- Sofia's sons, for example, and her prizefighter boyfriend. Mr. _____'s son Harpo is abusive at first because he thinks it's the manly thing to do (and because Celie, jealous of Sofia's strength, encourages him), then stops trying to be a slavemaster and quickly achieves a harmonious relationship with his wife. Yes, the villains are more noticeable; is that a problem? (Uncle Tom's Cabin portrays all whites as whip-wielding slaveowners!)

As with white men who've made similar complaints, Reed seems to be complaining that violent, abusive men are being depicted as unsympathetic characters, rather than the heroes they should be. As Callie Khouri, whose Thelma and Louise was criticized in similar terms, told an interviewer, "But overall I think I am certainly not showing anything like the animals you're likely to see in a movie by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, or Oliver Stone ... You can show the most low-life, scum-fucking sicko in the world doing all kinds of violent shit to each other, or to women, and nobody says boo. But you have a woman point out that a guy is a sick fuck and blow up his truck, or have a good time with a guy they already kind of know is not on the up-and-up, and all hell breaks loose."

Just as interesting is Reed's claim that the movie has "Celie ... holding a knife against Mr.'s neck. That scene doesn't appear in the book. Spielberg put that knife in Celie's hand." First, it's not a knife, it's a razor; second, I believe this scene is in the book, pages 102-3 of the hardcover, the blade is definitely in Celie's hand, and her intent is homicidal:

I watch him so close, I begin to feel a lightening in the head. Fore I know anything I'm standing hind his chair with his razor open.

Then I hear Shug laugh, like something just too funny. ... Shug got her hand on the razor now. She say, Oh it look dull anyway. She take and sling it back in the shaving box.

All day long I act just like Sofia. I stutter. I mutter to myself. I stumble around the house crazy for Mr. _____ blood. In my mind, he falling dead every which a way.

It's true that Spielberg overdramatized the scene, as is his wont; I've only seen the movie once, when it was first in the theaters, but as I recall it Mr. _____ ordered Celie to shave him; she prepared the lather and razor while Shug went walking in the fields, then had to run back screaming for miles just in time to snatch the blade from Celie's hand. Spielberg exercised far greater license than this elsewhere in the film. As far as "sexual predators" goes, it takes serious tunnel vision to claim that Walker presents this as a black-only problem. When Celie tells Shug about being raped by her father, Shug responds: "And I thought it was only whitefolks do freakish things like that" (97). Is this a depiction of all white men as sexual predators? As I recall it there are no positive white characters in the novel, but that never bothered me. The history of white racism, like the history of violence against women of all colors by men of all colors, is not to be denied.

Now, why did Reed forget this scene? He could easily have cited it as evidence of Walker's perfidy and hatred of men (you see?! she wants all black women to cut all black men's throats!!!!); instead he seems to have erased it from his memory.

Reed can muster plenty of African-Americans who attack Oprah Winfrey, who produced the film and whom I certainly don't consider beyond criticism, but it's hard to say how much of this is the sort of criticism that any rich, power-hungry person will attract and probably deserve. Reed joins another black male writer in denouncing Winfrey for producing films that have "negative stereotypical images of black men." (So, as far as I can tell, do most films produced by black men about black men; but again, gangsters and players are okay as long as they're heroes.) But it seems that Reed's most serious complaint about Precious is that it is a "film in which gays are superior to black male heterosexuals" and "Caribbean Americans are smarter than black Americans." (As though gays are all white, and no Caribbean Americans are black.)

I'm not interested in playing the game of competitive oppression, but I enjoy pointing out to African-American homophobes that they were enslaved for only 400 years, while men who have sex with men have been persecuted and killed for 3000 years. The people I mention this to are usually Christians and appeal to Christian tradition to justify their bigotry, so there isn't much they can say in reply. (There's nothing in the Bible against Africans comparable to Leviticus 20:13 or Romans 1:26ff; on the other hand, the fact that the Bible has no objection to slavery itself is an uncomfortable point for them, but they usually try to dodge it.) True, the death toll has been far greater for enslaved Africans than for queers, but as queers have so often been reminded, we can pass and are harder to hunt down and kill. On the other hand, peoples who were thought to be tolerant of queers, such as the pre-Columbian peoples of the Western hemisphere, were often not enslaved but simply slaughtered by the European Christian invaders.

But as I say, the game of competitive oppression is as useless as that of competitive poverty. I don't think that Reed would claim that the Holocaust justifies Israeli violence against Palestine -- I certainly don't -- and I don't think that the European/American enslavement of Africans justifies antigay bigotry by African-Americans. I'll give Reed credit for criticizing Bill Cosby for his attacks on ordinary black Americans, but as Michael Eric Dyson's book on Cosby shows, you can criticize Cosby without wetting your pants about feminists and gays.

Some apologists for bigotry have minimized African-American Christian bigotry on the grounds that it's based in religion, as though most bigotry weren't based in religion. Would they defend the longstanding racism of Bob Jones University because it's religiously based? Considering how often racism in America has been justified by appeal to religion, this is an absurd claim.

It appears to me that apologists for bigotry believe, or wish to imply, that references to homophobia in the African-American community are meant to say that African-American antigay bigotry is worse, or more widespread, than antigay bigotry in the European-American community. Maybe some people think so, but I don't. I don't know of any real evidence on the question, so I'm happy to treat homophobia by blacks as no worse than homophobia by whites. But antigay bigotry by whites is normative, widespread, and terribly destructive; I don't tolerate it, let alone excuse it on the grounds that it's worse among blacks. When I condemn antigay bigotry among African-Americans, I do so because bigotry is unacceptable. Portraying gays and feminists as white or white dupes puts black gays and feminists in a doubly hard place.

Meanwhile, I happened yesterday on a used copy of an earlier book of Reed's prose, Airing Dirty Laundry (Addison-Wesley, 1993), which contained attacks on Barney Frank for being gay and a defense of Clarence Thomas, who was also according to Reed depicted as a black sexual predator by white feminists, and suffered the awful fate of being elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States as a consequence. Oh, the humanity! Much like Chris Brown, who has also attacked Oprah for failing to appreciate how much he has suffered for his beating of his former girlfriend Rihanna; and who was defended by many of his young female fans who could understand why he'd have to slap a woman around.

Looking over those older essays reminded me where I'd heard Reed's rhetoric before. It's what I heard from white Southerners during Jim Crow days: 1) don't you outside agitators come down here stirring up trouble, our colored were perfectly happy until you brought your Red propaganda down here; 2) you cage up your colored up north, yet you paint us as a bunch of ignorant rednecks. (Randy Newman skewered this trope without mercy in his classic song "Rednecks", without sparing the North.) The trouble for Reed is that white gays and white feminists went after "our own" first, and we're still fighting that war. We are not being in the least hypocritical in challenging bigotry in the African-American community when it rears its head there.

I see that I've said little about Precious here. Well, I haven't seen it yet, and besides, I don't think it's really what got Reed all riled. Uppity women and queers have been a thorn in his side for a long time.

Eaters of Dust

While looking for something else (Isherwood's A Single Man, I think, or Frank Moorehouse's The Everlasting Secret Family) in the university library stacks, my attention was caught by a few small books at the end of a shelf. They were recent literature in English from West Africa, mostly Nigeria, and with the typical insouciance of a promiscuous reader I grabbed a handful and took them along. I haven't read enough African writing (though still more, I'll wager, than most random white Americans), and these were published in Africa for African readers, rather than in England or the US as exotica for white or African-American/Afro-British readers in search of roots.

One of the books I picked up was A Matter of Identity by Toni Duruaku, which turned out to be a play about a young man and women sent by their tribe into the realm of the Ancestors to be given directions for the future of Africa. The other was Iheanyichukwu Duruoha's novel Eaters of Dust (Ikeja: Longman, 2000), about the end and aftermath of the horrific Nigerian-Biafran Civil War of 1967-1969. I'm not sure what I expected, but Eaters of Dust turned out to be pretty complex.

The narrator, Nduweze, "barely seventeen" (4), is a mess boy in the Biafran 10th Battalion Training Depot 3 in Usi, formerly the Usi Grammar School. His childhood friend Chima, a few months older, is batman to the formidable and reckless Captain Ebenezer Odogwu, known as "Bazooka", so he has been to the front, unlike Nduweze, who's spent the war in his home town. "While others fought and died in the war fronts, I cooked for the sergeants in the rear. Though I was a cook, I managed to acquire all the military discipline and learn how to kill a man with my bare hands" (5). He quarrels frequently with his mother, his father having disappeared on a trip to Lagos; they don't know if he's alive or dead. As the novel opens, Ndu is watching refugees on the highway, fleeing from the advancing Federal troops. Orders come down to evacuate the depot, but it turns out to be too late. Captain Bazooka commandeers a passing car to carry off his personal plunder, then kills the car's owner in cold blood and drives away, abandoning both his wife Maria and the devoted Chima. Nduweze must flee with Chima into the forest, and returns to his mother's house.

Chima goes off looking for his master Bazooka, to return the Bible he left behind him. Ndu has a series of adventures and misadventures in the confusion that follows. He abandons his army uniform so he won't be shot on sight as a rebel, and spends a lot of time running around either naked or trying to keep a small cloth wrapped around his private parts. In addition to his ability (never actually used) to kill a man with his bare hands, we are informed that his penis is large enough to inspire comment from other men. (The novel is blunt about body functions, and Ndu dutifully informs the reader about cleaning his anus after each bowel movement. Reunited with Chima later in the novel, when both are again on the run, Ndu invents a tale about having gone out at night for a shit and then being scared away from the depot by gunfire. Chima asks him teasingly, "‘Have you cleaned your anus?’ I smiled and said, ‘Yes, of course.’" [174].) At the same time, Ndu complains when he sees his reflection in a mirror (47):

... my eyes [were] sleepy and my lips large and soft. I have baby-boy cheeks and I think I look very innocent and feminine. I knew I would be the last man to make a good soldier, not by a long shot anyway.

He feels smothered by his bossy mother's authority, and thinks he needs to do something to become a man. But not to worry, Ndu, looks can deceive. Baby-faced youths have carried out some major massacres. The riot cops in Seoul look cute and boyish, even pretty, but you wouldn't want to encounter them on a dark street.

The Federal troops occupy Usi and take over the depot to quarter themselves. The people of Usi scramble to find jobs with them, first selling them water, then building tents for them around the grammar school; the boys have already been dragooned to bury the dead scattered around the grounds. A number of Ndu's friends have survived the war, and much of the novel involves their relations with each other, with a lot of banter about girls and school. Ndu tells us that he did well in English class, because he used (famous Nigerian novelist) Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a crib.

Before long, though, the father of the man murdered by Captain Bazooka come looking for his missing son. One of Nduweze's friends, Cosmo, is found wearing a shirt taken from the dead man's body, and is accused of the killing. Tortured and beaten, he will be executed if the real murderer isn't found. In the end, Nduweze and Chima come forward as eyewitnesses, and justice is perhaps served. (Chima refuses the reward of "thirty Nigerian pounds" offered to him by the dead man's father, and the contrast with Judas Iscariot is clearly deliberate, though unsettling -- Bazooka makes a bizarre Christ figure.) Ndu travels to Lagos and finds father still alive.

Okay, that's the story. But the book contains a subplot that I hadn't expected. When the Nigerian Feds occupy Usi, Nduweze goes to the depot to try to make some money selling water to the soldiers, as many young men are doing even though carrying water is women's work. There's not a lot of food around; famine in Biafra attracted international attention, as it would a few years later in Bangladesh, and the occupiers have a lot of money to spend. Biafran money was virtually worthless by the end of the war, and several characters in Eaters of Dust are shown lugging around bags of it. The Hausa-speaking Feds must communicate in pidgin with the locals, and their dialogue with them is noticeably different from the (presumably Igbo) dialogue between Ndu and his friends and relatives.

In the yard at the depot, trying to find someone to buy the water he carries, Ndu observes:

There were many girls with hardly clothes on and their newly formed breasts shook as they sang and giggled. They were selling their water fast. I felt jealous because I knew these soldiers would soon start squeezing their breasts. I wished I were a girl. I continued singing nevertheless [126].

"I wished I were a girl"? That got my attention; Ndu knows what it means to be a girl whose breasts a soldier would squeeze. If the reader doesn't know, it's spelled out a few pages later in an exchange between Ndu and his friend Boy Shankar, who's helping a soldier build a tent (138):

‘...One could do anything now to get money. If I were a girl I wouldn’t mind selling myself.’
‘And since you aren’t a girl?’
He coughed. ‘Well, that’s why I am doing this.’

Ndu, meanwhile, has found himself a softer gig. After getting knocked out in a fight involving his friend Cosmo and a soldier, Ndu wakes up in the quarters of the camp Sergeant Major, W. O. I. Adamu Sambo, "a man of medium build, slightly pot bellied and with a face pitted with spots. He had a Mandarin type of moustache. He was looking at me with interest and when my eyes met his, he smiled. I seemed to like him because his smile was tender and reassuring, and he had a nice set of teeth" (128f).

He smiled back like a child, held my arm and squeezed it. Then he started rubbing the top of my hand, saying, ‘I like you Nduu and you go be my friend-okay?’ I nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
‘You go like to stay here with me?’ he said. ‘You go work for me and I pay you big money?’
Without thinking, I said, ‘Yes.’
‘Where is yor fada and yor moda?’
‘My fada dey for Lagos but my moda dey here.’
‘Now, you go work for me. Is dat clear?’
I nodded. ‘What kind of work I go dey do?’ I asked.
‘To wash my cloth das all! Musa will press. You hear?’ I said ‘Yes.’
‘What of food? I go dey eat here?’
‘Yes, everything, you must eat. We have everything.’ [130]

And a few pages later (148):

Our eyes met and held for an instant. Then I turned my face away.
‘You be like woman,’ he said.
I smiled like a little girl.
‘How I be like woman?’ I asked.
‘Your face and your body ……’
I continued eating and began feeling sorry for myself. Perhaps, he was right; I hadn’t gone to war like others and I looked feminine. Yet this view crippled my psyche because it explained all my ambition to subdue my mother.
Then he said, ‘You like me?’
I hesitated before I answered.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I like you.’
He shot out his hand, held my ear and smoothed the back of it; and then he held my hand and scratched it.

Plenty of explicit gay overtures there. Lest the reader suspect that I am imposing my cultural-terrorist Euro-American gay agenda on an innocent homosocial text, however, there's more. Ndu must fight off another Nigerian soldier who tries to rape him while Sambo is away, which indicates that others around them see their relationship as probably sexual. Then Ndu's old friend Sunny Bruzz shows up and meets Sambo, who takes a shine to him as well, giving him an expensive flask. Sunny asks Ndu, "Do you sleep on the same bed with him?" Ndu hesitates before lying: "No. I sleep on the floor" (159).

Whether Sambo and Ndu do any more than sleep together is left unclear. But when a sentry questions Ndu whose laundry he washes (164):

‘Bedsheet? Hah-ha, I know am Adamu Sambo na vey well bature. Play with people everybody. Him don play with you?’
I put on an embarrassed look, trying to help myself and again he said:
‘Him don play with you?’
Turning my face away from his, I said no.

Ndu had lied to Sunny about sleeping on the floor, so maybe he's lying here too. Ndu frets privately (166):

What was the special attraction Sunny Bruzz had which made Sambo start to like him? Apart from Sunny’s masculine shoulders and rock-like muscles, there was nothing attractive in him. As I had told you, his teeth were not complete, the right lower molars were missing. So why on earth would Sambo start to like him?

Well, I can see the special attraction Sunny Bruzz might have for Sambo. But this complicates the erotic dynamics of the situation. Many readers might argue that Sambo is attracted to Nduweze because of his girlishness, giving a pseudo-heterosexual cast to their relationship that reassures those trying to argue that there's nothing queer going on here, just manly soldiers bonding in the absence of women, one is the pitcher and the other's the catcher, blah blah blah. But Sambo, as the description I quoted above indicates, is not a particularly masculine figure, and for all that he's drawn to Ndu's effeminacy, he flips roles when he meets the butch, muscular, womanizing Sunny. Nothing seems to come of their flirtation, though, and Ndu later boasts to Chima, "Take it from me. I am that man’s best friend; the only cock that crows in his room. So be reassured" (189). Oh, I am, Nduweze, I am. Nevertheless, "I loved Chima, my spirit always yielded to his and I longed to yield to him more and more like a woman" (194).

In the end, however,

Seven days after I came back from Lagos, I had met Grace, a mulatto from Sapele, and we had fallen in love. Grace was not only beautiful, she was hard working and ambitious – and above all she was kind, soft and ripe. ... I had never touched her; in fact I had thought she was only being kind to me, having seen me so torn and haggard like a beggar, emerging from the ashes of Biafra. Then just the night before, she had whispered to me through the window -- 'Ndu, Ndu.' I had gone quickly to meet her. Quietly she had taken me by the hand, had led me into an unfinished brick house and had moved her hand up and down my spine. There, to my greatest surprise, something had happened. Exploding in my loins, a sudden fire filled me with lust. Clawing and grunting, she had made love to me. In the end, though exhausted, I had seen a whole esplanade of lush and strange sensation open to me; an experience that promised consummation. I had felt redeemed [210].

Well, maybe. This passage is a reminder of the symbolic function of "manhood"; maybe we're supposed to read Nduweze's attraction to Sambo (which is made explicit before Sambo makes his first move) as a symbol of his youth, incomplete manhood, displacement, failure as a warrior, need for a father figure, etc., all of which is left behind when a woman, "clawing and grunting," makes a man of him at last. Maybe, though it doesn't change the fact that an erotically-charged relationship between two males (and implicitly more, given Sunny's intervention and the sentry's knowingness), recognized as such by everybody in the novel, takes up about a third of the story. It's enough to undermine the widespread claim by many African cultural nationalists that sex beween males is a foreign import polluting pure African society -- even if there weren't plenty of other evidence to undermine it, from the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's novel The Interpreters [1965], featuring a conflicted black American expatriate who makes out well with the local youths and now Rudolf Pell Gaudio's study Allah Made Us [Wiley, 2009], about "sexual outlaws" in Nigeria. Far from being something alien to Nigerian society, sex between males appears to be common enough to merit no more than coarse joking when it rears its head. And the words "gay" or "homosexual" never turn up in Eaters of Dust; the novel shows how unnecessary and diversionary it is to obsess about such labels.

Poetry Friday -- Respectability

Respectability

My hair cut short, a tie around my neck,
a jacket on, I wander to and fro.
All this procures a somewhat larger check,
but how much farther will I choose to go?
A little at a time I disappear,
but whether from the edge or within
I couldn't say. Am I becoming clear
or is that rather that I'm wearing thin?
I may say: I am really not like this,
it's just a role I play, a mask I wear.
But then I poke beneath the artifice,
a little fearfully: Am I still there?
So far it doesn't hurt when I negate
myself. But how long till I dissipate?

---
Inspired by my year as a food service supervisor, so it must be 1979.

Dawn of the Dead in America

Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

"Explicit Gay Overtures"?

I was going to write about Teh Obama tonight, but some distractions came up, so I got a late start, and I don't know how long it'll take to vent my wrath. So here are a couple of short bits till tomorrow. I hope.

One: I gave one of my Facebook friends a merciless drubbing last week, with some help from another of his contacts there, for whining that English is in "decline" because, supposedly, Americans have a smaller vocabulary than they used to. That seems to be a dubious claim. Without claiming a decline in the language, though, I've noticed more typographical errors and weird confusion of vocabulary during the past few years than I see in older publications, even in slick commercial media.

To keep it gay: Out magazine, one of the few gay glossies still publishing, included in its Out 100 for 2009 the wonderful English writer Sarah Waters, whose work I've been following since her first novel, Tipping the Velvet. (The photo of Waters above comes from that feature.) The item mentioned that The Little Stranger, her latest, is "her first project without explicitly gay overtures." I think they meant "overtones" there, but Waters doesn't put gay overtones into her work: they are "lesbo historical romps," as the author herself puts it, with plenty of hot-hot girl-2-girl action. In Velvet, for example, a young woman who has worked on the stage as a male impersonator (drag kings are not new) is dumped by her female performing partner and lover. Out of money, she goes out one night in her Guardman's uniform, and discovers that she can earn a living giving handjobs to men who think she's male. One night, though, she's picked up by an older woman who sees through her disguise, and takes her home to meet her collection of dildos. And that's just the first half of the book. There's no need to decode Waters's novels, or look for overtones or subtexts. I'd say that "explicit overtones" is a contradiction in terms, in fact, indicating that the writer didn't know the meaning of one or both of those words. That he or she didn't know the meaning of "overtures" is an added bonus, I guess. (I sent e-mail to the magazine but didn't get a reply; not that I really expected one.)



Two: This clip from Crooks & Liars (via Suburban Guerilla, via the Sideshow). Alan Grayson is not a progressive by all accounts, despite his accepting the label in this interview, though that's not entirely a bad thing given the way that Democrats have fled shrieking from even the milder "liberal." Grayson didn't even flinch. I would have been happier if he, or someone, had added that the Afghan people have paid enough too. But it's exciting to see a Democratic Congressman throwing down the gauntlet to his president like this. I don't know if Obama can be persuaded to end the American occupation of Afghanistan, but for the first time in a long time I feel some, well, hope.

Bonus track: Cuddlebear fundamentalist kingpin Rick Warren has refused to condemn (via Band of Thebes) a proposed law in Uganda that would impose the death penalty for homosexuality, saying that "it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations." Oh, really? He seems to have changed his standards since he called for the assassination of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about a year ago.

The Slippery Slope

I really appreciate Taylor Harris's concern (via) for the sensibilities of religious believers. I'm sure he feels exactly the same way about the devout Christians who opposed the Civil Rights Movement because of their sincere, scripture-based conviction that God intended the races to be separate. Yet these fine people were demonized as "racists," "bigots," "rednecks," and the like. And the definition of American was changed from white to any damn color you please. You can see the decline since then. It may be too late to repair the damage now, but at least we can draw a line in the sand over sodomitical marriage and say, "No pasaran!"

But ... just a thought. Didn't the trouble really start when the Christians forcibly changed the definition of religion in the Roman Empire from polytheism to monotheism? And probably at about the same time, changed the definition of marriage from polygamous to monogamous? Or maybe it was when the Phoenicians changed the definition of writing from syllabic or hieroglyphic to alphabetic, thus allowing the common people to achieve literacy more easily? You can see how the quality of literary production has dropped since then.

Or maybe it was when the first mitosis changed the definition of life from one-celled to many-celled? Some will try to tell you, "The individual cells that make up our bodies are still alive, and the majority of organisms are single-celled. Multicellular lifeforms are just a particular organization. Hive organisms of eusocial animals (freqently haplodiploid) are a scaled up analogy." Don't be fooled! That's what the militant recruiting multicellular organisms would like you to believe: that they're really no different from one-celled organisms, and that multicellularism is an "alternative lifestyle" no different from any other. From that first fateful mitosis it was only a few million years to meiosis and sexual reproduction, and just look where it's gotten us.

(image credit; via)