The Maybe Islands

The Stone Gods
by Jeanette Winterson
London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007
(to be published in the US by Houghton on April Fools Day 2008)

I first encountered Jeanette Winterson through her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fairly naturalistic account of growing up lesbian in a working-class Pentecostal family in northern England. After that I read her novels more or less as they appeared in the US. (So far I haven’t gotten to Boating For Beginners, her retelling of the story of Noah’s ark, which Winterson dismisses as a potboiler, and one or two others.) After Written on the Body, which dazzled me, I began to notice what seemed to me a loss of energy in her writing. This was confirmed for me by her collection of stories, The World and Other Places. The stories were arranged in order of writing, and the earlier ones gave me as much pleasure as I’d remembered her earlier fiction doing; like her later novels, the later stories became more distanced and abstracted. Her writing was as skillful as ever, but something was missing.

Then a comment on Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For blog linked to Ursula K. LeGuin’s review of Winterson’s new novel, The Stone Gods. As the commenter said, LeGuin was “critically enthusiastic” about the novel, though I can’t recall the novel’s “characters … repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction.” (Looking over the text, I found one such announcement, but I’m not sure it should be taken literally. If you read the book, you’ll see why.) LeGuin also complained that “to me, both the love stories in the book are distressingly sentimental”, though she conceded that sentimentality “is very much a matter of the reader's sensibility.” I disagree about the love stories in The Stone Gods, which I enjoyed, especially since similar criticisms could be (and have been) raised about the love stories in LeGuin’s fiction, as in science fiction generally. Ditto for the novel’s didacticism; SF has always had a didactic streak, as LeGuin knows, but I never found Winterson’s commentary intrusive. She’s sharp and witty, and her ideas are interesting. One word that never occurs in LeGuin’s review is satire, and like so much SF The Stone Gods is satire, the love child of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Female Man. The question about satire is not whether it’s subtle, or whether it’s didactic, or even whether it’s sentimental, but whether it hits its mark.

The Stone Gods begins with the announcement of the discovery of Planet Blue, which except for a few dinosaurs is pristine and hospitable to human life. Since it is universally agreed that human beings have ruined the planet we have, Planet Blue looks like a great place to start over, learning from our mistakes and doing it right this time. (Are you done laughing? One reason I love Winterson is her disdain for this evergreen daydream.) Billie Crusoe, the narrator, works for Enhancement Services of the Central Power, one of three major power blocs on her planet of Orbus. "Enhancement" refers to the appearance modification that is practiced universally in the Central Power:

All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least, it’s a crisis among the cities of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favourites. That way the leaders look like star-gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.

The Central Power is a democracy. We look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy [19].

Somehow Billie is assigned to interview a Robo sapiens named Spike, a cosmetically female robot that has just returned from a survey mission to Planet Blue, and then is forced onto a spaceship taking the first human colonists to the new world.

Of course, Spike and Billie fall in love, and things go drastically wrong. There’s a brief interlude about Billy, a young English sailor left behind on Easter Island by Captain Cook’s expedition in 1774. He falls in love with Spikkers, a half-Dutch, half-Islander, “a man of forty years, yet wonderfully preserved, lean and strong, and with a cheerful, inquisitive face that reminded me of a good dog that never had a bad master” (105). Then we’re back with Billie, only on Earth this time, in a near-future Tech City after World War III. Spike is here too, “the world’s first Robo sapiens. She looks amazing – clear skin, green eyes, dark hair. She has no body because she won’t need one. She is a perfect head on a titanium plate” (132). Billie is her tutor, assigned to “teach a robot what it means to be human” (135); she smuggles Spike to Wreck City, the “No Zone” beyond the end of the tramlines, basically like the slums that circle today’s great cities except with residual radiation from the nuclear weapons that flattened the West in the war. In Wreck City they encounter a man Friday and a motley batch of post-punk dykes, mutants, and subversives, and things again get strange.

More than that I won’t say, because you should read it for yourself. The Stone Gods is more fun than any book of Winterson’s I can remember. Admittedly she’s not for all tastes – at her wildest she’s a bit dry – but she seems to have let loose here. If she hasn’t quite regained the energy of her earlier work, she’s acquired a new verve that is very encouraging to see. The satire is sharp and, I think, hits the mark. And oddly, The Stone Gods was published at about the same time as Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book, Making Money, which is also satirical and also features a female (though heterosexual) love interest named Spike.

I'm So Confused! The Whole World Is Spinning!

Oopsie! Tom Tomorrow is P.O.'d about the right-wing radio claim that Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign neglected to leave a tip to the Iowa waitress who served her at a Maid-Rite diner. "Well, big effing surprise," Tom huffs: "like pretty much everything else you might hear on right wing talk radio, it was not only untrue, it was demonstrably untrue." Of course I agree about the reliability of right wing talk radio, so I followed Tom's link to Steve Benen's The Carpetbagger Report, which huffed and puffed some more, and followed its link to this New York Times story, which included some information that neither Tom (maybe because he didn't click through to the Times story) nor Benen mentioned.

Clinton's people claimed that "the candidate and her aides had in fact left a tip: $100 on a $157 check at the diner. The restaurant manager, Brad Crawford, confirmed in interviews, including with The New York Times, that Mrs. Clinton, of New York, and her retinue had indeed left a tip, though he did not say how much." Interesting, but even more interesting was what the waitress herself had to say:

Reached at her home in Iowa, the waitress, Anita Esterday, said that neither she nor a colleague who helped serve Mrs. Clinton recalled seeing any tip.

She said a local staff member of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was in the restaurant on Thursday to tell them that the campaign had left a tip.

She said that when she and her colleague said they had not seen a tip, the staff member gave each of them $20.

Myself, I believe the waitress over her manager or the Clinton campaign. Especially since she had more to say:

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Tom Tomorrow quoted that line, as did Jonathan Schwarz in a nice posting about the misuse of terms like "lunatic" in mainstream political discourse. It's a good'un. But suppose that the same story were to circulate about George W. Bush; the liberal blogosphere would have been up in arms over the Rethugs' attempt to rewrite Mrs. Esterday's memory with that paltry $20 bill. (More likely they'd have sent her to Guantanamo until she remembered better.) What I like is that Mrs. Esterday refused to be bought.

I must say I'm surprised that a well-oiled (and funded) machine like HRC's campaign would have forgotten to tip her waitress. And of course, the right-wing pundits don't care about waitresses any more than Clinton does. But "demonstrably untrue"? It doesn't sound like it to me.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Another!

Another of my GCN book reviews, from 1981 or 1982.

A Smile in His Lifetime
by Joseph Hansen
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $13.95 hardcover
292 pp.

Last summer Mike Peters of the Dayton News published an editorial cartoon of a woman who, though “underpaid, sexually harassed, passed over for promotion and stuck in a stereotyped role,” opposes the ERA. Why? “She likes being treated special.” Someday I intend to draw a cartoon of one of those neo-butch gay men who haunt the johns, the dirty-book stores, the backroom bars, but won’t have anything to do with the gay movement. Why? Because they believe in being discreet about their gayness.

Joseph Hansen is the author of a series of mystery novels starring a middle-aged gay male insurance investigator named Dave Brandstetter. Brandstetter has his crotchets, but he’s a reasonably likable, competently functioning human being. Like many gay men of our parents’ generation, he has learned not to let hostile Society cramp his style much – a task made easier, no doubt, by the fact that he lives in Southern California. When gay activists do appear in The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of, the most recent book in the series, they are depicted as crazy fairies completely out of touch with reality. This is a bit odd since Mr. Hansen himself, according to the dust jacket of his newest novel, “was a founder in 1965 of the pioneering homosexual journal Tangents.” Surely he knows better.

Now Mr. Hansen has moved into “mainstream” fiction with A Smile in His Lifetime, his first non-mystery novel. Whit Miller, the book’s protagonist, is gay but unlike Dave Brandstetter, he is a psychic basket case. Whit is married to Dell Everett, a straight woman. As the novel begins, Whit and Dell are living in near-poverty in the hills back of Los Angeles. He is a struggling and unsuccessful writer, she is a former teacher turned antiwar activist. She takes care of him, since they both agree he can’t take care of himself. It is the mid-1960s. First Whit, who married Dell in full flight from his adolescent homosexuality (at 19 he had already had at least two intense relationships) tumbles ambivalently into bed with a neighbor boy. Then he reels from lover to lover trying to regain his lost balance. He finally publishes a best-selling novel; Dell leaves him; he becomes famous; falls desperately in love with a beautiful hippie youth named Jaime who moves in with him and goes mad after a bad acid trip; Whit’s house is burglarized by one of his subsequent tricks; his novel is turned into a film; he is nearly killed by a gang of queerbeaters. Throughout, Whit marinates in self-loathing seasoned with contemptuous remarks about “faggots,” and I suppose the reader is supposed to conclude that if you hate yourself, bad things will happen to you. By the end of the book Whit seems to have learned little or nothing from his suffering; presumably the reader, having read the cautionary tale, is expected to.

I keep reminding myself that Whit Miller’s distrust of politics (he can’t get interested in his wife’s antiwar activism either) and Dave Brandstetter’s contempt for radical fairies are probably far more common than my ideological commitment to militant gay pride. And I have to admit that there is a lot in Whit Miller that I can identify with: the rage turned inward against oneself, or outward at lovers, rather than at the real enemy, is something that ideology has only partially alleviated for me; Whit’s alienation and his flights from the intimacy he also craves come uncomfortably close to home for me. Yet there is a difference between us that I think is crucial: for me the rise of a militant gay movement in the late 1960s (part of the period the story includes) was exhilarating and liberating, but Whit is unaware or unconcerned that a new attitude toward being a faggot is being born. This might very well be exactly his problem, but if Mr. Hansen thinks so there is no hint in the texts. Nor is there any other positive alternative, it seems. Whit rejects the offer of at least one man to replace Dell as the nursemaid in his life, and I think he’s right, because Whit needs to learn to take care of himself. But it is clear that he can’t, at the close of the novel he seems to be withdrawing into hopelessness, unless the closing sequence (in which he rescues his cat Polk from his crumbling beach house) is meant to symbolize Whit’s new strength and courage. If so, I don’t believe a word of it, having watched Whit snatching defeat from the jaws of victory time after time for the past 290-odd pages. I’m not sure I’m asking for a happy ending; I’m not sure how I think the novel should end; but I’m pretty sure this ending resolves nothing – and if it wasn’t meant to, why bother to write at all?

Contrast, say, Daniel Curzon’s frankly propagandistic Something You Do in the Dark, first published ten years ago. Cole Ruffner, that book’s hero, never comes into contact with the gay movement either, but he does begin to learn to turn his rage outward, even if he does so too late. Or compare James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works, first published in 1967, in which the theme of the consequences of turning away love is carried to more baroque extremes – which is the point: A Smile in His Lifetime say nothing, it seems to me, which Purdy didn’t say fourteen years ago. Or consider Dancer from the Dance, in which Sutherland squelches every “slightest sign of complaint, self-pity or sentimentality” by saying something like, “Perhaps what you need is a good facial.” Perhaps what Whit Miller needs is a Sutherland in his life, instead of solicitous friends eager to shelter his sensitive artist’s soul from the stormy realities of life.

Mr. Hansen writes a spare prose that is sometimes beautiful:

Whit likes driving freeways after midnight. It is one of the times when he lets himself feel a little bit romantic. The long trail of red taillights curving away from him is beautiful and mysterious. He wants to know where everyone is going. It is more than wanting. He sickens with yearning to know where they are going and to go with them. … He knows nothing about their lives, but they are all beautiful and terrible to him, boxed up in those dark, hurtling cars. That he can’t be with them makes him ache. (p. 222)

A Smile in His Lifetime reminds me of Woody Allen’s film Interiors, an equally bleak and hopeless “serious” work. Mr. Hansen can do better, I know. Now that he has shown he can write a real novel, maybe he can go back to writing fiction in which the gay characters aren’t relentlessly punished throughout. There is a tendency nowadays (actually it goes back to the beginnings of the gay movement, and probably beyond as well) to claim that we don’t need gay pride any more, that gay guilt is a thing of the past. I’ll believe it when we start getting some gay male fiction where homosexuality is a given, not a problem. Mr. Hansen has already taken steps in this direction with his mystery novels; I hope he will go further in his future novels, whatever the genre. But A Smile in His Lifetime, as far as I can see, is a step backward.

Shall The Pot Contend With The Potter?

I started to write a paragraph or two as an update to the previous posting, but as usual it grew and grew into a separate post.

Jeffrey Weiss (who, I should mention, sent me a nice e-mail defending his case after I mentioned him in the previous post) commanded J. K. Rowling to shut up and recognize that “until those books were published, the characters and settings were yours to command and control.… Now they are ours.” (One of us, one of us! Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.) The meme spread like a radioactive virus, first to Rod Dreher (thanks to Roy Edroso for the link), then to one John Mark Reynolds (via a commenter on Dykes To Watch Out For). Dreher’s post, titled “Dumbledore, the Queen of Hogwarts”, was nothing if not succinct: “I’m with my Dallas Morning News colleague Jeff Weiss: J. K. Rowling really would do well to shut up.” (After all, if St. Paul would not suffer women to speak in church, why should Rod Dreher?) Reynolds was more verbose, rather like your own Promiscuous Reader: to show his evenhandedness despite his distaste for “disordered affections”, he wrote a second article to establish that he’d have objected if Rowling had declared Dumbledore a heterosexual. But he too agreed with Weiss: “Dumbledore no longer belongs only to Rowling. He also belongs to her readers who have been given a series of books in which Rowling was free to say what she wanted to say. … She wrote what she wrote and now it belongs to us.”

To borrow a word from Reynolds: nonsense. Just because the projected series is finished, that doesn’t mean Rowling is not allowed to revisit the Potterverse should she wish to. I imagine that she’s currently enjoying the freedom that comes from the end of her obligation to work on that massive project, but in years to come she might want to write about Harry again. Many authors have returned, for better or worse, to creations they thought they were done with: Ursula LeGuin to Earthsea, Roger Zelazny to Amber, Armistead Maupin to 28 Barbary Lane, Conan Doyle to Sherlock Holmes – hell, Shakespeare to Falstaff. If Reynolds believes that Harry Potter now belongs to him, he might try publishing a continuation of the Potter saga without Rowling’s permission. (Reportedly Rowling is more indulgent of fan fiction than some other writers, but even she draws the line at Potter “slash” erotica.) Harry Potter belongs to her until you pry him from her cold, dead fingers.

Echoing other objectors, Reynolds declares that Rowling “wrote about Christianity openly by Book Seven, but if Dumbledore was gay, she decided to hide it. She hid it so well that there is no evidence of it.” I wouldn’t go that far. In Deathly Hallows, tabloid reporter Rita Skeeter accuses Dumbledore of an “unnatural” relationship with Harry Potter. This is at least compatible with the way bigots have exploited homosexuality in the closeted, especially after they’re dead. Dumbledore’s was probably an open secret among wizards. Potter fans have also pointed to Dumbledore’s own account to Harry of his ambiguous fascination with Gellert Grindelwald.

“At this point it is too late for Rowling to change the text,” Reynolds declares. “She cannot decide to kill Harry now . . . or announce that Harry is actually a vampire, a member of the Tory party, or antidisestablishmentarian. She wrote what she wrote and now it belongs to us.” Again, nonsense. Rowling is not changing the text, though she could if she wanted to. Writers often do. In the days when popular fiction was serialized in newspapers or magazines, authors would often make changes, even of endings, for book publication. Rowling has her own constraints, grown in the construction of her massive project, which would prevent her from (say) declaring that Harry was a vampire all along.

It’s not surprising that People of the Book, a Book whose contents are supposedly set in stone, would want everything they read to be under similarly tight control. But if the Author of the Book wants to add some commentary, let alone some extra installments, those are authorized additions. Who are you, O Man, to reply against your Author? The vexed question is who owns the rights to the franchise.

In Jesus’ day the canon of the Hebrew Bible wasn’t set. The Torah, the Five Books of Moses, and the Prophets (which included “historical books” like Judges, Samuel, and Kings) were pretty much agreed on, but the third division, the Scriptures (Psalms, Proverbs, Chronicles, and so on), had permeable boundaries. A lot of writings survive that didn’t make it into either the Jewish or the Christian lists. (The Christian “Old Testament” doesn’t quite match the Jewish Bible.) Some of them, like Jubilees, are retellings of stories from the Torah, often told from different perspectives, like the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. (Even within the canon, Chronicles retells material from Samuel and Kings.) Or minor figures like Enoch get to be the stars of their own books, often with two or three sequels.

The Christians added a whole new cycle, which didn’t sit well with the original owners of the franchise. What are the gospels, after all, but Jesus fan fiction? (Son of Yahweh. Son of Yahweh Meets Satan. Son of Yahweh Meets Sons of Satan. Son of Yahweh Goes to Heaven.) Christians wrote more stories about Jesus and his family and friends, including the further adventures of Paul and other apostles, full of magic – I mean miracle, excuse me! – and other fun stuff. Then came the lives of the Saints, with gore, sexual threat (the virgin menaced by a slavering infidel is a perennial trope), miraculous escapes and martyrdoms galore. It continues to this day. Two From Galilee, anybody? Or, for the snuff crowd, The Passion of the Christ. (Personally, I prefer Paul Rudnick’s Adam-and-Steve play The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.)

Readers have always felt free to differ even with the official, published, canonical versions of the stories they loved. As a child, writer Jean Kerr (if I remember right) so disliked the unhappy ending of Gone With The Wind that she wrote her own happy one. There was a big fuss when Rowling made Harry's romance with Ginny Weasley canon: "On one message board, posters decided to unite against Spartz, Anelli and Rowling, writing that the new purpose of the forum was to 'express your views and show why the evidence was there for the [Harry/Hermione] ship, even if Ms. Rowling, unfortunately, did not see it,' and to 'let her know the way you feel about her comments, or point out how, why and where she went wrong in her development of the characters, or simply discuss how she will have missed a golden opportunity to tell one of the greatest love stories ever told.'" I pointed out before that conservative Christians aren't alone in their tizzy about the unfairness of Rowling’s revelation; at least one avowed atheist has complained in very similar terms, accusing Rowling of being “freakily obsessive about her characters.” As Rowling’s critics insist, Dumbledore’s gayness is not on that order; it’s a minor detail that is part of the backstory, and strictly speaking it's an addition, not a change – but if it’s so minor, why are they making such a fuss about it?

The Unbearable Straightness of Harry

Last week in New York City, J. K. Rowling announced to an audience of fans that Albus Dumbledore, late headmaster of Hogwarts, was gay. Pardon me if I’m underwhelmed, and not very moved by Rowling’s generosity in giving the world one more deeply closeted gay character, and a solitary token at that, but the British gay movement response was predictable: “a spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall added: ‘It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster.’” Peter Tatchell showed more sense, pointing out that a gay character who can be discerned to be gay in the book is more meaningful for readers, gay or straight. The American antigay-bigot response was predictable too; I won’t bother linking to the more blatant cases. Among human beings I liked best the blogger who titled her post “I Love My Dead Gay Dumbledore.” This was a reference to the great dark comedy Heathers, in which a weeping father expresses his love for his dead gay football-player son; a skeptic in the church murmurs, “Wonder how he'd react if his son had a limp wrist with a pulse.” I had the same thought about Dumbledore.

Then there were the straight liberals. PZ Myers is a scientist and an atheist who likes to twit Bible-thumping homophobes, but he was grumpy: “It's more fuss over nothing,” he harrumphed. “He's a fictional character, the author is getting a little too freakily obsessive over her characters, and it doesn't affect me one way or the other how the character swings. So Rowling says he's gay. Eh. Move on.” If only it were that simple. Some of his commenters promptly set him straight, so to speak, on authors and backstory. Me, I always get suspicious when a straight boy starts letting his imagination run too freakily free: “Dumbledore could have been written up as a flaming ponce who hung out in the Hogsmeade Bathhouse every weekend and did drag cabaret for fun”. I’ll bet he doesn’t care whether Dumbledore liked girls, boys, or Mackled Malaclaws! Someone has mild issues, I think, like the commenter on Blog@Newsarama who complained, “I didn’t really want to know this. Not that I care that a Harry Potter character could possibly be gay, but rather that it’s thinking of Dumbledore in a sexual way at all. It’s like seeing your grandparents doing it.”

Slinking further to the right, there’s this writer for the Dallas Morning News, who didn’t want to know it either, and apostrophized Rowling thusly:

Is Dumbledore gay? He is for you, apparently. But unless you said it in the actual books, must he be so for me? Your saying so now makes it harder for me to imagine anything different. Do you really want to limit your fictional world that way? …

For all of those years, until your books were published, the characters and settings were yours to command and control. But then you let them go.

And speaking for all of your happy readers I need to tell you: Now they are ours.

“Ours” evidently means “heterosexuals” here – it doesn’t occur to the writer that many of Rowlings’s happy readers are also gay, with opinions of their own on this subject. On Jeffrey Weiss’s planet, a gay character is somehow “limited” – can you imagine him making the same complaint about a heterosexual character? (Hey, Ms. Rowling, telling us that Harry got married to Ginny Weasley limits your fictional world!)

What surprised me a bit was the reaction among some gay men. When an article about Rowling’s announcement appeared on gay.com, the commercial gay chat and news site, many of the (presumably gay) commenters were hostile. Some accused Rowling of trying to exploit the gay male community to make more money, but some sounded just like homophobes: they didn’t want to know about it. One said he wouldn’t read the rest of the books because “this offends me”, but he didn’t explain why; nor did the one who wrote, “Like most fans around the world, I'm dismayed!!” Still another wrote: “Weather [sic] or not Dumpledore [sic] is gay has no bearing on the telling of the tale, it may be an interesting side note but the sexuality of his character has little to do with the story.” On the whole, the range of responses among these gay men was the same as on the straight sites I looked at, only with worse spelling.

Another ploy was the “They’re children’s books!” line. Strictly speaking, the Potter books are Young Adult fiction, which has always grappled with sexual and other social issues. There are a number of classic, if problematic YA novels that deal with homosexuality. Harry and his friends are adolescents, not children, and the series depicts their awakening heterosexuality (which was enough by itself to make some conservative commentators queasy). While it’s true that Dumbledore’s sexuality need not have been known to them, what about their fellow students? A Gay/Straight Alliance wouldn’t be out of place at Hogwarts, I’m sure. But that would raise the dread spectre of Politics, which was difficult enough when Hermione (no doubt thanks to her human background) tried to organize a movement to free the house elves. But Rowling’s world is one largely devoid of politics (except for the murky power struggles among the wizards); I think that’s one reason for its popularity, especially among adults of a certain age.

As Rowling herself said that night, “Oh, my god, the fan fiction!” Since the 1970s or so, there has been semi-underground erotica, known as slash fiction, depicting various manly couples as gay: Kirk and Spock of Star Trek, Starsky and Hutch, and more recently characters from the Harry Potter universe. Most of it is written by women, largely though probably not exclusively straight; SF writer and critic Joanna Russ wrote a famous paper about it, “Pornography By Women For Women, With Love.” I haven’t seen any of this stuff myself, though I’ve looked at some of the Japanese yaoi and shonen ai comics, also about male love and also wildly popular among young women. What Rowling didn’t make explicit, her fans certainly will. As Jeffrey Weiss wrote with something different in mind, the characters belong to the fans now, and not all of them want Dumbledore or Harry to be straight.

Although I’ve read all seven of the Potter books, I don’t think I’d be considered a fan. I’ve never found Rowling’s wizards appealing; on the contrary, they are narrow and provincial at best, racist and homophobic at worst. In The Deathly Hallows a sensational writer accuses Dumbledore of an “unnatural” relationship with Harry. This supports Rowling’s claim that Dumbledore’s homosexuality had long been part of his backstory for her; it’s reasonable to guess that his enemies used his known queerness to smear him, just as Muggles do in the real world. That the ploy worked doesn’t indicate that the world of wizards is any more enlightened about sexuality than the Muggle world. There’s also the slavery of house-elves, and the common anti-Muggle prejudice that so many wizards indulge, from the crude gut racism of the Malfoys to the muddled, well-meaning liberalism of Arthur Weasley. Magical candies and Quidditch, which delight so many of Rowling’s fans, aren’t enough to make me wish I could have gone to Hogwarts.

Christopher Hitchens, the Ann Coulter of the Alcoholic Left

O Cthulhu, I've put Hitchens's name into the title of a post. Who knows what I'll do next?

My fellow atheists are such a disappointment to me. For example, this morning on Avedon Carol's Sideshow blog, I read this account of Hitchens's performance at the Freedom from Religion Convention:

He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy. Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now — Rudy Giuliani — and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons (something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties.

Avedon commented, "Hitchens' 'atheism' turns out to be indistinguishable from everything he's said is wrong with religion, Jihad, Crusades, and all." I'd noticed that about Hitchens too, and not just Hitchens. Sam Harris is a big supporter of the "war on terror" too, and The End of Faith bore a blurb from torture supporter (and plagiarist, and all-round liar and thug) Alan Dershowitz. I checked the book's index when I noticed that, and found that it contained a long attack on Noam Chomsky, which is one reason I still haven't read it. But I did read Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris's plea to Christofascists to join the crusade against Islamofascists. As though Christofascists weren't already foaming at the mouth for more Saracen blood! So much for Dawkins's argument that a world without religion would be a world without war, or at least a world with much less of it. To say this doesn't mean that I've started liking religion, only that being an atheist doesn't automatically make you rational, any more than being a theist automatically makes you good.

Thanks to Avedon's link to Maureen Dowd, I found this piece ("Carson-Era Humor, Post-Colbert", which may or may not work -- you may have to go to the Dowd piece to get to it) which also mentions Hitchens: "Mr. Hitchens, a one-time pariah for his support of the Iraq invasion and his savaging of Mother Teresa, still serves as something of a social arbiter in Washington." Social arbiter? Still? That's even more discrediting than supporting the Iraq invasion and endorsing Bush in 2004. "One-time pariah"? Why not "still", especially since he keeps adding reasons to shun him?

Stop Necking With That Dog, Beryl!

Another book review for GCN, published sometime in 1981.

STOP NECKING WITH THAT DOG, BERYL! or,
YOUR MAJESTY IS LIKE A DOSE OF CLAP

A Liar’s Autobiography, Volume VI
by Graham Chapman
Methuen, Inc.
240 pp.
$13.95 hardcover

Since I am not, never have been, and do not expect ever to be a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I approached the task of reviewing Graham Chapman’s autobiography with trepidation. I mean, a little of these guys goes a long with me: I’ve never seen any of their films, never bought or read (except standing up, in a bookstore) any of their spinoff books, nearly dozed off during the one M.P.F.C. telly program I ever tried to watch, and although two of their albums are in my municipally-famous record collection, I haven’t played them in five years. And anyway, if you (O gentle reader) do happen to be a fan of theirs, you probably know already if you want to buy this book.

For the benefit of the rest of you, however, may I say that although I am still not a fan, I enjoyed A Liar’s Autobiography, Volume VI (No, it isn’t really Volume Six, that’s a typical Monty Python joke, borrowed from Gertrude Stein). Some of it is quite funny, such as the phantasmagoria of a gay bar in Chapter One:

At this point a man wearing a suit made entirely of wood is wheeled over my toe, and I look around to find David and see that he’s stuck talking to a group of people dressed entirely in leather, except for their spectacles which are made of glass and leather. He seems happily occupied so I continue to hunt for a drink. Someone shouts –
‘For Christ’s sake, Beryl, stop necking with that dog.’
‘But it’s an Alsatian …’ (p. 30)

…But I mustn’t quote too much of it, it’ll spoil it for you. One trouble with funny books is that the second reading lacks the freshness and surprise of the first, and the third … well, if there is to be a third reading, the book had better have more going for it than laffs. And (I hear you ask) does A Liar’s Autobiography, Volume VI have more than laffs going for it?

Well, yes, I suppose so. It is reasonably interesting to hear what it’s like to be the gay member of Monty Python, and I wish that more moderately famous gay people would follow Chapman’s example, come out, and tell us about themselves. Chapman comes across to me as a rather unremarkable man, not terribly insightful but not terribly dense either. He drinks too much, I mean way too much, and though he is prone for PR purposes to make much of the fact that he’s lived with the same man for umpteen years, he also has this compulsion to score sexually with at least one person in every town he passes through. He is commendably honest about his faults and decently modest about his virtues – loyalty to friends, hard work, and all that. The book is fragmented enough (mustn’t let the reader forget that this is a Monty Python book) that I had the feeling at times that Chapman himself wondered at times why he was writing it. There also seems to be a fairish amount of recycled Monty Python material used to pad out the text, such as the Oscar-Wilde-meets-the-Prince-of-Wales bit on pages 24 through 28, which I recognize from one of my two albums. The initiated fan will no doubt recognize more than I did.

Still, I’m always interested in the stories of gay people’s lives, and if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be the gay member of Monty Python, here’s your chance to find out. But I’d wait until it comes out in paperback.