Fit to Eat With the Hogs?

I just finished reading C. P. Snow's little book The Two Cultures, originally published in 1959, about elite conflicts in (mostly) British society about the status of science. Snow, who was a scientist and a novelist, complained that science got No Respect from academic "intellectuals", and The Two Cultures stirred up a lot of controversy when it first appeared. I've been meaning to get to Snow's work for many years -- somewhere I think I still have a paperback copy of his novel Corridors of Power that I bought in high school -- and I really just sought out a copy of The Two Cultures because it was discussed in a newer book I was reading on the Science Wars of the turn of this century. The edition I got from the library included Snow's essay "A Second Look" from the early 60s, in which he revisited his argument and acknowledged some of the more overwrought criticism it attracted. There, on pages 56-58, he made a wickedly lovely dismissal of a certain kind of criticism that more people ought to bear in mind.

A few, a very few, of the criticisms have been loaded with personal abuse to an abnormal extent: to such an extent in one case, in fact, that the persons responsible for its publication in two different media made separate approaches to me, in order to obtain my consent. I had to assure them that I did not propose to take legal action. All this seemed to me distinctly odd. In any dispute acrimonious words are likely to fly about, but it is uncommon, at least in my experience, for them to come anywhere near the limit of defamation.

However, the problem of behaviour in these circumstances is very easily solved. Let us imagine that I am called, in print, a kleptomaniac necrophilist (I have selected with some care two allegations which have not, so far as I know, been made). I have exactly two courses of action. The first, and the one which in general I should choose to follow, is to do precisely nothing. The second is, if the nuisance becomes intolerable, to sue. There is one course of action which no one can expect of a sane man: that is, solemnly to argue the points, to produce certificates from Saks and Harrods to say he has never, to the best of their belief, stolen a single article, to obtain testimonials signed by sixteen Fellows of the Royal Society, the Head of the Civil Service, a Lord Justice of Appeal and the Secretary of the M.C.C., testifying that they have known him for half a lifetime, and that even after a convivial evening they have not once seen him lurking in the vicinity of a tomb.

Such a reply is not on. It puts one in the same psychological compartment as one’s traducer. That is a condition from which one has a right to be excused.

The argument, fortunately, will suffer no loss if we ignore criticisms from this particular spirit, and any associated with them: for such intellectual contributions as they contain have been made, with civility and seriousness, by others.

(The "particular spirit" Snow had in mind, he acknowledged in an endnote, was F. R. Leavis, a famous academic literary critic of the period.)

I have many disagreements with Snow's thesis, which I hope to detail in a future post, but I hope I can stay on his level (or psychological compartment) about them.

You My Butch

I've always liked butch women, so it's no surprise that I like k. d. lang. I nearly wore out a VHS copy of her early videos, Harvest of Seven Years, and I just tracked down a DVD copy of same. In that period, 1984 to 1991, she was an amazing performer, full of exuberance, androgyny, and of course one of the great voices of the century. Fortunately some of my favorites of those videos are available online -- though not, alas, "Bopalena," her first video, of an old rockabilly song that she performed straight, or unselfconsciously gay. Another video from the same producers, "PollyAnn," is on YouTube, though, and it's raucous fun, with young k.d. in drag, complete with a drag queen's punchline at the end.



Not long later she graduated to a Nudie suit in the Grand Ol' Opry tradition:



See also her performance of "Pay Dirt" from the same TV program.

I've always loved her collaboration with Take 6 for the Dick Tracy soundtrack. This muddy clip from YouTube, unlike the version on Harvest of Seven Years, intercuts shots from the film, but the song is still there.



And I wish I could embed this lovely, raunchy, hilarious version of "What's New, Pussycat?" performed in Sydney, but you can still see it.

On the other hand, in this performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (a song that seems to be the Adagio with Strings or Pachelbel's Canon, if not the "My Way," of this decade) she seems to be impersonating Gertrude Stein. I know, there are worse people to impersonate, and we're none of us getting any younger, especially me. It's been twenty-five years since "Bopalena" and "PollyAnn." But what's up with that outfit? She doesn't move as fluidly and confidently as she used to, and her musical judgment is slipping -- she slides into self-indulgent bombast and bathos from the beginning.

(This performance [embedding disabled, or I'd have it here] by four Norwegian singers is the best "Hallelujah" I've heard.)

But she can still be a great singer when she wants to. Here she serenades Tony Bennett in tie and tails:

Chingusai

Here's the trailer (via) for a new Korean film that's supposed to open this month. Probably not quite safe for work -- there are some discreetly raunchy moments -- but safe for human beings. Sorry, it isn't subtitled, but you can probably get the gist of what's going on. The English title, Just Friends?, is a fair translation of the Korean chingusai, which means "between friends" and has been used by gay Korean organizations in the home country and elsewhere.



I was distracted at first by the English-language song that plays in the background, and by the comedy buzzes, clangs, and pops that I recognize from Korean tv shows. But it looks like it might be fun. Here's a poster.

Across the top it says "Mom! I like men!" Above the Korean title in small letters it says, very roughly, "99.9% Pure Gay Romance." A friend tells me that the word for "pure" is Pusan dialect -- that's a port city in southeastern Korea, also the home of the Pusan International Film Festival, where Chingusai screened in October. For a conservative Confucian country, Korea is putting out some interesting gay films.

The Bankers Believe, and Tremble

But hold the presses, there's more!

Not only has our President declared that he "did not run for office to be helping out fat cat bankers on Wall Street," he called a bunch of those fat cats to his office to tell them what's what. In a one-hour meeting (via). The President was girding his loins for that confrontation all weekend:

"If they wish to fight common sense consumer protections, that's a fight I'm more than willing to have," Obama told reporters in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the executive mansion.

That means he's finally going to rip off the mask and quit playing 12-dimensional chess! He's going to take the gloves off for some bare-knuckle mano a mano! He's going to show the banksters and America and the world what Barack Obama is really made of! (Sawdust, I think.)

Glenn Greenwald is dubious too. He quotes Time magazine:

"It's a p.r. stunt," says an executive at one of the banks that will be getting a dressing-down at the White House meeting. Executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are expected to be among those in attendance.

Greenwald remarks:

One of the most revealing aspects of the bailout was that it was justified by the increased lending it would enable, yet contained no requirement that the funds be used for that. And, of course, they weren't.

One can say many things about these bankers, but they're typically quite perceptive about matters of self-interest. They don't exactly seem frightened -- or even remotely concerned -- by the presidential "dressing down" they're about to receive. In fact, they seem to think it's all a sham for public consumption. I wonder why they think that.

(image source)

Wotta Kidder (and I'm Not Talking About Margot)

John Caruso has this punch line from our number-one standup President:

"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street."

Personally, I never thought he could top last year's:

"This is not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street," Obama told supporters at a rally at the University of Nevada at Reno.

He really is amazingly un-self aware, though I'm sure he gets plenty of encouragement to stay that way. The company he keeps, and all:

It looked like it was business as usual for President Barack Obama on the first day of his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, as he spent five hours golfing with Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank and chairman and CEO of UBS Group Americas. Wolf, an early financial backer of Obama’s presidential campaign, raised $250,000 for him back in 2006, and in February was appointed by the president to the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

I know, I've quoted that one before, but it's so nice I had to use it twice. In the meantime, in-betweentime, here are more gems from The Distant Ocean. This headline from last March:

"Bank Execs Pleased With Tone Of Meeting With Obama"

As John commented,

This would be something like "Mafia Bosses Pleased With Tone Of Meeting With District Attorney" or "Vampires Pleased With Tone Of Meeting With Van Helsing". Except in those cases it would be a surprise.

One of his commenters chimed in with:

Obama’s Tax Task Force Includes AIG Board Member

And now, a little traveling music, Maestro!

Boy Meets Boy

I've said before that what the world needs is a black gay Jennifer Crusie. He hasn't yet arrived, but we're making progress, with a white gay Jennifer Crusie for young adults. I may be too optimistic, not having read David Levithan's other books, but I read his first YA novel, Boy Meets Boy, and it's a sweet delight. According to Band of Thebes, Levithan said he wrote it because it was the kind of book he always wanted to receive as an editor, and it's certainly the kind of book I always wanted to read -- the book I wish I could have read in high school, before David Levithan was born.

Okay, it's a fantasy, but like a good fantasy it's not so far from reality as to be irrelevant. In a small city not very far from New York, there's a remarkably but not impossibly gay-friendly high school. Paul, the narrator of BMB, is just this side of being a cipher: bright, unspecifically talented, with a supportive family and friends. He came out to his parents in kindergarten, to other kids in second grade, was elected the first openly gay president of his third grade class, having "carried the girl vote, the open-minded guy vote, the third-grade closet case vote, and the Ted-hater vote." (Ted, his opponent, ran on a DON'T VOTE FOR THE FAG platform, which garnered only "the rather tiny lint-head vote".) Paul then founded a gay-straight alliance in sixth grade. As the case of Ted shows, bigotry and fag discourse are not totally absent from Paul's world.

In eighth grade, I was tackled by two high school wrestlers after a late-night showing of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at our local theater. At first, I thought it was a strange kind of foreplay, but then I realized that their grunts were actually insults -- queer, faggot, the usual. I wasn't about to take such verbal abuse from strangers -- only [his best friend, straight female] Joni was allowed to speak to me that way. Luckily, I had gone to the movie with a bunch of my friends from the fencing team, so they just pulled out their foils and disarmed the lugheads. (One of them, I've since heard, is now a drag queen in Columbus, Ohio. I like to think I had something to do with that.)

There are also some religious bigots to contend with later on, and a football player who wants payback after he's dumped by the school's star quarterback, Infinite Darlene (né Daryl). This makes the book not totally imaginary, a quasi-utopia which could conceivably exist someday... okay, maybe I'm fooling myself. What I think really appeals to me is that David Levithan's idea of the kind of world he'd like for gay youth is so close to my own. Plus other people have read and liked the book, which suggests that I'm not totally weird -- maybe just ahead of my time. Yeah, that's it.

Paul meets a new kid in school, Noah, also totally out but more conflicted, with a more intense relationship history. Levithan puts small obstacles in their way, just enough to sustain dramatic and erotic tension, and there's a small crisis that takes some ingenuity on Paul's part, with support from his friends, to resolve. (It's obviously a crisis that is required by the demands of the genre, but at the same time it rings true for the characters.) Resolve it he does, and all's well that ends well. No one is run over by a speeding bus, crushed by a falling tree limb, or commits suicide. Is that a spoiler? I don't think so. The starred Booklist review quoted on the dust jacket speculates that Boy Meets Boy "seems to represent a near revolution in the publishing of gay-themed books for adolescents." And about time, too!

The main difference between Boy Meets Boy and a Jennifer Crusie novel, aside from the trivial one of the same-sex romance at its heart, is that Levithan's characters are teenagers, unlike Crusie's late-thirties to early-forties protagonists. They're less finished as persons and carry a lot less baggage. But they could grow up to be Crusie's intelligent, resourceful, and likeable characters; I feel that they are living in the same fictional universe. Only gay. Now we just need a gay black Jennifer Crusie, and the time will be fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven will be at hand.

And this is Levithan's first book! I have a feeling I'm going to read most of the rest of them in the coming month.

Poetry Friday Will Be on Hiatus for a While

I have one or two more sonnets to post, and I can't find the folder that contains the rest of the Quadragesima poems. Once I find those, I'll pick up the thread again.