Category Archives: Literature

Recently added to my summer reading queue is this sizzling memoir by Josh Sabarra. He’s been featured here as the Hunk of the Day, but this is one Renaissance man who will likely be seen a lot more. (As David Beckham and Ben Cohen have been quiet of late, we are on the lookout for the next hunky conglomerate.) As mentioned, I’ll be reading his ‘Porn Again: A Memoir’ on the beach this summer (and writing a review when the vacation is over), thanks in part to this powerful teaser in his own words:

“I struggled for decades to find myself and to be comfortable in my own skin.  As I approached the beginning of the second half of my life, I thought that my stories might inspire people to step into themselves and entertain at the same time.

During the writing process, I learned that I had been borrowing my sense of self for so long.  I looked to food, plastic surgery, my career, my lovers and my celebrity friendships to try to make myself appealing to other people.  I finally realized that I am enough, on my own terms.” – Josh Sabarra

In addition to his novel (and another one on the way) he’s the sex columnist for ‘Gay Times’ magazine (and I’m secretly hoping he’ll write a Special Guest Blog for this little website – pretty please with a cherry on top?)

One of the more disturbing aspects of growing older (and into the dreaded middle-age) is a rapidly-encroaching inability to focus as well as I once did. To that end, I’ve been getting into anthologies and collections of short stories, where I can keep track of a plot or cast of characters without having to make a key with a list of names and descriptions so I won’t forget. (Yes, I have begun to do that.)

It’s strange how my memory works. I can recall events quite vividly from 1994, but ask me what I did two days ago and it’s gone with the wind. Luckily, there are plenty of collections that contain shorter tales and stories for the weaker of mind, including the one pictured here.

My friend Chris just sent me this great little book: ‘The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships’ as edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein. It’s a fascinating, and often quite moving, series of memories of friendships between writers. Some focus more on the writing aspect, others more on the friendship, and together they comprise a rich and enthralling experience. That it was given to me by one of my dearest friends makes it all the more resonant, and perhaps one day I’ll tell that story of friendship (with disguised names to protect the guilt of the other party). And though my modern day memory may be fading, I remember every moment of those first few days of friendship, first planted on a trip to Puerto Rico, and cultivated with travels and talks from San Francisco to New York to Miami to Washington.

It may be time to make new memories.

There’s a literary wonderland that is conjured whenever Gregory Maguire releases a new book, and that wonderland is a literal thing in his latest work ‘After Alice’ – his enchantingly twisted take on Alice’s own Wonderland. Rather than give away any juicy plot-points or spoil any secrets with a shaky synopsis, I’ll simply highlight my favorite passage, the one that spoke most deeply to me, and the one that echoes the sentiments of certain folks who love books and try valiantly to share that love with others.

Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, “This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.” But even as we turn to the fellow in the bed beside us to say, “Yes, this passage here,” whatever it is we recognized has already disguised itself, changed in that split instant. There is no hope that our companion can see what we, just for a moment, saw anew and hailed with a startled, glad heart. Literary pleasure, and a sense of recognition and identification, real though they are, burn off like alcohol in the flame of the next heated moment.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘After Alice’

Many are the books I’ve read and tried to press into the minds of others, and many are the unread books that friends have routinely and quietly ignored when I’ve brought them to their attention. Far from making me feel less alone, most great books leave me feeling an acute sense of loneliness – in the unshared resonance or recognition of some carefully-crafted passage of remarkable beauty, or some thread of a theme that they have no interest in pursuing. In reading a book that speaks to me, I mostly find friends and family falling by the wayside, and my only companion along the way being the author, ever unknown to me. I remain even more unknown to her or him.

Somewhere along our literary history, people started to think of Emily Dickinson’s poetry as cute and harmless fluff. In truth, it was far darker and more sinister than surface readings or historical reputation would allow. As is often the case with poets and poetry, things were never as simple as they seemed. Ms. Dickinson was a complex character, and her work often delved into the introspective reaches of the soul. What she brought up was not always pretty or nice, and she didn’t disguise it as such. It just took the rest of us a little longer to catch on.

One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted
One need not be a House
The Brain has Corridors surpassing 
Material Place

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting
That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter
In lonesome Place

Ourself behind ourself, concealed
Should startle most
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.

The Body borrows a Revolver 
He bolts the Door 
O’erlooking a superior spectre
Or More

~ Emily Dickinson

Only vaguely do I remember reading ‘The Turn of the Screw’ in one of my college courses. Henry James did very little for  me. Sometimes emotional constipation can’t help but seep into a writer’s work (surely this blog has been in need of an enema more often than not) and while it makes for an interesting tension, it’s a tension that I’d rather do without. Still, he knows how to build suspense, and on this eve of Halloween, that is wonderfully apt.

“It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.” ― Henry James

“I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.” 
― Henry James

“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.” 
― Henry James

“I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.” 
― Henry James

Labor Day may have come and gone, but technically it’s still summer, and at 93 degrees it certainly feels like. While I’ve put away my white pants for the season, summer lingers on in poetry and pool romps. Here’s a poem by one of my favorite writers, Mary Oliver, extolling the continuation of the sunny days:

LITTLE SUMMER POEM TOUCHING THE SUBJECT OF FAITH

 

Every summer

I listen and look

under the sun’s brass and even

into the moonlight, but I can’t hear

anything, I can’t see anything —

not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,

nor the leaves

deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,

nor the shucks, nor the cobs.

And still,

every day,

the leafy fields

grow taller and thicker —

green gowns lofting up in the night,

showered with silk.

And so, every summer,

I fail as a witness, seeing nothing —

I am deaf too

to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet —

all of it

happening

beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.

Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.

Let the wind turn in the trees,

and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.

How could I look at anything in this world

and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?

What should I fear?

One morning

in the leafy green ocean

the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body

is sure to be there.

~ Mary Oliver

Every once in a great while, a book comes along that makes you slow down and savor each page, forcing you to devour it as quickly as you don’t want it to end. The great literary conundrum – when you enjoy something so much you rush through it because you can’t stop, but at the same time you do everything in your power to prolong the pleasure, earmarking pages and underlining passages and revisiting favorite parts before it’s even over. Such was the power of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee – a classic that had somehow escaped my vision in the course of four decades. I just finished it, and what a wonderful read it was. In many ways, I’m glad I waited. This sort of jewel might have been wasted in my youth. Instead, I am still moved by its last few chapters, and it’s been haunting me since I finished it. The best books do that. They stay with you long after you’ve read them, inhabiting a place inside the soul that enriches and emboldens – a place that you don’t let everyone see, because it means too much, and too many people might sully it. Instead, you hold it close and secret and safe, and you hope the world doesn’t rock you too much to dislodge it.

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

“A steaming summer night was no different from a winter morning.”

John Irving is one of my favorite authors. He consistently delivers spellbinding prose, and every novel he crafts manages to conjure the aching resilience and hope of the human spirit with wildly varying settings and characters. The one constant is a gentle examination of the brutalities we inflict on one another, and the notion that no matter how impossible it may seem, we always have the capacity to change, to become someone new, someone better.

While I’ll probably always favor ‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’ over everything else (you never forget your first time), I was also quite enamored of ‘In One Person’. Perhaps upon perusing the following quotes, you may be tempted to give it a try. I’d certainly encourage it.

“You shouldn’t guess about someone’s past; if you don’t see any evidence of it, a person’s past remains unknown to you.” ~ John Irving

“That moment when you are tired of being treated like a child – tired of adolescence, too – that suddenly opening but quickly closing passage, when you irreversibly want to grow up, is a dangerous time. In a future novel (an early one), I would write: “Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult – in any way – something in your childhood dies.” ~ John Irving

“You can’t force children to become something they’re not. You can’t simply tell a boy not to play with dolls.” ~ John Irving

“What’s the point of having a love of your life, if he’s not always with you?” ~ John Irving

I have told you that I was reluctant to describe him as an artist pure and simple, and indeed that he declined this title with a modesty touched with aristocratic reserve. I might perhaps call him a dandy, and I should have several good reasons for that; for the word ‘dandy’ implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world; with another part of his nature, however, the dandy aspires to insensitivity…

The dandy is blasé, or pretends to be so, for reasons of policy and caste. He is a master of that only too difficult art – sensitive spirits will understand – of being sincere without being absurd.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are – or are not – to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life…

And the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator. The phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature. All the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized, and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of a childlike perceptiveness – that is to say, a perceptiveness acute and magical by reason of its innocence!

~ Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Charles Baudelaire wrote a great many wonderful essays, of which ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ is one. In the opening portion on ‘Beauty, Fashion and Happiness’ he makes a play for my own heart. I have forgotten which literature course listed this as part of its required reading, but I’m grateful it did. Hopefully I don’t betray my old-man curmudgeon status by stating that this speaks to a generation that likely won’t listen, but needs to hear it.

“The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present.” ~ Charles Baudelaire

Is there a place in this fast-paced selfie-obsessed world for such thoughtful reflection on our social condition, or is all that simply lost in the speed of everything today? I’d like to believe that such nuances, and such subtlety, are still able to be gleaned and understood, that some of us are capable of holding our focus and attention to have a succinct conversation and experience, uninterrupted and not chopped up by other distractions. Enough with the multi-tasking and light-speed-shifting social plate tectonics.

“The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other antique statues.” ~ Charles Baudelaire

What will last? What aspects of beauty are we preserving? What will survive the test of time, and what will fall by the wayside? When we look back at all these selfies years from now, assuming that we even do, what is it that we will see and remember? Will any of it linger beyond this fleeting second? I’m not convinced much of it will. You need to do something different, something daring. You need to make your mark and make it stick. Otherwise you’ll get swept away, lost and indistinguishable in the massive wave of self-promotion that social media has crafted and fostered. In a sense, social media is fashion. Baudelaire would, I’d guess, be quite taken with Instagram and Twitter.

The selfie is the modern-day artistic statue, erected with far less permanence, yet far greater reach.

I also want to believe, given that I’m writing this in a blog (the modern-day printing press, the current means of presenting work to the world), that even in this raw and rough method of transmission, there is the possibility for something beautiful, for something meaningful, for something that might last. A lot of sifting may be required, some searching and weeding through all the fluff, but in some select posts I have to believe there is something more.

“Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.” ~ Charles Baudelaire

And so I seek to find such beauty, to bring it to light, to give it a chance to embed itself within the continuum of human history. It’s getting more and more difficult to make something that sticks, and in my heart of hearts I think I may have failed thus far – but that’s the very thing that keeps this site going. There is the possibility of beauty, the potential for greatness. It’s just out of reach, but on my best days I’ve tasted it, I’ve felt it, and I know I’ve come close.

“…even in those centuries which seem to us the most monstrous and the maddest, the immortal thirst for beauty has always found its satisfaction.”  ~ Charles Baudelaire

A friend was perusing some of my books the other evening, and she happened upon ‘The Short History of a Prince” by Jane Hamilton. Perhaps better-known for her book ‘A Map of the World’ I have always found more of an affinity to ‘The Short History of a Prince.’ You’ll have to read it for yourself to understand why – or just read a few of my favorite quotes from it:

His was an ordinary tragedy, he knew. he had been happy as a child and had not realized it. But happiness was spent so quickly, he thought, and identifying it, feeling it, trying to hang on to it, made him nervous. maybe it was better to be ignorant of bliss, unselfconscious, and later have the sense to recognize its traces. ~ Jane Hamilton 

You have to live wildly, every now and then, so you can sleep at night, and have interesting material for your dreams. Don’t you? I figure it’s for the dream life that we have to really live. ~ Jane Hamilton

You might be expecting a wish list for the holiday season, and I’d be lying if I said another one wasn’t on the way, but it turns out that my most favorite things in the world aren’t colognes or messenger bags or shoes, but far simpler: words. Here are a few of my favorite strings of them:

You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n. ~ Milton, Paradise Lost

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are most themselves are the victims.” ~ Gregory Maguire

Another thing they knew and shared and believed was that no one could really help anyone else, that sadness is solitude, but you could love someone, without reservation or fanfare, just love them, without expecting anything in return and, sometimes, it would be enough. ~ Whitney Otto

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim, that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.” ~ Gregory Maguire

It was about wanting something that you have idealized to the point that, when you have it, you are still longing for it. Something can be yours and not yours in the same breath. ~ Whitney Otto