May 2014 – Page 84

Do You Know Your Ass From Your Elbow?

Because some digital book scanners don’t:

As Sarah Wendell, editor of the Romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books noticed recently, something has gone awry. Because, in many old texts the scanner is reading the word ‘arms’ as ‘anus’ and replacing it as such in the digital edition. As you can imagine, you don’t want to be getting those two things mixed up. The resulting sentences are hilarious, turning tender scenes of passionate embrace into something much darker, and in some cases, nearly physically impossible.

Some choice errors:

Mrs. Tipton went over to him and put her anus around his neck. “My dear,” she said, rapturously. “I have been hoping for years that you would talk that way to me.”

And:

“Bertie, dear Bertie, will you not say good night to me?” pleaded the sweet, voice of Minnie Hamilton, as she wound her anus affectionately around her brother’s neck. “No,” he replied angrily, pushing her away from him.

Alison Flood adds:

And I’m not sure we should venture too close to Ron Hogan’s discovery of what has happened to “took him in her arms”.

(Photo from Carl Warner‘s “Bodyscapes” series. Hat tip: PetaPixel)

The Rise And Fall Of The Gay Novel

Caleb Crain ponders the reasons why, after gay literary figures broke into the mainstream in the 1980s, their work has been a harder sell of late:

Gay novels do sell, and gay people do buy novels. But capitalism is a numbers game. Self-identifying homosexuals are not an enormous population, and, in general, they don’t buy literary fiction about themselves at a rate that would compensate for their small numbers. It can’t have helped that AIDS decimated the generation of gay men who, in the nineties, would have been in their forties, fifties, and sixties—prime ages for reading and buying books. It might also be the case that AIDS brought the attention of straights to gay voices in the eighties and early nineties, according to the principle that John of Gaunt set forth in “Richard II”—“O, but they say the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony”—and that interest in the gay novel faded in tandem with journalistic coverage of the AIDS crisis.

Whatever the cause or perceived cause, I suspect that, nowadays, a mainstream publishing house rarely takes on a gay novel unless an editor believes that the book will find straight readers, too. Because some straights still find homosexuality disgusting (cf. comment trolls across the Internet) and a larger number fail to find gay characters “relatable,” a gay novel faces steeper odds from the start. “It’s a non-homosexual world, and the majority of those who are buying, selling, and reading literature are non-homosexual,” the journalist Tyler Coates wrote for Flavorwire last summer, in an article that riveted my attention because it happened to appear the week before the release of my own novel, “Necessary Errors,” whose main character is gay. Or, as Cunningham put it, even more trenchantly, in 2000, while reflecting on the success of his novel “The Hours,” “I can’t help but notice that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”

Previous Dish on gay literature here and Crain’s own novel, Necessary Errors, here.

The Lost Art Of Memorizing Poetry

Nina Kang suggests that contemporary verse is simply difficult to remember:

Unfortunately, that strict meter we dislike was a pretty valuable mnemonic tool. Memory is reconstruction, and when we recite, we must reconstruct from the pattern of rhyme, internal rhyme, and meter, and from the remembered sensations of our throat muscles articulating the phonemes. During the era of rote memorization, poets generally used predictable and memorable formal techniques where “rhymes hinted at their partners and sense—and small remembered groups of words – contributed enough to restore the whole … as satisfying as solving a crossword clue” (from “Gray on a White Night: Reconstructing the Elegy through the Small Hours” in the London Times of April 22, 1960, according to Heart Beats). As a result, memorizing free verse poetry often feels like solving a crossword with only half the clues.

A defendant who is in custody flashes the four finger symbol known as Rabaa, meaning four in Arabic, during the trial of 20 individuals, including five Al-Jazeera journalists, for allegedly defaming the country and ties to the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood in the police institute near Cairo’s Turah prison on May 3, 2014. Peter Greste, an Australian journalist with the satellite news channel Al-Jazeera on trial, described his ordeal as a “massive injustice”, after spending more than four months in jail. By Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP/Getty Images.

Not To Miss A Beat

Megan Keeling profiles Elise Cowen, a female Beat poet who wrote in a community in which “only a few women were recognized as artists, and most were not deemed to possess the talent or creative soul required to produce art”:

Today she is most famous for being Alan Ginsberg’s experiment in heterosexuality, and the typist of his poem “Kaddish.” Beat scholars place her as the footnote in the Legend of Ginsberg: a devoted follower of the poet who lived in his intellectual shadow. Others have written her as a tragic-women-poet figure (she suffered from mental illness most of her life, and committed suicide at the age of 27.) But there is more to her story than that. Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.

I took the heads of corpses
to do my reading by
I found my name on every page
and every word a lie. …

After her death, Cowen’s family destroyed much of her poetry and writings, describing them as “filthy.” Her poems cover much of the same topics as the male Beats- spirituality, homosexuality, drug use and madness, among many other things. However, as a woman (and a queer one at that) she was too far on the margins even for the Beats. [Author Joyce] Johnson writes: “I’d show her the stories I was writing, but [Elise would] never show me her poems. ‘I’m mediocre,’ she told me, pronouncing the word in an odd hollow French way.” When her poetry was published, it was largely due to the efforts of her friends, especially Leo Skir, after her death. The first collection of her poems will be published this year.

Previous Dish on Beat literature here, here, here, and here.

What Is The Ulysses Of Romance Novels?

Noah Berlatsky calls for the creation of a “romance canon,” arguing that “the genre is so culturally maligned that there has been no concerted effort to codify it”:

I’ve poked around online to find “best of” lists or other recommendations, but it soon became clear that there wasn’t even a provisional consensus on which books were the best or essential romance novels. Jane Austen showed up consistently, as did Gone With the Wind, but there was nothing that gave me a sense that certain books were clearly central, or respected, or worth reading. The genre is so culturally maligned that there has been no concerted effort to codify it. There is, in short, no romance canon.

I’ve always been a little leery of canons. Listing the “best” books or movies or music is always going to be an arbitrary, not to mention hubristic, endeavor. … Looking around desperately and in vain for some sort of consensus “best of” lists for romance novels, though, I realized that such lists are, or can be, unexpectedly important. Canons are a way to solidify, or demonstrate, critical bona fides. Pop music and comics may not have the same cachet as great novels or gallery art, but institutionally codifying the “greatest” is an important way to assert that there is a “greatest” – that there is some group of experts who considers these works in particular, and the genre or medium in general, to be capable of greatness. Romance novels don’t have that.

(Image: From Berlatsky’s list of canon contenders)

A Short Story For Saturday

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” can be read in just a few minutes – and you’ll want to make it all the way to the end. Here are its opening paragraphs:

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

Read the rest here. For more of Chopin’s work, check out her Complete Novels and Stories. Previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

A Horse Rising From The Ashes

On this Kentucky Derby weekend, Byliner has made available to Dish readers Elizabeth Mitchell’s The Fire Horse, the remarkable account of Boyd Martin and an unwanted racehorse, Neville Bardos. A particularly gripping part of the story involves Martin’s stable catching on fire, endangering the horses he kept there:

He tugged his T-shirt over his head, took the deepest breath he could manage, and barreled in.

Inside, the blackness was almost impenetrable. The straw storage above the first third of the barn had been consumed by fire, and dark brown hay smoke churned like factory effulgence blasting down the breezeway. Martin couldn’t see well, but he could certainly hear the roar of flames eating through the wood and hay, the beams creaking, people outside hollering, the sirens screaming.

He came upon a horse’s body in the breezeway, probably the poor animal they had seen on fire, but in the blackness, Martin couldn’t tell which horse it was.

Here and there, the roof started caving, dropping beams. Martin felt along the wall, reading his way. Soon he was touching the metal screen on the side of the tack room, then the wash stall. And then in the blind darkness, he came to the opening of the first stall. He could hear a gurgling inside. Walking closer, he realized the choking sound was coming from the far corner. A horse.

For the next 48 hours, you can read the rest here. You also can purchase it as a Kindle Single here.

Month: May 2014