In The Economist issue of June 13th, in print; on June 11th on-line:
Obituary: Veil and beard and nuclear weapon
Marjane Satrapi set out to correct the West’s views of Iran
The author of Persepolis, an international sensation, died on June 4th, aged 56
(Extensive reference to men’s private parts, occasionally in street speech, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
From my 7/23 posting “Small worlds”, in an anecdote (from 1990) about my man Jacques and me:
to reverse the usual slogan, [Jacques] treats me as not only a great piece of meat but also as an especially wonderful human being. This is ridiculously sweet. Unrealistic but sweet.
The usual slogan is about men as meat. Some details.
After many grueling hours, I now have my books and DVDs sorted into (admittedly eccentric) categories on the bookshelves, in the various places the movers put the shelves. This task creates a series of insoluble puzzles in categorization, which I have been inclined to solve in an assortment of ad hoc ways.
There’s one giant category of linguistic structure, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, arranged (in a desperate faute de mieux move) alphabetically by author — which is truly not useful, but resists breakup because so many of my interests cut across subareas. Similarly for a giant agglomeration of public-intellectual books, many (but not all) touching on matters of language; this is where you’ll find Geoff Nunberg, Arika Okrent, Steve Pinker, and Ben Yagoda.
Then there are more specialized topic collections: your library probably doesn’t have a subcollection on male prostitution or comics studies, but mine does. I’ve done less breaking down of the DVDs, because there aren’t a great many of them, but that has led to some surprising neighbors — as with the sequence of Marx Brothers movies, then My Neighbor Totoro, and then The Night of the Hunter.
But at least if it’s survived to get here, it’s on the shelves. Somewhere.
In recent news: the publication (on 7/6) of John D’Emilio’s latest book, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press). From Jonathan Ned Katz’s blurb:
a report from the trenches, a history of the struggle to create a history of sexuality, a personal history of political activism, the story of a [AZ: devoutly Catholic] smart boy from the Bronx who made himself into a pioneering, left, feminist, anti-racist gay, public intellectual.
Which prompts me to tell an anecdote about my man Jacques and me — and John D’Emilio. So my tale will of course begin with Larry Kramer, the author of the controversial novel Faggots, but more important to my tale, the founder of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which means that through his ceaseless abrasive hectoring, he changed the world for the better and helped to save untold numbers of lives.
(There are brief accounts of Kramer and D’Emilio in my 7/21 posting “Two celebrated gays”)
For reference in an upcoming posting about small worlds: brief accounts of Larry Kramer and John D’Emilio, two (justly) celebrated and very public gay men, of extraordinarily different natures, who I happened, once, to get linked with as a member of that category. (Blame it on my man Jacques, who knew the complexities of my nature but still managed, in his love, to think of me as genuinely heroic.)
My second Sunday at Avant, beginning to refine old routines and create new ones. Did not celebrate with gay porn, but instead with an old favorite movie, the frivolous Astaire-Rogers delight The Gay Divorcee (from 1934). Your wife is safe with Tonetti / He prefer spaghetti. No Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing this Sunday, so I sang for two hours on my own, to Irish YouTube videos, eventually reaching peak loudness and passion. My tongue broke out in unknown strains / And sung surprising grace.
Accumulated the beginnings of way too many postings to come. And did the Sunday thing of restarting the computer and doing a save of its contents.
Ordered more household items, got some delivered, mostly things with instructions that are incomplete or completely incomprehensible, at least to me. On the first, I have a new atomic clock for the bathroom, the 40-year-old veteran being on its last legs; the new one has homed in on the right 12-hour Pacific Daylight Time, but has provided no way — that I can fathom — to set the date and day of the week. On the second, I have the mounting tape but completely fail to understand how to adhesive-mount my collages (merely printed on stiff paper, not framed or heavy) on my walls. And on and on.
This will all get worse tomorrow, when even more stuff gets delivered. So I can wander fretfully from one puzzle to another.
I am reduced to reporting on the minutiae of daily life; everything else is overwhelming. (Half an hour this morning finding out where something I was absolutely sure had been moved had been stashed in my new place. At least I did actually find it. View this as a cautionary tale. I’m getting very little done, very slowly, and not very well, but it’s the best I can do, so I plug away.)
It’s taken me a whole week to figure out how to walk through doors here. Well, the extremely heavy (because astoundingly sound-proofed) front door to my place — negotiated from a walker, so that mere strength is not sufficient for the task.
From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago):
guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.
Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations.
Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me:
— HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me nostalgic and sad.
Managed a shower, with improvised adjustments so I could sit down (though the shower is designed for a standing person) and also cope with a — surprise! — low-flow shower stream. All very edgy.
Then began some attack on the books, which are all mixed up, arranged on shelves in totally new ways in new places. As with pruning my library way down for the move, this requires handling large numbers of heavy books, so that my hands now barely work, cramp up, and hurt like hell. Constantly having to reinvent some new schemes for locating the books so that they’d be most useful and then rework them to fit the spaces I have. Utterly exhausted, barely able to speak. This is going to take many difficult days. Meanwhile, books are piled on the floor, on tables, and so on, while I sort things out. It’s a zoo.
Meanwhile, I’ve accumulated a huge number of fresh posting topics. Life lurches on.