Stephen McCauley excels in writing about the everyday, believing that people reveal themselves when they’re dealing with the small details and inconsistencies of their daily lives. In one sense, not much happens in his narratives, yet in a deeper way, everything changes. Affection, commitment, self-interest, and contentment are perennial themes, with characters trying to find their true selves.
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Brief reviews of TEN BRIDGES I’VE BURNT: A Memoir in Verse; DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA; MATERIAL WEALTH: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg; BOUND: Poems; and IN THE SPIDER’S ROOM: A Novel.
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At fewer than ninety pages, Rowe’s Liberated merely scratches the surface of Cahun’s life and art. But perhaps that’s appropriate as Cahun’s art often dealt with surfaces: poses, masks, assumed or discarded identities. The book pays tribute to Cahun’s Surrealistic photography and æsthetics, her aggressive anti-fascism, and her enduring, indestructible love for Marcel Moore.
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A new biography, Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta GarboI, by feminist historian Lois Banner—who’s the cofounder of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians—presents Greta Louisa Gustafson (1905–1990) as Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. So much has been written about the actress that the Hollywood dream factory exploited as a marketable commodity during the 1920s and ’30s, when Garbo was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” that it’s a challenge to say something new. Banner’s book offers a feminist rehash of Garbo’s childhood and reprises the well-known struggles on her quest for cinematic fame and financial freedom.
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Saint was a founding member of the Blackheart Collective, and published numerous collections of his own poetry, editing two anthologies, notably The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets (1991). Sacred Spells is a collection of exemplary poems, essays, stories, plays, and even some performance pieces.
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, I gave birth to two beautiful drag babies on Pier 54 in Manhattan. We were at Wigstock, the raucous drag festival. Like many mothers, I neglected their development, but they have since grown into upstanding, fierce queens. Hundreds of drag mamas, whom Elyssa Maxx Goodman lovingly documents in Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, were far more committed to their drag careers and to nurturing newcomers to the culture of drag than was I.
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Reviews of About Ed by Robert Glück, The Distance Between Us by A. C. Burch, 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World by Sean Hewitt and Luke Edward Hall, The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz, Mourning Light by Richard Goodkin, and Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art by Miriam Kienle.
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Miller’s text engages a fair amount of philosophical rumination, but pertinent to the visual examples under review. Her descriptions are usually quite on the mark, and her analyses, however speculative at times, never seem to emerge from left field. Body Language is an absorbing book for those who take photography and queer representation seriously.
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The moral became that “homoerotic attachments are acceptable, provided they manifest within the boundaries of socially appropriate behaviour,” states Andrew Sutherland in Queer Opera, his survey of homoerotic elements in the history of opera.
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THE LYRICS from a song in Stephen Sondheim’s dazzling Broadway show Sunday in the Park with George (1983) include these lines: “Bit by bit,/ Putting it together./ Piece by Piece—/ Only way to make a work of art./ Every moment makes a contribution,/ Every little detail plays a part./ Having just the vision’s no solution,/ Everything depends on execution:/ Putting it together/ That’s what counts.” Stephen M. Silverman’s lush, posthumous coffee table compendium of Sondheim’s career, Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy, does exactly that. It puts it all together to make an exhilarating work of art in its own right.
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