George Michael, prophet?

On last night's American Idol I was reminded how much I love George Michael's song "Praying for Time," which was released in 1990 (says Wikipedia).

Check out these lyrics and tell me if he's either 1) prescient -- corporate greed, environmental degradation, spiritual bankruptcy, personal disillusionment, media over-saturation and control, etc., et all -- or 2) was it that bad back in the late 80s/early 90s, too?

These are the days of the open hand
They will not be the last
Look around now
These are the days of the beggars and the choosers

This is the year of the hungry man
Whose place is in the past
Hand in hand with ignorance
And legitimate excuses

The rich declare themselves poor
And most of us are not sure
If we have too much
But we'll take our chances
Because god's stopped keeping score
I guess somewhere along the way
He must have let us alt out to play
Turned his back and all god's children
Crept out the back door

And it's hard to love, there's so much to hate
Hanging on to hope
When there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it's much too late
Well maybe we should all be praying for time

These are the days of the empty hand
Oh you hold on to what you can
And charity is a coat you wear twice a year

This is the year of the guilty man
Your television takes a stand
And you find that what was over there is over here

So you scream from behind your door
Say "what's mine is mine and not yours"
I may have too much but i'll take my chances
Because god's stopped keeping score
And you cling to the things they sold you
Did you cover your eyes when they told you

That he can't come back
Beacuse he has no children to come back for

It's hard to love there's so much to hate
Hanging on to hope when there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it's much too late
So maybe we should all be praying for time

Visuwords

Via Neatorama: Visuwords is a neat online graphical dictionary and thesaurus. The website allows you to look up a word’s definition and find synonyms in a network of nodes called "synsets."

Poetry in motion

Go ahead, make fun of me! But, I am so excited! Tonight is the night. I've been waiting for this!
Watch it and you'll be as hooked as I am.

Chuck Palahniuk, in the Advocate

Chuck Palahniuk writes stories that fearlessly expose the darkest parts of the human experience. So why is it that when it comes to his sexuality there are still some things he likes to keep hidden?

Palahniuk is author of Fight Club, Haunted, Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, etc.

Gay galore

The most recent issue of the Columbia Poetry Review contains work from the following gay poets:

Jeffery Conway
Reginald Shepherd
Brad Gooch
the late Tim Dlugos
Chip Livingston (The Museum of False Starts, forthcoming from Gival Press)
Charles Jensen
Michael Broder
Jason Schneiderman
Aaron Smith
Carl Phillips
Rafael Campo
Michael Montlack
Mark Bibbins (The Dance of No Hard Feelings, forthcoming from Copper Canyon)

among many other well known poets.

If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Hetero-normalizing Robert Rauschenberg

For Marshall, who emailed me about this very topic:

Hetero-normalizing Robert Rauschenberg

Speaking of Marshall, he sent me this link -- "a good (and amazingly long) essay by Clive Wilmer in the TLS on Thom Gunn"

Would you be on this list?

What do Lewis Carroll, Marquis de Sade, Rousseau, Horatio Alger Jr, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all have in common? Besides that they were all writers!

Click here to find out (slightly NSFW).

To boldly marry, where no gay has gone before

The headline on PageQ's splash page for its news story on Star Trek actor George Takei (Sulu) announcing marraige plans:

Mr. Sulu' actor Takei beams as his right to marry is phased in.

How many puns and pop references are allowed in a headline?

I bet we can come up with a starship-load more!

Post your best shot in the comments.

1001...

1001...movies to see before you die.

Just because I like lists and movies. Do I need a better reason?

This list is kinda interesting, listed by year going all the way back to 1902.

Jericho Brown out loud

Poet Jericho Brown gives a stirring, electric reading at Teachers and Writers 2020 Vision Reading series poccast. [Visit the page and click on listen or download to hear him!]

Terrance Hayes describes his work as "saturated with artful passion, full of tricksters and divas."

You can hear Jericho read this poem,"Prayer of the Backhanded," among others from his first collection, Please, which will be published this fall. Be sure to catch "Lion" and the final poem "Elegy-- surprising, moving and rich with trouble.

You can also hear me talk about Jericho and hear him read here.

And here's a bio on Jericho.

Freeing queer discourse

I recently came across this blog, and learned about this new collection of essays -- and it's free via the web!

Beyond Masculinity: Essays by Queer Men on Gender and Politics

What does it mean to be a queer man? Beyond Masculinity is a groundbreaking collection of 20 smart, insightful essays from a diverse group of writers that all tackle this question. All published online and available anywhere in the world, 24/7, for free. Readers will find a tremendously diverse group of queer men thoughtfully reflecting on their experiences – and using those experiences to build powerful analyses of their social worlds.

The editor writes on his blog, "But wait, there's more! Not only is it free and available to anyone in the world, but you can also subscribe to Beyond Masculinity on iTunes and download 12 of these essays as podcasts, recorded by the authors. So what are you waiting for! Get cracking!"

I'm in love with a criminal

Justin Nozuka

Poem in process

AWAY FROM ME




O Autumn That Never Was,
chain me again to the burning rim

of sundown and pour me glass
after glass of watermelon wine,

as cheap and pucker-sweet
as I feel when I'm happiest --

that is to say, when I pine
for a man whose chest

presses me down, pins
me to the bed's creaking.

But make him a specter,
gone when the moon sins

by lighting his brow
in the dark night,

burnishing away his skin
with amber, slicking

it with its wet light
until all that's left

is he voice, growling
I will

be back.
I will.

BREAKING: Gay marriage / Calif.

CALIFORNIA COURT OVERTURNS GAY MARRIAGE BAN; BECOMES SECOND STATE TO LEGALIZE HOMOSEXUAL UNIONS.

Gay marriage in California?

The clock is ticking. Less than an hour (at the time I'm posting this) before the Calif. Supreme Court is set to announce their gay marriage decision.

Check out this Wall Street Journal blog entry that has the background and analysis:

Anyway, what’s to be expected in today’s ruling? According to the Chronicle, the current court has a 6-1 majority of Republican appointees, but has a centrist record on social issues and has ruled in favor of gay-rights advocates in a number of cases, including three decisions in 2005 requiring equal treatment for same-sex parents in disputes over child support and custody. The justices seemed sharply divided at their hearing in the marriage case March 4.

Getting an 'F', even though you 'tried your best'

I enjoyed this essay published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, written by a college adjunct professor teaching English 101 and 102. He (I'm assuming the writer is male, not sure why) wonders if the national belief that everyone can get a college education is a good thing, if it's a passable idea to begin with.

But what I love most about the essay is that he really captures the sense of disillusionment (and, really, sadness) an expository writing prof. can feel when teaching students who have simply not been prepared, are functionally illiterate, or who just simply can't write to save their lives. He tells the story of having to fail a nontraditional student and the questions he asks himself. From start to finish, this essay resonates with me. I've been there, man. And if you've taught English 101 in the last ten years, I'm betting it resonates with you, too.

Here are some highlights:

Writing about failing so many students, he writes:

I feel no pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

About the (optimistic?) view that reading literature opens students' minds:

Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

Amy Sedaris

So this is probably NSFW. Amy Sedaris provides the voice of Paulie the Penis in this 'educational' movie.

The 100 books every Man should read

I'm not sure what criteria one uses to choose 'manly' books, but here's the Art of Manliness' 100 Must Read Books for the essential man's library.

There's a lot of the 'greats' and many 'butch' texts (for lack of a better word) like The Prince and Slaughterhouse Five, Call of the Wild, Lord of the Flies, but also books like The Picture of Dorian Gray, Walden and Plato's Republic and Paradise Lost.

So what makes a book manly?

Poetics of Indifference (draft)

(after Wayne Koestenbaum's essay)

"I've always felt that I've written more by not writing, than by writing."

"Oh heavens, when does one begin to write the real poems?"

-- Elizabeth Bishop

It seemed very moved
that I lifted my head
to see it enter the room,
which really was nothing
more than an uncluttered space.

It seemed to think
I couldn't care less

"You didn't care
a damn anyway," it said.

"Gradually, I cared
to wonder about you
less and less,"
I admitted.

It had become a patient
waiting for a doctor,
but secretly wondered,
'Will I ever been seen?'

It has no penny, no slot.
Why should it?
Though it does shine
like copper -- or something
else that shines.
Or once did.

I'd like to believe
it once hid
under my tongue,
placed there (by
whom? ) like a child
hiding the coin
of his shame.

How things have changed in the State shaped like a mitten

Gay student ranks as Young Citizen of the Year finalist.

School activities: Tolerance survey project, Gay Straight Alliance co-president, Planned Parenthood Peer Educator on sexual health topics.

Community activities: City of Ann Arbor election inspector; Habonim Dror North America local chapter co-educational director and head of social justice activities.

Robert Rauschenberg dies

'Titan of American Art' dies, says Times


Rauschenberg's page on glbtq.com

John Gallaher has images.

Poems mentioned in Paul Monette's Half a Life Story: Becoming a Man

A kind of anthology...
"To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing," by Yeats, W. B,
"Ode to Psyche," by John Keats.
"Cut", by Sylvia Plath
"Frost at Midnight," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Woman At The Washington Zoo," by Randall Jarrell
"A Toccata of Galuppi's,: by Robert Browning

Paul Monette, 49, Who Wrote of AIDS, Dies - New York Times

The dumbest generation? Ouch!

Saw this on Boston.com

Author Mark Bauerlein aims to provoke in his new book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future" (Tarcher/Penguin). Do you agree? Take a look at eight reasons the Emory University English professor gives to ''not trust anyone under 30'' -- see which you think is the best.

Big Gay Friday

Pink pages
Lesbian and Gay Titles from May -Dec. 08 from Publisher's Weekly.

Friday Feel-Good
Gay Kansas City area high schooler is named home coming king. And it's not a joke. This is heartwarming. Wish things had been like this when I was in high school. And he's adorable, to boot! Lots of pictures of him and the cheerleading squad. Yes, he's a cheerleader. Wanna make somethin' of it?!?!

Survey says...!
Are you a gay? Want to know more about your tribe? "The clearest picture yet of the identity, political attitudes, and civic engagement of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is emerging from the largest and most rigorous survey of that community ever conducted. The political scientists who conducted the study unveiled their findings at a forum in Washington, D.C. on April 30." Check out the whole article. Very interesting. Here are just a few of the things I noted:

One of the surprising and controversial findings is that half consider themselves to be bisexual. Sherrill explained, "Virtually all of the prior surveys asked the question, are you LGB, and stopped. We followed that up with, would you characterize yourself as L, G, or B."

---

Sherrill said bisexual men are "really distinctive." They are most likely to be Republican and conservative. "They are most likely to say, if they could get married, they wouldn't." Egan added, referring to those men marrying a same-sex partner. "For men, bisexuality tends to be a behavior; for women bisexuality tends to be an identity."

---

Only 29 percent felt a strong tie to the LGB community, said Egan, while 47 percent said it was important to vote. But those numbers were dragged down by those who

identified as bisexual and had less of a sense of commitment to the community.

Egan said that he was surprised by "the disconnect between the fact that LGBs are very secure in their identity and at the same time don't feel a strong sense of shared fate or community with people who share their sexual orientation."

That is very different from what is found among African Americans and Latinos. Sherrill believes it is because much of that sense of community identity is inculcated by the family during the early years of one's life.

---

Egan called coming out "a politically transformative experience." The people surveyed said they had become "more liberal, more interested in politics, less religious, and more distant from their families." That held true whether one came out early or late in life.

Wanna be one of those trendy gays?
Gay List Daily, a swank e-publication 'dedicated to making trendy gays even more trendy and gay,' will launch three new editions in the coming weeks -- New York City and Los Angeles, as well as a National "anywhere" edition.

Books for aspiring writers

Mental Floss lists four books for aspiring writers, and more via the comments.

Anyone have a favorite to recommend?

Modes of sexuality

"One way to look at sexuality: it is the image bank you plunder while you have sex of while you wait to have sex. Once you are done having sex, the image bank is closed, defunct. Until the next time.

"Another way to look at sexuality: it is the image bank you use all the time. It is the modus operandi of your motility.

"Usually I think if sexuality as a matter of acceleration and deceleration. Instead I should think of it was how and why I think.

"I should consider sex to be the art of making propositions. I should reverence the beauty of argument."

-- Wayne Koestenbaum, "Darling's Prick," Cleavage

Do any of these modes resonate with you?

Wayne Koestenbaum

"My poetry is pornographic, since I define poetry as language that envies the scene it is describing. Poetry is words watching and wanting to approach the object it renders."

-- Wayne Koestenbaum, "Darling's Prick," Cleavage

I'll be posting more gems like this from Cleavage. WK is my new hero.

Weird google searches that led people to my blog

"transvestism and gender in sardinian simbols"

and

"gay cupcake poems"

Sad news from Ptown

If you've ever been to Provincetown's Post Office Cafe, you'll have met this kind and funny fellow, David Dixie Federico. He died recently after an accident in his home. He was one of a kind!

Just when you thought there was nothing left to discover on the web

Lots of discovery today:

Edge New York talks to some of New York's 100's of gay bloggers.

Time's Top 25 Blogs

Webby Awards announced.

Two Webby nominated site I noticed:
1) Book Glutton -- a fascinating way to read books, annotate them and talk about them with other readers and writers. Watch the YouTube tutorial. [Personal note: I can see this becoming a great tool once they have more content!]

2) Blurb.com (make your own book) [Personal note: Self-publishers is becoming more acceptable. Not sure I'd ever do it, but they are winning awards.]

Some weird leftovers...
Contribute to ThingsIHaveLearnedInMyLifeSoFar
Ever heard of a Falindrome?
Manga editions of Shakespeare? From Cliffnotes?

State of Gay Publishing - 5/5/2008 PW

..."What is the state of GLBT publishing?”—... the state of gay publishing is deathly ill and quite possibly terminal, but that the literature itself is as vibrant, compelling and, arguably, groundbreaking as at any other point in its history...

Hmm. Ok. So where does that leave us?

Jason Shinder (1955 -2008)

Poet, editor, teacher, arts administrator, mensch, and literary mover and shaker, Jason Shinder
passed away on  April 24th. He had been fighting cancer for the past three years.
The founder of the YMCA Writer's Voice, he initiated the implementation of arts programming
throughout the Y's many nationwide community centers. The Poet Laureate of Provincetown,
he was also the founder of the Gibson Music Initiative and the Sundance Institute's
Arts Writing Program. Thank you, Jason. God bless. (And stay Jewish.)

-- from AWP

A conversation on Byron with Jason Shinder

On Shinder's The Poem That Changed America: Howl: 50 Years Later.

A literature that saves lives?

Several authors offered insights on the state and mission of gay literature. Carol Seajay, who along with Richard Labonte, received the Publishing Triangle Leadership Award, said, "As long as people are being hurt, we need a gay literature." The prolific author Katherine V. Forrest received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and made perhaps the most resonant comment on the need for gay literature when she said, "Those books saved lives and I should know because one of those lives was my own."

Coming Collapse of the Middle Class, says economist

This isn't what I normally post here, but it's something that's been on my mind a lot and is something I believe will become inextricably linked to social justice and equality in this country. I haven't watched the whole thing but I wanted to post it for others like me who might be interested.

Talk begins around the 5 minute mark. Note: It's an hour long so you may want to check out the comments section here.



Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. She is an outspoken critic of America's credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class.

May is here, May is Queer

May is here and QueerType's monthly update is online...where I discovered this.

Michael Walker and the DREAMWalker Group are now producing a regular newsletter of interest to LGBT writers and is open for submissions and suggestions. Visit the Web site at http://www.dreamwalkergroup.com/ for more details.

The New York Public Library now has a LGBT blog at http://lgbt.nypl.org/.


And this:

Harper Perennial will publish a new collection of short fiction by Dennis Cooper, Ugly Man, in the Summer of 2009.

Knopf will publish Emma Donoghue's Lesbian Plots: From Geoffrey Chaucer to Sarah Waters.

Ballantine will publish Rita Mae Brown's Pure Gold, a memoir about the animals in the author’s life.

Performance artist Terry Galloway's Mean Little Deaf Queer, about being gay and disabled, will be published by Beacon Press in the Spring of 2009.

Atlantic Books will publish Edmund White's biography Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

Much more! Check it OUT!

Publishing Triangle winners

Here's the full list, and below are the poetry categories. I'm reading Joan Larkin's book right now, actually. It's an engrossing read, emotionally rich yet rarely sentimental. I enjoyed Henri Cole's book but haven't read the other two Thom Gunn nominees, so I can't so much there.

Finalists for The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
WINNER! Joan Larkin, My Body (Hanging Loose Press)
Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree (Wave Books)
Jennifer Perrine, The Body Is No Machine (New Issues)

Finalists for The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Henri Cole, Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar Straus Giroux)
WINNER! (tie) Steve Fellner, Blind Date with Cavafy (Marsh Hawk Press)
WINNER! (tie) Daniel Hall, Under Sleep (The University of Chicago Press)

13 Crazy examples of why it's hard to learn English

Just a bit o' fun for a rainy Tues. The pics (from the popular site Engrish) are what makes this hilarious....13 Crazy examples of why it's hard to learn English

Provincetown in Poetry

Seth Abramson has a stunning poem in the just-out issue of poetry. It's called "Provincetown Fourth." There are also two other poems. Here he blogs about 'nearly crapping' when he got his contributor's copies. Love that! Congrats, Seth!

Spencer Reece has a long poem in this issue, too.

And a friend of mine has a prose piece enticingly entitled "Accessibility Blues."

OMG! You get an F

If I ever had students who wrote like this (see below), I'd really lose it!

NEW YORK—It's nothing to LOL about: Despite best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Thursday, also found that teens who keep blogs or use social-networking sites like Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace have a greater tendency to slip nonstandard elements into assignments.

The results may give parents, teachers and others a big :( -- a frown to the rest of us -- though the study's authors see hope.

You damn dirty apes!

Charlie Heston in the flesh (NSFW)...and hairy. Talk about the apes, Charlie!

I had such a crush on him running around in a loin cloth in Planet of the Apes. Of course, I didn't have a clue as to why my heart beat so fast during that movie (I think I told myself the apes were scary, yeah right).

What's weird is that I wasn't even born when the movie first aired. I had to see it in re-runs.

"How (Not) to Interview a Gay Writer"

This is from 2006, but this short piece about an interview of an Indian writer is a great example of how not to interview a writer who is gay. This is the assumption I feel I'm constantly working against, that the writers I ask for interviews assume I'll ask 'those kinds of questions'. Like these...

Q: But if you can be straight, and life is so difficult as a gay, isn’t it simpler to just be straight?

Q: This is something that people often snigger about: has boarding school anything to do with you being gay?

Q: Are you in a relationship just now?

What do these questions have to do with f'ing anything! It's like the interviewer thinks gay writer = professional gay spokesperson for all gays. Ridiculous!

These kind of interviewers are what lead people like Bruce Bawer to decry the whole genre:

Writing about proliferating interviews with writers, he says: "The interview vérité is plainly a symptom of [...] writer-worship gone berserk; and the writer-worship is in turn symptomatic of that perverse post-Beat Generation mentality that views the poet less as an artist — a human being using his craft, intelligence, and talent to create an ordered, controlled work of art — than as a prophet, a visionary, a seer, whose every act and utterance is taken to be of nearly scriptural significanc