Featured

If you look over at the sidebar, under "Featured," you'll see links to my new reviews of Shortbus and Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. Read the reviews.


This is my third review of Ready to Catch Him, and the one in which I think I've finally gotten close to what I wanted to say. (Not that the others aren't valid, but my feeling is that if a book or other work is substantial -- and this one is -- as time goes by and it sinks into your foundations, especially if you experience it several times, your thinking gets stripped to the essentials, and then you start building a new structure to house it. My prior reviews were valid then; this one is valid now, with the additional insights provided by the film.)

It's interesting, looking back at my past reviews sometimes, particularly of those works that moved me. My first review of Glen Cook's Tyranny of the Night, for example, was really atrocious. The second, taking it in combination with Lord of the Silend Kingdom, is much more intelligent -- much closer to what I feel I should be doing in a review.

Another thing about Bartlett's book that gives me words where I didn't quite have them: it's an elegy, a memory of the loss of what we -- gay men -- once had to offer the world. Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, I mourn the demise of "gay culture" -- it was heady, it was reckless, it was earthy and sensual, and it was the product of a kind of innocence and courage that no one else had, and no one else has still. I miss it -- I don't want to be like everyone else, and I want to live in a real world that is not completely prepackaged, and that's what we're heading for. We had something better. The mythic framework of Bartlett's novel is perfect -- we were creating myth then, and now all we have is houses, children, and SUVs.

That's quite a come-down.