Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Good weekend. Met GH's nephew S over dinner last night, at a Lower East Side Italian restaurant called Tres. He and his wife are light and sound installation artists. After dinner, we migrated over to the neighborhood garden, where we toasted marshmallows over a fire, put them with chocolate between crackers, and ate far too many of them. They are called s'mores, so I was told. This afternoon, GH and I saw La Cage Aux Folles at Longacre Theatre. Kelsey Grammer (Georges) was a strong stage presence, but the show belonged to Douglas Hodge, who played Albin, also known as Zaza in the cabaret. Hodge, a classical actor who worked with Harold Pinter, was very funny, and very moving. The dancers "Les Cagelles" were terrific. First show I watched with GH, and I am glad we both enjoyed it very much. Musicals are great entertainment, when done well. As Georges said of the cabaret, they are "rather gaudy, rather grand." Not gaudy, not grand is the small but exquis...

TLS September 25 2009 from Allan Massie's review of John Carey's William Golding: The Man who wrote "Lord of the Flies" : The victim in Rites of Passage is the young clergyman Colley, who takes to his bed and apparently dies of shame after participating in a drunken homosexual incident on the lower deck. Some of Golding's friends believed that he had homosexual tendencies himself, and after a dream in which he had dressed up in his mother's clothes Golding wrote in his notebooks: "I pretend to be immune to such bent delights as homosexuality and transvestism, but my dreams won't let me get away with standard attitudes about myself." He dreamed of making love to two of his Oxford contemporaries and of being invited by a small Ethiopian boy "to bugger him". He declined the invitation "with a gloomy sense that he has missed the only thing the place has to offer". Such dreams represented his unconscious self, and he denied an...

Arrived on Fire Island yesterday with TCH, for a five-day stay at the Grove Beach Hotel. I was here two summers ago, alone, not having met TCH yet, and this summer I am here with him as an ex (and more). We had lunch at Cherry's Bar, where I had written the first part of "Fire Island," and where the drag performance in the heart of the sequence took place. This time, I plan to work on revising the ghazals.  The bar was holding its annual Drag Attack competition, and a young queen who called herself Trashy Couture walked away with the golden blender. A few women there looked as if they could have been in drag, but were not. It was a jolly demonstration of gender indeterminacy. An older gentleman, with curly ginger mustache, kept warning me that I had to "pay" for the food and drinks TCH was plying me with. Another man, in just the right togs, wore a jacket that said "Mr. Fire Island Leather 2001." Competitions are a kind of communal ritual here.  At nig...

TLS May 1 2009 from Paul Binding's review of Arnold Weinstein's Northern Arts: The breakthrough of Scandinavian literature and art, from Ibsen to Bergman : When, in his sixties, Ibsen returned to Christiana (Oslo) after years of voluntary exile from Norway, he worked with a portrait of the Swede [August Strindberg] in his study, to remind himself of the threatening power of a writer twenty-one years his junior. * [In Fear and Trembling (1843)] Kierkegaard insists on the sheer terribilita of the Abraham and Isaac story, so central to the biblical idea of our relationship to God. We fail, he says, if we do not recognize the enormity of this episode, its repudiation of conventional bonds in its dramatization of what God expects of his human creations. . . . Looked at with his independent eyes, not only Abraham's behavior but that of God himself casts moral doubt on the whole concept of patriarchy, on which traditional society was founded. This doubt [Weinstein] sees as at the...