Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I asked Henry Abelove who were his intellectual guiding lights in his youth, and he cited Paul Goodman. What a surprise! I found Paul Goodman at Sarah Lawrence and consumed his poetry and essays on education. After hearing HA's answer, I bought Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals . The most striking aspect of this book is how Goodman manages to be both so logical and so imaginative. Whether he is discussing pornography, writer's block, making pacifist films, or banning cars from Manhattan, he is both persuasive and surprising. His imagination is not bounded by logic, and his logic is not softened by imagination. Some of the essays here are outdated, but the thinking behind them remains fresh and interesting. About advance-guard writing in America (and how commonsensical is the use of the English expression, instead of its pretentious French counterpart), Goodman writes as a committed writer himself: "An artists does not know that he is advance-guard, h...

Incredibly kind words about CONNOR AND SEAL from a historian and queer studies scholar whom I have the honor of calling a friend. Henry Abelove, the author of the groundbreaking study DEEP GOSSIP gives permission to be quoted and attributed. "I love the concept but still more the wondrous forms it takes in your imagination and writing. Harlem is so rarely allowed to figure America, and America's immigrants are so rarely represented as black in our canonical poetry, even in our canonical gay poetry. See, for instance, Hart Crane: “New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt” -- Italians, Swedes, Irishmen; but now we have Seal, too.... "And your poems beautifully echo (for me anyway) the works and graces of many of your predecessors. I hear Langston Hughes’s rhyming rhythms distinctly in “Arrival New York.” But Elizabeth Bishop is there, too — “Arrival at Santos.” I remember that you told me that you weren’t keen on George Oppen. Yet his cityscape — his sense of its multiple s...

Finished reading Anna Burns' Milkman today. I liked it very much. Henry Abelove gave me the book when he came to our holiday party. My Goodreads review: A revelation. How does one convey the emotional numbness that the unlikely heroine, Middle Sister, puts up to protect against the various invasive forms of violence in her Belfast community in the 1970s? By showing the constant struggle to maintain the shield, always in danger of slipping because of one's curiosity, anger, fear, and love, if not battered down by communal conflict. The language, repetitive, idiosyncratic, in one word, paranoid, immerses the reader in Middle Sister's consciousness. The immersion is complete with the voices of other members of the community, filtered through Middle Sister's consciousness in such a way that they are always at least potentially echoes of her own dilemma, figures of her own splitting. Today I also got to page 95 of Asad Haider's Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the...

I met Henry Abelove at Dorothy Wang's book party, and was introduced to his book of essays called Deep Gossip . The title is taken from Allen Ginsberg's elegy for Frank O' Hara. After describing O'Hara as a "Curator of funny emotions," Ginsberg praises him for his ear "for our deep gossip."  The essays are as engrossing as gossip, an apt compliment if we think of gossip as the sharing of information between disempowered people. In these essays, Abelove  performs careful and gracious corrections to what has been underestimated, overlooked and sidelined.  Like many gay men, I have read Freud's letter to the American mother, but had not realized that it was his last riposte to the moralism of American psychoanalysts. In the next essay, the suggestion that other sexual practices besides "intercourse so-called" have been redefined as foreplay in the late eighteenth century is brilliant.  Since I am not a fan of marriage, Abelove's read...