Elettaria

We're thinking of going to see Dorian Gray (is it any good, those of you who've seen it?), and it's got me pondering the phenomenon of excessively dull opposite-sex love interests in screamingly gay, but rather closety, novels. Sybil Vane is really terribly dull, and while she starts out as completely uninteresting to the reader, by the time Dorian has done with her, she's completely uninteresting to everybody in the novel as well. Another example is, erm, let me go to the bookcase since I can't remember her name, right, Esther in Ben Hur. Not only is she good, passive and unspeakably boring, but the hero keeps comparing her to his little sister, which is downright creepy. She's more obviously contrasted to the Sexy Bad Woman in the book, whom Ben Hur flirts with but ultimately rejects. His most intense relationships in the novel are with men, including a solid page of being ogled at one point by the guy ("he was a conoisseur of men physically") who ends up as his adoptive father, and the big relationship of course is with the Roman Messala. Apparently, in the film the actor playing Messala was intentionally playing him as a rejected lover, but Charlton Heston was homophobic and so wasn't told, and didn't notice, that he was playing the other half of a gay love scene.

Back to the "they're straight! they're straight! really, they're straight!" love interests. The Lord of the Rings is not a novel that to my view encompasses eroticism, but it does contain extremely strong bonding between men. In some cases, such as Frodo and Sam, I'd call it love, but even apart from that, it's noticeable how all the men pair off. It's a novel about a male world, of course, but still, the way Rose is introduced right at the end, after an entire novel's worth of Sam's fervent devotion to Frodo, is rather odd. As for the courtship of Arwen and Aragorn, it's relegated to an appendix, she just turns up and marries him in the novel almost out of nowhere.

Though nothing quite beats Defoe's lesser-known novel Captain Singleton, in which two men spend the entire novel thoroughly coupled up together being Gay Quaker Pirates (once misheard by a friend as Gay Quaker Parrots), sailing the high seas and then sharing a room when they retire. The sister of GQP A is introduced vaguely near the end, I think she's just mentioned in passing as their landlady, and then suddenly GQP B marries her without warning in the last paragraph.

I think these are a slightly different thing, though. It wasn't so much the idea of shoving an emergency woman into the plot to straighten things up and not being interested enough to flesh her out, it's when the character does get a reasonable amount of stage time and still comes up about as charismatic as a dishtowel. You could, at a stretch, even argue this about Ashley in Gone With The Wind, a novel I firmly believe to be a fine example of repressed lesbianism. Scarlett spends the whole novel in love with him, or at least with her idea of him, and he pops in and out, getting far less time and attention than his wife, Scarlett's sister-in-law, whom she claims to hate and with whom she is clearly rather obsessed. He's not bad as a character, he's certainly not as dull as Esther, but he's still rather, well, wet. Mind you, Melanie is a bit strange as well, she's portrayed as nauseatingly good although she's actually fairly human once you stop taking Scarlett's word for it.

Any thoughts on all of this, and does anyone feel like analysing the characters/novels/phenomenon further?

Carol Ann Duffy made Poet Laureate!

They turned her down last time because, and I quote but by now can't remember from where, they didn't think middle England could cope with having a lesbian mother as poet laureate. The BBC gracefully skirts this thorny issue by neglecting to mention that she's queer at all. I'm not that bothered, it's probably better than having a headline saying "First gay person as Poet Laureate!"* Heavens only knows that we all got sick enough of the media suddenly getting the urge to inform us in every single article just after the US election that Obama was going to be the first black US President, as if that were now his defining feature.

Going back to Duffy, I suspect another reason why she was passed over a decade ago is because her poetry is sometimes quite disturbing, all the more so because she's damn good at writing effectively. There was a row when one of her poems was cut from the GCSE syllabus over fears of teenagers being unable to understand irony knife crime (good response here and Duffy's response here). Maybe this shows a move away from the trend of sugar-coating literature-for-the-masses, where they try to pretend that the last thing poetry is about is sex or violence? Or maybe it's like the policy I reckon they follow for the Booker Prize, where good authors such as Atwood and McEwan get repeatedly turned down for their greatest works, then awarded the prize for a distinctly lesser novel out of sheer embarrassment?

Duffy's Selected Poems is a book that's had quite a run for its money in my household. In my teens, I borrowed it from my best friend DT, with whom I spent many an afternoon sitting on the floor, surrounded by books, reading poetry to each other. After a while, we discovered that the copy was nowhere to be found, so after rather a lot of sulking from DT I bought him another copy. A while later, I visited my aunt's London flat and lo and behold, there were two copies on her bookshelf. She must have seen it in our house, assumed it was her copy, and quietly snaffled it. I took charge of one of those copies, and as they were equally battered, never knew whether it was DT's or Aunty D's originally. A few months ago, this copy ended up being given to my friend S, so it has now gone from London to Edinburgh to Aviemore and possibly visited Jerusalem along the way. I bought myself another copy second-hand, and occasionally wonder what its history is. I should also get another copy of The World's Wife, since my former director of studies snaffled mine.

Anyway, Duffy is a poet who's sharp, witty, sexy without being syrupy, able to do marvellous things with mythology, ditto for gender, and is very good at making you think. Read her.

* Incidentally, is she?

A number of people have suggested that the problem with Amazon effectively censoring the advertising of LGBT texts is due to trolling, rather than a deliberate practice on Amazon's part. It does sound like it was started by a group of fundamentalist nutters, but don't assume that everybody working at every organisation involving books is a nice friendly liberal. I've made complaints because Calibre, a charity which provides an audiobook service for the visually impaired, flags some of its books with a warning that they contain "homosexual scenes" or "homosexual practices". I'm not even talking about books with sexual content. I complained about this a while ago, and the vague excuses that I was sent in response ended up in my junk mail folder. So before I realised they'd replied, I rang and got a man who told me hotly that these warnings were there for a good reason, because people ought to be warned about such things. It looks like Calibre has removed most of the warnings since then, but not all of them. I was too disgusted to use their service after that, I gave in and now fork out £50 per year for the RNIB audiobook service, which has a much bigger library, better facilities, no homophobia, and the worst you can say is that its cataloguing is a little strange (Measure for Measure appears in the children's section, for instance). I was too ill just then to kick up a fuss beyond this point, especially since it involved the uphill struggle of explaining what was offensive to people who didn't even begin to understand the connotations of the terminology they'd used. If anyone wants to make some complaints, or better still raise the issue with an LGBT group such as Stonewall, be my guest.

ETA: The issue hits the BBC, who reveal that someone has owned up to causing it all here, though according to this chap it's a fake confession.

The BBC has published an article about a cartoonist depicting Obama as a dead chimpanzee, which has outraged a vast number of people. The next two paragraphs are the ones I've just sent as a comment to the article, though knowing the BBC it won't get published.

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Cartoonists and satirists need to be aware of the connotations of images they use, including historical connotations. Using a chimpanzee to depict a black man* is the equivalent of using a sheep to depict a Jew. Both images have been used repeatedly as ways of attacking those particular ethnic groups, accusing them of being animals. These attacks have often been in the form of cartoons, such as those made by the Nazis.

The author's intent isn't really the point. The text, in this case the cartoon, is what matters. It's what's out there and what will be read by many different people in many different ways. Some interpretations may be the sort which are so far out that you have to squint to see where they're coming from and only a small handful of people will think of them. Some interpretations will be so obvious that a large proportion of people, even the majority, will think of them. The old insults about black men being animals is in the second category, and the reference to an obscure news story is in the first. The cartoonists seem to be so far removed from reality that they've got those two the wrong way around.

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( This is really niggling at me. )

So I was reading a BBC blog about McCain losing it at the end of a speech. If you look at the ninth comment from readers, it ends with the classic statement:

As my mother use to say "Unto thine ownself be true".

This guy's mother was Polonius?! The last person anyone would suspect of mpreg, surely.

It reminds of Shaffer's play Black Comedy. The basic premise of the play is that a group of people are stuck in a completely dark flat when the power goes down for the block. There's an engaged couple nervously meeting the girl's Major of a father for the fiancé's first time, the fiancé's ex-girlfriend who isn't meant to be there and didn't think she was an ex, the gay antiques dealer neighbour who's in love with the fiancé, and a middle-aged lady who is secretly chugging down the booze and whose veneer of genteel repression is in trouble. Middle-aged lady keeps on going on about her wonderful father (a vicar, I think), to everyone's annoyance. Finally, when she drunkenly announces, "My father always said, 'To err is human, to forgive divine,'" the Major snaps back, "I think that was somebody else, madam." Great play.

Incidentally, my mother likes to say, "Everything I like in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening," but at least I don't ascribe the quotation to her originally when mentioning this. I do, however, claim that my grandmother was the Wyf of Bath, as she had five husbands.

eye_of_a_cat is posting an Austen vs. Bronte poll, which completely fails to take account of the fact that people seem to be very divided on Jane Eyre vs. Wuthering Heights, rather than just happily loving all the Brontes. At least, so popular opinion has it. The time has come to discover the truth, and as in all good polls I'm refusing to accept the existence of a middle ground.

[Poll #1282245]

( Look what I made! )

I delivered it to the synagogue on Friday evening and it was received with a round of applause and much gratifying marvelling over it, especially the apparently wondrous fact that I hand-sewed it in just over a fortnight. I hope they work out a way to use it as a wall hanging for the High Holydays, they could really do with having something that looks a bit more Jewish in the church that they borrow for those services. Don't get me wrong, that Unitarian church is lovely and as churches go, it's relatively unchurchy-looking, but still, it's a church rather than a synagogue.

In other news, not only am I absolutely bloody shattered from spending four hours at synagogue (I'd forgotten how excruciatingly uncomfortable those chairs are), but I have what has been described by Gerald Durrell as a "rich, bubbling cold" and I want none of it. On the other hand, I've discovered that Potter's Life Drops (tincture of chilli, elderflower and peppermint, very useful stuff but HOT) go well in peppermint tea, and even better when you leave the used peppermint teabag in for the next cup and add a licorice teabag. Electric heating pads are also wondrous things.

I am also rather bored. Audiobook recommendations, anyone? You can see the books I have access to here.

Brian Blessed hosting Have I Got News For You.

That man is...words fail me. He should have his own show.

In other news, I just listened to the RNIB audiobook of The Day of the Triffids. The narrator was audibly drunk for most of it. Apart from anything else, this made me realise just how drinking goes on in that book. The end of the world is nigh? Have a brandy!

I listen to audiobooks while I sew, and tend to have two or more on the go at once. Right now I have Eco's The Name of the Rose for my Serious Reading, and am slowly making my way through Harry Potter for light relief. Last night I got through a few chapters of Eco, and after about an hour and a half of fairly heavy-duty 14th century church politics, including cults which were roaming about slaughtering Jews and burning witches, I decided to start Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It begins with Harry doing his homework, an essay entitled "Witch burning in the fourteenth century was completely pointless: discuss".

Any similar coincidences to report?

I was looking through old journal entries for something, and came across a rather amusing meme which I fancy taking again, originally borrowed from rymenhild. If you're going to follow it, list twelve characters and only then may you look at the questions.

1. Mr Collins (Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
2. Duncan (Atwood, The Edible Woman)
3. Fevvers (Carter, Nights at the Circus)
4. Billy Prior (Barker, the Regeneration trilogy)
5. The Wife of Bath (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales)
6. Elizabeth Mapp (Benson, the Mapp and Lucia novels)
7. Granny Weatherwax (Pratchett, various)
8. Ned Henry (Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog)
9. Drusilla Clack (Collins, The Moonstone)
10. Iago (Shakespeare, Othello)
11. Lord Henry Wotton (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
12. Lucy Snowe (Bronte, Villette)

( And now for the questions )