Percy

There will be a blizzard of "Best Of" and "Year in Review" lists circulating in the next few days. From news stories to novels to short stories, I always like seeing what ends up on lists of things to read. If you spot a 2013 "Best of" list for literary types, share it here. Here's are some queer themed graphic novels from The Advocate to get us started: Five of the Best LGBT Graphic Novels of 2013 Julio’s Day, Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics) Artifice, Alex Woolfson (AMW Comics) Flutter: Volume One: Hell Can Wait, Jennie Wood (CreateSpace) Transposes, Dylan Edwards (Fantagraphics) Anything That Loves, edited by Charles Zan Christensen (Northwest Press)

Nothing too odd this year, but last year my father got us a gigantic tic-tac-toe game. It's about two foot square with a wooden game board and heavy metal x's and o's. It's the sort of random thing an interior designer would use to stage a home in a photo shoot. He gave my brothers the same thing so now when you go to any of our houses, you'll see a huge tic-tac-toe game. This is the sort of thing my brothers and I bond over - strange gifts from Dad.

Stylistics – Here is a dense chapter in the story. In my imagination, when students of English Lit encounter chapters like this in a story, they squee and go all fangirl over the author. Carringtonrj prompts us into a close reading of Mary Ryan’s fictional, and fragmented, thesis on the organization The Body of Osiris. The thesis is itself comprised from a close reading of fragments of historical texts and, if I’m not mistaken, Carrington has mixed in for us some real, actual authors with some that have been invented for this story. While academically interesting, towards the end of the chapter I decided to take a step back and then another and another. I wanted to stop looking at the leaves on the trees and look at the forest instead. Mary Ryan in her thesis is trying to determine who might have been part of The Body of Osiris. Who was admitted to their membership and who was not? We’ve all been part of such a process, haven’t we? Even without intending to, we become part of groups or are excluded from them. [Here you get to join me in some self-indulgent meandering.] Imagine, for instance, if someone in a couple centuries were to look back and try to define the queer community. It’s a community that is always in flux, isn’t it? Externally, it seems clear who is in and who is not. If you are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered, you are part of the community, right? And yet, within this community there is a constant shuffling of who is considered part of it or who is not. Gay men and Lesbians are in the LGBT community but if individuals have remained in the closet, some would argue those individuals do not make up the community. Is the fact of being gay enough, or do you get admitted by some other act of participation, by being out about being queer? For that matter, should transgender folks be considered part of the queer community? I mean some of them transition and go on to live lives that are indistinguishable from that of straight people so while they are trans, they are also straight with all the privilege attendant to that. Are they really like us other queer folk? Same thing with bisexuals who are not is same-sex relationships – are they in or out of the queer community? What about straight allies or people who are questioning their orientation or gender? Are they part of the queer community or not? So what is the style of being queer? How is queer measured? How have those styles and measurements changed from generation to generation? It struck me that Mary Ryan was trying to pin down in her thesis answers to similar types of questions about The Body of Osiris. In the absence of a membership list, she focused in tighter and tighter on authors and texts, examining the cell structure and the DNA to determine who was connected to The Body and who was not. But she’ll never be able to define the Body by that sort of examination alone. At that level of an individual, there is always going to be evidence for both sides because individuals are full of duality and contradiction. She’ll always need to be zooming out, looking at the whole of the Body, to understand it. Like most groups, they are better defined in broad terms, not specific terms. I love the way this whole story gets me thinking…really a dense, meaty piece of writing. Delicious.

Finally was able to catch up on some of my reading yesterday…spoilers here and my comments focus on the chapters Stories of Osiris and Love. This Stories of Osiris chapter was echoed in some ways by the later chapter titled Love. I interpret the Osiris myth as a statement about the unending search for love and how humans experience love. In the myth, particularly as told by carringtonrj in this story, we can see the evidence of familial love, the love from platonic friendship, sexual love that is a straight, male-female relationship as well as a queer love in a romance between two women. Then there’s the love of a ruler for her people, a love that seems sincerely returned. There’s love that’s gone missing, that’s been thwarted by interference from others, and cannot be recovered. So the themes of love in the myth become represented in the actual relationships between the women in the story. Headstone and Ryan’s relationship is a deep friendship but is also a relationship where one is in a position of power over the other. The love is worshipful from Ryan at first, although that gets flipped and it’s Headstone who later prostrates herself to Ryan. Headstone’s relationship with Fell as well as Ryan is subject to outside forces. Both disintegrate under the interference from events outside the relationship, making Sarah Headstone the story’s most tragic heroine. There’s the complex relationship between Mary Ryan and Sarah Beadekker. It is simple enough for Ryan, but becomes enormously complicated for Beadekker who is engaged to a man and yet becomes emotionally involved while she seduces Ryan as part of her clandestine operations for the U.S. government. The parallels continue. The women are searching for truth and clarity and love. They are searching for the truth behind the organization dubbed The Body of Osiris which Ryan’s thesis asserts was an organization promoting a type of love – love of humanity's fineness, love of that which is transgressive in its beauty. The myth itself, as Isis searches for the parts of Osiris’ body, is really a search for love. The beauty of these chapters is how carringtonrj suggests that humans always have been and always will be seeking love. Even our narrator, living in a time where it’s suggested that people have their emotional lives all the way together, seems to be seeking an understanding of love and desire. This human quest is not limited to romantic or sexual love. All facets of love are always being sought, instinctively, by man, woman, all of us. Truth, beauty, giving and receiving adoration, is the unending quest of humanity, a desire so huge it can never be totally satisified.

Thanks for posting this. It clarified much about the law in theory and practice in India. Best wishes for continued progress in civil rights and change for the better.

Music is part of our lives. As you expressed here, a certain type of music, a musician, takes up a place in our lives that is personal but it also connects us with others. Music is a shared experience, a social fabric. You'll be able to enjoy Ray Price and the memories his music holds forever. I am sure with a little digging you could find his influences in later generations of musicians.

I am going to join the chorus here for more of this story. This was good but I almost felt like I was reading a summary of what was meant to be a much longer story. Well done, Wayne!

Good that you can laugh about it now! That read like a Three Stooges skit. Now tell us how you made it up to him. ;-)

You always have such good contributions for the anthologies, Dolores, and this is one of my favorites. Nice psychological snapshot of an addict's struggle. Thanks for sharing!

The never ending task of coming out! I think you did a good job showing the advance/retreat/advance of both Nathan and Sam as they came to terms with Sam's sense of gender and figured how they might establish a relationship with one another. Both their points of view were developed nicely in this short story.

I know exactly what you mean about wanting to argue with the narrator! I have read through the "Espionage" chapter and I can’t help thinking that the narrator is taking a romantic view of our world even as s/he disavows “some weird nostalgia for those troubled times.” There’s sort of a reverse pastoral being written here. Not that there’s reference to nature, but the future is posited as a simpler, straightforward sort of life where the truth is apparent. The past is a miasma of obfuscation and complexity, particularly in terms of human relationships. On the one hand, I want to shake the narrator and say, “Yeah, the disparity in our world really does suck and there were/are people living lives of true misery. Don’t even think about romanticizing this era, you learned twit.” On the other hand, I have no desire to race toward their “pacific, more sane era.” This makes me uncomfortably ask myself if I derive a sort of satisfaction in the struggles of the present day. Do I want peace on earth, good will towards men or not? Truth be told, the narrator does stop short of presenting the early 21st century as an idyll. S/he seems to be struggling with the same questions the reader is left with. What is truly valuable about our present age? Why is it valuable? What can we learn from our conflicts and misunderstandings? If we don't want a future free from conflict and misunderstandings then what sort of future is an ideal future?

Irving Berlin's White Christmas? Not gay, per se, but a fun, campy musical. I watch it pretty much every year while I'm making Christmas cookies, and it never fails to make me laugh.

Unlike being gay or straight, bisexuality or pansexuality is rendered invisible once a relationship with another person is established. This is particularly true if the relationship is monogamous and the partner does not identify as genderqueer. My partner and I are perceived as a gay male couple. The reality is that my partner's orientation is more nuanced than gay and my gender is more nuanced than male. Some people know this, particularly those who know my partner was in long term relationships with cis-gendered men and women prior to being with me or those who knew me pre-transition. Now we're two guys who have been in a monogamous relationship for over ten years. If we want to make others aware of his pansexual orientation or my transgender identity, we have to work it into a conversation. That doesn't happen too often in day to day life so those aspects of ourselves are largely invisible to anyone other than ourselves. Happily, this invisibility doesn't seem to engender distress for either of us. I guess the fact that we know each other's full range of sexual expression is visibility enough? Maybe there are still enough people who know the "full" story that we remain happy? I haven't really given this aspect of things much thought. Here's something cool. I was talking to the mother of a student at the San Francisco Ballet School a couple weeks ago. She knows I'm gay, but I don't know if she knows I'm trans. She said she was asking her daughter if one of her friends was gay or straight and her daughter said, "Mom, it's not that simple! You can't just say that you're straight anymore." A good thing - evidence that there is a growing consciousness of the middle ground of gender and sexuality and giving people a chance to claim that space for themselves.

I've made it through Chapter 8 - Conversations. This is a pivotal chapter in the story for Mary Ryan and Sarah Headstone, but I want to know what people think of the narrator at this point. Does the narrator have an agenda beyond their stated one of wanting cultural history to again be a respected area of study? S/he tosses in a lot of asides in this chapter. The thrust of the opinon statements seems to be that human society of the narrator's time (some indeterminate point in the future) is better for having a "cleansed" and "calibrated" system for establishing human relations. There is no longer innuendo, unspoken angst or confusion in personal relationships. The narrator re-iterates a few times that the method of the future is the preferred method. I wonder if s/he really does believe that or if s/he is just saying that's what s/he believes? After all, s/he finds the correspondence between the two women "sweet" and "poignant." Is the narrator covertly trying to get students of the future to question whether society has left behind, forgotten, scrubbed out something essentially human? How can the students of the future understand a work like "Kind of Blue" without experiencing a certain angst or sweetness or poignancy in their relations with others? Of course, this future hasn't been clearly described in the story, only hinted at, but I'm finding the narrator's motives more and more curious as the book progresses.

I'm starting a thread for carringtonrj's Body of Osiris. I find this story gets me thinking about the state of humanity today and asking all sorts of interesting questions along the lines of -- what is the current state of humanity and where are we going as a society? I figured I'd start dropping some thoughts into a thread here and if anyone wants to discuss them, or introduce their own discussion topic, I'll do my best to jump in and contribute. One of the main characters in the story is Professor Sarah Headstone and we get to know her in Chapters 2 and 3 by reading excerpts from a blog she maintained in the early part of the 21st century. Her blog records thoughts about her "Enthusiasms" and her enthusiasms are a survey of the humanities. Paintings, literature, music. Understanding human nature, human interests, human interactions by looking at the humanities. Many of the enthusiams were unfamiliar to me and I assume will be unfamiliar to other readers. For convenience, I've provided links to them here in the order they appear in the story and with the dates form Headstone's blog. Venus As A Boy – Posted 12th March 2009 By This River – Posted 23rd April 2007 Master and Man – Posted 12th August 2006 Sumer is icumen in – Posted May 1st 2012 Spem in alium – Posted 2nd February 2017 Chardin – Posted 31st March 2009: ‘The Ray-Fish’, ‘The Fast Day Meal’. Petruschka – Posted 24th August 2012 Kind of Blue – Posted 23rd January 2015 Carrington – Posted 12th July 2011: ‘The Lovers’, ‘Crookhey Hall’, ‘Green Tea’, ‘Self-portrait’, Max Ernst , ‘House Opposite’ , ‘Plain Chant’ , ‘Bird Pong’,‘The Giantess’, ‘And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur’; ‘Temple of the Word’; ‘Litany of the Philosophers’, ‘The Labyrinth’, ‘Crow Catcher’ Roseberry Topping – Posted 7th February 2008 The Rattle Bag – Posted 2nd Sepetember 2007 Seraphita – Posted 18th December 2011 If I had to pick a favorite from this list, I think it would be Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

Good for you! Glad to hear about a company that knows how to show its appreciation $$ for a stand out employee.

I really enjoy your contributions here, Bob. As I am just hitting middle age, I like thinking I have lots to look forward to. I wouldn't mind having life slow down a bit though. The years are already going by too fast!

I'm late to the party! Good to see you back around here, Yettie! It's not the same place without you.

I agree that the ambiguous ending can be the right one for a story. I guess it is a tool that some authors use more skillfully than others. Thanks for all the interesting comments here.

Double entendre notwithstanding, Mann got it right. The story built nicely for most of the book, spurred off into a polemic 3/4 of the way through, made a half-hearted attempt to get back on track but just, hmmm, deflated. i suspect the story was largely autobiographical and sine the author doesn't know how the issues she (as the character) was confronting will ultimately resolve themselves, she couldn't bring about a proper ending. Or, once she spouted off to the universe in her two chapter rant, she was spent and had no juice left to continue. Maybe that rant WAS the climax...for the author. Damn it, she got her satisfaction and I was left hanging.

I just finished a book with an abrupt ending where none of the storylines were resolved. This wasn’t a situation where the author built to a climax and then stopped, leaving a mystery to the resolution or offering the reader possibilities without being explicit as to the final outcome. No, the story just petered out. It felt like the author got suddenly bored or confused or just ran out of ideas in what was, up to that point, an excellent read. Period. Story over. Normally as a reader, I like it when I’m not given everything at the end but this ending was weirdly unsettled. So, how do others feel about ambiguous endings? Yea or Nay? What makes for a good ambiguous ending instead of one that leaves you feeling like the author simply gave up on the story? This was not a GA story, by the way, though I think it was the author's first novel.

Great interview--really interesting! I'm going to have to put Totallyy on my must read list. Well done, Ashi and Totallyy. :-)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KC

A good collection, Cia! Great for keeping writers focused on the realities of authorship. :-)

Lisa, You were great fun to interview and get to know better. It's awesome seeing what a fanbase you have here - you're really part of what makes GA such a great place to be!