Adam Phillips

Yeah. I'm of divided mind on that distinction. I agree with you, sort of. Music is the art I know best, and we make a distinction between various popular and folk styles on the one hand, and "serious" music on the other. And you know, there's no way even to make the distinction verbally without being pejorative (or incorrect; some people call the latter category "classical," which is just plain inaccurate). And it's a distinction the vast majority of the "serious" composers themselves never entertained conceptually. I enjoy all styles of music and don't have a lot of use for "snooty music folk" who claim never to listen to the likes of either The Beatles or The Black Keys. The key is whether or not the composer's product has life and vitality to it, in my opinion, regardless of style. I can't define that, actually, but I know it when I hear it. So, along with Sasha, I think the distinction between "serious" arts and "non-serious" is more than a little patronizing. Be that as it may, I get the point, even if the boundaries defining the two are a little fuzzy. Dubliners transcends in every way imaginable A Map of the Harbor Islands, and I've enjoyed both. Dubliners, in fact, gives a reader much more to chew on. Yet it's not going to the island with me, and Map is. That whole subject is worth a thread of its own at some time. At least I'm intrigued by it. Sorry to have hijacked my theme a little bit. I just got intrigued by a couple of sentences and thoughts Sasha threw down. Yeah, I already proposed that to my gaming partner, and the idea was struck down, lol. Ooh. Intriguing oberservation! What does that say about GA members?

Okay, your choices have influenced me to read your stuff, lol. Although if you're stranded on a tropical island, the Foucault seems kind of beside the point to me, right? It's a brilliant work nonetheless. I know and like all the books on your list except for Disgrace, which I've not read and keep meaning to. Dubliners is probably the one on the list I'd be most likely to steal from you if we were stranded on the same tropical island.

An old friend of mine used to tell me I'm part vampire, because my biorhythms are so messed up I'm often awake in the wee hours of the morning. I have an e-friend who's a member here, and she's often up at those hours as well, and we'll chat often during those hours, and more than occasionally we play "list" games. ("Name your five favorite actors. Five favorite Beatles tunes. Five favorite rock bands today. Five favorite varieties of apples." Etc.) She came up with a good one the other night. "If you were marooned on a tropical island and could only have five books with you, what would those five be?" So I'm inviting you to play the game with me! It can be any sort of book, including, say, books containing works that weren't originally made for "book" format, like, for example, Hamlet. Also, doesn't have to be fiction. There's one giant "cheat" allowed: In lieu of a book--and you can do this five times, if you want--you're allowed to pick a book series. Here are mine, in no special order: Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Stephen King, The Stand J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye Shakespeare, Hamlet I had a fair amount of pain having to leave off J. G. Hayes' A Map of the Harbor Islands and Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy. Map in particular is near and dear to my heart. But she said "five." Anybody else wanna play?

That's a very perceptive comment, Gandalf, and I think you may be on to something. Thanks for sharing.

I don't know what it is about politics that makes us all foam at the mouth. Sometimes--like the people who rubberneck at terrible auto accidents on the highway they're traveling--I can't keep myself from looking at the comments to political essays posted to the Internet, but most of the time it just depresses me. People are mean, hateful, and ignorant on matters of politics, and they seem to be enjoying being those things and beating up other people with those things! We had a politics-place in the Forums here once. And, predictably, it got mean and ugly too. And that's why we don't have it anymore and why we're not allowed to talk about politics here. I'm a team player and don't wanna tick anybody off. The good people here host me and they make decisions they feel are best for the health of the site. And I'm not gonna argue (much) with them...athough from time to time I poke a little bit of fun at the enforced "niceness." But a thread devoted to exploring people's visions of the future got locked here because people couldn't keep politics out of it...and something in me offered up a silent "hey, now, waitaminnit." How you gonna do a vision of the future without reference to politics? The state of income inequality? The environment? Etc., etc. At the heart of all our hopes and fears for the future are realties which are inescapably political. So I guess we just can't talk about the future at the Forums. Or the state of health care in this country and the rest of the world? This is no inconsequential topic, and it actually has some specific relevance to gay men as gay men, though not only to them. Seems like it would be something we should be able to discuss here. Or how about how society looks at and treats people of Our Community. Marriage is only one of the issues in this category. These have inescapably political ramifications, too, and seems like we could have some great discussion. But I'm not sure how to discuss these without venturing into politics. Is your state board of education trying to put non-science in science books, rewrite history for their history books, and legislate about the moral worth of gay people? Doesn't seem like we can talk about it here, because it inevitably involves politics. The more I think about this topic, the more subjects it appears we can't talk about here in the forums. Because politics touches us all over the place. Which leads me to wonder...instead of banning a topic from the site, can't we just warn people that the political threads will be aggressively moderated, and that we have a two-strike, or even a one-strike-and-you're-out policy regarding rudeness or incivility or flaming or whatever it is that has made political discussion taboo here? Maybe that would take up too much time from moderators, but would it take any more than they're having to give over to it now, locking down threads and warning people? That way the people who play nice would retain their ability to discuss, and the "problem children" would be escorted out and sent to the nursery to play with the Duplo blocks. And we could have a fun thread like "What's your vision of the future?". Just my wandering brain, wandering and wondering.

Thanks, guys! I've been away for some time, I'll admit. I'll be back with new chapters and new stories shortly!

I've been away from GA for a while. Just checked in because I'm ready to resume writing and posting again. And I was sad to read this. Trebs was a supporter of my writing and a fan of Crosscurrents, and I'll miss him.

Happy belated, Cia. Best wishes for many more!

Happy belated, Bill. Hope you had a great day.

Agggh. Sorry I missed yours, JoAnn. I been away from GA. Belated happy birthday; I hope you have a great day.

Coffee. From a quality roaster of specialty coffee. Intelligentsia is awesome. So is Stumptown. We have a great local roaster too, called Cultivar, in East Dallas. Fresh-ground with a burr grinder. Black, and brewed with a Hario V-60 or an Aeropress.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I've gone back and forth regarding whether or not CC "wants" a sequel. And after CC was finished I was ready to get away from writing for a while, so I haven't been too active. My main problem with a sequel to CC is that all decent stories--at least in the standard Western version--need a central focus, problem, or crisis as the engine that drives the train. Matt and Andy definitely worked their stuff out, and in between where we left them and a full resolution there's some drama and some crisis...but not much. It's mostly happily-ever-after following the last scene of CC. I'm not sure I can make a compelling story out of all that lol. But we'll see. In the meantime, the next thing I'll be doing is putting the next two--and final--chapters on Brushfire. Hopefully before September's over.

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond, Jaro, but I appreciate the reviews. Those of us who do this without expectation of monetary reward...well, it's the feedback from the readers that is the reward. So thanks.

I'm glad you enjoyed the story. And your advice may be grammatical, but it's not about grammar: It's about punctuation. ;-) Still, I'd ask you to elaborate. I'm not sure what you'd like me to review it with an eye toward. If even grammar is conventional, punctuation is surely more so, and the conventions associated with punctuation are even more plastic than those associated with syntax. I try to be a rule-keeper, but as I see it, punctuation functions in two ways. The first--and arguably primary--is to facilitate reading. The second is to indicate speed and cadence and give you a sense of how the author wants a sentence to "sound." I find that the two approaches to punctuation occasionally conflict, and I'm aware of using semicolons quite consciously with an ear toward cadence. Still, I'd be instructed: Which "rules" of punctuation--and trust me, I know them well--do you find so egregiously violated that you needed to shake your finger at me about them?

Thanks, Les. See the reply to AustralianEmu for the status of Brushfire. But honestly, did you have to mention Arbour here on MY pages? The guy's a complete loser with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Not. ;-)

Thanks for the kind words, Emu. Sorry for deserting Brushfire. I was waiting on some needed info. It's what happens when you don't do your research beforehand. And then I just got distracted by life. I'll try to have Brushfire finished within a month or so; there's not that much left. I'm glad you've enjoyed my other stuff, and ISWB was a labor of love. I don't know about "seamless," but I think I got said what Sam wanted to say. I talked to "Brian" briefly last month. He's doing well.

It's worse than any of you seem to realize: Buying gay art turns you gay.

I'm quite confident that I'm measurably dumber for having read this worthless essay. I could actually feel the IQ points dropping with each paragraph. It was, like, brain-numbing or something. And it wasn't even funny.

I dunno, I thought 50 was the new 20.

No effing kidding. For example, the old Alanis Morrisette song "Ironic," in which not a single damn example given in the song is anything that's ironic; they're all just examples of things that suck.

An additional lament that I have--besides my lament over gay and straight people doubting that I exist and perpetrating various other kinds of "bi erasure"--is that far too many of us chronically invoke Alfred Kinsey as the be-all and end-all of what should be known about sexual orientation. There are two subsequent researchers whose studies of sexual orientation are so significant that, in my opinion, that any discussion making even passing use of the Kinsey Scale needs to be supplemented. Those two scholars are Michael Storms and Fritz Klein, whose assessment tools are known, respectively, as the Storms Sexuality Axis and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid. You can do your own research on these guys, and subsequent criticism has demonstrated that they're not the be-all and end-all of what should be known about sexual orientation either; but their insights offer a significant elaboration on and advance from Kinsey's ground-breaking proposals. In a nutshell, Michael Storms basically establishes that there are a whole variety of sexual configurations that get lumped under "bisexual," and that these configurations aren't about "how gay you are"/"how straight you are." For one thing, Storms' work demonstrated that a person's same-gender attraction level is independent of that person's opposite-gender attraction level. "How straight" a person is doesn't indicate "how gay" that person is. What that ultimately means is that there's a wide variety of attractions out there, none of which are reducible to the others. I won't say more; it would take too long. But I'd invite people to read up on Michael Storms and the Storms Sexuality Axis. It's because of Michael Storms that some of us prefer talking about bisexualities over talking about bisexuality, as if bisexuality were some monolithic, unified thing. In a nutshell, Fritz Klein establishes that sexual orientation isn't just a matter of sexual arousal, but also involves a social dimension, an emotional dimension, a self-identification dimension, a "fantasizing" dimension, a "lifestyle preference" dimension, and a behavioral dimension...and, regarding all these dimensions, a temporal dimension. It is impossible to speak adequately about sexual orientation, he contends, if we define sexual orientation exclusively on matters regarding physiological sexual arousal. I think he's on the money when he contends that sexual orientation is more than about what makes a man's dick hard. The primarily limitation of both of these men's work is that each, in its own way, assumes that the basic template is binary. It's about your response to men, broadly construed, and women, broadly construed. Lately, people have been pointing out to us that sexual orientation may be even more complicated, at its heart, than that. This is the contribution that gender scholars and researchers have made recently. But in any case, the tendency we have to use Kinsey as the guy who let us all out of the box tends to overlook that he merely puts us all in a somewhat bigger box. And boxes are for storage, just like closets are for clothes. We may not be able to avoid boxes when we do conceptualizing, but at least we should not revert chronically to smaller boxes when larger ones have been found.

Done.

This got started in another thread, but I thought it might be fun to make it into a full-blown separate thread and have other people chime in. There are two older gay-themed British movies that I like a great deal: Beautiful Thing and Get Real. Among the pleasures of each of these movies was listening to relatively recent casual British English. And I got a kick out of a couple of terms and phrases that we either don't use in America or use in markedly different ways. Two that always make me laugh are England's use of "pissed," used as an adjective meaning "drunk," but which always means "angry" in America; and the tendency of English boys to call each other "wankers" as a put-down. I think all of us over here know what the verb "to wank" means, lol, but it doesn't get used here very much, and calling someone a "wanker" just doesn't happen. As a guy who's interested in language for its own sake, I found these two downright funny and a great deal of fun! Anybody else from America get smile over a British English word or phrase? And how about you English ladies and gents? Are there American English words or phrases that make you laugh?

Very nice. it's happening more slowly than a lot of people want...but we're getting there. In many places.