Haunting Douglas

Richard Canning's essay on Ghost Dance in 50 Gay … [Blah-Blah-Blah] didn't interest me all that much in Douglas Wright but looking at excerpts from Leanne Pooley's documentary Haunting Douglas certainly has. I'm tempted to spring the $35 for a NTSC copy. Check it out!

Until the acropolis …

Some people tweet, others facebook, I tumblr … in particular my favorite aggregator of images on the web, Foonman's Spiritual Remedy:

Clayton Coots (1936–1984)

Frank Rich has written a haunting memoir in the May 26 issue of New York about an older man who befriended his seventeen-year-old self at a troubled moment in his adolescence. An exemplary "life in the shadows" of a revenant in our triumphalist parades.

Inaugural Hatchet Job Award

Adam Mars-Jones' review in the Observer  of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall — "killingly fair-minded and viciously funny" — won the 2012 (inaugural) Hatchet Job award, given to the writer of "the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" to have appeared in the preceding year.

Vote Grindr!

You may be voting on our next list this weekend. Please consider Jaimie Woo's Meet Grindr. You can read a sample on amazon and I think it will persuade you that this is a smart and well-written work covering the personal, the technological, and the political (all of interest in the Grindr phenomenon). And if you're eBook savvy, it's a steal on amazon for $2.99!

Horace Mann School

There's an erotics to the act of teaching and sublimation in the art of it. Ten months ago the New York Times Magazine published an article detailing some of the failed sublimation in the decades after the Sixties. This month the New Yorker does a probing profile of one of the creepier of the Unsublimated. Together they make worthwhile (and available!) reading. We might even use a meeting to discuss them. The price is right.

"Paul's Case" — the opera

The Post today has a review of the world premiere by UrbanArias of Gregory Spears' opera of Willa Cather's story at Artisphere in Rosslyn. Last three performances are this weekend. I'm unable to go but I hope someone else will and post a review or comment. A ten-inch sample (oh Mary, how deranged!) — a ten-minute sample can be heard by clicking here.