Blake you are slowly drawing me in to this weird project of yours. I don't much like the genre/literary distinction, but you use it to tease out these more or less unconscious imaginations of what is (sexy, sophisticated, admirable, sad, fate, liberation, the list goes on) which begins to be evocative of more than a milieu . . .
I'm not sure what these little portraits add up to, or how you would even show that . . . but the pieces are starting to kind of resonate. I've no idea to what end. This seems to me critical and experimental in a really interesting way. Kudos & onward, I hope.
I hope so, too. And there is a part of me, especially as an outsider (I'm straight) but who grew up in some very gay circumstances in the South, that wants to edit the ms. Just saying.
I think what you are slouching towards is a portrait of a culture, demarcated by the emergence of sexual proclivities as a source of identity/culture (I've seen associated with NYC in the '20s) and, I don't know, Stonewall? AIDS? Gay Marriage?. That is, a portrait of the demimonde in the US (and in surprising quarters, like Mississippi or Birmingham). But instead of the anthropologist, you are the critic, looking back. Everything plays against poetry, or literature more broadly, maybe pornographic, but . . . does this sound right?
Blake you are slowly drawing me in to this weird project of yours. I don't much like the genre/literary distinction, but you use it to tease out these more or less unconscious imaginations of what is (sexy, sophisticated, admirable, sad, fate, liberation, the list goes on) which begins to be evocative of more than a milieu . . .
I'm not sure what these little portraits add up to, or how you would even show that . . . but the pieces are starting to kind of resonate. I've no idea to what end. This seems to me critical and experimental in a really interesting way. Kudos & onward, I hope.
Thanks! I'm not sure myself where it's all headed, although, hopefully a book deal!
I hope so, too. And there is a part of me, especially as an outsider (I'm straight) but who grew up in some very gay circumstances in the South, that wants to edit the ms. Just saying.
I think what you are slouching towards is a portrait of a culture, demarcated by the emergence of sexual proclivities as a source of identity/culture (I've seen associated with NYC in the '20s) and, I don't know, Stonewall? AIDS? Gay Marriage?. That is, a portrait of the demimonde in the US (and in surprising quarters, like Mississippi or Birmingham). But instead of the anthropologist, you are the critic, looking back. Everything plays against poetry, or literature more broadly, maybe pornographic, but . . . does this sound right?