Love these posts, as always. The passage on Foucault is so sad, almost eerie–in 1980 I assume Stambolian couldn't have known Foucault was sick, Foucault likely didn't have it yet or at least wouldn't have known if he did.
I'm not up enough on the medical side of the history to know to what extent anyone before 81 was yet sick or would have known themselves to be... there's too an eerie thing in at least the NYC gay press (maybe just because it includes so many Jews for whom Holocaust remembrance was becoming in that era so important) where the specter of Weimar's fall (eg, the popularity of the play 'Bent') keeps appearing *before* there's anything to be grim about...
Nicely done. I think you're right, roughly speaking. Along the same lines, I found Naked Lunch (I live in Lawrence, where Burroughs ended up) unreadable. Anatomy as philosophy just doesn't read well. And the now misplaced assumptions that (i) the reader would be offended, and that (ii) transgression would be . . . liberating? Deepening? Some strange fusion of Romantic sensibilities of passion and Edwardian edification? My sense is that a lot of this sort of modernism relied, more deeply than it realized, on the mores they attacked. Without being horrified/offended, there is almost no energy here. It's just a middle aged guy getting older . . . and that requires delicacy to write.
Love these posts, as always. The passage on Foucault is so sad, almost eerie–in 1980 I assume Stambolian couldn't have known Foucault was sick, Foucault likely didn't have it yet or at least wouldn't have known if he did.
I'm not up enough on the medical side of the history to know to what extent anyone before 81 was yet sick or would have known themselves to be... there's too an eerie thing in at least the NYC gay press (maybe just because it includes so many Jews for whom Holocaust remembrance was becoming in that era so important) where the specter of Weimar's fall (eg, the popularity of the play 'Bent') keeps appearing *before* there's anything to be grim about...
Nicely done. I think you're right, roughly speaking. Along the same lines, I found Naked Lunch (I live in Lawrence, where Burroughs ended up) unreadable. Anatomy as philosophy just doesn't read well. And the now misplaced assumptions that (i) the reader would be offended, and that (ii) transgression would be . . . liberating? Deepening? Some strange fusion of Romantic sensibilities of passion and Edwardian edification? My sense is that a lot of this sort of modernism relied, more deeply than it realized, on the mores they attacked. Without being horrified/offended, there is almost no energy here. It's just a middle aged guy getting older . . . and that requires delicacy to write.