Sympathy for Achilles

April 3, 2014

“The “Iliad” may be a giant of Western literature, yet its plot hinges on a human impulse normally thought petty: spite,” Natalie Angier writes in the April 1st edition of The New York Times’ Science section.

Natalie Angier may be a brilliant science writer for The Times, yet she has a long way to go as a classicist and literary critic. In an essay on the possible benefits of spite – I say possible because I don’t think spite is good in any event – Angier goes on to explain that Achilles sulked in his tent, holding a grudge against Agamemnon in part because he took Achilles’ war prize, the woman Briseis. Oh, if it were only that simple.

In fairness to Angier – whose essay is all about the evolutionary role spite plays in fairness – she doesn’t have the time or space in the article to unspool the back-story that explains the bad blood between Agamemnon and Achilles, two of the key figures in the Trojan War.

So here we go...

Interlude with the vampire, part 2

March 29, 2014

Recently, Anne Rice announced that she was returning to her most iconic character, the vampire Lestat, with the Oct. 28 publication of “Prince Lestat,” which thrilled me no end.

“Prince Lestat” would immediately follow the events of “The Queen of the Damned,” the third, and I think, the most sensuous book in “The Vampire Chronicles.” It is for me also the most homoerotic of the series, although I think Rice would say these books are instead vampire-erotic since her vampires cannot have sex. Whatever. The point is that in Rice’s work, bloodlust is a metaphor for lust, just as the relationship of the fun-loving Lestat and the depressive (and at times depressing) Louis – as well as that of Daniel, the interviewer in “Interview With the Vampire,” and the vampire Armand – is a metaphor for a gay relationship.

Looking back on it, I realize that these books paved the way for my own foray into homoeroticism with “The Games Men Play” series.

Is Christie Coriolanus?

February 1, 2014

Recently, a trio of screen stars has taken to the London stage to portray three of Shakepeare’s greatest characters – David Tennant (“Dr. Who”), Richard II; Jude Law, Henry V; and Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”), Coriolanus. Together they offer a kind of round robin of Shakespearean performance. On PBS, Tennant was a febrile Hamlet, a role that was played with lucent rationality on Broadway by Law, whose Henry V follows hard upon Hiddleston’s charismatic interpretation in PBS’ “The Hollow Crown.”

The three also offer lessons in leadership undone at a time in our history when the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – continues to haunt us. What, for example, would the Bard make of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisite? Would he cast him as his blustery Roman general Coriolanus, a man whose skills are undermined – no, doomed – by his own arrogance and blindness to the will of the people? Read more

Scaling “Brokeback” again

January 26, 2014

When people ask me to give them the “elevator pitch” for my novel “Water Music,” I always say it’s “‘Brokeback Mountain’ meets ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’” – not because I would equate my book with those works but because it deals with gay lovers and issues of power and submission. Such is our world – with no time for anything – that we must reduce everything to labels, boxes and clichés.

Everyone who writes about gay men in love today owes a debt, however, to Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful short story about two 1960s cowboys – shepherds really – whose love is doomed by an inability to communicate, by a closeted world and, in a sense, by the all-consuming nature of that love.

Now Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s equally haunting film version – starring the late Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, the more constricted of the two lovers, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, the more expressive – have been turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen, whose atonal style would seem pitch-perfect for Proulx’s Heminway-esque writing. (She contributed the libretto for the work, which premieres Jan. 28 and runs through Feb. 11 at the Teatro Real in Madrid.) Read more

Is gay the new black?

January 20, 2014

Recently, I was giving someone a pitch about my new, gay-themed novel, “Water Music,” which bowed last week – a pitch that I sometimes end defensively with, “Well, it’s not for everyone.” (I really must learn to stop demurring like that.)

Or maybe not, because when I say that, my listeners often respond as this man did: “I’m not so sure about that. I think it’s an idea whose time has come.”

This week seems to have confirmed that. HBO has a new series, “Looking,” about gay men searching for love in San Francisco. Unlike Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” (2000-05) – which was, let’s face it, all about hot guys (and women) having hot sex – “this show is at such a time when suddenly gay people can conform to heterosexual blueprints of how to live,” out actor and “Looking” star Russell Tovey told the Sunday New York Times (Jan. 19). “You can get married, you can have kids, you can have joint mortgages, you’re recognized as next of kin, which is all fresh.”

Tovey, who’s actually made a career of playing straight guys (the athlete Rudge in “The History Boys”), stars as a closeted footballer – soccer player to us in the U.S.– in John Donnelly’s play “The Pass” in London.

So is gay the new black – in more ways than one? Is Ellen DeGeneres, who’ll host the Oscars again (March 2), the new Oprah? Read more

Lit by lightning

January 14, 2014

I’m reading “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, $29.99, 312 pages), which is just the kind of book I like – one in which the author takes the intellectual ball and runs with it. Darrin M. McMahon must be good at it. He also wrote “Happiness: A History.”

Genius, as he notes in his introduction, has meant many things to many different times. The word comes from the Latin, but the Romans, who cannibalized Greek culture, were really borrowing from the Greek “daimon.” Your daimon was – is – your guiding spirit, the link to the divine. Indeed, “Daimon” is the title of my unpublished novel about Alexander the Great, who like the Emperor Augustus and a host of ancient luminaries saw his daimon – his genius – as proof of his divinity. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we got the modern definition of genius as extraordinary creativity and accomplishment and not until the 20th century that we got the IQ tests that sought to quantify it.

McMahon rounds up the usual suspects... Read more