Joey

This is brutal.

Yoiks. I kinda feel like I've been perving on a car crash. There are so many fucked up stories in here, from the early days of L Ron to right now. And even one of these stories, or just one insane incident mentioned in passing, would be enough to make me feel queasy and confused and full of questions, but then there is 400 pages of them. It's a lot.

There's the aliens and Tom Cruise and the institutional abuse you expect but then there's also the 1950s black magic cult, the largest civilian espionage op ever, Tunisian coup (!) and on and on.

This book definitely expanded my range of things I can say about Scientology beyond “I think they believe in aliens.” And the context on the time and scene when LRH started it all makes things make a little more sense to me.

Holy shit this book is brilliant. I had been putting off reading if for ages because I've read a fair bit of queer history and it often falls for predictable ahistorical projections and appropriations. This is nothing like that. Quite the opposite of books which tromp the old “everything gets better path”, this book makes the reader feel that being a man who had sex with men in the 1920s might well have been the most exciting life ever.

Every chapter would have been revelatory to justify a book of it's own. Chauncey has dug up all sorts of great stories: pick-ups in rough saloons of the 1890s, drag balls in Harlem in the 1930s with over 5,000 people, boarding houses, nightclub acts, bath houses of the 1920s, what Italian immigrants thought of doing it with fairies, cafeterias full of camp performances and on and on and on.


What's most exciting though is that Chauncey doesn't just pluck these people out of the past and project modern gay identities onto them. He doesn't believe they lived in the closet, he shows instead how these men lived as part of the various cultures in New York at the time as well as apart from these cultures in the gay worlds they sometimes made. He is at pains to discover how they made meaning of their lives and sex lives through the ideas of the time.

One of the central figures in Gay New York is the “fairy,” as gender was the primary way that difference was understood at this time. Chauncey shows how crucial this visible effeminate type was for those who embraced it, for those who fucked fairies, those who wished fairies would stop embarassing more normal “queers” and for the emerging class of men who defined themselves in opposition to it, as the concept of the heterosexual appeared.

The book is also a great portrait of New York, a city expanding massively in an era where cities had not long existed in America. Chauncey shows how bigger forces, like immigration, prohibition or middle-class attempts to constrain street cultures influenced how different gay worlds developed. He is constantly attentive to gender norms and class cultures, as well as race and immigrant politics. In short, this is a genius work.

This little book does everything you would hope for and more. The links to slavery and post-slavery forms of punishment are so horribly well drawn. The very idea of prisons, and prison reform is so well contextualized so that i understood that prisons are just the thing of the moment and there is a chance there might be a post-prison moment some day.

There is a lot of good history in this study of a family of Russian Jews and their lives from pre-revolution to the 1980s but it's hard to plough through at times.
Still, the father's story.. leaving anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia for America, becoming politicized there, leading an army against the Whites and Japanese, rising to top ranking Bolshevik, going to China to help kick off the revolution there, shit it's a really huge fascinating story.
The other main focus is the different guises that anti-semitism has taken in Russia and the USSR and the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s. Was really interesting thinking snout how people organised and did things to protest and resist even when they were scared to talk to anyone they didn't know.
For a random op-shop find I guess I learned a lot.

There are some great stories in here. I liked Imogen Binnie's story about fandom and brooklyn and histories a lot, and Casey Plett's “other women” was great. And I loved Red Durkin's piece. I mean OF COURSE.. it features an eating contest and name checks my idol Sonya Thomas. In fact there are a lot of celebrities in The Collection. Maybe someone can develop a literary theory about that. There's also quite a bit of fantasy fiction and even though I never read fantasy books I kinda loved those stories, a few of them just seemed so campy and perfect.

To be honest there were a lot of stories I hated as well. Maybe that's not surprising... some things were too familiar, and a few of the pieces were so expository, so memoir formula meets tumblr post that they made me cringe. Like dudes, you don't need to tell us everything you feel about being trans and everything that happened in your life. Sorry. I had to say it. but I love topside press and their work and I can't wait to read more. You should all buy and read this. You will love some stories I guarantee it.

And can I just say I am SO EXCITED TO READ RED DURKIN'S book please tell me it is coming soon??

I think perhaps I just don't really like biographies. So many dates and names.

But... I did enjoy how this just focuses on the first 4 years of Babs' career and how she invented herself, along with the help of many others. It brought home to me what a huge huge star she was (3 albums in the charts at once! concerts for 15,000 people when she was 21) and what a strange time in pop culture the early 1960s were. And I learned many interesting facts that I can use to impress other fans.

I hated the psychoanalysis. I want to believe she is happy and talented and just doing things for the joy of them, not because she never knew her father, needs a stronger man blah blah blah.

Also.. Mr Mann, it's very impressive that you googled the weather reports from 1963 but you don't need to start every chapter with the details. I don't care that “Barbra walked out into the above average heat of this August...”

I had to push myself a bit to get through the middle section but I did love this book, living in a fully described little town universe and the companionship of GE as such a know-it-all moralistic narrator.

Fuck. This book really punched me hard.
It races along really fast and breathless and it's over way too quick but it does a hell of a lot along the way. A lot.

creepy.

TW: rape.

I enjoyed reading this book and stayed up late because I didn't want to put it down but I do not think it is a great book.

This story of a man from a small Polish town moving to London to make money is trying for gritty realism I think, and the stuff about him sleeping rough, and missing Poland, is good.

But when he gets work at a super fancy restaurant, loses his girl to a famous (Damien Hirst-like) artist, and then achieves his dream... well it just feels too much like what middle-class English book reading types want to think happens to the poor immigrants they see working shitty jobs. Also Poland is neatly depicted as kind of two worlds - the modern one with shitty apartments and big hydro-electric projects, and the old one with sweet dying villages where everyone is poor but charming. I suspect there is a lot of grey area between the two.

Having said that, I enjoyed all the writing about work.

Also I lost sympathy for the main character after he raped his ex-girlfriend. Perhaps it's all part of the “gritty realism” but I thought the book kind of excused it because he was a bit contrite for a minute, and that is just gross.

This is a great great book. McPhee's recollections are so detailed and compelling. So many great stories about writing letters to AO Neville, station life, getting his “exemption” and all the really intense jobs he had over the years. I didn't know indigenous people could apply for “citizenship” in the 40s and 50s or that they jokingly called them their dog papers. And I sure didn't know much about life in the Pilbarra which I loved hearing about.

“-keep it simple. Tell what happens to people and that's all.
Today, 24 April, a little calm for the first time in a very long time, convince yourself that Storm, if I may say so, must be a masterpiece. Work on it tirelessly.”
Irene Nemirovsky, 1942.

I admit i wanted to read this because it was written by a Russian-French Jew in France during the occupation, because it was not completed before her deportation to Auschwitz etc .. But really you should just read it because it is a fucking amazing novel (or 2 novels really, the first half of a planned quartet.

Nemirovsky understands and includes so much. There is so much about the minutiae of meanness and class and status and survival and despair. There are no Jews, very few evil Germans (none?). Nothing I expected. Everything that is needed and no more.

There is a cheap Vintage Books edition out now or borrow mine. Yes I think youashould read this.

I kind of love these tiny monologue portraits of hustlers, truck drivers, tramps an others. And I guess Wojnarowicz wrote them when he was also a broke person living on the streets but after a while they started to seem very Diane Arbus, really othering, a bit freak show. So I don't know. I love stories of porn cinema hook ups more than anyone (Delany etc) but these started to make me feel a bit gross.

Really makes you wanna eat some good sandwiches.
The idyllic childhood start to this made me want to hate it but it really snuck up on me and there was too much I enjoyed for me to succeed.
Yes she is irritating as hell with her whole “I'm just a hard working dishwasher who learned everything the hard way but I am also a famous chef with a full time babysitter and an accomplished writer too” thing but she is really good at slagging off foodies and farmers markets, nailing what it feels like to have a sugar slump or talking feminism kinda sideways.

Some of the writing in this drive me up the wall but overall it's a pretty convincing demolition of ‘localist' approaches to politics, particularly food politics.
I got the most out of the section explaining how local projects often do the work of neoliberalism and are actually part of capitals' need to lower costs AND the section about the values of the petite bourgeoisie... this really synthesised a lot of how grossed out I have been lately by people's moralism about consumer choices... now I see why.

I wish I had more faith in revolutionary politics though, he sure does make an end to capitalism sound good.

These are perfect stories.

You know how some things are so complex that answers will only annoy you and insult many who know more?
no answers here and once I stopped struggling to understand who everyone was and what was happening I realised how this is the perfect book about assimilation, protection, dispossession, family, knowledge, settlement and everything else that a Nyoongar might want to tell you about southwestern australia. Needless to say it's brutal and sad.

Argh, YA book that is teaching acceptance of gay uncles by showing kids that being a fag is all about trying desperately to not get AIDS. Nice one.
I did enjoy all the talk of cowboy boots and denim shirts with snaps. And the teen sex, duh.

Really intense and layered. The dialogue kind of reminds me of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Fictional unstable Central American country, protagonist who is either delusional or just trapped in what is expected of a woman in her position, daughter who has joined some (Maoist?) terrorists, husband who is either a civil rights lawyer or a gun runner, philandering... Yup it's the perfect late 70s novel.
Didion also makes so much contemporary fiction seem obvious and over written.. in this tiny slim book so much happens and yet it's so unclear what is happening and I really enjoyed that uncertainty. No spoon feeding here.

This is just a really great book. Two sisters over 100 years old talk about growing up black in the south, becoming professionals, family, Harlem culture and heaps of amazing interesting other things I needed to know about.
Oral history rules.

This is not a bad book but somehow the protagonist being naive and thoughtless just really started to annoy me. Also it's all a bit too obvious and you don't have to have your character's husband die on the honeymoon to get her lost and sad.

ooh it's good so far. i like the description of the conference organising process and the reflective elements. i like the stuff on the intersections between disability and queer shame a lot. more to come...

part of my quest to read less by white men. ordered this on the strength of one of diaz's stories on the new yorker podcast and was not disappointed.

these are great great short stories. characters i have never encountered in other fiction. despair and anger depicted so delicately and perfectly. and no straight white men!

Wow. How did I wait so long to read this?
It's like the most perfect summary of 1990 lezness ever. And it has a daddy bottom, a rapist getting sacrificed by a witch priestess and womyn's land of course. Everything is so perfect. Though warning: there is a disturbing mix of hot and not hot sexual violence.