It's a beautiful day out there. A soft, powdery snow has been coming down, and in places where here's been no snow clearing, it's very high. As I was walking past Phillips Square this morning on my way to work, the snow on one side of the trench was up to my chest ( Read more... )

Malcolm Ross -- the man who almost single-handedly invented Canadian literary studies -- said that after 1967, every novel he'd read was influenced by either Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers or Scott Symon's Combat Journal Place d'ArmesThey're similar books. Both feature a member of the Canadian respectable classes who descends into into a kind of ( Read more... )

Today I finished Lover's Legends: The Gay Greek Myths, Andrew Calimach's attempts to restore at least one version of the more homoerotic Greek stories. Few of them are direct translations -- they're all mixes and matches of different fragments from a wide variety of sources to create possible lost versions.

He uses the Erotes of pseudo-Lucian to ( Read more... )

I came very close to simply giving up and stopping in the middle of David Nimmons' The Soul Beneath the Skin. I'm glad I kept with it, though. It got better after that chapter.

Some thoughts:

( Review continues )

Yeah, the book I was so eager about -- The Soul Beneath the Skin -- is starting to become tedious. The first two chapters were wonderful. They were about volunteerism and the much lower levels of violence in the gay male community than in the general public ( Read more... )

"Readers with an interest in Queer Theory might want to glance at the theoretic note on page 221 about the use of the word "gay" in these pages. For less academic types, who hear the term gay subject position and think "doggie style" -- go pour yourself a drink and we can get started."
-- David Nimmons, The Soul Beneath the Skin
I think I'm going ( Read more... )