OH DOCTOR CARR

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[macartney]

My Bestreads of 2015

2015 will be remembered as the year I continued my deep dive into the works of Samuel R. Delany. And the further I went, the more I remained convinced: he simply is the best English language writer alive today. The below blurbs were mostly copied from my contemporaneous reviews on Goodreads. So better late than never, here are the ten best books I read last year, in ranked order:

The Motion of Light on Water, Samuel R. Delany, 1988: More like an act of wizardry, magically conjuring up the past, than just a mere memoir. But not just conjuring the past, for Delany writes on a multitude of levels, traversing both time and space with ease. He may be the smartest writer I've ever read, yet even at his most complex and philosophical, he renders complicated ideas simply. The brilliance and beauty of this book--and Delany's life in a way--arise out of a kismet collision: the joy and boldness and naivety of youth; the possibility and shine and liberation of 1960s Manhattan; the codes and blurred lines and furtiveness of repressed, non-identity-based homosexuality; and the hindsight and wisdom and nostalgia of the author as autobiographer. Simply perfection.

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, Samuel R. Delany, 2011: A masterpiece. A beautiful love story. Sweeping and epic but also so simple and intimate. Brilliantly follows characters and a town over some 70 years, resulting in the best description and exploration of aging and gentrification/development I've ever come across. Graphic, in-your-face, unapologetic scenes of sex, sex, and more sex; the sheer volume and sustained presence of which has an effect of almost rewiring perceptions of sexual mores, of good and bad, of hot and not. An embodiment and exploration of theory, particularly philosophical theory, unlike any other fiction I've read, like only Delany does and can do: both ideas and Ideas underpin and guide this love and sex story. There are some flaws of course, but they are vastly outnumbered and almost trivial ultimately. This book only cements my previous opinion: Delany is a genius and the best living writer in the English language. (This is actually the book that everyone claimed A Little Life was.)

Just Kids, Patti Smith, 2010: I avoided this for years, unwilling to believe the hype and near universal acclaim. But on a whim, I bought it as a present to myself on my one year sobriety anniversary. Delicate, simple, poetry as prose: this was a gift of a book to read. Why did I wait so long? As perfect and joyful as everyone said. What a treat to be taken backwards through time and space along with Patti, causing me to remember my own earlier New York alongside of hers. The best love letter to first loves (in this case Robert Mapplethorpe and New York City) I’ve ever read. Simply divine. (2015’s M Train was a joy, even if it was unable to match the intensity and brilliance of Just Kids.) Patti Smith is a goddess, pure spirit and essence. Embodiment of the life force.

The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, 2011-2015 (specifically #2, The Story of a New Name, 2012): Such an epic story told in such an intimate manner. A true page-turner rooted in honest observations, intricately drawn characters and well-structured story, not gimmicks and tricks (though there are some amazing cliffhangers!). A powerful and stunning portrait of female friendship infused with an abiding passion and love for the written word (both as a writer and as a reader) and backgrounded throughout with modern Italian history and events rumbling like Vesuvius. No matter that the final and most recent installment fell rather short: the second novel more than makes up for it with its captivating exploration of love and obsession, knowledge as seduction and power as a never-ending dance-off.

The Mad Man, Samuel R. Delany, 1994: Delany continues to soar in presenting and exploring lives and behaviors forgotten, ignored and dismissed by most other writers and artists. A sublime murder mystery, porn fantasia of sorts that doubles as a heart-felt, class-crossing love story and triples as an academic, philosophical exploration of boundaries and taboos. Delany himself forewords the book by claiming it is not a novel about homelessness, but I’ve never read anything that so drastically reset, expanded and deepened my view of people without homes and lives lived on the streets. The book similarly forced me to rethink previously dismissed sexual practices and mores. For the full magic, read this along with the earnest and romantic Bread & Wine, a graphic novel with similar themes detailing Delany’s IRL story of meeting his then homeless life partner, Dennis Ricketts.

The Return to Nevèrÿon series, Samuel R. Delany, 1979-1987 (specifically #2, Neveryóna, 1983): Set in a long ago time in a forgotten kingdom, Delany explores the structures of civilization in this four novel “sword and sorcery” series comprised of eleven interlinking stories surrounding Gorgik the Slave Liberator.  At times privileging academic exercise over pure storytelling, the series nevertheless captivates as much as it elucidates. To be immersed in Delany’s Nevèrÿon is to watch him attempt to name the unnameable magic and spirit that makes humans human. Even when the story creaks and shakes from the weight of Delany’s ideas, it never falls apart and, like a Rube Goldberg machine, its near destruction makes its eventual success all the more fun and awe-inducing. The second book Neveryóna, a stand-alone novel chronicling the adventures of a young girl named Prym, is the most cohesive and successful of them all. A true joy of a character resulting in a story that is a delight to read and so very delicious to think about.

The War Against All Puerto Ricans, Nelson A. Denis, 2015: A must-read for any American. A thoroughly engaging, eminently readable, well-researched account of the life of Albizu Campos and the Puerto Rican Nationalist party he helped lead. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know most of the history presented here. The actions of the U.S. Government on the island of Puerto Rico on behalf of U.S capitalist interests were more than shameful—they were downright criminal. Besides being a necessary recounting of the island's story, this exceptional history is another marker of how the post-war, "anti-Communist" behavior of the U.S. Government destroyed not only a political ideology ("the left"), but also doomed American workers and the poor to a life of inequality, as they and the political system has been dominated by and under the control of the oligarchs and industry. Denis subtly hints at a way forward, for an island and people still besieged and under yoke. One great first step is for everyone to read this phenomenal book.

About Writing, Samuel R. Delany, 2006: An essential collection of Delany’s previously published non-fiction pieces centered around, obviously, writing. Like all his writing, so very smart and dense. A fun glimpse inside the mind and thought process that produced my favorite books of the year. Offers a road map of influences suggesting further reading such as Stein and Forster. As much a guide on how to be a reader as it is on how to be a writer. Looking forward to regularly rereading and referencing this in the years to come.

Totempole, Stanford Friedman, 1965: Defied my expectations and more than lived up to the hype. A gay novel for the ages. Friedman delivers a masterful rendering of dialogue, along with acute, sensitive psychological observations of a boy's developing sensual and sexual desires. An interesting balance of intimate character insights presented at an almost clinical, distant remove--we feel both at one with the characters and also apart from them, particularly the protagonist Stephen. This dichotomy neatly (and subtly) mirrors the “coming out” process so beautifully and delicately explored in the story. The book's only flaw is the heavy-handedness of the politics (global and sexual) in the last section, which--while understandable in the context of being published in 1965--unfortunately cements this as a “book of its time” and not a timeless masterpiece. But it’s so, so, so close to being one that, even at 400 pages, it felt unfairly and tragically short; I wanted so much more of Stephen and the Wolfes. A shout-out of thanks to New York Review of Books for bringing this classic gay novel back into print.

My Brother and His Brother, Hakan Lindquist, 1993: A simple and beautiful Swedish story, originally written in 1993 and only recently translated. A love letter to brothers of all kinds—biological, romantic, missing, imagined, desired. A ghost story that is equally mysterious and heartbreaking, without being trite. A study in the desire to connect. A quick read if you open up to it. I sobbed for like the last 40 pages.

[lastnightatthemet]

[macartney]

#gpoyw is that still a thing??? (is tumblr even still a thing???)

[macartney]

See u soon Stritchy!

I’ve been crying all morning. Like the condensation on my iced coffee, the tears seem to reappear no matter how many times I wipe them away. I cry a lot in life, but today has been particularly intense. I cried like this a year ago too.

The day before, on July 16, Israel had bombed a beach in Gaza City, killing four little boys. Thanks to the internet, within seconds you could read real-time reports, within minutes you could see photographs, and within hours you could see video. Four little boys on a beach running away from the ocean; one second they were there, the next they weren’t. The whole Israeli campaign—a few weeks old at that point—had left me upset and feeling helpless, but this beach incident took it to a new level, as my various screens seemed to make time and space disappear, leaving only anger and tears in their place.

The next morning, exactly a year ago, in the waiting room of a posh Midtown phone repair shop, the TV was set to CNN. The screen cut away to breaking news that a passenger plane had been “downed” in Ukraine. Initial speculation was that perhaps it had been shot by the new Ukraine government or the Russian-associated rebels. It was a Malaysian Airlines flight so perhaps that airline had become cursed, and this was connected to their plane that disappeared in Southeast Asia that spring. Or perhaps this was simply the new normal and little boys just disappeared from beaches and planes just disappeared from the sky.

I received my repaired phone—a new screen to replace the one shattered when dropped the Sunday before, after a drunken and hazy night at Tiki Disco—and returned to work, feeling even more helpless and raw. I decided to hide out for a little bit in a stall in the men’s room, an oasis and the only bastion of privacy for office-less office workers. Refreshing Twitter, I saw a tweet from Adam Feldman, a Time Out New York theater critic, that Elaine Stritch had died. And the bottom fell out. Whatever fragile bottom had existed after the emotionally exhaustive events of the previous days, it was gone now. And however much I thought I had been prepared for this moment—and there had been enough dreams and discussions and false alarms and fire drills and even inside information to make me think I was mentally and emotionally and physically ready for this day—well, all of that goes out the window when it actually happens. I think I said, “Shit.” I was so sad. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sad in my entire life. Elaine was gone, and this was the new normal.

My first memory of Elaine Stritch is in the fall of 2001. I was 18 and newly arrived in New York—an acting major at NYU. My cousin’s mother-in-law—an old Jewish woman living on the Upper East Side—was recommending shows for me to see. “But really, the hottest ticket in town, the best show in all of New York right now, you won’t be able to see able to see. Elaine Stritch’s one woman show at the Public. The whole run is completely sold out. Such a shame too, because it would be perfect for a theater student like yourself.” (I’m sure I had to have come across Elaine before—as the star of Company, as a guest on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, as a performer on one of the myriad 1990’s PBS Broadway specials—but if I had, the name and story of the Broadway legend had never settled in my mind.) So when the show announced a transfer uptown to the Neil Simon, I was excited and determined not to miss out on the experience. Even though I was only months into my new life as a New Yorker, I knew one thing for certain already: if there’s any theater recommendations not to ignore, it’s the recommendations of an old Jewish woman from the Upper East Side.

The show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, lived up to the hype and then some. It was, quite simply, the best theatrical performance I have ever seen, and expect to see, in my lifetime. I saw it on Broadway three or four or five times—I can’t remember exactly—that winter and spring, taking along a different friend each time. We would get cheap student tickets for up in the back of the mezzanine and then move down to the stage left box seats at intermission. During the second act, Elaine would look up to us and use us as stand-ins for Susan Harris during her reenactment of her disastrous Golden Girls audition (“Here you’ve got the houseboy entering to set the bar and my line is ‘Ying, don’t forget the hors d'oeuvres.’ Would it be okay if I said ‘Ying, don’t forget the fucking hors d'oeuvres’?”). Sitting in the box seats, knowing Elaine could see us, having her even use us in her performance, made me feel magical as if I was part of her story, as if some of her old school glamour and talent would rub off on me. One time we even went backstage after the show to get our programs signed. I mentioned I was attending Stella Adler for acting training and invited her to return to the studio. “I studied there, you know. Great teacher, great talent, Stella was.”

I would meet her once more. In 2010, after a performance of her Sondheim cabaret show—a performance that took place on Elaine’s own 85th birthday and was attended by Stephen Sondheim himself, along with Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Frank Rich, Liz Smith, among other luminaries—I talked my way into a photo with her. I had earlier that day delivered 85 cans of Diet Coke to the Carlyle Hotel as a birthday present for Elaine. Mentioning this to the Café Carlyle manager got me an appearance with Elaine, even though she was in rough shape from a hypoglycemic attack or some other diabetes-induced ailment and was trying to rush back to her room. She was curt and angry to be having to even deal with me. Posing for the picture, I habitually placed my arm on her lower back; she jerked her body an inch and said to me, “Don’t fucking touch me.”

In the weeks and days leading up to that birthday show, I became obsessed with finding and posting Elaine videos, songs, photographs, quotes and stories on my Tumblr. The tag “see_u_soon_stritchy!” started as sort of a gag and a way to get excited about the show, a way to build up expectations and help me mentally and emotionally justify the many hundreds of dollars it would cost me. Along the way, however, the tag became something more: a respite, a sanctuary, a passion. I wasn’t very happy in my life, feeling stuck and trapped. Deeply in debt, drinking too much, and nearly depressed, my Elaine blogging was a bright spot of joy in my life, in which I felt creative and alive and at the top of my game. It coincided with the glory days of Tumblr—during which I made great IRL friends and felt a real sense of community on the internet—and my Elaine posts received attention and love and gave me a feeling of being respected. I was an expert on something; I was an expert on Elaine Stritch.

Elaine became a major touchstone in my life for the next four and a half years. You could say I was obsessed—because I was—although that word feels dirty and cheap and seems to reduce the importance she played in my life to some mere teen-idol-like fandom. She was an inspiration both onstage and off. She was a spirit animal for how she dealt with challenges and struggle. She was a legendary talent unlike any the world will ever see again. She was also an alcoholic, something I’d regularly wondered if I was too. So when I saw the news that she had died, I responded in the best way I knew how to deal with sadness and in the best way I knew how to honor her: I got drunk. I proceeded to go on a bender that lasted several days, cost more than my monthly rent, and ended with me deciding never to drink again. This Tuesday—July 21, 2015—will be one year off the sauce, one year without alcohol, one year of me as a recovering alcoholic. Deciding to stop drinking was the second best decision of my life, second only to coming out as gay in 2001, shortly after moving to New York City and shortly before Elaine entered my life.

My life hasn’t magically become perfect in the past year since I got sober. I’m still a little lost, a little stuck, and a lot in debt; but I am able to deal with these things with a clear head and a clear heart, and that’s not nothing. I am happier (although what is happiness in these dark days of late capitalism?), but more importantly, I am freer. The joy of not being a slave to alcohol, to not desperately want just one more drink (“Two drinks a day. TWO drinks a day. TWO DRINKS A DAY. It doesn’t work. Not when you want eleven. Not when you’re shopping for wine glasses in the vase department at Bloomingdale’s. But, if you’ll pardon the pun, I gave it a shot.”) is something absolutely amazing. I am trying to live each day with intention and that’s about the best one can ask for in life.

So although my day today—just like July 17 a year ago—has been full of crying, the tears are coming from a far different place, a far better place. The world is still fucked up; Israel still brazenly commits war crimes, planes are still crashing, and Elaine is still dead. But I am alive and that means something. I am alive and able to become that most cliché of homosexuals: the ones who are sober thanks to Elaine Stritch and simply must tell the world all about it.

See u soon, Stritchy! Or actually, how about not?

[macartney]

Went to see La Prophéte Friday Night with Alan at the Met. First opera I've seen. Throughout, the performance kept visually rearranging what was taking place onstage, subvocally replacing lines of song with spoken or sung poetics. Wondered at Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, how amazing it must have been. Le Prophéte was pretty boring, realized the singers of the middle-upper-class characters retaining this form through time as something to be indulged in and appreciated in a removed way, small personal pleasures I guess, but more important, how the modernization of such forms could be quite amazing, enthralling, etc. A few moments here or there where the voice was interesting in its sounds, manipulations, otherwise was quite boring. Had to pinch my own leg to refrain from bursting out laughing during solemn scenes. Later showed Alan my artwork. He seemed a bit put on the spot, not wanting to have to tell me he did not like the drawings because of their content. I felt a bit awkward and sad at our obvious differences in perception. It magnified the very things Dirk and I talked about in terms of the conscious choice of imagery we work in, how it becomes unsettling or mildly threatening to those who enjoy an established order or large-scale security. How could I explain that these images reflect energy I’ve picked up in society, in movement through these times? It’s just a translation of what takes place in the world, I found myself almost apologetic because of the choice in what I’d created. These distances (the horror! the horror!) in between people like me and Alan or myself and Randy or myself and numerous others. At one point after waking I asked him what images would be beauty to him (in response to his question/statement: You have talent, why don’t you use it to draw beautiful things?). His descriptions of images were beautiful, I had to agree, they were things to which I’d also be drawn, imagery I hope to put down on paper in the future. But still in all they don’t answer my own or other people’s questions of why I’m drawn to images that unsettle or confront the viewer in an intense way. I once tried to define it for myself, actually I’ve made numerous attempts at defining it but all I come up with are somewhat lame quasi-psychological reasonings such as: in opposition to the large period of time in which I hid the actions of my youth, street routines, homosexuality, etc., etc., after age twenty I began showing people my more murderous images or writings as if to shock them, or to introduce to them the things or representations of things I’d always felt pressured to keep hidden, placing my enormous head-held energies into others’ hands rather than acting as the silent guard of them. Don’t know if I’ll ever come to understand it. But possibly the way forward is for me to try to extend the range of creative acts to cover both images of beauty (silent disturbing beauty) and of intensity—in drawn images and in written images and in photographic images. In doing this—creating a range rather than keeping the beauty hidden as I have done within journals, head, etc.—then I can at least have the physical proof of that range, and thus no longer feel the need to explain it or prove it in conversations or apologize for not having shown the range in its entirety that I feel is contained within me. Delighting as well as shocking that angel within my forehead.

David Wojnarowicz, October 28, 1979 diary excerpt in Brush Fires in the Social Landscape

[lesbyterianchurch]

[macartney]

Hervé Guibert, GHOST IMAGE, 1982 #gaylit #photography #homosexuality

[macartney]

Michael Callen's go-pack (HOLD TIGHT GENTLY by Martin Duberman, 2014) #fridayreads #gaylit

[britneyaddiction]

[saiasus]

Convincing a top to bottom

[christopherstreetreader]

[luanoespaco]

[macartney]

Let’s just put him right here—on my blog, on my face, wherever—forever.

[macartney]

Yesss!!! Where and what? Tell me all the things!

David Wojnarowicz's burning house stencil in black on the inside of my arm, just below the elbow. I'm excited! Well, excited and scared but I've been wanting it for a while now!!! Huzzah. Yours are gorgeous bb. 😍

[adtag]

I HATE EVERYTHING (The Merry Widow)

[ambiguousparrish]

[confessionsofasteelmagnolia-dea]

Bwahaha

[simultaneouslysobbing]

[simultaneouslysobbing]

[chowleen]

Samuel Delany speaks the truth about learning, participating, teaching.

And here’s Cathy Davidson’s lovely write-up on Delany.

[macartney]

"And I said, I said look don't you realize every time you don't answer a question you're learning something, you're learning how to make do with what you got, you're learning how not to ask for a raise when you, you know, when... you're learning how, how to take it, that's not good, that's not good... This has gotta be, you need to teach people they are important enough, they're important enough to say what they have to say, it's just very important..." 

This is actually the first video of him I've ever watched and beginning at 2:43 is the first time I've ever heard him speak. What a beautiful and amazing man, as generous in spirit and heart as his words heretofore suggested him out to be. What a divine little snippet as my first. This man is my hero, my prophet, the gay mentor I never had.

[macartney]

When I entered the Variety Photoplays Theater, doubtless, like half the men there, I was terrified of AIDS. As I walked around the theater, doing what I did, like most of the men there, I thought about AIDS constantly and intently and obsessively. But when I left (and in this aspect alone, perhaps my experience is—not unique—but certainly rare), I no longer had any fear of the disease. At all. Concern? Yes. Of course I retain that. But I spent the whole time, as I roamed the theater, orchestra, balcony, and lounge, doing all the things I've recounted to you, thinking with a violence and a life-and-death committedness it will be hard to convey. Certainly, telling you the result of that thought is that the fear—the dull, so reasonable, yet so crippling terror a part of my life and the lives of so many gay men for two and a half, if not three and a half years—has vanished, does not give you the process's mechanics or affect. When sex is so available and plays such a large part in life, sexual activity ends up fulfilling many, many psychological functions—as chosen recreations often do: it helps you deal with any number of tensions and becomes a stabilizing and balancing force—and it provides an object for as much or as little intellectual analysis as anyone by temperament might require. (Sex and death, William Butler Yeats wrote somewhere, are the only subjects truly mysterious enough to engage the serious mind.) Still, when life tensions get high, it's almost impossible to avoid the logic: Well, I probably have it anyway. I might as well go out and do at least some of what I was doing before. At this period, people who cruise with any frequency are not gambling on the possibility of avoiding it. Largely, they are gambling on what strikes them as the much higher probability that they already have it—so that, in terms of their own eventual health, their activity makes no difference. The argument is there at one level or another of consciousness in us all, believe me, who do. Yet another of the strongest realizations I had while walking up and down the aisle of the Variety was that this was precisely what the situation was for me—indeed, for so many gay men—when I first started cruising as an adolescent, living at home on Staten Island. AIDS had put us in the same situation I'd been in when the only information I had about homosexuality was what I'd found in an outdated psychology book by Erich Fromm from the 1950s on a shelf of the local library, whose appendix told me that to indulge one's homosexual urges was to foredoom oneself to an unavoidable career of alcoholism, devoid of any "rewarding" or "mature" relationships (whether sexual or any other kind), with an almost-certain probability of suicide sooner or later! It was a non-win situation, in which to be concerned about it at all was, in itself, to be doomed; thus I went out into the world carrying a mantle of death and resignation as heavy as Childe Harold's. And what relieved it was not the political flowering of gay rights—which, frankly, seemed so distant from me I wasn't even sure if what I did (I mean, I didn't have a "life partner"; I wasn't dreaming about "coming out"; I wasn't a happy homosexual—I was scared shitless!) was even concerned with what they were doing. But it was only through a few years of doing what I was doing and looking at the people I was doing it with, many of whom seemed no less happy than anyone else, that I began to ask that most empowering of questions: Could all these people around me be both crazy and damned? When one is dealing with the satisfaction of an appetite, you relegate the Eric Fromms et alia to the place where one stores those abstractions that don't particularly relate to the systems of the world around you. I did that. And I ceased somehow to be terrified. (It was only when I ceased to be terrified that I could even pick up a flyer, a pamphlet, a book about Gay Liberation and read it. And, by then, I was already converted, as it were.) Somehow, moving around the Variety, I ceased to be terrified again.

Samuel Delany, The Mad Man, 1994