felis_ultharus

Not much to say, except that I'm more than four-fifths finished the final edit. I wanted to be farther, but I procrastinated too much yesterday.

I'm also really enjoying Place d'Armes, by Scott Symons. It was once considered one of the two most influential English-language Canadian novels of the 1960s, but because of the cowardice among the Canadian literary set, the other influential novel -- Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers -- remained read and in print, while Place d'Armes got forgotten.

That's a shame because so far, Place d'Armes is a much better book -- it's much more restrained with the stream-of-consciousness stuff, so it's much more readable. And unlike Beautiful Losers, it's not just going for shock value.

(Somewhere between the vibrator-that-achieves-sentience and the threesome with Adolph Hitler, Beautiful Losers started to bore me. Nothing can shock you anymore by the time you're halfway through that book, and since its only appeal is shock value, it destroys its own audience.)

Even less than a quarter into the book, I can tell that Place d'Armes really deserves the place Beautiful Losers has in the Canadian canon, but because it's homosexually explicit -- whereas Beautiful Losers is mostly heterosexually so -- it's unlikely to take that place any time soon.

Come; let us squeeze hands all around; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm forever!
------ Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Chapter 94

The "sperm" here is the spermaceti oil of the Sperm Whale. I'd say the mind-in-the-gutter interpretation was unintentional, but having read "Billy Budd" -- Melville's short story about homosexuality -- and since the guy speaking here describes himself as married to another man, I know Melville wasn't quite that naive.

On that note I am finally reading Moby Dick, whose second half I skimmed for my exam, but didn't read carefully.

You know, the modern fashion of having women act the women's roles in Shakespeare means that some of the humour in these plays is lost.

Take As You Like It. The big joke of the play is that Rosalind is a woman pretending to be a man. The play is chock full of double entendres, and in-jokes that the audience gets while the characters are clueless.

But if you remember that Rosalind is being played as by a boy -- since women weren't allowed onstage in England until 44 years after Shakespeare's death -- then you realize the double-entendres are actually triple-entendres, and the whole thing is a lot funnier.

To top it all off, Rosalind takes the name Ganymede. Ganymede, ferzeussakes!

For those of you who don't know, Ganymede was the beautiful teenage Phrygian boy that the Greek god Zeus fell in love with, and kidnapped to to his penthouse apartment atop Mount Olympus.

(Mythology does not record the outcome of the story, but I strongly suspect that he was reduced to a Phrygian-boy-sized bloodstain by dinnertime, as Zeus's violently jealous wife Hera did not like to have rivals.)

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a ganymede was yet another word for "passive homosexual" -- intriguingly, the English Renaissance had a lot of words for that -- so Rosalind's nom-de-drag may as well be "What-a-fabulous-window-treatment."

I also hope I live long enough to see a major-motion-picture production of Romeo and Juliet where Juliet is played by a man, the way Shakespeare intended.

Okay, Shakespeare is really creepy. I can't believe it took me so long to notice.

I mean, it's not just the co-dependent 14-year-olds with their suicide pact (Romeo and Juliet).

I'm re-reading the sonnets right now, and about 126 of them are devoted to a young man who the poet is in love/in lust with. Shakespeare goes on and on about this guy's beauty, and about how he must reproduce to preserve that beauty in another generation. Shakespeare promises the young man immortality through his poetry, and the poet laments that he has a penis because the young man is heterosexual. Then he goes on some more about the guy's beauty.

I was trying to imagine how a straight man would react to 126 poems from another man obsessing over his beauty, and whether or not he reproduces and generates good-looking children. The words "restraining order" came to mind.

On a less ethereal plane, I seem to have developed a minor peanut allergy. So far, it's nothing dangerous, but I've heard these things can get worse with repeat exposure, so I'm going to have to be careful to avoid things with nuts in them :/

I'm still enjoying Solomon Gursky, though it is getting a little irritating because of all the homophobia. At first, I was giving the author the benefit of the doubt -- he's not writing about nice people, and I assumed it was they, not the author, who were the bigoted.

After awhile though, it gets to be a little too much, and you have to wonder if -- among the dozens of queer predators and shallow queens, all played for laughs -- there's going to be one nice one. Mordecai Richler is misanthropic, but there are nice straight people around the margins of his story.

( Minor spoilers here for Solomon Gursky )

(I need a Canadian Lit icon. If I could draw at all, and still access to Photoshop, I think I'd put together a Samurai Susanna animated icon, done in the style of a Canadian Heritage Minute. You know, something like an anime scene, followed by,

"In 1837, Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie defeated the last ninja gang of the Duoro Township, ending the plague of ninjas that had been plaguing the Canadian wilderness, and thwarting American plans to built a space station capable of destroying Ottawa from orbit. A part of our heritage.")