emma_in_dream

Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Door Frame: Poems Selected and New, 1950 - 1984 (1984)

‘My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every act of resistance and each of my failures’ (Tear Gas, 1969)

I love this collection - but really only for the works from the late 60s onwards. Rich was obviously a talented writer early on, and her early works are full of allusions to Western poetic traditions. But they are so careful and so hedged.

It is only after she gets angry that Rich gets interesting. Her poetry is perhaps slightly less polished, but much more incisive.

After Marlowe' violent and mysterious death, he was reported as saying:'All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools'. Of course, this accusation came amidst accusations of heresy, of atheism, of drug use and of spying. So, who knows? Plus, of course, it is hard to tell how Elizabethans might have viewed male/male sex, but almost certainly not as an identity.

However, I'm going to count Marlowe just as I did Sapho - on the grounds that they have been claimed as queer ancestors.

Additionally, Marlowe's choice of subject matter is a *big gay call out*. He wrote about Edward II, whose affection for his favourite Gaveston made him notorious in the late medieval and early modern periods. Check out Gaveston's vision of how he would entertain the king:

'Therefore I'll have Italian masques by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies and pleasing shows,
And in the day when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad,
My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay;
Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds teh water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive-tree
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring...' (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 54-65)

The editor, David Bergman, chose short stories that challenge and disturb. Which is a quite reasonable approach to a collection, but I was so put off by the first story in the collection that I could not appreciate the whole.

Keith Banner's "Holding Hands for Safety" is the lead piece in the collection, and as far as I am concerned it is not really a story about human beings but about a world universally populated by sociopaths. Not one single character is anything other than physically, morally and intellectually repugnant. The two gay characters are possibly even more repellant than the others, but only because you see more of them on screen. Even the murder victim is repulsive. So Bergman succeeded in disturbing me, but frankly I see little value in creating a world which bears zero resemblance to the world anyone not in a warzone knows.

Despite being so put off by Banner's work, there were stories of value in the collection. Reginald Harris' "A Tour of the Collection" was technically interesting, and Greg Johnson's "The Death of Jackie Kennedy" was moving. Nonetheless, the collection is not a keeper.

I think the series really takes off at this point. Vicki finally makes a choice between the human detective Mike and the vampire prince Henry. Also, the emotional tension gets much higher as *Blood Pact* (1993) is a zombie story - but the zombie in question is Vicki's recently deceased mother. It's a genuinely scary situation.

*Blood Debt* (1997) is also genuinely scary - it features the ghosts of people murdered so their organs could be harvested. My copy came with a complimentary edition of *Blood Bank* (2006), a collection of short stories about Henry, Tony, Mike and Vicki. I am a completist but I was not so gripped that I would have bought it otherwise.

Both novels and the short story collection show Tony, a minor character in the first few novels, coming into his own. You understand how he gets a spin off series (the Shadow books which are next on my list).

Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (Eds), Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1996) and Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001)

The fantasy anthology features a lot of authors I like - Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Tanya Huff - and yet I did not like it.

On the other hand, the horror anthology is the last, and in my opinion, the strongest, of Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel’s *Bending the Landscape* series. There is plenty of scope for strong stories exploring queerness in horror stories.

The standouts for me:

Alexi Smart’s ‘Broken Canes’ really captures the horror of knowing you have seen a terrible crime but not being believed because you are too young, girls, and queer to boot.

Even more creepy is Mark W Tiedemann’s ‘Passing’ in which the protagonist turns himself into the enemy in order to survive.

It is hard to believe that Tanya Huff began the *Blood Price* series nearly twenty years ago. They’ve held up well as urban fantasy. Plus, with her intelligent vampire Henry, she was an early rider of the paranormal romance wave.

The *Blood Price* series charts the adventures of Vicki, a Toronto detective who was forced into early retirement from the Police force by her deteriorating vision. Matched against her lack of night vision is Henry’s inability to work during the day. The two work together to solve paranormal crimes.

In *Blood Price* Vicki inadvertently gets involved in pursuing a murderous demon controlled by a teen loner. In the process she meets Henry, a 450 year old vampire who was born Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, and considers her relationship with her ex-Police partner Mike. In *Blood* she investigates a series of grisly murders against a pack of opera-loving werewolves.

Zippy plots, good characterisation, a competent heroine, a rounded cast of supporting characters, including some casually introduced gay and lesbian relationships - what’s not to like?

The first four pages of *Toddle Waddle* read ‘Toddle, waddle. Flip, flop. Hurry, scurry. Clip, clop.’ It’s a delightful romp with language, spot on for a toddler. And, obviously, once again, a large part of the genius of the book is the illustrations by Nick Sharratt.

He uses bold colours and clear images with enough detail that my two year old daughter can examine them for a long while. His visual jokes are just the right level for her - the frog sitting on the boy’s head makes her laugh.

I sometimes hear Pearl lying in her bed recitign some of the lines of the book to herself. Clearly she is thinking of it happily.

*Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal* was published in a limited edition of 200 de luxe, carefully circulated copies in 1893. The care was essential as this is a work of gay porn.

The book is famously associated with Oscar Wilde. A bookseller claimed he had held a copy of the book for a round robin of authors including Oscar Wilde; Wilde’s publisher also sold a line of erotica, including *Teleny*.

One sees why people associate it with Wilde. The style is very reminiscent of *The Picture of Dorian Grey* (1890). It has the same hothouse atmosphere, the same scent of heliotrope, the same slender youths with lavender gloves and drooping dissipated eyelids. What it also has, of course, is lots of priaptic unions.

Cut for weird nineteenth-century porn.

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I chose it because of the Wilde association, but I regret it.

Linda de Haan and Stern Nigland's *King and King* (2002) and *King and King and Family* (2004) are two of my daughter’s favourite books. I think they hit all the right notes for a two year old.

The illustrations are funny, with their pet cat, the Crown Kitty, doing something naughty on virtually every page. *King and King and Family* features plenty of animals, and so gets her seal of approval. And, best of all, both Kings wear their crowns on every page. Pearl likes royalty - even pictures of the Queen on coins interest her - and so she likes pictures of the two handsome Kings.

The two books tell the story of Prince Bertie whose mother decides he must marry. Unfortunately Prince Bertie doesn’t like any of the princesses but when he sees Prince Lee it is love at first sight. They marry. As the text says slyly, ‘The wedding was very special. The Queen even shed a tear or two.’ Then they live happily ever after, known as King and King, and going on a honeymoon in the sequel. In the course of this second adventure they see lots of animals taking care of their babies and they adopt Princess Daisy.

These books are obviously designed to promote a message of social inclusion and I must say that on at least one occasion I have seen my daughter puzzling over the message. She has pointed out to me that the two Kings kissing are ‘two daddies’, before getting distracted by Prince Lee’s goatee and sparkling teeth. So, ideas are slowly percolating away in her dear little head.

Currently our copies are on loan to a four year old who told her parents that only men and women can get married. Pearl regularly asks where they are. I’ve been reading them to her frequently for at least nine months, so they’ve been great value. Any book that holds her attention over such a developmental period is a very good book indeed.

(Although obviously my opinion is not shared by all parents as there was a lawsuit to try to have it removed from a school library in Massachusetts and it features on the most often challenged library books list).

The routine check up with midwives on Friday shows that SLF has spent the last month growing at a monster rate and is now apparently six centimetres taller than she should be. Genetics were suggested as an explanation but I scoffed at that. No other explanations were offered, and I must wait two more weeks before seeing a doctor in overworked public system.

And yet this is not at the forefront of my mind. What I am obsessed with is the gearbox of the car. Apparently the pins of the carriers failed and all the gears are destroyed and the box itself is holed. The cheapest solution appears to be a second hand gear box, but I am told there are very few available and I am still looking at a cost of $1500 for the part, plus the same for labour, which is money which frankly I don’t have given that I stop work in six weeks.

And I am so ticked off that I have wound up in this position because of the stupid hail storm in March. Because it totalled my car I had to get another one. Because everyone else was buying at the same time I had a choice of one slightly overpriced car and had to get one without a service record. Although I had it inspected and immediately serviced, it has conked out. Because it was second hand it did not have warranty. Because I have had it for more than three months (22 days more), it no longer has second hand caryard warranty. Because it just broke, rather than being in a crash, it is not covered by insurance. And so I am left with an enormous bill.

I am so stressed by this that I am barely even thinking about the much more serious massive child issue. Why? What does this mean? Why such a porker? I have so far resisted Googling it but I don’t know if I can hold out for two weeks.

All this is exacerbated by Pearl’s terrible sleep patterns. She has been completely thrown by the new fridge. (No, don’t laugh, having lots of people over two weeks in a row, things moved about, then having to walk about at night so the RAC could pick up the car, has totalled her sleep patterns). She is back to only wanting to sleep while being held which is really exhausting me. This is why I am zooming through the Queer Lit 50 challenge – I am reading them at night in the long hours that I spend holding her.

This augers very badly for the future. If getting a new white good has disrupted her routine to this extent, I cannot imagine what she will be like with a new sister. I dread it.

Of course I feel rotten about my self-preoccupation. Some of my friends have real problems. I just have a mysteriously big SLF, a non-sleeping toddler and a money hole.