Comic novels:
Fry, Stephen: Hippopotamus, The
???????????? Liar, The
???????????? Making History

Dramatic novels (but very witty):
Highsmith, Patricia: Talented Mr. Ripley, The
Magrs, Paul: Strange Boy
O?Neill, Jamie: At Swim, Two Boys
Renault, Mary: Last of the Wine, The
???????????? Persian Boy, The
Stadler, Matthew: Allan Stein

Historical fiction (in chronological order):
Petronius: Satyricon
Rocco, Antonio: Alcibiades the Schoolboy
Sade, Marquis de: 120 Days of Sodom, The (warning: never read more than a page a day)
Wilde, Oscar: Teleny
Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice
Green, Julian: Other Sleep, The
Isherwood, Christopher: Berlin Stories
Cocteau, Jean: White Book, The

These are just off the top of my head; I need to rummage through my bookshelves and make a more organized list.

I hope this won?t make you repent your intention to suggest more. I?d meant to amplify and qualify my responses but I can tell that Charles would rather have me in the living room with him and not typing away here. Hence my spare reply.

That I can?t read Edmund White probably says much about my prejudices. I have bushels and bushels of them. I?m more drawn to the humor of the penis than its capacity for tragedy.

Stephen Fry, yeah, I do need to finally give him a try. Probably the idea of reading an actor seems too odd on this side of the Atlantic. If I?d known his fiction has queer content I?d probably have tried it. All I knew was that he was in the grain of Wodehousian farce.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, haven?t read a mystery in years. But that is in the shop often enough if I can bring myself to try one again (right now I can only imagine rereading Father Brown or Nero Wolfe).

Strange Boy, I?ve never read the Narnia books. Children?s fiction is another blank for me.

Mary Renault, oh no, not historical fiction.

Allan Stein, from the one review I read I?m not sure what I?d think of it but it did sound interesting enough to try.

Satyricon, read it shortly after I came out. A very sane novel. I sure wished I had a little Giton.

de Sade, I don?t know if I could manage a page a day.

Teleny, I read an extract when I first came out. The only time I?ve actually seen a copy was in an ordinary bookshop in Savannah, GA (birthplace). Why I didn?t buy it - damned if I know. Regardless of the question of attribution I probably should read it one day.

Death in Venice, liked the movie. (I don?t read anything in translation that was translated later than the 17th century. That can sound pissily pretentious but isn?t meant so. And I only know English.

Isherwood, read almost everything (excluding the spiritual crap).

What I want most of all is a third Joe Keenan novel. Better yet, a gay Evelyn Waugh.

Your points are good, except for not reading translated stuff. Robert Frost said that ?poetry is what gets lost in translation?. That?s true to a degree and applies to translating books into movies, as well. The trick is this: if the medium forces you to take something away, then add something new. Just as Stanley Kubrick managed to do this very well with his movies based on books, Sidney Alexander succeeded with his fantastic translation of Michelangelo?s gay poetry. (Want gay poetry? I can recommend lots and lots.) I suggest that if you lose your prejudice against translations, you might gain access to a multitude of excellent writings.

Regarding Edmund White - had I heard of him, I might have gotten your point and skipped a few recommendations.

Regarding Allan Stein - VERY witty. I could take back all other recommendations of books that aren?t outright comic, but not this one. It?s the wittiest piece of non-comic fiction I?ve read.

Well, really I didn?t make any points that could be called good (or bad). It was more in the line of ?I don?t know art but I know?

Every now I try something outside of my taste. Usually I bounce. I read about three-fourths of one of Christopher Coe?s novels earlier this year. Suddenly I wondered why I had the book open, closed it and never went back.

I have an openly cowardly avoidance of tragedy unless it is highly stylized: slasher movies or Elizabethan drama.

Oddly enough I developed my prejudice against translation long ago when reading Nietzsche. Walter Kaufmann, the translator, painstakingly documented the flaws of prior translations and noted what was lost even in his English editions. I didn?t plan to stop reading translations but eventually I did (with special exceptions, I?m reading John Florio?s Montaigne on and off but that is for Florio).

I?m not an anglophile but I mostly read British writers. My ear has become so biased that much contemporary American prose simply doesn?t please me. (For similar reasons I can read much of the TLS but not of the New York Review of Books.)

There?s no argument that I?m missing much with my prejudices. But I?m never going to read everything that I already I?d like to before I die. Like every decent person I?ve got stacks of unread books.

And much I want to reread: Boswell?s Johnson, Anthony Powell?s Dance to the Music of Time. I never did answer you about Powell. That I read a twelve volume novel sequence says how much I esteem his books. (The first volume is A Question of Upbringingif Widmerepool amuses you watching his ascent and fall over the decades is for many worth the effort of reading the novels.)

Gay poetry? I?m an American. I?m only half kidding; I think that the British, however much poetry reading may have ebbed over there, are much greater readers of poetry than literate Americans. If I ever make it all the way through my Library of America Wallace Stevens I?ll be happy with myself.

I like to call Edmund White the gay John Updike: lots of flash. Which isn?t to mock him. I like my penis well enough but find him too serious about sex, which I think should be fun and funny. Partly it may be that I came of age after Stonewall but before AIDS.

I?ll keep your whole list in mind. It was only about three years ago that I started reading gay fiction again and watching gay movies at all (I jumped to the current crop pretty much straight from Boys in the Band, the Italian homoerotica has its own separate place.)

Would you consider it very rude, not to mention arrogant, if I tried to initiate you to appreciate - nay, admire - ars poetica? Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Well, your metaphorical money, that is; the one you must put where your mouth is.

I have selected four poems from different styles that I trust will appeal to a discriminating reader such as yourself.

.

In a Town of Osroini

From a tavern fight, where he was wounded,
they brought us our friend Remon, at about midnight yesterday.
From the windows, which we kept open wide,
the moon lit his beautiful body on the bed.
We?re a mixture here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Remon?s just the same. But yesterday,
when the moon lit his erotic face,
we all thought of the Platonic Charmides.

- Constantine P. Cavafy, 1917

.

Rondels part 2

Boy of red lips, pale face, and golden hair,
Of dreamy eyes of love, and finger-tips
Rosy with youth, too fervid and too fair,
Boy of red lips.

How the fond ruby rapier glides and slips
?Twixt the white hills thou spreadest for me there;
How my red mouth immortal honey sips
From thy ripe kisses, and sucks nectar rare
When each the shrine of God Priapus clips
In hot mouth passionate more than man may bear,
Boy of red lips!

- Aleister Crowley, 1898?

.

It Was a Navy Boy

It was a navy boy, so prim, so trim
That boarded my compartment of the train.
I shared my cigarettes and books to him.
He shared his heart to me. (Who knows my gain!)

(His head was golden like the oranges
That catch their brightness from Las Palmas sun.)
?O whence and whither bound, lad?? ?Home,? he says,
?Home from Hong Kong, sir, and a ten months? run.?

(His blouse was all as blue as morning sea,
His face was fresh like dawn above that blue.)
?I got one letter, sir, just one,? says he,
?And no shore-leave out there, sir, for the crew.?

(His look was noble as a good ship?s prow
And all of him was clean as pure east wind.)
?I am no ?sir??, I said, ?but tell me now
What carried you? Not tea, nor tamarind??

Strong were his silken muscles hiddenly
As under currents where the waters smile.
?Nitre we carried. By next week maybe
That should be winning France another mile.?

His words were shapely, even as his lips,
And courtesy he used like any lord.
?Was it through books that you first thought of ships??
?Reading a book, sir, made me go aboard.

[?]

- Wilfred Owen, 1915

.

The Stupra part 3: Dark and Wrinkled

Dark and wrinkled like a deep pink,
It breathes, humbly nestled among the moss
Still wet with love that follows the gentle
Descent of the white buttocks to the edge of its border.

Filaments like tears of milk
Have wept under the cruel wind pushing them back
Over small clots of reddish marl,
And there lose themselves where the slope called them.

In my dream my mouth was often placed on its opening;
My soul, jealous of the physical coitus,
Made of it its fawny tear-bottle and its nest of sobs.

It is the fainting olive and the cajoling flute,
The tube from which the heavenly praline descends,
A feminine Canaan enclosed in moisture.

- Arthur Rimbaud, 1923

Ronnie:

I hope you?ll forgive my tardy response. Fleshly life (opposed to the web) is encumbered right now. And having too much email in the same folder imposes an equally real if less dramatic impediment.

This is going to be quick and bald:

?beautiful bodyerotic face? : Those are just abstractions. What made the body beautiful, the face erotic? There?s no surprise, warmth, it is just a list of ideas.

?Boy of red lips, pale face, and golden hair? : OK, Take some Keats, translate it into some other language. Then give it to a monoglot and have him translate it back into English using a dictionary. I was thinking that maybe if I hadn?t noticed that it was by that old windbag Crowley (who I?m mildly fond of in a distant way) I could?ve taken it more seriously. Probably.

It Was a Navy Boy: This I liked. I?m sure if I were to meet Owen?s bright and honest young man I probably wouldn?t be at all attracted. But Owen?s evocation of details makes it easy for me to translate into my own erotic sensibility.

The Rimbaud: oh, you are going to hate me. I just snickered, it reads like faux-literary porn to me.

Really I?m sure you know far more about poetry and are more appreciative than I am. But you had to ask so you got my gut reactions.

Even though lots of the poetry I?ve read is erotic in some way or another I haven?t really felt much sexual response to poetry since I was young. My reading of Keats was always biased toward the homoerotic details, the damask cheeks. And Venus and Adonis is I found very arousing (one of the few poems I can remember exactly where I was the first time I read it).

You?ve run into one of my odd biases. I do not have strong sexual responses to literature. When I do it is always in some odd detail and almost about personalities. Probably one reason Hollinghurst?s ?bossy bottoms and timid tops? resonates so strongly with me. Now that is my sexual past. I have a past filled with bossy bottoms.

It is like erotica in general. Keep your naked bodies but a random photo of a boy in a sweater I?ll remember for years. (Of course my sexually ideal people do not appear in porn: no market.)

And thinking about it one of the recurring themes in my sexual daydreams have been about people I?ve seen in real life.

I guess I can sort of recapitulate that for me it is all in odd details spotted here and there and not conceptualizations.

Or something (not sure if this will even make sense.)

Richard,

I?m really sorry to hear about Charles. Don?t worry about taking time to respond. Charles needs you more urgently than I do.

Regarding Cavafy - agreed; though of course he knew exactly what he was doing. By going into abstractions, I believe he desired merely to sketch an outline that the reader could fill as he wished. To me, Cavafy is the poetical equivalent of Henri Matisse in that regard.

As for Crowley, I think you have a bias. Had I put some other name under the verses, I suspect that your reaction would have differed. Due to my lack of interest in Magick, I don?t hold much of Crowley?s work in that field, but I consider his poetic talents greatly underestimated.

Glad you liked the Owen; he?s one of my favorites. Perhaps you might want to get hold of a copy of his collected poems.

Finally, you seem to have misunderstood Rimbaud. It?s a parody, for heaven?s sake. He parodized the poorly-executed pseudo-literary pornography that was making the rounds in his day, and while he was at it, he parodized his own style too. You are forgetting that poets can have a great sense of humor.

While I didn?t think of quoting Keats, I briefly considered adding a Whitman poem to the mix? but the posting had to end somewhere.

In any case, I appreciate your feedback to these. And I?m not at all sorry or disappointed about your initial reaction. Good poetry, like good anything, can only be fully appreciated when you?ve known enough of the bad.

Now to your other comments:

Regarding the eroticism of a boy in a sweater, I wholly agree. To show everything bluntly is often to destroy the mystery behind it. However, the appropriateness really depends on the subject. I greatly appreciate the Beats, for instance, since they put forth a very important message: that you CAN show everything if you wish. Ginsberg?s work is of high literary merit because when he revealed all, it was an appropriate response to the reservations of the society of his day.

Regarding your claim that your sexually ideal people do not appear in porn: maybe, but from what I?ve been able to determine of your tastes, Amos Badertscher certainly seems to come close here and here.

Nevertheless, I can identify with your comment about the odd details, and the translation into people you?ve seen in real life. Photography doesn?t do a good job of catering to those needs. But poetry certainly gets close.

Yeah, I missed the intent of the Rimbaud poem. No context. All I know about him is that we sell him to the same kids that buy Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac and Ayn Rand. Not that I?d judge him by his fans. I haven?t read about European Lit. in a very long time.

The photos of the boys were very fetching; I have a weakness for long hair. Though my lust for slender smooth boys has moderated through the years (in a way I consider healthy). Then again if I weren?t partnered I my own a book of them.

Increasingly the qualities that have come to stir my erotic self aren?t the ones lying on the surface. I felt desire for Charles the first time we talked on the phone. He had the distinctive voice of a nelly gay guy born in the Southeastern US. Sometimes his wrist hangs limp in a way that always stirs me. ?Something in the way [he] moves?

You don?t see much of boys wearing eyeliner. In hours of heavy Google searching I?ve found a few earlier photographers like Wilhelm von Gloeden. I like boys with lilies.

I like to look at pictures of pretty twinks but in my sexual daydreams it is a boy I glimpsed on the street in San Francisco many years ago I remember. (Some time I need to return to my a couple entries where I tried to address the idea of people you?ve passed on the street as the real ?sex symbols.?)

And my sexuality tends to tug my sexual fancies this way and that.

Someone who ordered a book from Books Do Furnish A Room and tracked down my weblog. A conversation about gay novelists drifted to my sexuality (by way of homoerotic poetry, which Ronnie was hoping to help me appreciate). I thought...
Read more in Homoerotic words & pictures ?

Someone who ordered a book from Books Do Furnish A Room and tracked down my weblog. A conversation about gay novelists drifted to my sexuality (by way of homoerotic poetry, which Ronnie was hoping to help me appreciate). I thought...
Read more in Homoerotic words & pictures ?

Richard,

you wrote:
Yeah, I missed the intent of the Rimbaud poem. No context.

Um, my bad. I should have mentioned that all of The Stupra, of which this is merely an excerpt, was in a similar style.

All I know about him is that we sell him to the same kids that buy Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac and Ayn Rand.

You are correct in implying that those three, while undoubtedly brilliant authors, aren?t exactly famed for their sense of humor.

I have a weakness for long hair.

Me too, and I wear it long, myself. To me, hair contains a lot of personality.

[M]y lust for slender smooth boys has moderated through the years (in a way I consider healthy).

Well, I agree that it is definitely easier to have, no pun intended, broader sexual preferences.

Then again if I weren?t partnered I my own a book of them.

Just to be safe, you might want to place aside a photo-book of Herbert List (sample photo) or Will McBride (sample photo), if you happen across one in your bookstore.

You don?t see much of boys wearing eyeliner. In hours of heavy Google searching I?ve found a few earlier photographers like Wilhelm von Gloeden. I like boys with lilies.

In my opinion, eyeliner on boys seems more a case of gilding the lily. Gloeden, while a pioneer in gay photography, made use of an overblown style that doesn?t appeal to me on neither artistic, nor erotic level. Ditto regarding Pierre et Gilles, though they seem to go at it with a lot more self-mockery than Gloeden ever did.

?the idea of people you?ve passed on the street as the real ?sex symbols.?

With that I agree wholeheartedly.

Ronnie

Since you appreciated the Wilfred Owen poem, I thought I?d offer you the opening verse of a poem of similar style, this time by Oscar Wilde. I?m transcribing it from my copy of Wilde?s Collected Works by Wordsworth Editions; if you like what you see, you can search for the rest of it online.

Charmides

I

He was a Grecian lad, who coming home
With pulpy figs and wine from Sicily
Stood at his galley?s prow, and let the foam
Blow through his crisp brown curls unconsciously,
And holding wave and wind in boy?s despite
Peered from his dripping seat across the wet and stormy night.

Hi? I was looking for the text of ?It Was A Navy Boy? by Wilfred Owen, and this was the only website I could find that had it. But, I am missing the last 3 stanzas. Do any of you have it? I am writing a paper, and it?s kind of hard to write without the last 3 stanzas. Thanks so much!

I've written about this in another of my weblogs but it can't hurt to try it here. I'd like to find more literate, funny gay fiction that I'd enjoy. For now my list is restricted to Joe Keenan and...
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