From the ‘Best Title’ file we hear that author Jeffrey Eugenides has won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex. 365Gay.com (4-8) reports that the story of eight generations of Greek-Americans as told by hermaphrodite (or inter-sexed) Calliope (later Cal) has been called ‘brilliant’ and ‘astonishing’ by critics.
While we’re in a bookish mood, you might want to check out The Book of Salt by Monique Truong as reviewed by The NY Times Book Review (4-6). Salt is the story of the gay Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in France before WWII. The review does not indicate how much of the novel is invented but the plot has the famous lesbian couple using Trac, their cook, as an amateur Mata Hari to sleep with, and report on, various (male) personalities. A snoop is a snoop is a snoop.
Still floating along literarilly—The Atlantic Monthly (5-3) in an essay by David Brooks says only one writer so far has ever given an accurate sense of what American politics is really about and he’s been dead some hundred years. Brooks is referring to the ‘good grey (and gay) poet’ Walt Whitman. Whitman wrestled, and won against a central American paradox: America the powerful vs. America the democratic. ‘Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training school for making first-class men’ [we would say ‘people’ today]. Americans should be ‘freedom athletes.’ Whitman first supported and then criticized the Civil War; he nursed the wounded (and not just because he was attracted, sexually, to soldiers). Conservatives and liberals would benefit from reading Whitman’s 1871 essay, ‘Democratic Vistas.’
The NY Times (4-6) reports that a fair number of gay couples who tied the knot in Vermont, can’t untie it unless they live there.