We spend a lot of our off-hours sprawled out on our sofa listening to music with a book propped open in our mitts. Even so, we get sent many more review copies than we can possibly read. But here are a few books that we did get to, and that we can vouch for. They're not by any means "the best" of the year, but every one of them rewarded our sustained attention.
Cabot Wright Begins by James Purdy (new paperback edition, Liveright) "Once established in her tenement work-room or, as she called it, her detection center, she was assailed neither by fear of rats or physical violence so much as by an uneasiness of more practical consideration. How was she to get herself introduced to the rapist in the first place?"
"Down There on a Visit" by Christopher Isherwood (new paperback edition, FSG)
"Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns" by David Margolick (Other Press)
"Drinking with Men" by Rosie Schaap (Riverhead)
"Garry Winogrand" edited by Leo Rubinfien (SFMOMA/Yale University Press)
"The Hotel Oneira" by August Kleinzahler (FSG) "Then, hey presto, there I y'am, eye to eye with the buckle of your belt,/Toenails painted crimson, lipstick too, like the ass of a certain baboon I knew."
"A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World" by R.B. Parkinson (Columbia University Press)
"I Look Divine by Christopher Coe" (new paperback edition, Bruno Gmuender) "I wonder if Nicholas really believed that cheekbones have bad days. I wonder to what extent, exactly, a slack jawline could make him feel like a milestone or a transition.
"Then I catch my own face in the lacquer.
"God help me, I look like Edith Head."
"I'm Your Man - The Life of Leonard Cohen" by Sylvie Simmons (Ecco)
"Lasting City - The Anatomy of Nostalgia" by James McCourt (Liveright) "Perhaps you ought to run the reel backwards at rewind speed to that very day, the Sunday we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. And you brought in Nagasaki, which nobody ever talks about. Nagasaki is definitely B-list."
"My 1980s & Other Essays" by Wayne Koestenbaum (FSG) "In the restroom of the Morgan Library I met the great poet James Merrill and he complimented my peacock-blue silk jacket, and what did I say in response? Nothing. I should have followed him to the urinal. Instead I washed my hands and fled. Why didn't I try to pick him up, so I could now be telling my 'I had sex with James Merrill' story?"
"Pigeon in a Crosswalk - Tales of Anxiety and Accidental Glamour" by Jack Gray (Simon & Schuster) Gray was on-site producer for CNN's New Year's Eve Live with Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin when Griffin went off on some hecklers on-air to memorable effect. "Shut up! You know what, screw you, I'm working. I don't go to your class=MsoPageNumber>job and knock the dicks out of your mouth!"
"The Two Hotel Francforts" by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury)
"Watergate" by Thomas Mallon (new paperback edition, Vintage)
We also really loved the book-length gay comic "Al-Qaeda's Super Secret Weapon" by David Zelman (Northwest Press), all about jihadists attempting to bring down the West by infiltrating gay culture. Its publisher calls it an "erotic political satire" and says it "sends up hypermasculinity, fear of gays in the military, religious and cultural stereotypes. While it's got some explicit content, there's relatively little considering the length of the book." Yet Apple has blocked it from sales on iBooks, citing its "prohibited, explicit or objectionable content." Just one more reason to keep buying books in their traditional, words-on-tree-pulp form. Let's keep freedom of expression away from the digital gatekeepers.
Big Nights Out
At first we felt slightly silly and childlike for enjoying Cirque Dreams Holidaze, with its skipping reindeer, gingerbread acrobats, and skating choo-choo train, which played the Curran Theatre for a short run last week. Then we remembered that everything about the holidays is silly and childlike: Hanging stockings, singing carols, spinning dreidels. OK, Out There did none of those things in our childhood, which we spent in gin joints, chaining cigarettes. But it's nice to return to a romanticized past that never was.
What are you doing on New Year's Eve? Out There and our perspicacious "plus one" Pepi will be following our instincts and our own longstanding tradition by going to see "wise Latina" comic goddess Marga Gomez, this year playing the Brava's New Year's Eve Comedy Fiesta, along with stand-up comics Dhaya Lakshminarayanan and Micia Mosely, to benefit Brava Theater Center. The show starts at 9 p.m. (doors and bar open 8 p.m., and Brava's Countdown Dance Party follows the performance) at Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St. in SF. Tickets ($30+) are available online at www.brava.org. See you there!
Correx Box
We read other newspapers' corrections boxes the way sports fans follow box scores. A pair of interesting correx appeared in the august pages of The New York Times recently, and we're here to share them with you.
First, it's good to see that "The Old Gray Lady" has been forced into raising its consciousness around transgender issues. "An article last Thursday about lesbians' reaction to the movie 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' gave an outdated reference to the Wachowskis, the siblings who directed Bound. Although they were brothers when the film was made, one of the two subsequently underwent gender transformation and is now known as Lana Wachowski."
Then, all these years later, it seems the purported psychic powers of Joan Crawford have not waned. "An article last Thursday about the River House co-op in Manhattan misstated the circumstances surrounding the placement of a large neon Pepsi billboard on the other side of the East River from the co-op. It was put up several years before the co-op board rejected Joan Crawford; it was not put there as an act of revenge by Ms. Crawford, who married Pepsi's president in 1955 and was on its board starting in 1959." But she did say to the board, "Don't frug with me, fellas, it's not my first time at the rodeo!"