It's that time of year again when we dive into the stacks upon stacks of book review copies towering over our desk and dip into some stories and nonfictional accounts we haven't been able to cover fully. To make this exercise fun for us, and hopefully for you dear readers as well, we hereby present a few unattributed passages from the books, as well as the sources' bibliographical information. See if you can match the text to the book. Answers appear at column's end for the stumped among us. And no cheating!
The Passages:
1. "I was living in a loft on Avenue B with my ex-girlfriend Amy, and her roommate, Rennes, who would pick up closeted fags and have noisy, slurpy sex. I shouldn't complain. He'd agreed to let me live there for cheap, the broke poet with some weird disease that had me crying out with feverish dreams, disrupting his postcoital sleep. Drag queens had been there first, and it took days for me and Amy to clean the eye shadow ground into the bathroom grout."
2. "Like every America hero, Louganis appeared both exceptional and typical. Divers have a unique history that links them to various national narratives and visions of the world. For example, after showing athletes in all sorts of disciplines, Leni Riefenstahl chose to conclude Olympia, her film of the 1936 Games in Berlin, with the diving events."
3. "When the body's core temperature drops in the 80s, complete apathy comes, and then stupor as the cold renders brain enzymes less efficient. The consciousness that still clings to the rapidly cooling body grows blissfully unaware of the catastrophic breakdown of physical function."
4. "There was one trick where we were ushered into a spaceship by a group of androids. The spaceship would fly upward and dangle over the stage. People would be literally shaking! It was priceless seeing the looks on their faces when the androids converged at the front of the stage, took off their masks - and were us!"
5. "Infertility isn't the kind of subject people tend to talk about at work. 'Hey, Frank. How was your weekend?'
"'Pretty good. Saw the new Batman movie, tried that new Italian restaurant downtown, found out my sperm count is zero.'
"'Oh yeah, how was the food?'"
6. "Fantasy tethers you to a possible world but makes you passive too, she suggests, 'waiting - waiting with dread' to discover what you already know, that the shoe of realism will drop."
7. "'We think the tomb was broken into twice in antiquity,' Carter put in. 'One party of thieves seems to have been after the perfumes and the anointing oils, the cosmetic creams and unguents - they were priceless then. We found the containers they'd left behind. Glorious things, finely carved, made of calcite, alabaster, but they left them - all they wanted was the face creams.'"
8. "Reed Marks, the hot, dirty-blond boy from the Little Rock team, at 16 already had a pelt of dark-brown stomach hair. I only spoke to him when I was in the water, lest he notice my raging hard-on when those crystal-blue eyes gazed at me."
The Books:
A. "The Visitors" by Sally Beauman; Harper, $27.99
B. "Denali's Howl - The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak" by Andy Hall; Dutton, $27.95
C. "Sex, or the Unbearable" by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman ; Duke University Press
D. "The Nearness of Others - Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV" by David Caron; U. of Minnesota Press, $24.95
E. "Eating Fire - My Life as a Lesbian Avenger" by Kelly Cogswell; U. of Minnesota Press, $19.95
F. "Mommy Man - How I Went from Mild-Mannered Geek to Gay Superdad" by Jerry Mahoney; Taylor Trade, $24.95
G. "Shining Star - Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire" by Philip Bailey; Viking, $27.95
H. "Sally Field Can Play the Transsexual - or, I Was Cursed by Polly Holliday" by Leslie L. Smith ; PressLess
The Answers:
1. E; 2. D; 3. B; 4. G; 5. F; 6. C; 7. A; 8. H.
Vanessa's victory
San Francisco Opera presented its eighth simulcast from the War Memorial Opera House to AT&T Park last Sat., July 5. This year's free Opera at the Ballpark offering was Verdi's La Traviata. Each year in cooperation with KDFC Classical Radio, SFO has held a public contest for someone to sing the National Anthem a cappella at the ballpark. The contest attracted 74 submissions from folks throughout the Bay Area, plus one each from Nevada City and Merced. The winner was selected by KDFC President Bill Lueth and San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley, and the 2014 winner was San Francisco resident Vanessa Bousay, a personality created by Erik Chalfant.
None other than B.A.R. society columnist Donna Sachet graced AT&T Park some five years ago with her own interpretation of our national anthem, so there is precedence. And we heard Bousay actually could sing.