David Pratt's Blog
July 20, 2014
Out of the Sublime, the Ridiculous
Writing a novel is a ridiculous undertaking. I spent two years writing Looking After Joey, the story of a gay porn character (not actor -- character) who steps out of the TV into the real life of a single accountant in New York City, and he gets stuck there. It's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" with lube and jockstraps. The accountant’s best friend decides to teach this boy, Joey, all he needs to know about being a gay man in the "real" world, then take him to a fabulous Fire Island party and show him off. So now it’s My Fair Lady with lube and jockstraps (don't think about that too long). Our heroes just have to get invited to said party, a process so wonderfully, absurdly complicated that I will not attempt to describe it. But I will describe the result. The accountant, his friend, the porn character and his eventual real-world boyfriend—become a family. It took me two years to get these howler monkeys to form a family. Ridiculous!
No.
Not if you are in love with story. Not ridiculous, if what makes you weak in the knees is knowing you have created something that will to make someone laugh. You feel that laugh coming. And you laugh, too. Not ridiculous, if you go weak in the knees knowing you will bring tears to someone’s eyes. And you tear up, too. And the two years are not ridiculous if you go weak in the knees knowing you’re going to surprise someone. Laughs and tears and surprises are gifts, and you are as excited as a kid on Christmas to give them to readers and have readers open them. It is indeed more blessèd—and more fun—to give than to receive.
I’d love to give samples from the book, but I don’t want to spoil the fun. I’d also have to give you the backstory on each sample, and honestly, I love piling on characters and incidents so much that any scene after about page 17 would require just too much set-up. You really should just read it. Now. This summer. In a hammock with a glass of lemonade, or at the beach. You can polish it off in an afternoon, and I promise: if you have a twisted sense of humor and you like love and family and stuff, you will have a wonderful time. Pitch done.
This love of laughter, tears, surprise, characters and story, like all loves, makes you do crazy things. Write novels. Make films. Paint paintings. All to animate persistent phantoms in your head, phantoms more real and important than many people you see day-to-day. Heroes and villains, triumphs and defeats, thrills, chills and spills growing in your head until you have to bring them into the world, even though the world has so many already. We keep creating because if we stopped… Well, for me, there is no if. Take everything from me, and I would still create. I would memorize everything! There are parts of "Joey" I have virtually memorized, out of love. As an artiste, I am supposed to be dissatisfied with my work, so excuse me for having enjoyed it -- not just because my imagined readers might laugh or cry, but because I myself was entertained. Satisfied. Fulfilled. And I thought, if I was fulfilled, others would be. But as I actually spun the tale, I did not think of my eventual readers. I edit for the eventual reader, but I create for myself, and the multitudes I contain.
So, two years: not so ridiculous after all. In fact, maybe essential. In fact, I guess I just talked myself into the next book!
If writing books is ridiculous, running a bookstore is ridiculous, too. More ridiculous, because it’s real estate. To the short list of inevitable things—death and taxes—add a third: real estate. Stuff takes up space. (Corollary: to get stuff, you have to cover distance.) Outcasts—queers and other oppressed minorities—in order for their voices to be heard and their priorities to be honored, must find ways around the real estate imperative. They must find literal spaces in which they can experience who they are, spaces maybe know one else wants, spaces no one else knows are there, and they must find ways to hold onto and expand those spaces. As an adolescent I had my own room. It helped a lot. I had used book stores. I had my imagination. Now we have cyberspace, physically limitless but limited functionally. We need our physical spaces. Some are still there. Some are transforming. Some are disappearing. All belong, to some degree, to a shadow economy.
Think of favors exchanged. People gathering windfall fruit or growing vegetables in abandoned lots. Debts excused or overlooked. Review books given to a bookstore. Someone eats. Someone reads, nestled deep in that shadow economy the real world ignores. Queers often live this way. Those deemed unemployable by others or even by themselves survive on temporary jobs, on tips, on what they can make with their hands and what they can do with their bodies. Once, when all they wanted was someone to speak to them as though they were real, they went to the bookstores: Oscar Wilde in New York; Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia; Glad Day in Toronto; Common Language in Ann Arbor; Outwords in Milwaukee, whose owner brews you a cup of coffee, too, because the wind blows hard and cold off Lake Michigan, and you might stay inside a little bit longer. Calamus in Boston. Outwrite in Atlanta. Proud in Rehoboth Beach. Some are no longer with us. A few still are.
When Giovanni’s Room held its fortieth anniversary celebration in 2013, former owners came, as did current owner Ed Hermance. As they all spoke, it became clear that no one had made from the store what the world calls a living. Especially in the down-and-out seventies, people went without insurance, savings, new clothes, new shoes, even went without food in order to support the gay rights, civil rights and women’s rights movements. (“There were times I bought film before food,” a lesbian photographer friend once said.) People lived on the edge in order to see those movements gain momentum and produce results. There was no money in pamphlets and chapbooks, in marches and signs. Even queer publishers complained. The only sure money was in the physical printing and shipping of those books. Production and distribution. Everyone else ate peanut butter and showered with cold water—and were so alive with the electricity of the cause that they barely knew the water was cold. Eventually, maybe even printers and shippers ate peanut butter. The caviar was for those who owned the buildings they printed in and shipped from.
The Internet has now given us a vast, if in some ways limited resource for being heard, for spreading our gospel. I am grateful that, for many, that gospel is gay books. I have been able to tell about my book and my self on a number of blogs over the past month. For me, for my personal satisfaction, the publicity is only a part of it. Perhaps the greatest gift has been the opportunity to talk about why I write what I write, and who my forbears have been. It has hardly escaped me that most of my opportunities have come from women. Women have been there at crucial junctures in my life, specifically, in my gay life. They have understood what men, straight or gay, could not or would not. They have supported what men could not or would not. Their more inclusive, more open, more accepting and more trusting world view has allowed me space and has given me inspiration. Because of women in my life, there has always been a place to go and a reason to go on believing. Ridiculous? Never. Essential to life? Always.
No.
Not if you are in love with story. Not ridiculous, if what makes you weak in the knees is knowing you have created something that will to make someone laugh. You feel that laugh coming. And you laugh, too. Not ridiculous, if you go weak in the knees knowing you will bring tears to someone’s eyes. And you tear up, too. And the two years are not ridiculous if you go weak in the knees knowing you’re going to surprise someone. Laughs and tears and surprises are gifts, and you are as excited as a kid on Christmas to give them to readers and have readers open them. It is indeed more blessèd—and more fun—to give than to receive.
I’d love to give samples from the book, but I don’t want to spoil the fun. I’d also have to give you the backstory on each sample, and honestly, I love piling on characters and incidents so much that any scene after about page 17 would require just too much set-up. You really should just read it. Now. This summer. In a hammock with a glass of lemonade, or at the beach. You can polish it off in an afternoon, and I promise: if you have a twisted sense of humor and you like love and family and stuff, you will have a wonderful time. Pitch done.
This love of laughter, tears, surprise, characters and story, like all loves, makes you do crazy things. Write novels. Make films. Paint paintings. All to animate persistent phantoms in your head, phantoms more real and important than many people you see day-to-day. Heroes and villains, triumphs and defeats, thrills, chills and spills growing in your head until you have to bring them into the world, even though the world has so many already. We keep creating because if we stopped… Well, for me, there is no if. Take everything from me, and I would still create. I would memorize everything! There are parts of "Joey" I have virtually memorized, out of love. As an artiste, I am supposed to be dissatisfied with my work, so excuse me for having enjoyed it -- not just because my imagined readers might laugh or cry, but because I myself was entertained. Satisfied. Fulfilled. And I thought, if I was fulfilled, others would be. But as I actually spun the tale, I did not think of my eventual readers. I edit for the eventual reader, but I create for myself, and the multitudes I contain.
So, two years: not so ridiculous after all. In fact, maybe essential. In fact, I guess I just talked myself into the next book!
If writing books is ridiculous, running a bookstore is ridiculous, too. More ridiculous, because it’s real estate. To the short list of inevitable things—death and taxes—add a third: real estate. Stuff takes up space. (Corollary: to get stuff, you have to cover distance.) Outcasts—queers and other oppressed minorities—in order for their voices to be heard and their priorities to be honored, must find ways around the real estate imperative. They must find literal spaces in which they can experience who they are, spaces maybe know one else wants, spaces no one else knows are there, and they must find ways to hold onto and expand those spaces. As an adolescent I had my own room. It helped a lot. I had used book stores. I had my imagination. Now we have cyberspace, physically limitless but limited functionally. We need our physical spaces. Some are still there. Some are transforming. Some are disappearing. All belong, to some degree, to a shadow economy.
Think of favors exchanged. People gathering windfall fruit or growing vegetables in abandoned lots. Debts excused or overlooked. Review books given to a bookstore. Someone eats. Someone reads, nestled deep in that shadow economy the real world ignores. Queers often live this way. Those deemed unemployable by others or even by themselves survive on temporary jobs, on tips, on what they can make with their hands and what they can do with their bodies. Once, when all they wanted was someone to speak to them as though they were real, they went to the bookstores: Oscar Wilde in New York; Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia; Glad Day in Toronto; Common Language in Ann Arbor; Outwords in Milwaukee, whose owner brews you a cup of coffee, too, because the wind blows hard and cold off Lake Michigan, and you might stay inside a little bit longer. Calamus in Boston. Outwrite in Atlanta. Proud in Rehoboth Beach. Some are no longer with us. A few still are.
When Giovanni’s Room held its fortieth anniversary celebration in 2013, former owners came, as did current owner Ed Hermance. As they all spoke, it became clear that no one had made from the store what the world calls a living. Especially in the down-and-out seventies, people went without insurance, savings, new clothes, new shoes, even went without food in order to support the gay rights, civil rights and women’s rights movements. (“There were times I bought film before food,” a lesbian photographer friend once said.) People lived on the edge in order to see those movements gain momentum and produce results. There was no money in pamphlets and chapbooks, in marches and signs. Even queer publishers complained. The only sure money was in the physical printing and shipping of those books. Production and distribution. Everyone else ate peanut butter and showered with cold water—and were so alive with the electricity of the cause that they barely knew the water was cold. Eventually, maybe even printers and shippers ate peanut butter. The caviar was for those who owned the buildings they printed in and shipped from.
The Internet has now given us a vast, if in some ways limited resource for being heard, for spreading our gospel. I am grateful that, for many, that gospel is gay books. I have been able to tell about my book and my self on a number of blogs over the past month. For me, for my personal satisfaction, the publicity is only a part of it. Perhaps the greatest gift has been the opportunity to talk about why I write what I write, and who my forbears have been. It has hardly escaped me that most of my opportunities have come from women. Women have been there at crucial junctures in my life, specifically, in my gay life. They have understood what men, straight or gay, could not or would not. They have supported what men could not or would not. Their more inclusive, more open, more accepting and more trusting world view has allowed me space and has given me inspiration. Because of women in my life, there has always been a place to go and a reason to go on believing. Ridiculous? Never. Essential to life? Always.
July 4, 2014
Now I Know the Things You Wanted That You Could Not Say
The time for wishes is usually Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s (Eve or Day), but maybe this isn’t a wish. Maybe this is a vision, so maybe it is fit for the most visionary American national holiday. This is definitely not a wish, because it will eventually happen. There are murmurs already. So maybe this is a reminder—that until this state of affairs comes to pass, us queer people as a group, as a nation within a nation, will not be free.
Same-sex marriage bans are collapsing in so many U.S. states, so fast that I can barely keep track. I am not going to attempt a count, because I would have to research the exact status in each state of the new states, and often there are tortuous footnotes; judge ruled but it’s under appeal but but but…
Suffice to say it’s all eventually good, all a victory for true equality and independence.
Which means they like us now, right? They really like us!
Not really. The heterosexual men of my generation still can not discuss homosexuality with much ease. Actually, plenty of homosexual men of my generation—homosexual men who are technically out—still can not discuss homosexuality with ease. I forget this, because I am a (gay) writer, and I socialize with other mostly gay writers. We write about this stuff, so of course we talk about it and post about it. But in general, among those I know, men and women of both orientations and various orientations in between, homosexuality is acceptable but not really ever a topic of conversation.
So my vision:
Queer people will truly be free when children are born into a world that will naturally assume that somehow at some time they might well be queer. The time is coming. Today, good young liberal parents let their toddlers cross-dress. Boys can play with dolls and girls with trucks, and in good liberal households it is acceptable to for a little boy to blurt out, “I want to marry Johnny when I grow up!”
But the society at large still posts a message that this is an aberration. An acceptable aberration. An “okay” aberration. But outside of a few urban areas, it’s an aberration that, even if “okay” (by which we often mean “completely not okay”) we don’t discuss. (I’m not even getting into segments of the culture where it is totally not okay.)
For all the good intentions going around, queer children still have to fight their way through a sticky web of shame, doubt, isolation and fear. Gay marriage is a huge step forward. But until this vision comes to pass—that children arrive in a world where queerness is a potential given, an option from the word go—those children will not be free.
But as I say, the time is coming. Happy Fourth of July, 2014.
Same-sex marriage bans are collapsing in so many U.S. states, so fast that I can barely keep track. I am not going to attempt a count, because I would have to research the exact status in each state of the new states, and often there are tortuous footnotes; judge ruled but it’s under appeal but but but…
Suffice to say it’s all eventually good, all a victory for true equality and independence.
Which means they like us now, right? They really like us!
Not really. The heterosexual men of my generation still can not discuss homosexuality with much ease. Actually, plenty of homosexual men of my generation—homosexual men who are technically out—still can not discuss homosexuality with ease. I forget this, because I am a (gay) writer, and I socialize with other mostly gay writers. We write about this stuff, so of course we talk about it and post about it. But in general, among those I know, men and women of both orientations and various orientations in between, homosexuality is acceptable but not really ever a topic of conversation.
So my vision:
Queer people will truly be free when children are born into a world that will naturally assume that somehow at some time they might well be queer. The time is coming. Today, good young liberal parents let their toddlers cross-dress. Boys can play with dolls and girls with trucks, and in good liberal households it is acceptable to for a little boy to blurt out, “I want to marry Johnny when I grow up!”
But the society at large still posts a message that this is an aberration. An acceptable aberration. An “okay” aberration. But outside of a few urban areas, it’s an aberration that, even if “okay” (by which we often mean “completely not okay”) we don’t discuss. (I’m not even getting into segments of the culture where it is totally not okay.)
For all the good intentions going around, queer children still have to fight their way through a sticky web of shame, doubt, isolation and fear. Gay marriage is a huge step forward. But until this vision comes to pass—that children arrive in a world where queerness is a potential given, an option from the word go—those children will not be free.
But as I say, the time is coming. Happy Fourth of July, 2014.
June 20, 2014
The Winner Takes It All!
Congratulations to Emily and Robin, who won the two giveaway copies of Looking After Joey. It was a rough battle! -- with 503 Goodreads members contending. I was very pleased to see all the interest, so I will be holding another Joey giveaway soon. In the meantime I see more than 250 of you have Joey "to read," so it looks like he might have a long run. It's the perfect time of year as Joey's a great beach or hammock book. Especially if you he's given to you for free! Watch this space!
June 17, 2014
Finishing Off
I have neglected my desert island book list as I have been generating material for my blog tour (latest post is here: http://thenovelapproachreviews.com/2014/06/14/welcome-to-david-pratt-and-the-looking-after-joey-blog-tour-and-giveaway/; thank you, Lisa!) I can by now honestly answer the question, “What was your inspiration?” in five different ways. I can talk about Looking After Joey as a comedy, a drama, a satire, a tale of growing up, and more. But for now, on to the last entries in my Desert Island 10.
9.) My list has been to England, my list has been to Ireland, my list has been to more than half the United States, and, as number 8 was not a book per se but a huge self-renewing stack of travel magazines, my list has been just about everywhere else! But my list has not been home. I am a New England boy. So who is it going to be? Emerson? Melville? Jewett? A few years ago, I got an unexpected holiday bonus at work. I knew immediately what I would spend it on. For months I had had on my Amazon wish list The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, a complete facsimile edition of the poems in two volumes. The cost had fluctuated all over the place, but at that moment stood at around $250. I swooped them up. Emily, in her own handwriting. Who could ask for anything more? Well, I sort of could. Emily’s handwriting is devilish to read. So I hope I get to bring my print edition, just for those time when, you know, I can’t read the great lady’s glorious meditations as she wrote them, exploring and dwelling in the shadowy, silent depths of the soul. I hope Emily will be the one actually to teach me how to live on my desert island.
10.) Finally, the New England boy won’t be satisfied without his Walden. And again, as with the Norton Anthology, it must be my own Walden, the one I had as a college sophomore, complete with sophomoric thoughts in the margins. That was where America was born, for better or for worse, for me, and that is where I shall dwell every few weeks on my island.
So there you have my ten. I am sure I could do another ten right now, and another. Maybe I will do this again next year, and see what I can come up with!
9.) My list has been to England, my list has been to Ireland, my list has been to more than half the United States, and, as number 8 was not a book per se but a huge self-renewing stack of travel magazines, my list has been just about everywhere else! But my list has not been home. I am a New England boy. So who is it going to be? Emerson? Melville? Jewett? A few years ago, I got an unexpected holiday bonus at work. I knew immediately what I would spend it on. For months I had had on my Amazon wish list The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, a complete facsimile edition of the poems in two volumes. The cost had fluctuated all over the place, but at that moment stood at around $250. I swooped them up. Emily, in her own handwriting. Who could ask for anything more? Well, I sort of could. Emily’s handwriting is devilish to read. So I hope I get to bring my print edition, just for those time when, you know, I can’t read the great lady’s glorious meditations as she wrote them, exploring and dwelling in the shadowy, silent depths of the soul. I hope Emily will be the one actually to teach me how to live on my desert island.
10.) Finally, the New England boy won’t be satisfied without his Walden. And again, as with the Norton Anthology, it must be my own Walden, the one I had as a college sophomore, complete with sophomoric thoughts in the margins. That was where America was born, for better or for worse, for me, and that is where I shall dwell every few weeks on my island.
So there you have my ten. I am sure I could do another ten right now, and another. Maybe I will do this again next year, and see what I can come up with!
June 12, 2014
How I Found My Cover Boy
Take a look at the Looking After Joey video, then read how I found cover model Nicholas Gorham. The video is here: http://vimeo.com/91786797
I had two cover concepts for Looking After Joey: the one I ended up using; or, more discreetly, a montage of everyday sights from Chelsea, the New York City neighborhood where the characters live: door buzzers; street signs; a breakfast table; a subway entrance. Joey is a sequence of outlandish, hilarious events, but it is also a book of the everyday. People get up and make coffee. They trek to work, go out after, grumble about the price of the wine and tapas, come home and watch reruns and chat about their day. You might call Joey a domestic romantic comedy – a dom rom com! I wanted that everyday-ness on the cover. On the other hand, one of my characters was straight out of a porn film. Here was my chance to legitimately put a naked guy on the front of one of my books, just like everyone else! Could I resist? No.
But who?
My photographer friend Eva Mueller knows more gay men than I do. She volunteered to help me find the guy. But still, who would it be? What were the criteria, exactly?
Joey, as I mentioned, is a character from a porn video. In the pantheon of porn archetypes, he’s the innocent kid, the one who reluctantly (at first) forgoes an algebra test to have a sexual encounter. I sent Eva a couple of pictures of eighties porn star Mike Henson. In the meantime, I could not resist looking for my archetype as I walked down the street. It was titillating, of course, but, if Eva couldn’t find someone, might it even prove necessary? I hoped not. Contrary to what you might think, the prospect of having to find a photographic model on the street is not pleasant. You’d have to convince them you’re not crazy. You’d have to hope they’re not crazy. And while you may think the streets of New York swarm with beautiful young men and while you would in fact be right, when your filter is “must look like a porn character,” guess what? Many beautiful young men don’t pass through that filter.
Of course today we have “amateur” porn in which almost anyone can be a “star.” But the classic porn looks are very specific. If we think “porn star” just means “sexiest” or “most built” or “most beautiful,” we are wrong. In those days of pretend-scouting my cover boy, I saw many compelling types of male beauty and sexiness that did not come near the porn look. Ironically, one potential criterion for sexiness is having no idea that you are sexy. You do have to pay some attention to clothes and grooming, but looking too deliberately put-together can be off-putting. It’s become a cliché that inner qualities make someone sexy, and it is true: confidence, curiosity, and the cluster of qualities we call character all make a man sexy. That is how I created the character of Doug in Looking After Joey. He has a bad haircut and wears a lot of plaid, but he is honest, loyal, forgiving, and the list goes on. He’s not a paragon. He sometimes lacks belief in himself, but he does not give up. Doug’s presence in Joey’s life ultimately makes Calvin rethink his and Peachy’s obsession with getting into the party.
I have written elsewhere about gay men and character. When I was growing up, homosexuality was a moral failing. So you hid all those tendencies from a young age. Making you, in turn, deceitful and even a liar. So many of us felt automatically shut out of the whole character thing. The whole student-council-president-graduation-prize-winner thing. You started compensating in other ways. All A’s. Perfect hair.
Eva ultimately found my cover guy, Nicholas Gorham. Interestingly, he did not have the exact look of a porn star, either. But he could convey the impression, which was what mattered, and that was actually better than actually being a classic porn star. Nicholas is in fact an actor. He is a very good-looking actor, true, but it was his ability to act the part of beautiful, lost, needy, clueless but decent and loving Joey that made him perfect for the cover. And while acting was involved, he did bring his own qualities to the shoot. I don’t know Nicholas well, but I could tell from the moment I met him that here was someone who had consciously worked at being a good man. Of course, we might have found a real porn star that could have conveyed all this, but I think maybe a professional porn actor might have had trouble surrendering the smoldering image to the playfulness and vulnerability we needed, to the whole colossal joke of sitting there in his underpants eating muesli – a running gag from the book, which you now have to buy because you are so curious.
Nicholas, on the other hand, took up cereal and spoon with perfect grace, flashing that slightly-guilty-but-not-really-because-he-knows-he’s-going-to-get-away-with-it grin over and over, making it spontaneous every time, while I called “Hey, Joey!” and “Stop eating in bed!” from off-camera and Eva snapped away. It wasn’t easy. He had to eat a lot of cereal. It was granola, not muesli, as muesli does not photograph well, and for a similar reason, it was half-and-half, not milk. And the dribble on his thigh was an accident that really happened; it was not photoshopped.
I had two cover concepts for Looking After Joey: the one I ended up using; or, more discreetly, a montage of everyday sights from Chelsea, the New York City neighborhood where the characters live: door buzzers; street signs; a breakfast table; a subway entrance. Joey is a sequence of outlandish, hilarious events, but it is also a book of the everyday. People get up and make coffee. They trek to work, go out after, grumble about the price of the wine and tapas, come home and watch reruns and chat about their day. You might call Joey a domestic romantic comedy – a dom rom com! I wanted that everyday-ness on the cover. On the other hand, one of my characters was straight out of a porn film. Here was my chance to legitimately put a naked guy on the front of one of my books, just like everyone else! Could I resist? No.
But who?
My photographer friend Eva Mueller knows more gay men than I do. She volunteered to help me find the guy. But still, who would it be? What were the criteria, exactly?
Joey, as I mentioned, is a character from a porn video. In the pantheon of porn archetypes, he’s the innocent kid, the one who reluctantly (at first) forgoes an algebra test to have a sexual encounter. I sent Eva a couple of pictures of eighties porn star Mike Henson. In the meantime, I could not resist looking for my archetype as I walked down the street. It was titillating, of course, but, if Eva couldn’t find someone, might it even prove necessary? I hoped not. Contrary to what you might think, the prospect of having to find a photographic model on the street is not pleasant. You’d have to convince them you’re not crazy. You’d have to hope they’re not crazy. And while you may think the streets of New York swarm with beautiful young men and while you would in fact be right, when your filter is “must look like a porn character,” guess what? Many beautiful young men don’t pass through that filter.
Of course today we have “amateur” porn in which almost anyone can be a “star.” But the classic porn looks are very specific. If we think “porn star” just means “sexiest” or “most built” or “most beautiful,” we are wrong. In those days of pretend-scouting my cover boy, I saw many compelling types of male beauty and sexiness that did not come near the porn look. Ironically, one potential criterion for sexiness is having no idea that you are sexy. You do have to pay some attention to clothes and grooming, but looking too deliberately put-together can be off-putting. It’s become a cliché that inner qualities make someone sexy, and it is true: confidence, curiosity, and the cluster of qualities we call character all make a man sexy. That is how I created the character of Doug in Looking After Joey. He has a bad haircut and wears a lot of plaid, but he is honest, loyal, forgiving, and the list goes on. He’s not a paragon. He sometimes lacks belief in himself, but he does not give up. Doug’s presence in Joey’s life ultimately makes Calvin rethink his and Peachy’s obsession with getting into the party.
I have written elsewhere about gay men and character. When I was growing up, homosexuality was a moral failing. So you hid all those tendencies from a young age. Making you, in turn, deceitful and even a liar. So many of us felt automatically shut out of the whole character thing. The whole student-council-president-graduation-prize-winner thing. You started compensating in other ways. All A’s. Perfect hair.
Eva ultimately found my cover guy, Nicholas Gorham. Interestingly, he did not have the exact look of a porn star, either. But he could convey the impression, which was what mattered, and that was actually better than actually being a classic porn star. Nicholas is in fact an actor. He is a very good-looking actor, true, but it was his ability to act the part of beautiful, lost, needy, clueless but decent and loving Joey that made him perfect for the cover. And while acting was involved, he did bring his own qualities to the shoot. I don’t know Nicholas well, but I could tell from the moment I met him that here was someone who had consciously worked at being a good man. Of course, we might have found a real porn star that could have conveyed all this, but I think maybe a professional porn actor might have had trouble surrendering the smoldering image to the playfulness and vulnerability we needed, to the whole colossal joke of sitting there in his underpants eating muesli – a running gag from the book, which you now have to buy because you are so curious.
Nicholas, on the other hand, took up cereal and spoon with perfect grace, flashing that slightly-guilty-but-not-really-because-he-knows-he’s-going-to-get-away-with-it grin over and over, making it spontaneous every time, while I called “Hey, Joey!” and “Stop eating in bed!” from off-camera and Eva snapped away. It wasn’t easy. He had to eat a lot of cereal. It was granola, not muesli, as muesli does not photograph well, and for a similar reason, it was half-and-half, not milk. And the dribble on his thigh was an accident that really happened; it was not photoshopped.
June 6, 2014
Here's to the Ladies Who Blog
My blog tour is off and running! Kazza and Son created a beautiful spread, while Ro asked me about genres, and I told her about throat singing (and no, that’s not a euphemism).
Seriously, though, these folks devote enormous energy and creativity to getting the word out about their favorite books and authors: an invaluable service to our community. I am very honored to be featured on both these blogs, and there are more to come. Oh, and they are not all ladies. I'll be guesting with the lovely and talented Jeff Erno, and I will be stopping by GGR soon.
On Top Down Under (free giveaway here): http://ontopdownunderbookreviews.com/giveaway-looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt/
Literary Nymphs: (also with giveaway)http://literarynymphshotlist.blogspot.com/2014/06/looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt.html?zx=8484aa7bcaf675e6
Seriously, though, these folks devote enormous energy and creativity to getting the word out about their favorite books and authors: an invaluable service to our community. I am very honored to be featured on both these blogs, and there are more to come. Oh, and they are not all ladies. I'll be guesting with the lovely and talented Jeff Erno, and I will be stopping by GGR soon.
On Top Down Under (free giveaway here): http://ontopdownunderbookreviews.com/giveaway-looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt/
Literary Nymphs: (also with giveaway)http://literarynymphshotlist.blogspot.com/2014/06/looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt.html?zx=8484aa7bcaf675e6
June 3, 2014
It's Getting Hot Out Here! (Desert Island Books, Part Three)
Three more desert island books…
6.) I promised I’d go all erudite on you. And I promise you this is legit. I love James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I have actually read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A few times. Have I understood James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? To a degree. I can find some if hardly all of the references and motifs in a given excerpt. There’s a lot of, you know, recursive…recursiveness. And stuff. Also, a lot of it’s really hilarious and a lot of it’s really beautiful. So, am I taking Finnegans Wake to my desert island? Not quite. I want a twofer. I am taking Finnicius Revém, Donaldo Schüler’s translation into Portuguese of Joyce’s work, published by Ateliê Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil. Schüler, you see, places the translation next to the original, so I get to enjoy Joyce and then enjoy Schüler’s sometimes completely made-up equivalents of Joycean wordplay. (My partner is Brazilian is how this, including me collecting all six volumes of Schüler, got started. To date I have four. They are not easy to find.) Joyce’s multilingual puns are often untranslatable. Reading Schüler we may marvel at what he has managed to recover or transform, or we may regret what is lost. Kind of like life. By the way, have I mentioned that I want this desert island to be off the coast of Brazil?
7.) If I’m going to have Joyce and that Norton Anthology, I should also have a dictionary. But why waste one of my ten choices on a book I’m only going to use for reference? Well, I’m also going to read that dictionary. No, seriously. My dad did that all the time. Try it. It’s kind of addictive. And I want it to be the OED. All twenty volumes, please. Girlfriend is not going to lie around on the hot sand clutching a magnifying glass.
8.) I once again appeal to the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands. I am hoping that, for number eight, His Honor will let me stretch the definition of a book. I want a big ol’ pile of travel magazines. I want page after slick, colorful page of boutique hotels I can’t afford, castles I’d never get to, and hikes and climbs that would tax my plantar fasciitis. I love the luxury of the places and I love the luxury of the language. In travel magazines you never labor to find anything (the way I had to search half an hour for the Rembrandthuis, which my map told me was RIGHT THERE!). You are “whisked” to places. You “hop” between islands. You “swing” and “jump” and “sail,” whether you are sailing or not. Beaches and trails are nearly empty. Bars are just full enough to be cozy. Festivals are never crowded or smelly. You just hop from escape to escape to escape. Actually, I wonder if the Commissioner would get me a bunch of subscriptions, so there will always be something new, and I will never have to come back to where I have been.
Last two desert island books soon!
6.) I promised I’d go all erudite on you. And I promise you this is legit. I love James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I have actually read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A few times. Have I understood James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? To a degree. I can find some if hardly all of the references and motifs in a given excerpt. There’s a lot of, you know, recursive…recursiveness. And stuff. Also, a lot of it’s really hilarious and a lot of it’s really beautiful. So, am I taking Finnegans Wake to my desert island? Not quite. I want a twofer. I am taking Finnicius Revém, Donaldo Schüler’s translation into Portuguese of Joyce’s work, published by Ateliê Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil. Schüler, you see, places the translation next to the original, so I get to enjoy Joyce and then enjoy Schüler’s sometimes completely made-up equivalents of Joycean wordplay. (My partner is Brazilian is how this, including me collecting all six volumes of Schüler, got started. To date I have four. They are not easy to find.) Joyce’s multilingual puns are often untranslatable. Reading Schüler we may marvel at what he has managed to recover or transform, or we may regret what is lost. Kind of like life. By the way, have I mentioned that I want this desert island to be off the coast of Brazil?
7.) If I’m going to have Joyce and that Norton Anthology, I should also have a dictionary. But why waste one of my ten choices on a book I’m only going to use for reference? Well, I’m also going to read that dictionary. No, seriously. My dad did that all the time. Try it. It’s kind of addictive. And I want it to be the OED. All twenty volumes, please. Girlfriend is not going to lie around on the hot sand clutching a magnifying glass.
8.) I once again appeal to the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands. I am hoping that, for number eight, His Honor will let me stretch the definition of a book. I want a big ol’ pile of travel magazines. I want page after slick, colorful page of boutique hotels I can’t afford, castles I’d never get to, and hikes and climbs that would tax my plantar fasciitis. I love the luxury of the places and I love the luxury of the language. In travel magazines you never labor to find anything (the way I had to search half an hour for the Rembrandthuis, which my map told me was RIGHT THERE!). You are “whisked” to places. You “hop” between islands. You “swing” and “jump” and “sail,” whether you are sailing or not. Beaches and trails are nearly empty. Bars are just full enough to be cozy. Festivals are never crowded or smelly. You just hop from escape to escape to escape. Actually, I wonder if the Commissioner would get me a bunch of subscriptions, so there will always be something new, and I will never have to come back to where I have been.
Last two desert island books soon!
June 2, 2014
What to Curl Up With (Part Two)
More desert island books…!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
June 1, 2014
What to Curl up With (Part One)
What do you take to a desert island? Say you’re allowed ten books. They should be…what? The ten greatest ever written? Anna Karenina? Remembrance of Things Past? I’d kill myself. Or the ten most inspiring? What inspiration do you need? It’s a desert island! So maybe we want the ten most comforting books. But those might be ones you had as a kid. They would take between three minutes and three hours each to read. Whatever the case – comfort, inspiration or genius – one thing is certain: these would have to be books you could read over and over. Depending on what else there is to do (does this island come with shelter? what’s the food situation?) you will be reading each book once every two weeks for the rest of your life. Here is what I think I would take. Part one.
1.) My Norton Anthology. Kills a couple hundred birds with one stone, dunnit? And to be clear, it would indeed have to be my Norton Anthology, the one I used in Introduction to English Literature at Hamilton College in the fall of 1976. The one with which I learned to read. And quite possibly write. In high school, the teachers’ questions ran to, “Why does Atticus mean when he says that?” and “Why does Pa Joad do that?” They’re trying to sharpen your mind and mold your character. Fat chance. In my case. But in the big, bright room in Hamilton’s Root Hall, Professor Austin Briggs took Chaucer and Shakespeare and Pope apart, line by line, often word by word, to reveal simply how literature works and what it does. It was my first sustained encounter with poetry, which high schools, at least then, thought students thought was boring, so they avoided it. Then suddenly Beowulf. Suddenly Spenser. Suddenly sonnets. Grown-up stuff with a grown-up purpose. Why had no one told me? I did not write back then, except for assigned papers. But I believe Austin Briggs’s impassioned, witty, detailed exegeses of these writers made me wish secretly to do the same thing, and those exegeses gestated and eventually, well, Bob the Book is not The Faerie Queene, but then, The Faerie Queene is not Bob the Book. At any rate, I am packing my Norton Anthology, complete with the scribblings of a suddenly energized 18-year-old in the margins.
2.) Spenser and Pope are fine. More than fine. But at the end of a long day, you can’t quite sit down by the fire and have a whiskey with those towering and ancient intellects. E. B. White’s essay “Home-coming,” the first in his collection One Man’s Meat, is actually about the end of a long day, a day of driving up Route 1 to North Brookline, Maine, where the Whites had a house and, more importantly, a barn that became the setting for perhaps the greatest work of children’s literature ever. “Home-coming” is witty and sharp-eyed, as is everything by White, and what is more, it calms the soul: sunset along tacky Route 1 and the woods and fields and marshes beyond; the arrival at the empty house; the whiskey by the fire; and a curious and amusing event that suddenly brings a gaggle of neighbors – aka the volunteer fire department -- into White’s parlor. I would happily take just “Home-coming” (yes, the hyphen belongs) to my desert island, but of course I am going to take the whole book. One Man’s Meat also contains such White classics as "Clear Days," "Salt Water Farm," "The Flocks We Watch by Night," "Once More to the Lake" and the lovely "First World War." Life amused White, and it made him anxious, and he is frank about both. Of Route 1 he says, “There is little to do but steer and avoid death.” And so I know I shall have at least one perfect soul mate on my island.
The next installment of my desert island books shall be revealed soon!
1.) My Norton Anthology. Kills a couple hundred birds with one stone, dunnit? And to be clear, it would indeed have to be my Norton Anthology, the one I used in Introduction to English Literature at Hamilton College in the fall of 1976. The one with which I learned to read. And quite possibly write. In high school, the teachers’ questions ran to, “Why does Atticus mean when he says that?” and “Why does Pa Joad do that?” They’re trying to sharpen your mind and mold your character. Fat chance. In my case. But in the big, bright room in Hamilton’s Root Hall, Professor Austin Briggs took Chaucer and Shakespeare and Pope apart, line by line, often word by word, to reveal simply how literature works and what it does. It was my first sustained encounter with poetry, which high schools, at least then, thought students thought was boring, so they avoided it. Then suddenly Beowulf. Suddenly Spenser. Suddenly sonnets. Grown-up stuff with a grown-up purpose. Why had no one told me? I did not write back then, except for assigned papers. But I believe Austin Briggs’s impassioned, witty, detailed exegeses of these writers made me wish secretly to do the same thing, and those exegeses gestated and eventually, well, Bob the Book is not The Faerie Queene, but then, The Faerie Queene is not Bob the Book. At any rate, I am packing my Norton Anthology, complete with the scribblings of a suddenly energized 18-year-old in the margins.
2.) Spenser and Pope are fine. More than fine. But at the end of a long day, you can’t quite sit down by the fire and have a whiskey with those towering and ancient intellects. E. B. White’s essay “Home-coming,” the first in his collection One Man’s Meat, is actually about the end of a long day, a day of driving up Route 1 to North Brookline, Maine, where the Whites had a house and, more importantly, a barn that became the setting for perhaps the greatest work of children’s literature ever. “Home-coming” is witty and sharp-eyed, as is everything by White, and what is more, it calms the soul: sunset along tacky Route 1 and the woods and fields and marshes beyond; the arrival at the empty house; the whiskey by the fire; and a curious and amusing event that suddenly brings a gaggle of neighbors – aka the volunteer fire department -- into White’s parlor. I would happily take just “Home-coming” (yes, the hyphen belongs) to my desert island, but of course I am going to take the whole book. One Man’s Meat also contains such White classics as "Clear Days," "Salt Water Farm," "The Flocks We Watch by Night," "Once More to the Lake" and the lovely "First World War." Life amused White, and it made him anxious, and he is frank about both. Of Route 1 he says, “There is little to do but steer and avoid death.” And so I know I shall have at least one perfect soul mate on my island.
The next installment of my desert island books shall be revealed soon!
May 30, 2014
Pulling Against
I have been anxious for some time to write a blog post about a recent review of "Looking After Joey." In its entirety this review reads, "I thought this would be a comedy of errors, what I got was a dissertation on existentialism. Interesting book." The tone is unenthusiastic and the reviewer gave just three stars, but I love this review. It makes me proud of "Looking After Joey," because the truth is that "Joey" is both a comedy and, well, not quite a dissertation, I hope, but a rumination on time, loss and the need for love. And the two overlap. Some of the biggest laughs point to truths about ageing and connection and what we owe one another. And some of the more wistful moments suddenly explode in laughter. I myself would tear up when I read over the Joey and Doug scene in which the former is trying to decide whether or not to stay in this world. And yet one can't help but chuckle because Joey's dilemma is precipitated by... Well, I won't give away any more of a spoiler than I already have. But that scene shuttles back and forth many times between tears and laughs. Different emotions pull against each other all the time in "Joey." I think it's natural. (Speculative fiction allows for this in a way realism may not.) Our worries, losses, anxieties and failures have their poetry. Often jokes are part of that poetry. Jokes are how we make those things okay. And when we do succeed, when we connect, well, of course that is poetic, too. I think all this is why the reviewer quoted above, while having their expectations frustrated, also had to conclude, "Interesting book." I second that emotion! (And I still maintain that "Joey" is a beach book! Pick up a copy along with your suntan lotion!)
