Lovecraft would have turned 124 today.
I just read a few pages of Zukofsky's fiction. It features a similar delight in rhyme as does his poetry.
I haven't read much Lovecraft in recent years, but he certainly has shaped my reality. One of my high school students read At the Mountains of Madness over the summer. I read that back in the 1980's. I love how Shea and Wilson use Lovecraft as a character in Illuminatus! In that novel Lovecraft took particular pride in At the Mountains of Madness which led me to read that Lovecraft novel.
Catullus 9 seems to deal with friendship between Catullus and another man. The translation at Wikisource has the line, "I shall kiss your beloved face and eyes." The commentaries I looked at did not suggest a homoerotic meaning.
Buster Keaton loved bridge.
Boris Karloff loved cricket.
Make of it what you will.
Bowie Kuhn loved baseball.
ReplyDeleteWord has it that Esther Williams loved swimming. (I'm making of it...)
I recently watched Prof. Jay Parini give an hourlong talk on YT, and he casually described Hawthorne and Melville's friendship as "homoerotic." He briefly compared and contrasted it to Thoreau's and Emerson's relationship.
"Homoerotic" seems one of the more interesting floating signifiers for me. In a very long (mid-19th c?), art criticism has described many images as "homoerotic" without implying homosexuality. This has been my main interpretation of the term since I was around age 23.
I had a Ulysses reading group and one brilliant guy, when we were ending the first chapter, thought Stephen and Mulligan seemed to have something homoerotic going on. Because I'm so aware of the differing semantics of the term - and it had been that reader's first time reading Ulysses - I asked, "Do you think maybe Stephen's gay? Or Mulligan? Both? And he said, No! He thought the term had roughly the same meaning that I did: some sort of non-sexual erotic tension, or lines of emotional force running between two characters of the same sex. And I confided that, for the rest of the book, there's not much gay sex at all...
I like the current Wiki on the word:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoeroticism
Thanks for commenting.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother loved Esther Williams movies. I will write more later.
I have only had one Ulysses study group. It met at a ballet studio. A journalist came to interview me about the group - the only interview I've ever given in tights.
ReplyDeleteThe Wikipedia article on "homoeroticism" makes a distinction between homoerotic desire and homosexuality which it describes as a state of "being." This makes me think about Shakespeare. Leslie Fiedler in The Stranger in Shakespeare suggested that Shakespeare lusted after males but didn't act on that desire. I used to agree with that, but reading Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun persuaded me that Shakespeare probably acted on those desires. I certainly don't know for sure. I suspect Melville acted on those desires as well. I don't know what happened between Ishmael and Queequeg when they shared a bed, but more and more Moby Dick seems to me Ishamel's tribute to Queequeg.