Buggeryville

Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City, the oldest gay bookshop in the US, is closing.

Bookstores are an infrastructure for the cultivation and dissemination of ideas. They work in ways that other infrastructures -- the internet, say, or libraries -- don't quite work. But they're also not as profitable as they are necessary. I've been thinking about this, in terms of Obama's plans to improve the US's infrastructure; some sort of bookstore subsidies seem in order. Though how that could be fairly implemented, I don't know.

I went into the Oscar Wilde Bookshop maybe twice in the decade or so I lived there, even back when I was a bookish gay teen who spent all his time in both halves of the Village and who thought reading up on queer stuff was urgent, and I doubt I ever purchased anything from them. It seemed to be, maybe not a relic, but certainly something irrelevant to my life (even as it was so clearly positioned to be part of my life), but still something I was glad was there, in some abstract sense. So I'm not that affected by losing this bookshop on a personal level -- yet, like with most bookshop closures, it still seems tragic.

Everyone has blogged about bookstores closing, and I don't have terribly much to add, I suppose. We all know that the disappearance of bookstores isn't quite made up by the abundance of the Internet. We all know publishing and bookselling, when done properly, isn't a sustainable business model, yet they seem to improve lives and to create opportunities and potentials in society that far surpass their costs -- much like, say, highways. But, as they say, everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Is there leadership on this issue, is there a plan, or do we have faith that the internet (or some other structure) will replace the bookstore network's various roles adequately? Or is this a structure that has lost its energy, which no amount of regret and wild gesticulation will restore? (I lean towards thinking, well, we should at least try to salvage something, perhaps something exciting will come out of it.)

(Thanks to LH for tipping me off to the news, via Facebook.)

And I keep thinking about appropriation as a way of accessing the sentimental.

I read for Spare Room back in July 2006, and as always I was trying to write something new for the reading. But I was emotionally overwrought (oh, you know... boy trouble) and this got completely in the way of writing anything. I had too much to say. I had something to say and said it, and it was not poetry.

I won't publish the poem I ended up writing, as I don't see much of a point in it existing outside the time and place of that reading (which happily wasn't recorded). But think I'm happy with it as a solution, so I want to say a few words about that. But I don't want to do the dickish reductivist Conceptual Poetics 101 move of conflating the idea of the poem with the poem itself. Let's not do that. Reading about the poem is unlike reading the poem, and quite unlike being at my reading of the poem in July 2006. If you weren't there: This will not be the same. But perhaps it's interesting to talk about (which is the other thing they teach you in Conceptual Poetics 101).

I ended up working with "The Windhover", Gerard Manley Hopkins's emotionally charged poem. Both I and the cause of my tsuris were both deeply fond of Hopkins, and we had a "moment" over this poem, which he had memorized, and which I happened to be carrying a copy of -- well, enough about that.

I broke the poem into short fragments, a few words at a time, and rolled them on my tongue, surrounded each fragment with homophonic translations, changing the lines' meaning by placing them in the midst of a rush of other meanings, and repeating as necessary.

Hopkins' consonant-dense, stress-dappled, clumpèd-cluster-cluttering lines encouraged the repetition and sound-based reorganization. And Hopkins' ejaculations -- "O my chevalier!" -- and his overcharged vocabulary -- "ecstacy", "my heart in hiding" -- all... well, it gave me an excuse to write like this:

...the motion set in
motion, meaning
moored in minute
motions, minute
mentions, making
many million
maybe-meanings
set in motion.
More was said for

keeping off dangerous offers,
keeping off dallying dangers,
keeping off delight. Deep in the
kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,
center of dimly-dealt-with
inner endangered doings,

deeply damped down
deeply damped down
deeply damped down
deeply damped down
deadened dendrons, the
dapple-dawn-drawn
devil starts to
tap a tomtom.

Which, oof, is a bit much, especially on the page (or on the screen). But it was written as a text to be read aloud at a reading, in a particular time and place, for a reader who was in a particular emotional state, for an audience mostly made up of people who knew me (but who mostly didn't know I was in such a state) -- it became, of course, performative, but what isn't these days? And I am told that it was effective and striking, although what exactly was going on was obscured and deeply coded (because the details were probably not interesting and certainly not poetry). (Oh yes -- the obscuring of a romantic situation you didn't want to talk about, that also made Hopkins seem like a good choice...)

Still, I've already included way too much of the poem here (on the record!), and if I weren't such a packrat I would have deleted the file immediately after the reading.

vir facie, mulier gestu, sed crure quod ambo,
jurgia naturae nullo discrimine solvens,
es lepus, et tanti conculcas colla leonis.
--Ennodius, c. 500

So, I cannot make sense of this poem. Or, I can make sense of it. It seems totally clear. I feel like I "understand" it. I think about it. I tell people about it, and have done so for the year or so that I've known about it. It stays with me, and makes appearances in my life at the nicest moments. It is a good friend. But I don't really have a context for it, and I don't know how or why it was written.

Also I can't translate it. I can crib it, and I can point out some of what is going on in the poetry, but I can't reforge it in English. Except I'm pretty happy with "You're a rabbit" for "es lepus". So, two words down. (Update: Although technically a lepus is a hare, not a rabbit. I was always told they were the same thing, and certainly Bugs Bunny cartoons agreed, but apparently not.)

Ennodius was a Gallo-Roman bishop around 500 and is mostly remembered for some theological writing and for leaving a bunch of letters that offer historians information on some of the political and religious issues of the time. And he wrote some poems, including some Martial-like epigrams, and I suppose this poem is one of them. I found it in Thomas Stehling's Medieval Poems of Male Love and Friendship, though you could argue that this poem maybe doesn't strictly fit that title. Stehling also published a translation, but it was really a crib.

(There's a nice comment on that Amazon page, by the way.)

Here's my stab at a crib:

A man in your appearance, a woman in your gestures, but in between your thighs, a bit of both, / resolving nature's quarrel by ignoring any distinction, / you're a rabbit, and you trample the throat of such a big lion.

One doesn't expect sixth century bishops to write epigrams praising the ability of hermaphrodites to destroy gender binaries and overpower nature itself! And I might be too stuck in my twenty-first century mind, but poem seems entirely positive about it! This is what I don't understand.

Anyway, I'm going to think about this for a few more years while I'm in grad school. I should go look up a few more of his epigrams. Or more references to rabbits vs. lions in late antiquity/early medieval times. Hey, let me get back to you.