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A Night at the Opera, Another Night at the Theater, A Weekend at Home

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The better half and I try to vacation at least three times a year — my birthday, his birthday, and our anniversary.  This being the Internet, I won’t tell you which one occurred last week, but we weren’t able to get away, and so decided to celebrate at home, in New York City.  Here’s what we did:

Wednesday:  Dinner at Hell’s Kitchen, a trendy “progressive”-Mexican place in (where else?), Hell’s Kitchen.  Being reluctant omnivores, we went for veggie choices.  A recent trip to Italy had made us more aware of the lovely artichoke, which is not on enough menus in the United States, so we started with the poached artichoke quesadilla with idiazabal cheese, roasted sweet corn, and poblano crema.  Yummy.  For main courses we ate light and shared family style:  We ordered  huitlacoche with avocado, and mascarpone cheese. Hutlacoche for the uninitiated is a truffle that grows on corn — or in simple terms a fungus.  It has a unique taste and texture, a bit smoky, a bit spongy.  We are fans.  Plus the cheese didn’t overwhelm the dish, which is one difference between “progressive” Mexican and run of the mill.  The crispiness of the taco created a perfect balance of textures.  As a second main, we had the burrito with wild mushroom,  guacamole and poblano sauce, which was also well balanced and delicious. The mushrooms tasted like they might have been sautéed with a teriyaki sauce, giving them a steak-like flavor.  We split a dessert, banana empanadas with chocolate sauce and fresh whipped cream.  The cream was unsweetened as it should be to help offset the sweetness of the sauce and the banana.  There were other dessert choices that sounded equally good.

Then we walked up to the Metropolitan Opera House to see La Traviata directed by Will Decker with Natalie Dessay, as Violetta, Matthew Polenzani as Alfredo, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky is Germont,  I am an opera ignoramus.  The decision to go to the opera was made by my better-half, based on its being on both our bucket lists.  Neither of us had seen live “grand” opera before, except maybe once or twice on PBS.  We are now both fans, trying to figure out what we can sell to pay for season tickets next year.   We were expecting to be entertained.  We were expecting “theater.” What we got was an emotional wallop.  Even in the back of the orchestra where we were, when Gourmont slaps Alfredo and you hear him fall, there was more than a murmur in the audience.   To train the human voice to do what they do and do it while dancing, laughing, running and crying is amazing. To do it while acting is a miracle.  While we were expecting the tragedy of the lovers, Hyorostovsky’s nuanced performance made us feel Germont’s guilt and regret for separating them as well.  The stark set with its surreal clock ticking away the minutes of Violetta’s life, and the contemporary dress created a sense of timelessness.  This wasn’t a story about a nineteenth century courtesan, but about life, death, love and regret.

The following evening was theater night.  Ducking work, we got to TKTS at 2:20.  The main line was already huge, but the Play Express line was short.  By 3;15, we had two FRONT ROW seats to the Clybourne Park, which had opened earlier that week.   On the one hand, we were amazed at our luck; on the other, hand, it’s scary that almost all the non-musical plays had availability.  The play, itself has been described as a “sequel” to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.  More accurately it’s a re-imaging, with a first act taking place in 1959, the time when the original is set, and the second act fifty years later.  It’s been described as an  “uproariously funny”  comedy.  While it is that, it’s also an explosive drama.  There are several points at which violence seems imminent, and we weren’t prepared for the tragic tone of the first act.  When the curtain came down for intermission, my better half said, “After this, I’m going to need a drink.”  The second half is funnier, broader, more satiric, dealing with gentrification and reverse integration, but that too moves into dangerous territory.

We ate after the theater at Marseille, an unpretentious but stylish, French bistro on ninth avenue.  We ordered snails, of course.  Going carnivore, I ordered the honey glazed duck breast.  The better half had the mussels with fries.  Lots of mussels, and the best fries either of us had ever tasted, ever, in our lives.  We tried to figure out what made the fries so perfect.  Garlic might be one answer, but there was also the lack of grease and perfect crispiness.  The desserts are a bit more extensive than what’s on the posted menu.  We had something mousse-like with dark chocolate, so intensely rich that we were satisfied with just a few spoonfuls (rare for us).

We hardly left the house over the weekend, except for errands and long walks to local parks — Central Park, Fort Tryon, Morningside and Riverside, where everything seemed to be in bloom.  Saturday night, I started to read Just Kids,  Patti Smith’s memoir of her time in New York as a bookstore clerk/struggling artists/poet and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.  I kept reading into Sunday morning when I finished. I mention it here because like our two nights out, the  book could only have taken place in New York, although the New York, Smith writes about where young artsy types could somehow eke out enough of a living to afford the smallest room in the Chelsea Hotel is long gone as are the bookstores where she worked Brentano’s and Scribner’s.  Argosy somehow survives.  Gotham Books which published her early work, gone as well.

Smith, herself, has been quoted as saying that New York is now beyond the means of struggling artists who would be better off going elsewhere. Still for those of us, artist and non-artist who remain or are just visiting, and have limited incomes, some discounts are available. Our two front row theater seats costs were about $60 a piece at TKTS, and though we paid full freight at the opera, discounts and standing room are available.  Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen offers many reasonably priced restaurants.  Walking is still free, as is browsing, and books remain here and elsewhere the most affordable form of entertainment going.

For those of you who might not make it to the Met this year, here’s a clip:

Fake!

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“I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

—  Fielding Melish, Bananas

In an age when the “self” may have infinite online iterations and an “award winning” 16-year old novelist  can unapologetically admit to “mixing and matching” by mostly taking the words of a less well-known writer, and still get nominated for a prestigious literary prize, how do we even begin to define “fake”?

Millions of viewers tune in for the wedding a woman famous for nothing.  The marriage is over in 72 days, and it’s possible the bridegroom wasn’t in on the joke, yet the celebutante’s ratings and brand do not appear to have suffered.

Still, some fakes are roundly condemned. In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan wrote How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Viswananthan got a major book deal while a sophomore at Harvard.  The novel came out, and so did the accusations that she had stolen chunks from another author’s series.  Viswanthan claimed it was unintentional. When the extent of her cribbing made her excuses unlikely, she blamed her photographic memory, saying she must have “internalized” the other texts.  Her publisher didn’t see it that way and canceled her contract.

Fitzgerald aside, second acts exist in America., Kaavya went on to Georgetown Law School just like former “journalist” Steven Glass who had been famously fired from The New Republic for passing off fiction as journalism.

There are many infamous cases of straight out plagiarism and other literary fakery over the last ten years —  “fake” memoirs like A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.  Frey is best known for an oft parodied episode of getting reamed out  by an enraged Oprah.  There’s Margaret B. Jones, who published a memoir of gang life in South-Central, in which she claimed to have been a part-Native American foster child in South Central.  She turned out to be a white surbanite with the last name of Seltzer, who briefly went to a public high school.

Perhaps the condemnation of Frey, Viswanathan, and Jones/Seltzer has to do with their “success” at fooling the self-important.  You don’t mess around with Oprah, The New York Times, and big publishers.

I’ll admit to having sympathy for Laura Albert who wrote novels under the name JT LeRoy and even had a relative make public appearances as this persona.  She was convicted of fraud for signing legal papers using her pseudonym.  While she never claimed that her books were non-fiction, she gave her alter ego a backstory suspiciously similar to that of her characters — a childhood of abuse and neglect, sexual identity issues, prostitution, etc.  As Birdie Coonan in All About Eve might have said “What a story. Everything but the blood hounds snapping at her rear end.”

Readers who “believed” in JT LeRoy were very upset to find out that the “author” didn’t exist.  Yet, how does that change their relationship to “his” fiction?  In an interview with The Paris Review, Albert explained the origin of the JT LeRoy persona.  In her version, LeRoy was not invented to fool readers or sell books, but to protect the psyche of a writer who was filtering some difficult material, which in fact came from her own past.

Do we forgive Albert because the writing stands on its own and the motives, at least in the beginning, did not appear to be monetary ones?  Or do we condemn her because readers grew emotionally invested in an “author” who was in fact a creation?

Sometimes it’s difficult to spot a motive for fraud. Over the past couple of weeks,  The Hacker Hunter has become the talk of the town on Kindle related blogs.  This is a techno-thriller/spy novel, self-published in October that amassed 350 favorable reviews.  The problem was that none of them were real.  The “tells” for fake were abundant, and the numbers impossible. Even Amanda Hocking, the Queen of Kindle doesn’t have anywhere near that many reviews on a single book.  Readers complained and almost all the reviews on Amazon US were pulled.  As of this writing, they are still up in the UK. The book itself wasn’t just “bad” in a Jacqueline Susann kind-of-way, it was the Springtime for Hitler of books.

Fake reviewers are reportedly paid $10 a pop and the review mills may be paid twice that for setting them up more. That means the author of Hacker could have spent $7k on the fakes. Did he really think this would lead to big sales?  A movie deal? Why not just hire a ghostwriter?  Or at least a proofreader?  Why risk one’s own reputation and maybe even one’s business?

Pondering motives brings me to the curious case of QR Markham, aka Quentin Rowan, whose thriller Assassin of Secrets was published in November by Little Brown (the people who brought you Kaavya Viswanathan).  Secrets was getting rave reviews and all kinds of buzz.  Within two weeks of publication, readers had noticed the plagiarized passages from a number of other books, and Rowan’s entire oeuvre turned out to have involved a lot of heavy, unattributed borrowing. When caught, Rowan admitted the fraud, even though some bloggers offered a way out, imagining it could have been a brilliant postmodern hoax.

Rowan sat down for a virtual (honest) conversation with a blogger about his “career”. He  suggested that it was having a poem anthologized in Best American Poetry when he was nineteen years old that set him on his wayward path.  He thought he was “destined” to be a great writer, and when he started writing prose, he just found other people’s words more “clever” than his own and started to “swipe” them.  He compares this to other addictive or obsessive behavior that is not rational.  There’s something awfully self-pitying about those remarks.  “Poor me, if only I hadn’t been ruined by early success and had applied myself to my craft.  I could have been somebody.  I could have been a contender.” Or as Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine put it, regarding music, “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

Nietzsche said, “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.” Another cure for insomnia is schadenfreude.  Rowan is an investor in a bookstore, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg. I blame Williamsburg itself for sealing his destiny.  I used to live there once before it became a playground for trustifarians and the tragically hip.

This is a neighborhood about which a young musician recently told me, “It’s not enough to be an artist or a musician, you have to be the right kind.”

Back in the 80’s, when my friends in the East Village referred to Williamsburg as a suburb, when taxi drivers wouldn’t take me there, when it was still a real place, there were writers and artists even then, but they weren’t there because it was a “scene.”  They were there because it was affordable. Nowadays, I feel too old, too ugly and too poor to even get off the train at Bedford Avenue, much less set foot in its most chichi of bookstores.

Rowan wasn’t actually trying to be a writer.  He was trying to be “the right kind“, the “kind” who gets published in the right places, and owns the coolest shop on the coolest block, in the coolest neighborhood, of  the greatest great city in the world — even though it’s a world of appearances that are no more real than shadows cast on the wall of a cave.

My Most Popular Post

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I sometimes copy my posts to Open Salon.  I’ve made “Editors’ Pick” there a few times. Editors’ Pick puts posts in the center column, where anyone dropping by the site is likely to see them. The editors tend to pick posts with universal appeal or dealing with current events. My posts in the center column include ones on cyber-bullying,  on politics — or more accurately, political personalities, and one or two on life events. They are likely to be viewed by several thousand people over the day or two they hold the center.

On this, my rather eclectic, “personal” blog, I don’t get nearly as many hits. Still, a post I published almost two years ago continues to attract readers almost every day. Not large numbers, but usually several a week, whether I’ve published any new posts or not.

Is this one of the Sarah Palin-bashing bits of snark? Is it a serious solution to big social issue? No. It’s something I wrote about my childhood home in Sunnyside, Queens.

I have no illusions about the reason for its popularity. People around the world are not checking it out because of an interest in the early years of the author of Loisaida — A New York Story.

They are checking out the post because I stole the title. You can’t copyright titles, and I didn’t do it to purposely mislead people on the Internet. I named the post, I Used to Live Here Once.  I knew where it came from, a classic very short story by Jean Rhys. Rhys’ story is often anthologized. I’ve taught it in both community college and high school classes. It’s just about perfect.  Lazy students afraid to think for themselves are plugging the title into search engines, looking for somebody else’s interpretation, and that’s the reason for the “hits.” So if you’ve come here  for an easy answer, you can read my “hidden” synopsis, followed by a brief interpretation, but if you haven’t read the story itself, you really need to first.  You can do so here. I’ll wait.

A young woman watches children playing outside of her house. They don’t notice her, even when she calls out to them, shouting, “I used to live here once.” She remembers bits from her life. She finally remembers slipping on some stones in the river. The boy and girl who don’t hear her, suddenly get tired of their play, feeling a strange chill and they decide to go in the house. The last line of the story is: “That was the first time she knew.” The interpretation which even not so great readers get, having seen The Sixth Sense, and similar movies like it, is that she is a ghost.

Beyond the obvious, the story is haunting for other reasons. Rhys was a life-long outsider. A “white” Creole woman from Dominica, she lived and wrote most of her life outside of it. Her personal life was chaotic, married three times, once to a spy, once to a jailbird. At times, she depended on the kindness of male patrons and admirers, including at one point, Ford Maddox Ford. The story is sometimes seen as a metaphor for her own displacement.

So when I wrote a post about my sense of saudade when thinking of  home, I thought of Rhys’ story.

We never lose our childhood. The memories are centered in places that mean something, that haunt us. And I believe we haunt them as well. Certainly, in the months following my father’s death, I felt his presence in the house, looking over my shoulder as I packed the boxes, whispering in my ear as I spoke to potential buyers. He was in every corner, often checking in with me regarding my mother. Where was she? Was she safe? I had to reassure him often.

But it’s not just the dead that haunt. The living do as well. I’ve moved a lot, and sometimes I’ve passed up apartments that didn’t feel right, where the melancholy hung like curtains, even if the space was spacious and sunny.

And these days, going on six years since the house was sold, I still haunt the block on occasion. Walking past the gate, and thinking, “I used to live here once.”

Sequel and Sensibility

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PD James at 91 is about to publish her novel, Death Comes to Pemberly, a mystery-murder sequel to Pride and Prejudice.  No need to worry — Wickham, seducer of teenagers and the rake you love to hate, is the one who gets it.

James has stated she always wanted to do this.   Godspeed.  Short of murder, ninety-one year olds should be able to do whatever they’d like.

But how do we (myself and anyone who cares to comment) feel about this? Is this, as Martha Stewart would say, “a good thing”?

In principle I’m not against sequels, prequels, and reboots written by authors who didn’t write the original, but I have my own rules for which ones interest me.

There are sequels that happen because readers can’t let a character go.   This seems most prevalent in detective fiction, with authors continuing to write books featuring Sherlock Holmes, or in the case of Perchance to Dream, Philip Marlowe.  Have any of these ever surpassed the original or even come close?

Perchance to Dream by Robert S. Parker was officially sanctioned by Chandler’s heirs after Parker had completed Poodle Springs, Chandler’s unfinished last novel.  Authorized sequels may work for hardcore fans but they box writers in.  Parker said he wouldn’t do another because he “didn’t want to spend [his] life writing some other guy’s books”

There is also, of course fanfiction which doesn’t enter into the “official” canon, and is often written by amateurs.  This is more prevalent when the originals were  television series or even comics as opposed to novels, and almost always when they are of a particular genre, especially science fiction and fantasy.

Another example of the authorized sequel is Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCraig. Authorized stories bring with them restrictions. McCraig had to maneuver around the overt racism and defense of chattel slavery embedded within the point of view of the original, which would not sit well with modern readers, while at the same time not  wavering too much from its conception of its characters.  He chose to ignore the storyline imagined in the previous continuation, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley, a bodice ripper, set after the original, in which Scarlett goes to Ireland, where race is not an issue.  McCraig downplayed the love story, and focused instead on deepening our understanding of the protagonist. The book  received a decent critical reception,, but didn’t do well with hardcore fans. While Ripley’s sequel was panned, it was a commercial success, giving readers what they wanted, more than eight hundred pages of  Scarlett.

Sequels authorized or not, that stay close to the intent and perspective of the original, are primarily written to please fans and sell books.  They don’t bring anything new,  except possibly an ending in cases where the writer didn’t finish the story, or a resolution to a part of the story the creator left hanging.  By their nature, they  do better if they are offering more of the same.

Recently, there’s been an invasion, of horror-parodies, pioneered by Quirk Books. These include Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters and The Meowmorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant adorable kitten.  I will confess to never having read any of them and having no interest in doing so.  A five-minute sketch or YouTube video I could see, but they are stunts, not novels.

Another kind of continuation, taking place in what Lost fans might call the “sideways-verse” is a bit more interesting.  These books deconstruct the original, recounting the story in a way the original writer never could have imagined.  A great example is Jean Rhys’  Wide Sargasso Sea, which brings us Jane Eyre as seen through the eyes of  the madwoman in the attic herself and her keeper.  A fully realized tale of Rochester’s first wife, Wide Sargasso Sea is set partly in the West Indies and deals with racism, colonialism, and the powerlessness of women to control their own destiny.

There is also a very unauthorized  take on Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone,  by Alice Randall, tells the story from the perspective of a completely “new” character, Scarlett’s slave half-sister — the child of Mammy and Scarlett’s father.  Randall’s story gives us a different take not only on the characters we know from the original, but on the ones we barely see — the house slaves who have their own agendas.  The problem with Randall’s book when compared to Rhys’ is that Rhys parodied a true classic still taken seriously, while Randall looked at a story so dated by its racism and nostalgia for the “old south” that one wonders if a parody was even needed. In terms of readership, Rhys was offering something new, a way to examine issues around feminism, race, class, and colonialism by hearing from characters who didn’t normally get their own books — Creole women, British servants. By the time Randall’s book came along, we already had original stories about the ante-bellum South told from the point of view of slaves.  Who was her readership?  Fans and apologists for GWTW wouldn’t be interested, and she’s not telling people who dislike the original anything they don’t already know.  To pull off the deconstruction model, you have to be deconstructing something that serious people still take seriously.

And so back to James.  Will Death Comes to Pemberly be a success?  Commercially, I predict it will be a smashing one. I’ll buy a copy.  James is not Austen, but she’s no slouch as a stylist. She knows how to tell a story, especially a mystery.  She has a huge audience even without the Austenites, and the Austenites won’t be able to resist.  She admits to having had a lifelong passion for Austen’s work.  She’s writing, in a sense, professionalized fanfic — not authorized, not the same genre, but told with  love and respect for the source.  Most likely, she’ll present the characters as we know them.  Darcy will not have turned into a wife-beating philanderer. Elizabeth will still be Elizabeth.  And if Mr. Collins is a less than passionate husband, or Mary has never married, but has chosen to set up housekeeping with a female friend, we won’t delve too deeply. Will it have the reverence of an authorized version?  I suspect it will, to the extent that it will strive for historical accuracy and won’t veer far from our expectations of how characterize will behave.

Will it tell us anything about Austen’s world that Austen herself was unable to perceive?  Doubtfully. If Darcy’s money comes from plantations in the West Indies, we won’t learn about the conditions of the workers..  The servants at Pemberly will continue to be mostly invisible.  The resolution of the mystery will not reveal a larger rot at the core of society.

Yet, by bringing in murder most foul, won’t something change?  This is to be a mystery, not a love story or one that ends, like most of Austen, in a marriage. Then again, perhaps an announcement of Kitty’s engagement will come in the final chapter,  assuming of course she isn’t exposed as a murderer and hanged for killing her brother-in-law.

Self-Published At the Book Club

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The New York Times Magazine has a story, which is only slightly condescending, about Amanda Hocking, the twenty-something self-publishing phenom whose paranormal romance/fantasies have earned her over $2 million.  Ms. Hocking recently signed a seven-figure deal with St. Martin’s Press. While stories like hers should do something to lift the stigma of self-publishing in the digital age, they are countered by other reports, such as the recent Reuter’s piece about counterfeit books being sold cheap on Kindle.

The truth is there probably never was a stigma for the mostly young readers of Ms. Hocking’s work.  They saw stories they were interested in and tried her books.  They didn’t avoid her work because it lacked a familiar imprint or because it wasn’t pre-certified by Publisher’s Weekly.

Within some genres, self-published books are selling well.  In thrillers, two of the top ten books at the Kindle Store US are self-published.  Both have the advantage of selling cheap — 99 cents compared to up to $12.99 for some of their competitors, which may be even more expensive than paperback versions. Romance, mystery and other genres have all been invaded by these upstarts.   While the Kindle Store is only one store, its scope is huge with e-books now outselling paperbacks on Amazon, which through its Kindle app, controls 75% of the e-book market.

Things are different when it comes to literary fiction.  Or perhaps I shouldn’t use the term “literary fiction.” Writers can classify their own works as “literary,” and a couple of self-published 99 cent novels identified as such have slipped into the top 20 on Kindle.  Both, however, also fall into other categories with wider appeal.  Maybe the term I’m looking for is “serious fiction.” The kind of books read by people who take reading seriously. You know who I mean — people who LOVE books,  pride themselves on actually having made their way through at least some of Joyce and Woolf, fans of all the Jonathans (Letham, Franzen, and Safron Foer), Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, and anyone published in The New Yorker with the exception of Stephen King.  Those readers may read books from respectable independent houses or even obscure zines put out by writers and editors they’ve heard of, but 99.9% won’t even look at self-published work from the Kindleverse.

Months ago I suggested to a friend, a serious intellectual type and avid reader, that she look at a book I thought was not only good, but might even be important.  It was a historical novel, set mostly in London in 1963, with some back-story in the war and post-war years, references to mods and teddy-boys, jazz and The Beatles, as well as to the Cuban missile crisis and the Profumo scandal.  Her reply when she realized that the work did not have the approbation of a publishing house major or even minor was, “I don’t have enough time to read published books.”

I didn’t buy this explanation.  My theory is that while readers of genre fiction are simply looking for stories that keep them turning pages, “serious readers,” have another agenda. Heaven forbid they should like something that hasn’t been vetted by publishers and critics, only to be told later that it’s derivative or not as good as they thought.  It would be like buying a blank canvas, and then finding out it was just a blank canvas and not an accepted example of minimalism.  It’s not that they lack the time to read self-published books, they don’t even want to be seen with them.

The book, I was recommending was Larry Harrison’s Glimpses of a Floating World. Although I never convinced my friend, I’m pleased to say I got my book club to look at it.

This was only our third club meeting.  The previous selections were Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany.  I was thrilled that the club had taken my suggestion of Glimpses.. (Full disclosure: The author is fellow member of the Year 0 Writers group, and a facebook friend.  We first “met” on a writer’s site, where we admired each other’s work. We have never met in the non-virtual world.)

I didn’t take a poll, but I don’t believe anyone in the club had ever purchased or read a self-published book before.

So, how did it go?

As with previous selections, opinions varied. One reader complained that she didn’t find any of the characters sympathetic and didn’t see much change or growth in the protagonist, Ronnie.  It was also clear that she was not predisposed to read a book about a seventeen-year-old heroin addict.   Others pointed out that as long as he remained a junkie, showing growth would have been unrealistic,   but there were “glimpses” of his capacity to care for others and  by the end his thinking had evolved at least to the point where he understood his addiction to be a dead-end.   There was general agreement that the character was well drawn.  He acted like the adolescent he was — intelligent, but immature, in some ways even gullible.  Everyone thought that Ronnie’s father, Freddy was just an awful human being. A couple questioned the idea of his professional rise with the police. This led to discussion about “successful” people whose lives were a mess, and the nature of corruption and who rises to power within a corrupt system.    A few weren’t satisfied with the ending — finding it “contrived” or “overkill,” but I was not the only voice in the room who had a different take.

The point is, the book was taken as seriously as any other book.  Everyone thought the writing was high quality and professional. . No one complained about proofreading, formatting, editing inconsistencies or any of the other issues often associated with self-published books. All found it a gripping read.

As with any discussion on any good book, there were disagreements and tangents. We veered off into talking about British films set in that period that also dealt with social taboos, A Taste of Honey, Victim, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

So back to the question I asked before: How did it go? The short answer is: It was “normal.” We were able to discuss the book and not the fact that it wasn’t traditionally published. It was not unlike going to a same-sex wedding and realizing it isn’t that different from any other wedding.

There was no pre or post-club survey, but maybe the members of the club will now be more inclined to read untraditionally published works. I hope so.

And just to encourage any “serious readers” who have not yet taken the plunge, here’s a trailer for Glimpses: