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The Dirty Tricks Department

John Lisle

St. Martin’s Press

Hardcover; 338pg; photos

Spy vs. Spy vs. batbombs to biological warfare

Science historian John Lisle’s ‘The Dirty Tricks Department’ delves into the activities and operations of the Office of Strategic Services, the espionage agency established in 1942 in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Lisle investigates development of the OSS’s secret weapons and grotesque experiments aimed at neutralizing enemies by any means necessary from foot soldiers to secret agents, by concocting lethal weaponry, including vectors of biological weapons including bubonic plague, typhus, anthrax, and other nerve agents within enemy territory with little regard on collateral damage to civilian population.

It was headed by Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan, a WWI hero, and chosen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a former Ivy League classmate FDR. Donovan in turn recruited the once mild-mannered Stanley Lovell, a chemical scientist from MIT who hatched some diabolical weapons of mass destruction to be used in espionage mission against the Germans, Italians and Japanese. The battalion of operatives and newly recruited American and foreign spies in the field to carry out covert missions behind enemy lines.

Many of the schemes that failed spectacularly, for instance the gathering of thousands of bats that were sedated and outfitted with bombs for deployment to Japan. Or cluster bombs ignited from pens, to firearms strapped to the body that could be triggered by breathing heavily as to expand ones chest. Or how about mixing explosives in Aunt Jemima pancake mix that could be detonated. Or bribing German farmers who supplied food for Hitler’s mountain fortress, to lace it with female hormones so his moustache would fall out and he would grow breasts. At one point they spray painted foxes to make them ghostly, transporting them to Japan on the off chance that enemy soldiers would see them and think it was an omen that the war was doomed. Needless to say, many of these project barely got off the ground before the schemes literally blew up in their faces.

  The book has an episodic structure. The Camouflage Division and Undercover Missions and the first half focuses on the agency’s desperate attempt to develop viable secret weapons. As entertaining as some of them might be in a mad scientist sort of way. Lisle is a noted expert on US Intelligence systems and the chapters focused on US spy cells and secret military operatives on field missions are much more interesting. Those undercover agents working with the freedom fighters of the French Resistance, for instance, sabotaging Nazi trains and decoding propaganda.

 Tracking agents captured, escaped, or outwitted their captors. Virginia Hall joined the resistance movement in France and was a fearless saboteur. After recovering from losing her leg from a gun accident, she returned to field, and disguised herself as a peasant woman in a perilous climb through the Pyrenees Mountains (a range that astronaut Chuck Yeager dubbed “the bitchiest bitch” of a Trek. Hall survived all and was awarded the Medal of Honor by Truman (which she declined.)

Another was George Langelaan who had radical face surgery, in part because he wanted to be handsomer, but mainly to disguise himself to infiltrate German intelligence cells. He was caught. Spend a year of hard time being starved in solitary but had devised a morse code transmitted (by tapping) via prison pipes among fellow prisoners on death row, planning their successful escape from imminent death.

 One of the most fascinating OSS operative was Moe Berg, who quit being a professional baseball player to become an OSS spy. Berg was known as “the brainiest guy in baseball.” The OSS was also impressed with the fact that he spoke 10 languages. He even had film footage of Tokyo shot from rooftop when he was on a baseball exhibition series in Japan with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1934. The film that OSS found valuable for some strategic planning. Berg was dispatched on a mission to assassinate German physicist Heisenberg who was part of the group developing Germany’s atomic bomb. After the war Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom, but he refused to accept it,  

The political and espionage suspense kicks in with the chapter on the hunt for Germany’s heist of Europe’s Uranium mines and Heavy Water stockpiles. Lovell and European agents piecing together the trail and timeline of launch sites for the atomic bomb. Germany was well on its way with prototype of atomic bombs in the 1930s, by the time Oppenheimer was recruited for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

Division 101 first deployment was a near disaster and they lost lives, Unprepared initially to destroy the Japanese tactical airfield that launched from the Narazi jungle in India. Daredevil pilot Carl Eifler headed the mission who Donovan sent back to the US, even after his fearless infiltration into enemy encampments, for which he suffered serious injuries and PTSD. He eventually went to divinity school and “tried to distance himself from the demons of his past.” Lisle reports. At a reunion of OSS personnel, Eifler intimated “And you know,” he said, “If we had our just desserts, we’d all be hung as war criminals.”

Another major project getting off the ground was the creation and infiltration of propaganda and counterintelligence misinformation. Methods that we now live with daily now has dominated the news not only in the United States, with our enemies around the world and home-grown fringe groups as Q Anon and nationalist militias armed with weapons of war and embracing fascism, all working overtime..

But as John Lisle exposes in his book The Dirty Tricks Department. The worlds of secret codes and disinformation and aggressive propaganda are nothing new…only deadlier than ever in its destructive reach.

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Composer Matthew Aucoin on Opera

“The Impossible Art- Adventures in Opera is composer Matthew Aucoin’s is part memoir and deep dive into the dynamics of creating an opera. Aucoin is a composer and conductor leading orchestras including the Chicago Symphony L.A. Opera and the Metropolitan  Opera.

Opera is the original of multimedia artform that requires collaboration between musicians, librettists, classically trained singers, choral directors, and design artists, Aucoin notes where artform can “collide and transform one another.”

Aucoin writes that he has long wanted to write a book that explore  the “generative. impossibilities. But I wasn’t sure when, if ever, I’d managed to step off the merry-go-round of musical work, composing, performing, traveling long enough to gather my thoughts

The opportunity came during the industry shutdown. After Aucoin had just conducted the debut run of his own opera ‘Eurydice’ at L.A. Opera in 2019, which was also scheduled for the East Coast premiere at the Met in 2021, conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, In the interim Aucoin and his husband Clay returned to their farm in Vermont  giving him time to write his book   

In his introduction he encourages readers to skip around to chapters about their favorite operas or composers, or famed productions. He covers works by composers from the baroque, classical, romantic eras, and up to date analysis of contemporary operas including works by Thomas Ades (“The Exterminating Angel”), John Adams (“Doctor Atomic”), Chaya Czernowin (“Heart Chamber”) and Nico Muhly (“Two Boys”),

As a Verdi aficionado, Aucoin deconstructs the innovations Verdi brought to his operas based on Shakespeare’s plays such as the radical orchestral elements in Macbeth , the earthy inventiveness of his portrait in Falstaff and the vocal innovation Verdi created in Otello

In his chapter ‘The Firewood and the Fire” he examines the often antagonist interplay between composer and conductor he one of the rare instances of mutual respect between the Igor Stravinsky and gay poet W. H. Auden’s collaboration on their opera “The Rake’s Progress.”.

Stravinsky had a reputation for pushing librettists around- telling Jean Cocteau, for instance, that his libretto for ‘Oedipus Rex” was “too Wagnerian” then ordering him to make it “very banal.” But the composer did not have problems with Auden and considered him an artistic equal. But, as Aucoin intriguingly reports, Auden’s lover, writer Chester Kallman, who was a lifelong opera goer, and librettist who flagged problematic plot points in Auden’s narrative, (before Igor saw them)  knowing they wouldn’t translate to the stage.

In his chapter “Finding Euridice” Aucoin talks about his own creative collaboration in a transcribed conversation with playwright Sarah Ruhl who wrote the libretto for his opera.

The elements of the creative process history is particularly relevant now as opera companies worldwide are programming composers from musical genres that never would have been considered a generation ago. Creatively, it is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious eras in opera history. But the astronomical costs of bringing new work to the stage is more  a whole set of often impossible challenges for creative artists and opera  .

 Despite the external hurdles of an ever-changing opera industry there is producing work that connects to audiences, and notes that “We still can’t explain why some melodies and not others lodged themselves unshakably in the minds ear….There is no reliable way to predict what will make a convincing musical embodiment of love. Jealousy or rage?” 

For opera artists this is a must read and for opera buffs a wry, insightful behind the curtain expose of the often-hellish creative process. As Aucoin illustrates it can be a thrilling ride to Hell and back making an impossible art possible. Cue Music!

The Impossible Art| Adventures in Opera |by Matthew Aucoin

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Softcover; 299 pgs;

www.fsgbooks.com

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Denneny looks back ‘On Christopher Street‘

‘On Christopher Street’ is a collection of articles by Michael Denneny, editor and co-founder of Christopher Street Magazine, the influential periodical that chronicled GLBTQ culture and politics of the post-Stonewell years of liberation and two decades of social justice activism in response to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic.

Denneny also assembled a coterie of gay and lesbian writers who wrote essays, stories, poetry, profiles, and advocacy pieces, and also was one of the few openly gay editors at MacMillian Publishing, when he founded St. Martin’s Press and advocated for books by openly gay writers who had been routinely ignored, along with gay readership, by most houses.

His unique perspective representing gay authors was key in what emerged as a gay literary renaissance. Many of his sociopolitical essays still resonate the most in this collection. And many pieces address the fractious strategies of a visible queer community that ultimately were united in confronting homophobia by religious and right-wing politicians.

Denneny at his analytic best as he lays out strategies vis-à-vis  gay politics, culture, individual and community action. It still resonates as the right-wing culture wars rage on against GLTQ+ communities across the US,

“My attempt to survey the gay political situation at the beginning of the 80s, a decade after Stonewall and just before the epidemic was about to break over us. Being gay is a more elemental aspect. Who I am then? My profession, my class, or my race?” He provocatively wrote in his essay “Gay politics and its Premises.”

  ”It is the basic tactic are weirdly homophobic culture uses to destroy us. -first isolate, then terrorize, then make disappear by self-denial.” “If society tries to destroy us by first isolating us, it follows that what is necessary to fight back is it not only defiance, but the acknowledgement of a community and the construction of a world.”

Denneny’s polemics on strategic ideas and insights about GLTQ solidarity in the face of bigotry and hate in the 80s still inspire.

Meanwhile, he was not a publisher hiding away in an editorial ivory tower. Denneny was out and about in the gay community and was working stories-. From covering gay French philosopher Michel Foucault’s sell-out lectures in Manhattan to interviewing a ballet dancer who also worked on Broadway and made just as much money as a  go-go ballet dancer-escort in the bars.

His interview with bestselling author Felice Picano about his nonfiction novel’ The Lure’ about a serial killer in the rough trade and leather bar community of the 70s, articulating the author’s non-voyeuristic approach in the telling of this story in contrast to the release of William Friedkin’s exploitive film ‘Cruising’ which igniting street protest of its depiction of yet another psychopathic gay killer, at its specious depiction of the leather bars.

“On Christopher Street” honors the many author-activists whose work Denneny championed and he includes many of his private notes and letters with writers and activist in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. His chronicles of writers and AIDS activists Paul Monette,  Vito Russo, John Preston, and many others, that are moving documents the historic impact of their activism.   

Denney’s revisits the power of Larry Kramer’s j’accuse tactics, first in his incendiary editorial “1,112 and Counting”, the alarming much attacked screed published in all of the gay newspapers in March 1983, was not only a battle cry to gay community action ae tactics, whose all or nothing strategies, for better or worse, led to the formation of GMHC and ACT-UP. .

One of the most moving is his ‘Eulogy for Allen Barnett’ which he delivered at St. John the Divine for the author  of writer who died at age 36 of AIDS, just after the publication of his first book “The Body and Its Dangers” with the profoundly resonate story “The Times as It Knows Us.” Denneny writes “The first time I read that story; I almost couldn’t breathe. But how much more harrowing must it have been the act of writing it.… That comes when the imagination is infused by a naked courage.”

Denneny was in the literary and social justice fight from the start. His direct-action speech on gay rights delivered at a gathering of writers at Giovanni’s Room bookstore in 1982 in Philadelphia. Reprinted here as his manifesto-  “Win or lose, it’s the fight that counts, that strengthens us, which means we win every time.” Words to live by more than ever as state legislators are banning books, legislating against GLBTQ rights and vilifying transgender and nonbinary Americans.

On Christopher Street | Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall By Michael Denneny | University of Chicago Press  www.press.uchicago.edu

 

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Andrew Holleran’s ‘The Kingdom of Sand’ and Jack Parlett’s ‘Fire Island’ are portraits of GLBTQ+ worlds in stark relief.

Fire Island by Jack Parlett | Hanover Square Press http://www.hanoverSqPress.com

British poet & scholar Jack Parlett was on a fellowship from Oxford in 2019 to research cruising rituals of gay men. and his study brought him to the beaches of Cherry Grove and The Pines. Parlett covers that waterfront and much more in his book ‘Fire Island’ a social history of America’s fabled gay utopia

The queer lore of Fire Island reaches back to the 19th century with tales of visits by Wilde and Whitman. Even without electricity, in the 1920s, it was an idyllic getaway for Broadway performers, and soon a haven for artists and for countless others it was an escape from systemic oppression and rabid homophobia. Parlett chronicles the arc of the history and symbolic importance of what Fire Island represented for gay Americans over the course of a century.

‘Fire Island’ chronicles the tales of famous visitors including Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Marlon Brando, Janet Flanner, James Baldwin, Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Jared French, Patricia Highsmith, et, al.

And from there weaves his own his own experiences of self-discovery, exploring the clubs, the social strata and navigating the boytoy beach culture and sexual freedom including forays into the sexual playground of the dunes (immortalized by former dancer Wakefield Poole’s gayporn classic ‘Boys in the Sand’) and the notorious Meatrack.

But before that Parlett had his own symbolic ritual, the first thing he did was etch the name of poet Frank O’Hara in the sand on the exact spot where the poet died in a sand trawler accident in the 1950s.

One of the most stirring chapters in ‘Fire Island’ titled ‘The Plague’ chronicles the harrowing years of the AIDS epidemic is a stirring commentary on the history of loss, community, and activism. It opens with Parlett was part of New York’s 2019 Queer Liberation March organized Reclaim Pride Coalition, a group seeking to return the GLBTQ Pride month celebration away from being commercialized and depoliticized.

Larry Kramer gave his last speech at that march, before his death in 2020. Kramer was shunned on Fire Island after his novel ‘Faggots’ a satire on 70s hedonism in New York, when he became the fearless voice of AIDS awareness and activism. And as Parlett recounts, Kramer was challenging a new generation of gay Americans, intoning “What does Pride mean to you?” in front of 45,000 people in Central Park, as he called for more community solidarity and activism.

Parlett evokes all of the real and symbolic promise of Fire Island as a GLBTQ+ mecca as a vital chapter of American history. And a reminder that we must always be ready to fight for our place in the sun. Cue music!

~

Jack Parlett also pays tribute to the Violet Quill era of writers of the 70s including Fire Island denizens Edmund White, Vito Russo, Felice Picano and specifically Andrew Holleran whose defining 1978 novel “ Dancer From the Dance’ he cites as the “eulogy for the era’s dance floor and for many the ‘Great Pines novel.” Holleran’s latest work ‘The Kingdom of Sand’ is both fascinating and challenging.

The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran | Farrar, Straus & Giroux

http://www.fsgbooks.com

Andrew Holleran’s 1978 gay literary classic ‘Dancer from the Dance’ captured the spirits and momentum of the gay sexual liberation in New York and Fire Island. His subsequent novels- Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, In September, the Light Changes– have autobiographical threads, His last was ‘Grief” was published in 2005, and ‘The Kingdom of Sand’ picks up the story of its unnamed narrator, a gay man in his 60s, who has returned to Florida to take care of his dying parents and doesn’t leave and sets up a new one, in a barren and hostile environment.

Urged by friends to sell the home and resume his life, but he drifts into inertia, set in his ways, no healthy relationships outside of his friend Earl, a closeted neighbor in his 80s in failing health.

Holleran’s portraits of elderly gay men living dystopian lives in the retirement near Gainesville, Florida. Clinging in desperation to any sign of gay connection, resorting to haunting an old-timey porn arcade for anonymous sex or spending afternoon at a remote dock to pay hustlers to suck them off. Then recoiling into their isolation, trying to live with some dignity, in retirement in otherwise hostile hetero-dominant communities.

For both men, their only direct gay sexuality is to go to the video porn arcade (yes there is still that in this narrative), or a remote beach dock and hookup spot, which now is subject to police shakedowns circa 1955. For the narrator he relates watching porn on the laptop in the spot where his father would play solitaire. He spends many evenings with Earl watching old DVDs. and keeps an eye on a handyman who runs errands and fixes up the house for an increasingly infirm Earl.

Holleran is as obsessive as his main characters, listing, for instance, a laundry list of Hollywood gay cult classics that Earl watches, when a couple of flicks would make the point.

The prose imagery is bleak, some of it this side of Proustian. But he lingers on indulgences, itemizing things for instance, describing two men consumed with passing their evenings watching classic movies, in one section he lists a dozen of them, when one or two would make the point.

Even though the narrator casually mentions that he has a regular sex buddy for 20 years, it is mentioned in passing as he obsesses about the objects in Earl’s home. Forensic bleakness is struck over and over. It is more than a bit heavy going.

Holleran’s subject is death, and the fact that elderly single GLBTQ people face unique challenges. But that worthy subject gets buried in stream of consciousness, elegiac rambles. Doubly frustrating when Holleran’s imagery and symbolism about the natural environment and the flora and fauna is as elegant as ever . Meanwhile, there are long passages the narrator’s stream of consciousness rambles on about detoured roads and boarded up businesses, which after a while are redundant filler.

That said, the dynamics of the unnamed narrator and his friend Earl, in his 80s, are poignant and dimensional. You get glimpses for instance, of Earl and the narrator’s younger lives, oblique references to their past lives and relationships, flashbacks of their more fulfilling experience as a gay man, before the forensic bleakness drags on hitting the same motifs, and it is fascinating that if you hang in, you end up caring about the narrator and Earl.

But their stories are seem a bit out of balance. They are after all old enough to have survived eras of no legal civil-rights as queer men, and post-Stonewall liberation, then the , then community solidarity of the AIDS decades, and the codification of GLBTQ civil rights legislation. Somehow, it fascinates though in the arc of Holleran’s novels from Dancer.’ But only up to a point, as he abandons his characters in queer no man’s land.

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The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain by Paul R. Deslandes

University of Chicago Press

https://press.uchicago.edu

Paul R. Deslandes investigates the generational dictates of what constitutes ‘masculine; appearance and behavior in his book ‘The Culture of Male Beauty.’ The book spans almost two centuries of interconnective analysis with the ongoing subtexts of straight, gay, genderfluid and racial sensibilities.

The coverboy of Paul Deslandes’ book is Edwardian gay poet and star athlete Rupert Brooke in fact was so comely in physical appearance that he was a model for E.M. Forster’s gay classic ‘Maurice’ which the author withheld from publication until after his death.

And Deslandes deconstructs Britain’s oppressive inequities of a century of obsessive sexual mores, propagated by religion, politics and society at large. Most of the rules which only seemed to apply to the lower classes or those trying to live openly on queer street.

Indeed, the hot-house all-male environments of Oxford and Eton, being on the not so down-low was normal rite of passage, but the offense was of course owning it and god forbid, saying it out loud. The repressive rules prohibited any realistic or healthy discourse about sex, straight or gay, sometimes even in marriages.

Deslandes’ chapters on male appearance after WWI are expose the insensitivity toward soldiers who were somehow survived the trenches in France and Germany, returned home with severe injuries and was considered disfigured faces, the victims of mustard gas, bomb shrapnel, bayonets, starvation.

British Military were well aware of promoting the images of handsome, groomed men in uniform that would attract men from poor backgrounds. As much as they would try to hide the images of men returning from war with devastating injuries to their faces.

Of particular interest .  Deslandes tracks the trends of ‘beauty’ trends of men in post WWII Britain. The image makers of fashion houses, salons and increasingly, gay culture at large. But in all three areas, exclusion ‘effeminate’ men and black and brown men.

Deslandes’ investigation on the experiences of soldiers who survived, with devasting injuries to the face and body, is sensitively written and critically important cultural history of Britain’s cynical view in this era of a person’s worth in terms of physical appearance. 60 years later the British tabloids would publish gruesome images, with the stink of homophobia, of HIV/AIDS patients with emaciated bodies and faces swollen and scarred with Kaposi Sarcoma.

The elimination of decriminalization of homosexuality, led to the flood of gay pornography in Britain in the 60s, was part key in gay cultural openness and visibility. The liberation march of living openly or expressing their sexual identity was a sea change for the country who convicted Alan Turing, the man who broke the Nazi enigma code and was a pioneer in developing computer technology, Turing was sentenced for gross indecency because he admitted he was gay. The court gave him the option of jailtime or medically induced castration. He chose the latter, and the side effects were so severe they drove him to commit suicide.

Culturally, that was another matter as politicians, religious leaders and straight communities continued to demonize, harass, attack, discriminate and oppress gay people. This also is the subtext of Deslandes’ study. As is the politics of GLTBQ visibility.

It is also a unique history of queerness as expressed in open, subversive, or coded ways in eras of culturally oppressive environments. From the inherent understanding that the naked statuary of a male wrestling with a huge python was purely academic in 18’’ just as it was understood in the 1970’s nude photos of queer men of color in magazines such as Zipper were not about diversity but about the fetishization of black and brown bodies by white publishers.

Comprehensive cultural research to debrief (sorry) such topics as the influence of the ultra-beefy ‘clone’ look of 70s gay men in the US as it became trended in British gay skin mags, for instance, is inadvertently campy by now, There is a lot of valuable history here in Deslandes’ comprehensive approach. Admirably he delves into the negative and unhealthy concepts of proscribing what and who determines what physical attributes are beautiful. And the how notion of attractiveness and masculinity.

Aside from pornography, Deslandes examines the commodification and exploitation of models by the fashion industry recognizing the open market of gay consumerism. The cultural phenomenon of British sport star David Beckham launched as an international underwear model with a huge gay following. As silly as such campaigns always are, the marketing targeted to both straight women and gay men as a profitable campaign changed the corporate fashion and the impact on representation of queer visibility. A picture is still worth a thousand words right, no?

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Watergate | A New History

by Garrett M. Graff

Simon & Shuster

Hardcover; photos; 795 pgs; $35,

Political journalist and historian Garritt Graff acknowledges that there are shelves of books and declassified government documents that chronicle Watergate saga that led to the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency. But, 50 years on, Graff debriefs on all of the untold tales of all the president’s men and women in his book ‘Watergate- A New History.

Graff is not only a veteran political reporter for Politico, The Washingtonian, CNN and New York Times he is a researcher who can stylishly weave together the many colliding political capers and dramas that swirled around Nixon with both journalistic and theatrical flair.

The book opens on Richard Nixon’s “last joyful day” in the White House- the day he and Pat hosted his daughter Trisha’s wedding in the White House. But the next day he groused that there was not enough tv coverage, that had it been a Kennedy wedding it would have been covered live on all three networks. The following day the wedding was covered on the front page, with a glittering photo of the event, but next to it ran the first installment of The Pentagon Papers that exposed the disastrous US policies that fueled the war for over a decade that had cost tens of thousands of American lives.

Even though the Pentagon Papers exposed the malfeasance and warmongering hubris of previous administrations, Nixon was obsessed with insider leaks to the press could potentially lead leaks about the first term of his own presidency. And what was being plotted for his second term.

Graff is methodical in his sourcing and granular its detail- both the established facts and disputed ones- newly revealed sourcing and, critically, exculpatory evidence that can now be collated into the voluminous Watergate lore.

 There’s deep background on known and unknown aspects of Watergate and the cast of infamous characters the short list being- Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy- the jailed off burglars being paid off to keep quiet, not to mention the Oval Office cabal of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean collaborating with the hard-drinking paranoid, vengeful Nixon.

Graff’s paints a dimensional portrait of a Nixon, the man and politician full of dualities and contradictions, but as he justified his actions and whose less self-destructive side led him to think of himself as the great statesman who had a positive agenda for cleaning up the environment, achieved détente with Russia and China, advocated for cancer research, and even for more women in the male dominated jobs in government. Graff reminds readers of his reasonable political agenda.

The overtures to bug the Watergate was ignited by Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist being surveilled. Nixon had considered J. Edgar Hoover useless to do his bidding. Graff goes into the shady dealings of Nixon’s landslide victory in 1968 dubbed, The Chenault Affair where Nixon’s engaged a society matron to in sabotage the Paris Peace talks until after his 1968 run for the presidency.,

Nixon who was vengeful, petty, insecure, and power greedy. And sabotage political opponents. Graff devotes a chapter early on detailing the Chennault scandal in which Nixon was engaged in clandestine overtures with the South Vietnamese government that would stall the Paris peace talks at the end of the Johnson administration. Johnson knew about it and tried to contain it, when he could have exposed Nixon in what would have, on the face of it been a treasonous offence.

Nixon’s fear of leaks over his impulses to ignore legalities. The formation of the Plumbers, not only to smear Nixon’s enemies, but using methods that were indisputable crimes. Sound familiar?

Graff dissects the events that led up of the break-in at the Watergate. Gives the backstory of the dupes and shady characters recruited by Nixon’s henchmen. The opening chapters dissecting Nixon’s obsessive tactics employed to blackmail, silence, and smear his real or perceived enemies.

Graff delves into fascinating episodes such as Nixon knowing that the aging J. Edgar Hoover was losing his iron grip on the FBI. Mark Felt aka Deep Throat, was Hoover’s heir apparent at the FBI. Or that Nixon and his inner circle figured it out early that he was feeding information to reporters. But Nixon thought it wouldn’t serve them to expose him but strategized how to sideline, and control him, knowing that he was waiting be named director.

John Dean’s image as the President’s lawyer of conscience who’s famous ‘There’s a cancer growing on the presidency’ account to the Ervin committee made him come off as a choirboy, as Graff reveals Dean’s testimony was a performative red herring to the Ervin Committee since he an active participant in the coverup from the start.

Graff tips his hat to the groundbreaking first line reporting by Woodward & Bernstein in cracking open the case, but he also dissects the faults and factual errors in their best-selling All The President’s Men and the blockbuster movie produced by Robert Redford.

And to fill in the areas that dropped off the radar, or were under seal, or hidden until years after Nixon was out of office. New details about the infamous showdown over the Nixon tapes, the Saturday Night Massacre, Executive privilege, Rosemary Woods contortions caused the 18-and-a-half-minute-gap,

At near 800 pages of reveals, Graff uncovers all of the political malfeasants, hubris, smear tactics and dirty tricks that became the Nixon administration’s brand. Watergate | A New History reads like a political primer that anticipated what the Republican party has now become, a secret, cut-throat, undemocratic, petrified institution cast with people who will do or say anything to stay in power.

Nixon’s tragic flaws are still fascinatingly Shakespearean in their complexities, even as his compulsions are the stuff of farce- unfortunately a comedy with tragic consequences for a democracy.

 

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The Unquiet Englishman | A Life of Graham Greene

By Richard Greene

W.W.Norton & Company; 591 pgs; photographs

Graham Greene was one of the 20th century’s most successful novelists, from the droll theatrics of ‘Travels with My Aunt’ to his portrait of a soul-searching rebel priest in ‘The Power and Glory.’  Greene wrote characters that captivated readers for six decades.   

 The shortlist of his bestseller include– Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Ministry of Fear, The Confidential Agent, The End of the Affair, Our Man in Havana- but that is only half the story of his prolific and adventurous life. Graham was a war-time journalist for LOOK magazine, a part-time British M15 spy, a playwright and screenwriter (often uncredited). And he was a self-styled diplomat who inserted himself in political hot spots around the world, exploits he copiously chronicled in letters and journals.

A new biography by Canadian writer Richard Greene brings new insight and analysis of Graham’s restless nature, his relationships and his creative life. The author had access to previously Greene’s private papers and dictaphone recordings. Graham even kept a copious log of his dreams because he admitted in his sort of autobiography titled ‘A Sort of Life’ he didn’t trust his memory.

Respected all over the world for his accomplishments on all these fronts, his career rarely gave him pleasure, he was in it for the adventure. He sought out adventure in political hot spots around the world, even often flirting with the idea that he would be happier if ‘the bullet’ would finish him off.   

As RG reveals, Graham’s restlessness and insecurities drove him to dangerous parts of the world in Latin America, Africa and Indochina where he got the inside track on corrupt regimes, spy networks, military leaders, and rebel enclaves. He even spent six weeks in a leprosarium in Africa for research for his novel A Burnt-Out Case, about a depressed architect. who exiles himself to the Belgian Congo before it became a Democratic Republic.

As assured as Graham was in his professional achievements, he suffered from manic depression, and from a young age, contemplated suicide. He was a heavy drinker and at various times he was addicted to opium. His marriage to Vivien was tumultuous, even though he was genuinely but he had casual and serious affairs that eventual caused their permanent separation, but they did not divorce.

Greene had a relationship with Catherine Walston and their affair lasted years, only splitting, sort of, when he fell in love with actress Anita Bjork, a star of Swedish theater and international cinema.   

 Meanwhile, his Greene’s relationship with his son Francis Charles and his daughter Lucy Caroline remained distant. His work keeping him abroad for long stretches, with him sending letters that didn’t make up for missing key events in their lives.  His daughter Caroline eventually moved to Canada and literally build a horse ranch. And even though Greene put up the money, when he finally visited her, she told him how hard his absences and reputation as a womanizer, drinker and political instigator had negatively impacted his family.  

Greene was equally critical of political ideologies as mechanism of power and corruption whether it was in communist, socialist, democratic republics or dictatorships. Greene chronicles Graham’s lifelong commitment of putting himself in ‘harm’s way’ to bring attention to human rights abuses around the world. In Haiti to research The Comedians, his scabrous depiction a corrupt Duvalier presidency. After the book’s became an international bestseller ‘Papa Doc’ admitted that he wanted to assassinate Greene, but was ultimately afraid of suffering international reprisals that might hurt Haiti’s tourism.

 The last two decades of his life, Greene didn’t slow up, but his heavy drinking, drug use, strained relationships and ceaseless globetrotting caught up with him. He had several serious health problems, but they slowed him down for as long as it took to get back to his hectic life of traveling and writing.

Richard Greene insights into Graham’s compulsive creative process is fascinating and authoritative and gives the background on the real people Graham knew whose character and deeds were the source of his most compelling fictional characters.

The author’s methodical and illuminating machinations of corrupt regimes- the setting of so many of Greene’s best novels- bring new insights into Graham’s exclusive access to top officials around the world.   This biography is a fine line a portrait and Richard Greene’s comprehensive research and understand of Greene’s body of work, is an authoritative, wryly observed portrait of the man, his work and his daring times.

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booksbooksbooks, Lituanian-American artists, NewYorkUnderground, poets

I Seem To Live ~Vol. 1- 1950-1969

~The New York Diaries  Jonas Mekas~ with entries by Adolfas Mekas

~ book designers: Fabian Bremer, Pascal Storz ~ editor: Anne König

SPECTOR BOOKS 1000pgs. illustrated; photographs; archival footage

“Immigrants to America do not ‘adjust’ to America, They rather resign to it. They live in a state of resignation.” Jonas quotes Eduoard de Laurent’s as he records the realities of his and Jonas’ new life in America. Jonas chronicles ironies, hypocrisies, dangers and triumphs as he and Adolfas were creating New York’s avant-garde film world, that eventually went international.

~Previously on ‘I Seem To Live’

– Underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas lands at Rikers’ on obscenity charges for screening Flaming Creatures, establishes the New American Cinema Co-op, the nexus for dozens of underground filmmakers~ & more movie mayhem with Salvatore Dali, Orson Welles & but still lives on coffee & starves as he establishes the most cutting edge filmmakers of the 60s Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Robert Frank, et. al.

~~upcoming in Part2 of Jonas’ diary~ A Song for Avila, St. Theresa ‘s roses on Time Sq. Roberto Rossellini, taking on the cops’ payoffs, film ‘Diaries’, the Warhol shooting, the birth of Wooster St. Cinematheque, Jonas’ j’accuse to the international festivals Jacqueline Kennedy’s favorite film~ Jonas Mekas’ Walden II.

Ostensibly a diary of filmmaker, film journalist Jonas Mekas ‘I Seem To Live’ a philosophical & artistic survival guide of a Lithuanian immigrant, a stranger in the strange land of New York City,  were he careened from assimilation to  self-alienated, observed, started an arts movement and completely assimilated. Part immigrant memoir, part art treatise, part philosophical manifesto of the arts vs. the world of commerce, politics and American culture.

Adolfas was back from the service and part of Jonas cast and crew for his movie Guns in the Trees, shooting on location in Manhattan, the New York countryside and New Jersey, encountering law enforcement, starvation, constant harassment by police in the city and in rural areas, for shooting without permits or on private property. Mekas’ film was re-released in New York in 2019 with a positive re-review in the New York Times.

He was also on the set of artist Robert Frank’s legendary avant-garde film ‘Pull Your Daisy’ written and narrated by Jack Kerouac. Mekas has unannounced poetry entrees including the brilliant poetic portrait of Peter Orlofsky.  (there is film of Orlofsky dancing with Nico at a VU performance with Jonas looking on has surfaced on YouTube).

Mekas may not bore his compatriots on the state of the film arts, but he records all his commentary throughout his dairies, he is, in retrospect among the most adroit observers of both commercial films in the US and the serious filmmakers and the entire post-WWII auteurs in Europe/

By the mid-60s Mekas was still running the Cooperative, planning the Cinemateque on Wooster St.  Raising money and networking for some 30 filmmakers, packaging the film ‘Expositions’ and getting them on the international film festival circuit, and still writing & editing Film Culture.

Mekas was not only major presence in the New American Cinema, he was becoming disenchanted by the whole subculture.   He had to remind the most successful directors – Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger that they were part of the collective and should not put themselves forward as representative of  NAC ourvre.

Mekas was starting to be resentful of being prevented from making his own film because he was so preoccupied with the constant demands of FC, NAC and running the Coop.

Still out of money to the point that he had to remind people that while he was working to get money for their productions, he was weak from not having enough money for food.  Still, he reports in diary, that “His colleagues who knew how he lived, treated me like I was independently wealthy.”

And Jonas was presenting Warhol’s early movies that were playing with every perception and satirical implications of ‘underground’ film. Jonas recognized that they were part of Warhol’s art revolution and living underground culture documented in ‘My Hustler’ ‘Naked Restaurant’ and Chelsea Girls.  Mekas also was involved with events with the Velvet Underground and hosted their first public performance at a convention of the American Psychiatric Association.

Jonas presented what ended up being ‘A happening’ at the Coop with Gato Barbieri’s quartet performing and Warhol’s gang, rockers, poets, literati, jazz luminaries and coffeehouse denizens. 

Meanwhile, he was also  on the scene in Europe. In London an independent film organization was forming and reaching out to Jonas to advise and collaborate as they got established.  He was more involved with the international festival circuit.  Despite complaining about being kept from making his own films as he tried to organize the co-op

He was honest with everyone around him, yet still carried everything on his shoulders to keep the underground film production, distribution expanding. He never abandoned artists he respected even if he knew they were taking advantage of his time, influence and not contributing in the spirit of the co-op.

Of the avant-garde filmmakers who were being seduced by making it big, he was just as wary.  He saw the hubris of redundancies of so called ‘underground’ films.  The pitfalls of being outrageous for outrageous same.  Meanwhile, he rejected any notions of censorship as nothing more than.

He was busier than ever. Only managing to schedule an hour or two a day to write and film his own projects. He had convictions and integrity and passion for the art form as being by design experimental, socially relevant and anti-Hollywood.

What he admired about Hollywood were the cinematographers, actors, writers  and directors who realized their vision despite the studios.  His admiration extended to such film heavyweights as Howard Hawks, Hitchcock and Welles. But mostly dismisses Hollywood as products of commercialism and trended public taste.

Jonas also is harsh to European cinemas, especially film festivals criterea for prize winners. He participated in festivals under certain conditions that supported the filmmakers. He was invited to be on festivals juries, which he turned down on principal, because judging ‘best’ films was not just absurd to him, but designed for exploitation.

Even as he was a revered film journalist for Village Voice, he was venomous to film ‘critics’ specifically and in general questioned the whole journalistic field as irrelevant to the understanding of the art of cinema. Meanwhile, he continued to work on his film projects. He was in demand internationally as a lecturer on film arts and NAC initiatives and expositions.

Jonas applied for and was awarded a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to (he lobbied for $55,000) for the purchase and renovation of was to be the Wooster St. Cinematheque, that would be a film center that would not only preserve and present NAC and avant-garde films properly, but would not be subject to any industry rules. It would be a nexus for The Film Culture community and Coop operations.

After a year renovations on the two floors the Cinematheque would occupy, the city kept closing it down for minor violations, but the real reason was that Mekas refused to pay L & I officers payoffs. Mekas even filmed them making their shakedowns, but the fix was in with judges, officers and city cronies.

As fines and shutdowns mounted up Mekas wrote of the Kafka-eque situations and some of his most beautifully poetic passages (as well as rage against the machine) fill these pages.

Jonas continued work on “My New York (or American) Testament with his later films “Walden II” “Diary” and “A Song for Avila” which he describes so movingly in his diaries. However distracted by his pioneering efforts for vanguard film arts and on behalf of the Coop’s roster of filmmakers, Jonas proved he had as much say artistically, and vitally always challenged himself not to become what he despised in the film industry, whether it was out of Hollywood product created by producers or if it was an equally exploitive arthouse film.

 Jonas as a Lithuanian refugee poet and now in print is his epic prose poem is finally in ‘I Seem To Live.’

click to go to part 1 of ‘I Seem to Live’ review~ https://alternatetakes2.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/booksbooksbooks-32/

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Antigay ministries, booksbooksbooks, GLBTQ International issues, Investigative reporting

Spiritual murder in the Cathedral or Holy Hypocrisy Batman!

In the Closet of the Vatican

 by Frederic Martel

US publication, Bloomsbury (Feb. 21)

~note fr Lew: this is an excerpt from my lengthier essay on this title~

Frederic Martel has written several books on GLTBQI issues, but his latest ‘Sodoma’- English edition titled ‘In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy’ has garnered immediate international headlines.

Frederic Martel

The book has been published in 15 countries simultaneously and has been translated into eight languages. And interest in the book was further ramped up because it was released the same week pope Francis convened 200 Church leaders from around the world to discuss clerical sexual abuse. GLBTQ activists and abuse victim groups were rightly skeptical of Francis’ ability to effect ‘zero tolerance’ policies since the conference ended with no significant church policy changes.  The issues continue to be heirarchal turf wars about keeping the system of coverups and the Catholic downlow closet in place.

Martel makes it clear up front that his book is not about the vast epidemic of pedophile priest abuse, although he detailed how systemic cover-ups are often in play, ‘Closet’ busts open the web of deceit the Church propagates regarding the ranks of gay priests-estimated to be at 80%- counting both celibate and practicing.  His main thesis focuses on what he views as the rank and file clergy continue the official propaganda of hate speech and hostility to GLBTQ rights and visibility, as they ramp up official condemnations with the intent to demonize homosexuals.

Meanwhile, grabbing that same week with the Cardinals, was the revelation that Australian Cardinal Pell, one of the most powerful men in the Vatican, had been convicted in December of child sexual abuse.

Vatican officials had to know Martel’s reputation as a gay journalist, yet he gained exclusive press access inside the Vatican, where frequently was on the inside for research and interviews. Is this book part of an internal insurrection against grotesque hypocrisy that would point to a new era of recognition of same-sex unions and non-condemning acceptance of homosexuals? The official signs are not good.

Martel is exhaustive in his sourcing, in total, having interviewed 1,500 seminarians, priests, bishops, monsignori, prelates, nuncios, and other church officials to reveal the inside politics.  He exposes the elaborate ‘system’ of gay priests who keep the closet door sealed shut, so they can live double lives on the officially sanctioned downlow. .

In his forward, Martel also explains that it is not his intent or mission to out clergy, or even judge them, but to expose the ‘system’ that fosters lies, foment homophobia and fuels the culture of intimidation, harassment, lies, sedition and antigay vs pro-gay factions that have reached an all-out internal war for generations. 

At the same time as they put forth the Catholic Church official view that homosexuality is an ‘intrinsic disorder’ and vehemently oppose same-sex marriage, LGBTQ equality and most egregiously publically equate homosexuality with pedophilia. 

There have been criticisms that the book has no index, or research appendix, but Martel’s source citations and  bibliography can be accessed online codex. But no one is officially refuting the veracity of his findings.

Martel’s sometimes gossipy style and wry, sometimes campy asides have brought criticisms as well. He is not above mocking so many hypocrisies about priests living the double life and publicly are rabid homophobes judging gay people who are out and just living their lives honestly. Meanwhile in private that same cleric can be a seminarian cruising, ugly couture wearing, T-spilling, not so private but otherwise officially reigning raging queens in bad, & expensive dresses.

The network within the Vatican and diocese around the world that props up a system that tolerates and even encourages sex between priests in “the luminous world of interior cruising, with its worldliness, its subtleties, its games,”….more dazzling and radiant, the version of caps and cassocks.”  Martel reports in one of hundreds of eye-witness accounts in the book.

The other great aspect of this book is that Martel also investigates the often destroyed careers of gay priests who refused to go along with the rules of the Vatican closet. Martel’s first chapter (‘Domus Sanctae Marthae) tracks the spiritual journey of former gay priest Francesco Lepore, a Latin scholar and devout gay priest and the courageous stance he took with Pope Francis when on the fast track in the Vatican, essentially working side by side with Francis. But when Lepore was subjected to the mafia tactics within the hierarchies and toxic politics within the Vatican, he wanted out and refused to be what was expected of him and entrenched in the institutional hypocritical status quo within the Vatican- a self-loathing gay priest who was encouraged to be on the downlow, while being officially homophobic.

Lepore rejected the Church’s conditions that would have advanced his career goals at the expense of his spiritual integrity. In telling his story he goes to the heart of Martel’s book and rejected the institutional toxic environment. He triggered an investigation by searching for gay websites on the Vatican computer which he knew would cause his superiors to interrogate him. When that happened he wrote a letter to Francis, pronouncing his truth and informing him that he was leaving the priesthood.

As hazy and contradictory as Francis has been on the Church’s current view of homosexuality in public, Martel reports that at his 2014 Synod to Church leaders he spoke of the grotesqueness of clergy protecting pedophile priests as part of their own elaborate cover to remain in the closet.  Martel defends Francis will to dismantle ‘the system’ though it is hard not to wonder why Francis is so schizophrenic about it in public. As recently as this month a rabidly homophobic cardinal blamed pedophile sexual abuse crimes within the church because of GLBTQ culture, openness and pro-gay civil-rights.

But, as the author reveals, Francis’ famous “Who am I to judge,” was far from a papal edict to stop judging the GLBTQ flock. Martel dissembles the comment for its ultimately benign context and effect.  As much as Martel respects Francis, he dissects his ‘Machiavellian’ moves and contradictory statements about gays.  Privately liberal, but still sticking to the church’s draconian condemnations. Meanwhile, he also can take advantage of it as a political football, like any other politician. He is surrounded by gay clergy for instance, but when France put forth an out gay ambassador to the Vatican, the pope lobbied Hollande to nominate a heterosexual. France stuck by their gay ambassador and the post wasn’t filled.

The Vatican closet wars rage on and Martel has plenty of shade to throw even as he turns a spotlight on the political hubris, intrigue, corruption, folly and intramural sex that exists in the Vatican and the Catholic Church diaspora since for centuries. Nevermore politically charged than it is now, with front page sex scandals and financial crimes peeling away faith in the institution worldwide. Still, there is a lot of blind faith and the church policies can cause a lot of confusion, harm and homophobia particularly as there is a real-time international threat, both politically and culturally, against the human rights and very lives of GLBTQ people.

~Stay tuned~

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booksbooksbooks, poetry

Revisiting British poet Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn | New Selected Poems

Edited by Clive Wilmer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

https://us.macmillan.com/fsg/

British poet Thom Gunn was recognized as a unique talent from his very first collection “Fighting Terms” which was published while he was still studying at Cambridge in the early 50s. Gunn bucked the poetry trends of the time of deconstructed free verse. He made his name as a contemporary classicist and avoided what Gunn referred to as “confessional” free verse of famous contemporaries Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Robert Lowell, among others.

Even as he resisted “dramatizing” himself as so many other poets did in his era, he was, without doubt, a visceral poet who chronicled his life and times.

The full range of Gunn’s aesthetic is explored in- Thom Gunn – New Selected Poems, chosen by his lifelong friend and poet colleague Clive Wilmer who along with selecting the perfect poems that represent different aspects of Gunn’s best work, Wilmer writes an in-depth biographical essay and backstories of his creative journeys.

Gunn’s style was one of an ‘anonymous’ poetic auteur, closer to Elizabethan masters John Donne, Dante and Shakespeare. Gunn literary persona was reserved, objective and philosophical. A wry and compassionate observer, he used both naturalized meter and lyrical syntax and aspired to achieve clarity through “imagery and discourse.”   He grew up in England during WWII and Gunn later wrote that a key motif was that of a soldier.   

Gunn: “I was 16 at the end of WWII, so my visual landscape was full of soldiers. Of course, I became a soldier for two years  in the national service so that was another kind of soldier.”

Gunn would let long periods go by before he assembled a collection of poems he judged as worthy of publication.  Later in his career, Gunn also embraced free verse, but never abandoned structure and never repeated himself.  

It is apparent that obvious that Gunn was not living in some literary ivory tower, he was engaged with the world, and primarily the gay world as the main theme, less obliquely than other famous gay poets.

It was no accident that Gunn eventually met and befriended British expat Christopher Isherwood in California, along with becoming an intimate friend, Gunn admired Isherwood’s ‘transparency’ of his writing.

After falling in love with a handsome dramatic actor at school who was straight, they became friends and colleagues.  Gunn soon fell in love with Mike Kitay, who became his lover and lifelong companion even when they were no longer sex partners.   Gunn and Kitay left England to live the gay life in San Francisco.

“The Hug” a very private remembrance of sleeping with Mike Katay, couldn’t, in fact, be a more intimate self-portrait and completely universal in its impact.

He observes and documents life in San Francisco and the gay and straight street life.

“The Difference” is an equally intimate scene of a brief encounter with a trick, that is given equal philosophical importance. Especially in a time of grief, as his world was under attack from an unknown pathogen and a rabidly anti-gay government who did not care how many  GLBT Americans suffered or died.

Gunn never wrote with more craft, passion, and artistry as he responded to what was happening to his gay brothers during the AIDS epidemic. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, Gunn produced his most significant work.

Gunn became a writer warrior and his poetry in the AIDS era was the work of an ‘artist as a witness’ to his life and perilous times. He was among the earliest major writers to use their medium to report the impact of AIDS on gay America with his collection “The Man With Night Sweats.” These poems are among some of the most powerful literary work by gay writers documenting the personal loss and social impact on the gay community.

Gunn wrote many elegies for friends who had died of AIDS, of the impact of the epidemic in San Francisco. Gunn stated that he never felt that there was really a gay ‘community’ until he saw how GLBT people came together to help each other from the beginning of the epidemic, creating services to care for HIV/AIDS patients and grassroots support networks and AIDS activism. Wilmer writes that Gunn, from a literary standpoint, rose to the occasion and also produced the most powerful and well-crafted verse of his life.

Indeed, the poems and elegies written during this period are profound, well-crafted and most vitally exemplar of an artist as a witness to history. 

Poignantly, during the AIDS crisis, Gunn writes ‘The Gas-poker’ a poetic verite of his mother’s suicide, which took place when the poet was just 15.  He and his brother rushed to save her in a barricaded room, after they read her suicide note, tried to break down a door to get to her, but it was too late. 

His literary accolades include fellowships from the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Levinson Prize, the W.H. Smith Award, the Sara Teasdale Prize, et. al. Wilmer’s volume is a rediscovery of this gifted British poet whose work belongs in the pantheon of vital gay American literature.

Gunn, Wilmer reports, was also a beloved and respected professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Still, in the US Gunn enjoyed the academic or popular success he previously achieved in England.  This volume goes a long way in correcting that.