The North Issue 68 Guest Edited by Andrew McMillan and Stephanie Sy-Quia

 

I got this best on my love of Andrew McMillan’s work, and it was pleasing to find plenty of Fourteen Poems poets included …

I put tabs in the following :

Dinner by Galia Admoni – a great combination of food and heart break

The Boy I Shared a Tree With by Kit Ingram

Ballgown by Chris Beckett

Forever Young by Colin Bancroft

The Bed by Diana Cant

The Gazelle by George Ayres

Queer Time by James McDermott

Clutter Jar by Christopher Horton Bravado by Dale Booton

When my father was in hospital by Caroline Druitt

This Voice by Andrew Hodgson

To The Dogs by Louise Welsh

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

I read this in a single sitting on the plane / train home from Gran Canaria – it held my attention, it is a “page turner”.

The return to the underbelly of life in Glasgow is one that Welsh clearly enjoys writing.

I found it a much more successful book that A Lovely Way to Burn but I never reached the level of investment in it I did with The Cutting Room or The Second Cut.

My suspension of disbelief hovered in the balance – that Jim Brennan had managed to escape his beginnings and become part of the establishment only to be dragged back is clearly an interesting narrative device but something just didn’t quiet slot into place for me.

Touch by Thom Gunn

I tagged …

No Speech from the Scaffold, which concludes by saying that what matters “… is his conduct | as he rests there, while | he is still human.”

Snowfall, which concludes “… | I find an edgelessness.”

In the Tank, with it sense of clarity coming in to “the felon” in their cell.

Armistead Maupin

Tales of the City

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

We have an exciting gang of people, a zesty buzz to their interactions – and I just want to know what happens next…

More Tales of the City

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Maupin is providing us with a Soap Opera, which I don’t see as a negative comment. Our mainstream Soap Operas have in recent years explored a range of stories drawing on the experiences of LGBT+ people and in some ways I think it is important to remember how different the context in which Maupin was writing was. This volume published in 1980, perhaps a high water mark for movements of liberation started in the 1960s before the crisis of Aids and right-wing retrenchment took hold.

These stories remain very fresh, young people testing their identities – those across the generations wrestling with social expectations – all of them struggling, at some level, to be comfortable in their own bodies, in their own lives.

The is a comedy to many of the situations, not because they are played for laughs but because quite often life is fairly ridiculous.

Further Tales of the City 

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Within the delightful dramas of this instalment of the Tales it is Michael Tolliver ongoing struggles with love and identity which perhaps have the greatest power – it is a theme that feels so fresh. There is an exploration of ways in which Michael finds self-acceptance as a gay man a particular challenge – he has internalised some of society’s negative assumptions and can’t let himself embrace the love that is there to surround him.

Babycakes 

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

There is a warmth in encountering the cast of characters again, they are becoming old friends… The situations have perhaps been pushed even further yet there is such life to them that they become believable.

Michael Tolliver’s visit to London is a window to the past of the City, especially the gay past of the City, that feels more remote that the years would suggest.

Significant Others

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

The unfolding of the AIDS crisis increasingly dominates this tale and Michael Tolliver’s loneliness.

As usual there are powerful ideas explored within the comedy to the situations that play out – weaving the two together – for example towards the end DeDe and D’Or share moment of mutual confession and forgiveness which is captured “In a burst of hideous insight, DeDe realized the depth of her commitment to this marriage. She had just traded adultery for a cheeseburger and an order of french fries.”

At one point Michael reflects that “nothing would ever happen, no one would ever care until straight people started getting it.” - that AIDS was just a gay problem and therefore for not worth worrying about – I think Diana played a big part in changing that for us, but we need to be constantly watchful for those things that impact the lives of the marginalised and minorities which we allow ourselves, as “normal” people, to ignore.

Sure of You 

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This is the final of the first run of novels although it doesn’t read as a finale, so I am glad to know that this are more books for me to go on a read.

I think reading this directly after Black Deutschland set a context, both being set in a similar time, but I am not sure exactly what that context was…

There is a domesticity to this episode, the nesting of Michael and Thack had an echo of Hide by Matthew Griffin but it is there too, in a funny sort of way, in Brian and Mary-Ann’s break up. A particular ache and intensity of love in the ordinary not the Rom-Com soft focus fluff.

The shadow that HIV/AIDS hangs over Michael made me almost weepy – the fear about getting ill but also the stigma – we are still not over that, the dragging of heels to make PREP freely available is the currently playing out of the stigma, in not so subtle ways it reinforces our belief that gay men are dirty and should know better. It makes me feel sad and tired. We snatch space of our love, we can’t take it for granted.

Reading it in Gran Canaria I was mindful that staying in hotel where around a third of guests were same-sex couples you start to feel normalised in a way that you are not in day to day life, however much we have formal equality, and the chance to be in such space is a privilege. 

 

Maybe the Moon

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This is not part of the “Tales of the City” but it is a close relation. Cady has a view of Hollywood based on being on the margins, because of her size, which perhaps allows the holding up of a mirror in a way a true “insider” could not do.

Maupin gives Cady the dignity of her sexuality, something that society struggles to do for people whose bodies do not fit the “norm”. In his playfulness he is able to explore “issues” without ever preaching at you.

Writing in 1992 a major part of the plot is closeted existence of a young gay actor – sadly this aspect does not feel as dated as it really should – there is some space for openly gay people within Hollywood but it feels like it is still a limited and contested space. 

 

The Night Listener

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This is something of a Russian doll, storytelling within storytelling within storytelling, and the sense of nothing being as it seems is an unsettling delight.

There is something warm and reassuring about a Maupin book – surprising but familiar territory. I think it is enjoyable to read about the dysfunctional lives of people who happen to be gay. Being gay is not the root of the dysfunction – they have difficult relationships with lovers, with parents, but so do most straight people. It is a world complete in itself.

Michael Tolliver Lives

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This return to the Tales of The City clearly carried risks, the best part of 20 years had pasted between the publication of Sure of You and Michael Tolliver Lives – years when the world of gay men in liberal western cities was remade, 2007 may have been something of a high point (LGBTQ+ life seemed to be getting ever better, the pathway to full inclusion seemed inevitable in ways that now feel, frankly, naive) – it was a moment when it could almost have felt like there was nothing left to say.

But it deals with being a middle aged gay man – and I have to put my hand up and accept that I am perhaps reading this as the sweet spot in terms of my own life – lots of things drive the “Peter Pan” mentality of so many gay men, in this novel Armistead helps us let that all go and be ourselves.

There is also a little bit of a flavour of a greatest hits album, all the old characters are name checked in ways that give the faithful reader a warm glow but would be lost on anyone starting their journey here. 

 

Mary Ann in Autumn

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

Once again we have the familiar cast, and as with Michael Tolliver Lives it is an exploration of middle aged lives – how have the twists and turns shaped these people, how have they found happiness, how have they ended up still searching for it?

While it was an enjoyable read there was a moment about two thirds of the way through when I saw what the classic Maupin plot twist was going to be, how the seemingly unconnected parts of the narrative were going to turn out to be inextricably tied together – and I felt a little flat when the big reveal finally came as I tried to politely muster my surprised face…

Help the Witch by Tom Cox

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This collection of short stories allow Tom Cox to play with the enchantment of the world. In the tradition of folk tales, ghost stories, these have little modern twists – some it is the contemporary setting, some it is the ‘form’. Some have the mystical element front and centre, others it remains in the corner of your eye. Throughout it is his characteristic deep attentiveness to place that really draws you into the heart of the story telling.

This is Hardcore by Jane Savidge

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This exploration of Pulp’s 1998 album was enlightening, setting the album in context of their wider career when for me it had been my entry point to the band, indeed it is really the mainstay of my engagement with Pulp.

Therefore Savidge drawing a clear distinction between what came before and This is Hardcore makes me think again about it as I didn’t really know that much about what went before. I didn’t encounter it as different, as marking a change.

The close reading of the songs also showed how much of the lyrics went over my 17 year old head – the fact that it is about sex and drugs was not entirely lost on me, but the depths of those references certainly were.

I remember someone at Scripture Union camp complaining that they didn’t want to hear Jarvis Cocker panting and moaning on a record – but if I am honest that only made me like the album all the more.

Death in Irish Prehistory by Gabriel Cooney

 

This is a fascinating book, guiding us through 8500 years it deals with the gap between the physical remains that we have uncovered and the beliefs that will have shaped the way the dead were treated.

To go from artefact to belief inevitably requires an imaginative step. Prefacing each chapter with a short story of the burial, based on one of those discussed in the chapter, and bookending the word with poetry allows Cooney to bring that imaginative process to the fore.

Too often archaeologists present their interpretations as “facts”. We can make reasoned and reasonable inferences from the archaeological record, and from comparisons with practices in our own era – but we should hold those lightly.

Cooney shows that richness and complexity of the treatment of the dead across the vast span of prehistory, showing the development over time of some features but equally the way that this was in no way linear – some practices come in and out of favour, most periods are characterised by multiple traditions, and there is always the awareness that those represented in the archaeologic records are only a handful – the majority, mostly the overwhelming majority, are invisible to us. There is this unseen hinterland beyond the practices we can speak about archaeologically.