Wednesday reading summary

Now, in an amazing development, actually posted on Wednesday!

Currently reading:

The Lying Stones of Marrakesh and Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, by Stephen Jay Gould. Two books of essays from the 1990s and thus the later end of Gould's essay-writing career (in which he wrote a monthly essay for Natural History from the 1970s to the turn of the millennium). In some ways I prefer Gould's earlier essays, which are shorter, pithier, and feel meatier scientifically, but these are nice and are satisfying my Gould craving.

Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. Yes, still reading this. Almost done now.

A Minority: A Report on the Life of The Male Homosexual in Great Britain, by Gordon Westwood (it's a report he prepared for the British Social Biology Council), with a foreword by Sir John Wolfenden, head of the eponymous committee. This was published in 1960, in the aftermath of and in support of the Wolfenden Committee report recommending the decriminalization of homosexuality. I found it a month or so ago at the possibly-magical bookstore where I also found Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law. I think the universe may be telling me to write more about queer men in postwar Britain. Anyway, it's not the sort of book you read straight through, and some of Westwood's comments are as condescending as you'd expect (although not all by any means, and one of his special concerns is overturning popular myths about gay and bisexual men), but I'm skimming through and focusing on the data from the men who were interviewed. There's an enormous amount of information about things like background, jobs, sexual history, number of partners, kind and length of relationships, preferred and most common sexual acts, degree of being what we would now call "out" to friends and family, attempts if any to have heterosexual relationships, history of arrests and/or blackmail, etc. etc.

Besides statistics, Westwood also quotes the interviewees verbatim, and it's amazing to get relatively unmediated access to queer men's own voices in this era. Among other things it counteracts some of the condescension and the framing (although very pro-tolerance framing) of homosexuality as a "problem." A whole range of experiences and attitudes show up, of course, from defiance to self-hatred, plus a strong sense of community among queer men and often of solidarity with other marginalized or persecuted groups.

Special note for halotolerant: Westwood, in the context of a discussion of "facultative" (i.e. situational) homosexuality, notes that "a study of several ex-prisoners of war at an R.A.F. Rehabilitation Centre showed that a few individuals had difficulty in reverting to heterosexuality when they were no longer segregated from female company," but that most didn't. Several points of interest here, I think: that such a study exists implies once again that there was much more POW homosexuality than secondary sources acknowledge; it was clearly an open secret postwar if the RAF were doing studies about it; and most importantly, there really were men who discovered a queer orientation and perhaps queer identity while POWs. Westwood's source here is his own previous book Society and the Homosexual, published in 1952, which I obviously need to get hold of ASAP.

Addendum: A moment's googling informs me that "Gordon Westwood" was the pen name of Michael Schofield, who was an RAF fighter pilot during the Second World War before becoming a sociologist. He was himself gay and had a long career as an activist for gay rights and other causes. *hearts him enormously*


Recently finished:

The Vows of Silence, by Susan Hill. Another in her bleak mystery series featuring Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler. These book both enthrall and infuriate me. They're well-written, often subvert mystery conventions in ways I enjoy, and have the character focus I prefer in mysteries. On the other hand, Serrailler is something of a Mary Sue (brilliant detective and painter whose work is exhibited in smart galleries, handsome, desirable, and his inability to maintain a relationship is the result of his standoffishness rather than a lack of willing partners) and his family is both improbably perfect--they're all amazingly dedicated doctors who also keep beautiful gardens, sing in the cathedral choir, and maintain a deep intellectual and spiritual life--and improbably tragedy-prone. A lot of Hill's sympathetic characters tend to be almost too wonderful, right up until something awful happens to them. The Serrailler books also seem to take place in the World Without Queer People, a fictional construct I have ranted against more than once. And this particular book's mystery was predictable and not all that engaging; it was really just a maguffin allowing Hill to explore the Tragic Things happening in Serrailler's family, and also to suggest that no mature and well-adjusted person would choose to be single, which is one of those cultural assumptions that fills me with CAPSLOCK RAGE. And yet I devoured the book in a day and was glad to find that there are two more recent-ish installments I haven't read yet. Go figure.

Dark Secrets, by Michael Hjorth and Hans Rosenfeldt, trans. Marlaine Delargy. This one's not published yet; at work we get Advance Reader Copies of some books, and I grabbed this one because, hey, free mystery novel. It's one of those grim Scandinavian mysteries that imply that some of the best countries in the world to live in (Sweden in this case) are hotbeds of violence, vice, and despair. The mystery was formulaic, and while I liked most of the secondary characters on the police team (who to be fair do get their own substantial storylines) I couldn't stand the protagonist, Sebastian Bergman, an ex-police psychologist who comes out of retirement, for reasons of his own, to assist on a case. Bergman is a near-sociopath who uses his psychological insights to manipulate everyone around him and in particular to seduce endless numbers of women. In a relatively interesting turn, he's aware of his own dysfunction (in one of my favorite passages, he compares his compulsion to seduce and discard women with the compulsions of serial killers) but profoundly averse to attempting to change; when people try to reach out to him, he deliberately hurts or offends them so they'll leave him alone. Unfortunately, the authors aren't content to have us dislike Bergman. Instead, while showing that he was always cold and manipulative, they also attribute a lot of his behavior to Tragic Backstory, specifically the death of his wife and daughter during the 2004 tsunami (they were on vacation in Thailand at the time). I hate Tragic Backstory as a device to make dickheads sympathetic, and the melodrama of this particular storytelling choice (not just a car accident or a house fire, no, a tsunami!) gives the whole book a whiff of Hollywood. It's probably no accident that both authors are primarily screenwriters. There's also an implausible twist about Bergman's private life that similarly looks like hoping to get a movie contract. So, a tolerable novel to read on an airplane, but that's about all.


What I'm reading next:

Don't know. There are a couple of things (Westwood's book mentioned and a collection of essays about sex in wartime which contains one about queer people in the British military during and after the Second World War) that I should try to get hold of through Interlibrary Loan.