#don strachey books

[grison-in-space]

So I'm rereading all the Don Strachey books again because I forgot how much I loved them

...and I forgot what an absolute cat Timmy can be.

Timothy Callahan is of course Don's firmly on-again lover, usually described as as a fussy, well-manicured Irish-Catholic gentleman with strong opinions about politics and ethics and also a tendency to be outraged at wastefulness. Think an American and all too human version of Good Omen’s Aziraphale. So I mentioned earlier that there's an ongoing tension in the earlier novels about whether Don can manage monogamy with all that gorgeous ass floating around Albany, NY? Yeah, cut for more on that--I, ah, left out a bit of nuance there. 

Also, I left out a lot about things I love about these books, so there is more gushing about complicated but human relationships 

Yeah, I forgot to mention that Timmy also has a distinct gift for successfully sleeping with very specific people when he's especially annoyed with Don over the whole thing in order to make a very, very pointed commentary on Don’s habits. And at one point, in an argument when he’s particularly angry, gets out of the car Don is driving, sticks his fingers down his throat, and aggressively projectile vomits at Don to make a point. 

(Don totally deserved it.) 

(I’m occasionally reminded of @ladypolaris‘ writing of Kraglin, to be honest.)

God, a thing I love about this series is that it’s very deliberately written to show off a solid, committed relationship where both characters know it’s a good, solid, committed relationship... and yet there’s still tensions within the relationship, there’s still ongoing arguments and bits where Don is being a giant cranky whiner about the fact that it’s winter in Albany, Timmy, being cold is the worst, and Timmy is just totally done with him and tells him to quit being a whiny shit about it. 

And at the same time there’s these silly moments like this:

He got up and brought me a beer. I grunted benevolently. He sat down again and picked at his chili.

“Let’s make a deal,” he said after a moment. “You quit acting churlish with me and I’ll quit acting churlish with you. I understand that you hate the cold weather, and you’re between cases, and you’re bored with Albany, and with me, and with yourself — and that the AIDS situation has put a crimp in your normal abnormal outlets. But all this tension is getting me down, and there’s no point in both of us being miserable. I know you feel too rotten to act sweet naturally, or even just civil, but do me a favor and fake it part of the time. I’ll be grateful, and I’ll bet you’ll feel better too.”

“What? What’s that you say? You want me to periodically hide my precious inner feelings? As if after all these years Dr. Joyce Brothers’s column turned out to be simpleminded charlatanry?”

“Yes, bottle up your negative emotions in a neurotically unhealthy way. For my sake. Just off and on until spring. Your springtime emotions I like a lot.”

I took a long swig of beer. “I don’t know, Timothy. I have to tell you, this is a bolt out of the blue. Your proposition is not something I ever dreamed I’d be faced with when we began sharing hearth and home and Vaseline jar. I’m going to have to give this one a lot of thought.”

“Don — I’m serious. Really.”

I ate the chili and drank the beer and grimly considered what he had said. As usual, he had me. A student of Jesuits, Timmy could play fast and loose on the larger matters, up to a point, but on the conduct of human affairs he was pathologically astute and rational.

I said, “Look, I know you’re right. I hate this town in winter with its wind and cold and sooty snow, and all those moral pygmies in charge of the place. But taking it out on you is unfair, and I’ll try moderately hard not to do it anymore.Try, I said. A small maniacal outburst once in a great while is still okay, right?”

“Of course. It’s all right with me if we both remain human. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now get me another beer.”

“Get it yourself, Kramden,” he said, and laughed but didn’t get up.

I got myself another beer.

Which might be one of the best depictions of an actual established relationship discussing existing dynamics that I’ve ever seen. It’s all too rare in any media to get to see that kind of firmness under teasing when one person establishes some boundaries about behavior with a beloved significant other, much less to get to see it between two gay men living in an objectively fairly difficult time and place to be gay. 

(Remember--they might be living in New York, but these guys aren’t living in NYC, they’re living in the state capital of Albany. There’s legitimately another character who moans to Don repeatedly that “to get any action, you gotta drive out to Troy, or maybe Elmira.” Upstate New York is not by any means NYC, and it certainly wasn’t at the time the books were being written, when Albany politics were famed for their corruption.)

And then there’s the thing where in the very first book when we meet Don and Timmy, they’re noted to be about forty. They age in a way that is kind of absurd in terms of the passage of real-world time--I think Don manages to be about fifty or maybe a well-aged sixty by the time of the last book I’ve read, which was written in 2011. I believe Don started life out as a gentleman approximately the same age as Mr. Stevenson, his author, but I’d imagine writing about the adventures of a 79-year-old got alarmingly close to home, and so Don ages (as Mr. Stevenson wryly comments) at “a rate of about one year for every two or three for the rest of us.” 

Anyway, my point is that there’s literally no point in these novels, written over the course of almost forty years, in which Don and Timmy’s relationship is between two young people; they’ve been very explicitly middle-aged this whole time, and that’s another thing you don’t get to see in fiction much. It’s comforting to see the romance of the middle-aged, you know? Don explicitly didn’t come out until some time in his thirties, and there’s a lot of compassionate and rather sweet depictions of older folks who are by no means dead within the community. The second book actually revolves around the relationship of two lesbians in their sixties and seventies. (There aren’t as many women as I’d like in Don’s world, of course, but Steveson is very, very clear about the fact that his community was not an all-male one--which is refreshing to me, honestly.) 

And so we get exchanges like this one as Timmy discusses his plan to walk to his office:

“I’ll shovel the walk first.”

“Lift with your arms and not with your back. That’s what the radio said. You’re past forty now and might have a heart attack.”

“Nah, I’m twenty-seven. I’ll always be twenty-seven.”

I kissed him on the little bald spot on the back of his head and left him to his bowl of mush.

I love them. (These snippets are both from Ice Blues, which I happen to be reading now.)

[thatssoplizzy]

You Can Have Your Grit and Eat It Too

This post is full of spoilers the way caves are full of spiders, but below are my thoughts on the last episode of the Veronica mars revival, and why it wasn’t necessary.

So off the bat, let’s start with the obvious. Veronica Mars is Rob Thomas’ creation and vision, and he has the right to do whatever he wants with these characters. That’s the beauty of being a storyteller, you’re telling a story, and how it ends is up to you. So this post isn’t me shouting YOU DID IT WRONG into the void, but rather me saying, ‘Cool story, bro- But if it was mine, I’d have done this instead’. So, like, don’t fill up my mentions with how it’s not my art or whatever. I know that. I’m a grown ass woman who knows grown ass things, I’m just spit-balling here. 

So, spoiler, in the last half-ish of the last episode of season four, Logan and Veronica decide to get married. Veronica, who for good personal reasons, has spent the last seven episodes bitter about Logan’s proposal, has second thoughts and decides to go for it. It’s cute, it feels like a fitting wedding for the series (a no-nonsense courthouse affair), and then BAM, bomb goes off, Logan dies. The idea behind this being that getting Logan out of the picture is the only way to move Veronica forward. And sure, it totally works. Veronica now has to go off and find herself, she’s back to being that bitter queen we loved and respected- And yeah, from here you can take her wherever you want. 

Cool, fine, sure. That 100% works, and I fully understand the idea behind it.

It’s also an easy cop out. (I’m allowed one bitter comment here, okay, just hear me out)

You know who doesn’t stay in one place very long usually? Like, someone who could be on a TV show that you could easily move from town to town every season? ...A military spouse. See I know a few military spouses, and while some of them do settle down in one place, a lot of them pack up and move every couple years. And man, have you ever been to a military neighbourhood/community? Between the weird Stepford shit, the MLM sales, and the catty gossip... Those places are RIPE with the kind of stupid drama to paint a pretty backdrop in a gritty Veronica Mars mystery. 

So you throw Veronica into a marriage where suddenly she might have to leave Neptune whether she wants to or not (built in conflict right there, baby), you put her in a constant state of flux where she never settles down long. You now have the freedom to put her anywhere, even overseas if you like. Logan can always be shuffled off on a mission if you need him gone... And there is conflict number two. 

My experience here is second hand, but being a military spouse can be lonely. A lot of the friends I have who are military spouses I only keep in touch with via email or Skype now. It has 100% made it harder to maintain our friendships. I hear from them often how they’re just not connecting with other spouses in their community, or that they have connected and now are moving again and have to start over. They talk about their spouses being gone for long stretches, how they sometimes have regrets. They talk about how some of them are ready to start families, but infertility issues make it harder, and because their spouse is away or working long hours, it all feels futile. ...Tell me that’s not all the fuel you need for a damn good story.

Now maybe you want to make the argument that it’s noir, and noir has to be gritty and sad. Cool, cool, I hear that. I love noir, so I know what you’re talking about, but... Let me tell you about one of my favourite noir detectives in literature (and on screen), Donald Strachey. Donald is the lead character in a series of books by Richard Stevenson. He’s an openly gay detective, which is pretty cool for a series that started coming out in the early 80′s, and a lot of the stories involve some dark shit- However, despite all this, there’s a light in each book, and that light is Don’s life partner, Timothy. Don and Tim have a solid relationship, and it doesn’t stop the stories from being dark and intense. In fact, their relationship is one of my favorite parts of the books and the films, because the fact that Stevenson could write such good mysteries with those noir tones and still weave in what felt like a warm and solid relationship was impressive to me. Their relationship never feels cheap or easy, it never feels like Tim is there to be a device, he’s just part of Don’s life, and as such part of his story. So, yeah, you can have happy relationships in noir, it’s been done and it’s been done well. 

So yeah, TL;DR: I get it, I accept it, it’s fine. ...But if you want me to help write some wrongs Rob Thomas, hit up my messages. *fingerguns* I’ll gladly help you cook up a way that Logan lives without you needing to dedicate yet another season to him and Veronica will they-won’t they-ing at one another. 

[danu2203]

CURRENT READS

[allbestnet]

Guardian Essential Library

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Annals by Tacitus

The Armada by Garrett Mattingly

Aubrey's brief lives by John Aubrey

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X

Beethoven's Letters by Ludwig van Beethoven

Bully for Brontosaurus by Stephen Jay Gould

C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too... by John Diamond

Candide by Voltaire

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven by Charles Rosen

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Collected Poems by Edward Thomas

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

The Complete Poems by Christina Rossetti

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

The complete poems, 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Danube by Claudio Magris

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

Diaries by Alan Clark

Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend by Thomas Mann

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote's Delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain by Miranda France

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson

Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage by Richard Holmes

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

English Society in the Eighteenth Century by Roy Porter

Eothen by Alexander William Kinglake

Essays on Music by Theodor Adorno

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin

Experience by Martin Amis

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton

The Glenn Gould Reader by Glenn Gould

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

Henry James: A Life by Leon Edel

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

If This Is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

In Siberia by Colin Thubron

In Xanadu: A Quest by William Dalrymple

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell

The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel

Memories and Commentaries: New One-Volume Edition by Igor Stravinsky

Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements by Paul Strathern

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi by Jonathan Raban

On the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Orwell and Politics (Penguin Modern Classics) by George Orwell

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

The Painter of Modern Life by Charles Baudelaire

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost

Politics by Aristotle

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Quest for Corvo : An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons

Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy by John Updike

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Selected Writings [Oxford World's Classics] by William Hazlitt

The Social Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich

Sun Dancing by Geoffrey Moorhouse

Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared M. Diamond

Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems by Thomas Hardy

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey

Troilus and Cressida; A Love Poem in Five Books by Geoffrey Chaucer

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

[giftideasfromaycaramba]

Despite the fact that he was not fond of Queer Nation activist John Rutka, notorious for his self-righteous "outing" of Albany's closeted gays, gay private eye Don Strachey agrees to help out when Rutka is shot and his house is firebombed

Check out this item in my Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/listing/926525784/third-man-out-a-donald-strachey-mystery

[squidgiepdx]

Snowflake Challenge - Day 8

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. There's a lot of stuff that I absolutely adore, and it's hard to pick out just one thing. I don't have images of two of them, but everyone should know them. The first thing is in "The Shrine" when John and Rodney have beer on the pier, and later in the episode when Rodney is collapsing and John has his hand on Rodney's back. John's thumb caressing Rodney's back is something that is a connection between both the characters and the actors that you just can't fake. Also in Stargate Atlantis in The Tao of Rodney, there's another little thing that's easier to miss. When Rodney collapses in John's quarters, you can barely see it, but there's a teardrop. Watch it frame by frame, and you'll see it. To go with another fandom, I adore the movie Breakfast with Scot. Not only is it a cute movie, but it's about hockey - which I adore. And of course there's the kiss between Ben Shenkman and Tom Cavanagh - the two leads. It makes so much sense in the movie because it shows how big the character of Eric grows from the beginning of the movie to the end. Here's the kiss: And finally, for my absolute favorite canonical couple, it has to be Don and Timmy from the Donald Strachey Mysteries. You wouldn't know that one of the actors was gay and one was straight, because they fit together so perfectly. This scene, from "Shock to the System" is my aboslute favorite. NOTE: Discussion of suicide: I'm sorry that was so heavy, but you can cleanse your palate with this cutie patootie clip: comments from squidgiepdx http://ift.tt/2CTkwxL via IFTTT

[brigdh]

Reading Wednesday

Penric’s Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold. Another novella about Penric, a sorcerer – which in the rules of this fantasy series means he is possessed by a friendly chaos demon. Penric’s is named Desdemona and has possessed ten women – plus a lioness and a mare – before him, giving it a rather female personality. Penric’s Fox follows fairly closely after Penric and the Shaman (link to my review of it), wherein he met Inglis (the shaman of the title) and Oswyl (a sort of police detective). In this one, Penric is spending a pleasant day fishing with Inglis when Oswyl arrives to ask for their help – another sorcerer has been murdered and her demon is missing. This sets off the murder mystery that ends up being the main plot: Who murdered her, of course, but also how on earth could anyone sneak up on a women with a demon, and where exactly has that demon has gone off to? And most importantly, who was the real intended victim: the woman or the demon? When it seems the demon may have jumped into a passing fox, Penric and the others begin to search the forest and its hundreds of local foxes, a task much like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Their task is complicated when they find signs that the still-unknown murderer is also looking for a certain special fox. I really enjoyed this novella. The Penric series (and the larger series it’s a subthread of, The World of the Five Gods) are all light, fun short stories, absolutely charming ways to spend an afternoon. I loved reading about Inglis and Oswyl again, as I'd liked them previously and was glad to see their friendship with Penric deepening. It’s also intriguing to see that Bujold seems to be setting up future stories to further explore the relationship between the magics of sorcerers and shamans, a topic that I’m very interested in her take on and so I will be looking forward to reading whatever comes next. My one complaint is that, late in the novella, there's a development that seems to draw on the real-world issue of police brutality. I don’t think Bujold handled it offensively, but it’s a brief digression and that's not a great way to deal with such a sensitive topic. I wish she had either gone into it with real depth or had just not brought it up at all. As it is, it feels half-hearted, which isn’t fair to such a serious matter. But this is literally only a few pages out of two hundred, so I certainly wouldn’t un-recommend the novella for that alone. On the other hand, it did bother me, so I wanted to mention it. Overall, a fantasy series that takes a digression into murder mystery. Certainly worth reading if you’ve enjoyed other books in the series, but not a good introduction to the world or characters. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Death Trick by Richard Stevenson. A murder mystery set in 1979 Albany, starring Donald Strachey, a private detective and gay man. The writing definitely shares some traits with the sparse, hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but Don has a sense of humor and tendency toward cheerful sarcasm that lightens the cliche and makes him a fun character to spend time with. He's in a fairly committed relationship (though unfortunately we don't get much background on that in this book) but struggles with monogamy; both halves of the couple sleep with other people in the course of the plot. Which, by the way, is this: Billy Blount, a young gay man, spent the night dancing at a club with the DJ, Steven Kleckner. They were seen leaving together. The next morning Steven is found stabbed to death in his bed and Billy has gone into hiding. Don is hired by Billy’s parents to find where he’s gone and convince him to come back home – the parents have already worked out a plea deal with the judge and DA. However as Don investigates he slowly becomes convinced that Billy isn’t the killer, and his parents don’t have his best interests at heart. The real fun of this book isn’t so much the mystery itself but the rich world of the gay community in a small city in the pre-AIDS era. No single person (including Don) gets much depth, but the setting as a whole is crowded with recognizable characters quickly sketched out with a few well-chosen details. There are hustlers and cruising in the park, poppers and bath houses, radical anarchist groups and drag queens, gay bars with lightless back rooms raided by the cops, and lots and lots of disco, music and pop culture references (which I mostly didn't recognize, to be honest; I am not familiar enough with the 70s). It’s not all fun, of course; Don also deals with homophobic cops and mental institutions using electroshock therapy to cure teenagers of their ‘poor social adjustment’ (aka gayness). Death Trick is the first of a 15 books series. The cover is, uh, kind of appalling (unless you enjoy cheesy 90s stock photos, I suppose)(also why is there a dog? There’s no dog in the book!), but I really enjoyed reading it, and will absolutely be checking out more of the series.

[DW link for easier commenting]

[grison-in-space]

Currently on Grison Rereads Don Strachey:

Don's trying to find a guy name of Mack who got out of prison fairly recently, and the only lead he's got is the man's fiance, Flo. He tries to convince her he's Mack's parole officer, but she figures out pretty quickly that he's no parole officer. So Don improvises:

“Could we just step inside? You’re going to catch a chill standing out here without a coat on and — well, this is going to shock you, but my relationship with Mackie is kind of personal, and I think now is as good a time as any for you to hear about it.” I took out my wallet and presented her with my membership card in the National Gay Task Force.

“Mackie has stolen my man, Flo. I want him back. Maybe between the two of us we can make Mackie see the light and then he’ll come back to you and give me my man back. Down at Sing Sing Mackie stole my honey away from me.”

Don

Don no