In the New Yorker...

[serious crayons]

In the latest issue, I devoured the overview of the "fast casual" quickly growing class of eateries. Probably like the article on grocery stores to most people, but it impacts on my job directly. Plus, it was only one page long.

One page long makes it waaayyy better than the grocery store piece. As I recall, I made it through about six pages of that one before throwing in the towel. Plus I'm interested in the fast-casual movement.

But wait -- it affects your job directly? Lee, I can never keep up with what you're doing for work. Sometimes you're unemployed, sometimes you have a job, sometimes you mention losing a job, but I never get the story as it goes along! (Not that this is the best venue, of course, but keep us readers of FRN informed!)

I'm looking forward to reading all about the history of gayness and how the Germans invented it (?) by Alex Ross.

I hadn't noticed that one, but it sounds really interesting. Alex Ross wrote something a while back about him and a friend encountering a group of drunk, fratboyish guys and getting kind of nervous, but then the guys left them alone (one of the fratboys might have even been gay himself -- I can't remember all the details) and the incident illustrated how our culture had changed, at least partly.

I don't usually have much interest in reading about classical music, but Alex Ross is an interesting writer.

[Front-Ranger]

Hi friends and New Yorker readers,
I moved a couple of posts over to my blog, as they were off topic. Back to discussing The New Yorker! I misspoke in my last post about Alan Gopnik's article. It's about the rise of gay RIGHTs, not gayness. Even though he makes it clear that he is discussing gay rights, he still fails to credit the Greeks and Romans in the history of same sex awareness, IMO.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Hi friends and New Yorker readers,
I moved a couple of posts over to my blog, as they were off topic. Back to discussing The New Yorker! I misspoke in my last post about Alan Gopnik's article. It's about the rise of gay RIGHTs, not gayness. Even though he makes it clear that he is discussing gay rights, he still fails to credit the Greeks and Romans in the history of same sex awareness, IMO.

Well, bear in mind, Alex Ross' article is essentially an expanded book review, or, at least, it takes Robert Beachy's book as its starting point, and same-sex attraction in the Ancient world isn't the subject of Beachy's book. Ross writes (p. 73), "The title of the chapter, 'The German Invention of Homosexuality,' telegraphs a principal argument of the book: although same-sex love is as old as love itself, the public discourse around it, and the political movement to win rights for it, arose in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

A common belief is that the Ancients did not have the concept of sexual orientation that we have today. The development of that concept owes much to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld (again, Germany, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), who is discussed a lot in Ross' article.

Beachy's book and Ross' article aren't really about the awareness of same-sex attraction. They're about the growing awareness that some people are naturally orientated toward people of their own gender, and that therefore they don't deserve to be punished by law for the sin/crime of sodomy.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting things that I took away from Ross' article is that, apparently right from the very beginning of the understanding of sexual orientation, there were conflicts between masculine-identified homosexuals (androphiles?    ) and their more effeminate brethren (see, e.g., p. 75). The more things change, the more they stay the same. ...

[Jeff Wrangler]

I don't quite know what to make of Kidzania (Jan. 19), but it was kind of fun to learn that zania means adulteress in Arabic. 

[Front-Ranger]

Thanks for setting me straight correct about both the author and the scope of the article.

... one of the most interesting things that I took away from Ross' article is that, apparently right from the very beginning of the understanding of sexual orientation, there were conflicts between masculine-identified homosexuals (androphiles?    ) and their more effeminate brethren (see, e.g., p. 75). The more things change, the more they stay the same. ...

I thought the same thing when I read that passage!

[Jeff Wrangler]

Thanks for setting me straight correct about both the author and the scope of the article.

Going a bit OT here, but do you know the book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, by John Boswell? The book is easily 30 years old, or more, by now, and very dense (I remember footnotes in untranslated/untransliterated Greek), but Boswell, whom we lost to AIDS in the early 1990s, was an amazing scholar, and I remember the book as having a lot to say about Greek and Roman attitudes toward same-gender attraction and sexual activity. I ought to read it again myself some day.

[Jeff Wrangler]

So at lunch today I read Adam Gopnik's Jan. 26 piece on the French write Michel Houellebecq. I sure wouldn't want to have dinner with that guy; in his picture he looks awfully depressed and sour. But as for the article, I admit I laughed aloud at Gopnik's line about the French 1960s, when "Catherine Deneuve was in every other movie." 

[serious crayons]

I broke down after all and began the article about the guy who's an expert at making things go viral. It's more interesting than I thought it would be.

[Jeff Wrangler]

The Feb. 2 issue arrived today, and I'm already enjoying Elizabeth Kolbert's article about Seneca.

[serious crayons]

The Feb. 2 issue arrived today, and I'm already enjoying Elizabeth Kolbert's article about Seneca.

 Me too. It has been my lunchtime reading for the past couple of days.