Edmund White: On fire with desire
Imagining Stephen Crane’s lost gay novel.
Category: {gay}
Gay
Men with snakes
Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).
No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that women were depicted in late Victorian and Symbolist art, with one chapter, “Connoisseurs and Bestiality and Serpentine Delights”, being devoted to representations of women with animals, especially snakes. The story of Eve and the Serpent prompts many of these latter images, of course, while scenes with other creatures seem intended to demonstrate the Victorian attitude that woman was closer to the brute beasts than man and could often be found conspiring with them to bring down her masculine masters. Continue reading “Men with snakes”
The recurrent pose 6
Further examples of the Flandrin pose from photographer Amat Nimitpark. Not sure what’s going on in the picture above but the scene below finds a use for a nearly-nude male that would no doubt have surprised Jean Hippolyte Flandrin. Needless to say, I can think of a few other uses for this blue-eyed boy…
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
Felix D’Eon
Dancer by Felix D’Eon at his Flickr pages. His artwork based on the photos, including some gay erotica, can be seen at his website.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
• The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953
Jack Kerouac book covers
left: Andre Deutsch (1958); right: Penguin (1972).
In a year filled with cultural anniversaries, here’s another. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is fifty years old next month and to celebrate this Penguin is publishing the book in its original form for the first time. Although the cover of the first edition described the text as “complete and unexpurgated”, names were changed to protect the innocent and/or guilty and other aspects, such as some very mild gay sex references, were removed. The same site I linked to last year with a great selection of William Burroughs book covers has another section devoted to Kerouac’s magnum opus.
The challenge with this book is whether or not to feature a road as the main image; some designers rise to that challenge better than others. The Ukrainian cover crudely modelled on a Jack Daniel’s label is a particularly unfortunate choice considering that the author died prematurely from cirrhosis of the liver. As with William Burroughs, some translations of the title work better than others: Unterwegs (German) sounds clunky to English ears while Sulla Strada (Italian) has more poetry than the original.
• The Observer on the book’s fiftieth anniversary
• Beat Scene magazine
• Kerouac’s bisexuality explored at GLBTQ
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive