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- Thoughts on two books, both about the creation of something mythical
Thoughts on two books, both about the creation of something mythical
Can you believe I tied together a book about the history of an ancient city with a book on male desire?
The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men by Manuel Betancourt
I’ll start by saying I liked Manuel Betancourt’s book overall. In The Male Gazed, Betancourt uses the close-reading framework to dive into the various images of men he’s desired throughout his life. His book unfolds through a series of analytical and jovial essays all tied back to a central theme grouping together his objects of desire. It’s a good enough read and reading it reminded me how good close reading is a skill you develop over time and fine-tune to absolute precision.
The central problem with The Male Gazed has less to do with what Betancourt writes and more to do with what I expected when I saw a long academic title. That’s on me. But when I first started reading Betancourt’s book I went in expecting some sort of overarching thesis of male desire. I think he does get there a few times. There are brilliant passages about very specific cultural references to masculinity and feminity, which pieced together do craft some sort of sense of Betancourt’s relationship to desire or what he thinks about male desire on screen. Realistically though this book is a memoir through essays, cataloging the pop-cultural influences on Betancourt throughout the ages. There is no tightly defined thesis statement or new analytical framework to view desire through, it’s more of just an insight into how desire has shaped him. Which, can’t fault him for that’s a lovely reason to write a book!
His overarching views on how we construct (or should construct) masculinity through on-screen representation and internal desire are sound. I don’t think I learned any new great ah-has about masculinity or desire, but I did enjoy reading through is catalog of desire.
I’m trying this new thing too where I quote some good pieces of writing1 I liked from the books I’ve been consuming as I try to improve my writing. So here are some passages I really loved:
What could we imagine if we thought of the screen as a disco ball, reflecting our own light back at us in dizzying new rhythmic compositions that encourage us to dance with abandon?
García Márquez’s own plots pilfered freely from the realm of the cursi. He’s long credited those outsized melodramas his grandmother so giddily regaled him with in his youth as being central not only to his narratives but also to his own storytelling sensibility. The author understood that there was something of value therein, that such maudlin sentimentality could be the source of great cultural impact.
On the wrestling mat, and particularly during practice, she’d come to see how aggression and tenderness could coexist. Whenever she’d grab her camera to document these meets, she’d be most taken by instances where two teammates would throw moves together only to pull themselves apart and make sure they hadn’t hurt one another. It was in those moments of twinship and opposition—which very much describe this most performatively violent of sports—that Schorr saw her project truly come together.
I wavered between wishing I’d be so admired as to be told to get on all fours and pleasure myself, and wanting to find someone who’d be so intoxicated by me that he’d do all I asked of him. This is why, perhaps, both Rechy and Almodóvar incorporate the mirror into their erotic scenarios: for many gay men like myself, the mirror was the first place where we could play out our own sexual fantasies. Yet that reflected image in front of me was also the source of many of my anxieties.
Victory City, Salman Rushdie
I haven’t read a lot of Rushdie. I read Shame in college and I think I read the Satanic Verses, though if you asked me to recite anything from either of those books I’d fail spectacularly. This is a shame because each time I do read something by Rushdie I’m in awe of the raw talent and sheer power that each of his sentences conveys. Victory City is Rushdie’s latest work and almost his last possible work after he was stabbed brutally and lost sight in one eye. There’s a good New York Times review of Victory City which highlights a lot of the background of this book and its connection with Rushdie’s previous themes. In short, Victory City is the story of a city created by our main character Pampa, and a bag of magical seeds. The story starts in violence: Pampa’s mother walks into flames in a ritualistic ceremony of sorts, following the other women who, suddenly without husbands due to a recent battle, are determined to reunite in death. This spurs a century-running resolve in Pampa to never allow women to be burned again and a constant push and pull between the powers women have over men.
Rushdie presents a city that’s governed by love, pluralism, and true equality. He tells the story of a fictional city based on a real one (Vijayanagar) where people move beyond their petty squabbles to create a glorious society built on the promise of independence and respect. Or, at least they try. As hard as Pampa pushes throughout her centuries of living, she can never seem to overcome the bitter vices of humanity or the stacked hand of geography which constantly fights against the city.
One thing, which I didn’t really note till reading the New York Times review of Victory City is the allusions to Invisible Cities. As Michael Gorra notes, “‘Victory City’ invokes the Ramayana, but Rushdie has a more immediate precursor in mind, and the tale of his own vanished city comes loaded with allusions to Italo Calvino’s ever-marvelous “Invisible Cities,” in which all places are but shadows of an incomparable, idealized Venice.”
Which is probably a good reason I loved it so much. Invisible Cities was probably the first book I read that earnestly made me want to be a writer. A high school English teacher first introduced me to Calvino through Numbers in the Dark which I loved so much I read Invisible Cities2 shortly after. For a while, I was obsessed with the magical realists, which Salman Rushdie can certainly claim some patronage. Victory City plunges fully into the realm of magical realism, maybe straight to fantasy as we see through the eyes of a human touched by the gods how civilizations rise and fall. It’s well worth the read and a relatively easy read too. Just like above, I tried to break down just a few sentences/passages I truly loved in Victory City.3
In the beginning there was only the pain, the kind of pain that made death feel desirable, a blessed relief. Finally that extreme pain subsided, and for a long time afteward there was nothing. (277)
Except at these times she stayed in her corner, undying, undead, waiting for the end. (278)
That night he died, and the timeless silence returned, and closed in upon her. (279)
I have wanted many things I could not have. I have wanted my mother to walk out of the fire unharmed. I have wanted a companion for life even though I knew that I would outlive any companion who came my way. I wanted a dynasty of girls who would rule the world. I wanted a certain way of life even though I knew when I wanted it that I was dreaming of a distant future that might never arrive, or arrive in some half-hearted, damaged way, or arrive and then be destroyed. But it appears that the thing I wanted most of all was this:
I wanted to be king. (250)
This was how the world was in those days. Tragedy gave birth to armies, and the symbolic or allegorical meaning of indivdual human responses to disaster—heartbreak, generosity, loss of consciousness—had to be tested on the field of war. (247)
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