S oon to B e a M ajor
M otion P icture
by Warren Dunford.
A lyson Books, 2000;
$12.95 softcover.
auded by Canadian
critics when it was first
published in 1998,
Warren Dunford s novel
arrives south of the border
this month. The perfect beach book, Soon to Be
a Major Motion Picture turns up stateside just in
time for winter. But it can take your mind off
gloomy gray weather as easily as it can distract
you from the fact that your skin is about to
burst into flames.
As our neighbors up north already know, it’s
not really being made into a movie with any
haste—although the fast-paced and suspenseful
story would translate well. When the protago
nist, an aspiring screenwriter and frustrated fag,
accepts a fairly fishy offer to flesh out a sce
nario pitched by a peculiar producer, hilarity
ensues. This tale is more of a Dashiell Hammet
than an Agatha Christie: The mystery isn’t ter
ribly difficult to decipher, but kooky crooks and
a dash of real danger make for an exciting ride.
Soon to Be is also recommended reading for
aspiring artists of all persuasions who are toiling in
obscurity and approaching middle age at the same
time. The three artsy characters’ personal and
professional triumphs cannot fail to inspire the
unrecognized genius. — Christopher D. Cuttone
T he N otorious D r . A u g u st :
H is R eal L ife and C rimes
by Christopher Bram.
William Morrow, 2000; $26 hardcover.
Strange bedfellows
A scribe, a slave and sexy Jews
are the subjects of three n ew books
ome novels are main
>>»<
courses; others are
breads, wines or
desserts. The Notorious Dr.
August is the whole damn
meal: intricate, satisfying
and good for you as well.
Christopher Bram,
author of six books in
cluding The Father of
Frankenstein, from which arose the movie Gods
and Monsters, has written a book that is more than
mere fiction; it also has the feel and function of
good classic literature. This novel is so rich in de
tail and so intricate in its plot, you might be fooled
at times into thinking it is historical biography.
The Notorious Dr. August begins in the last
days of the Civil War as young August Boyd
finds fate tossing him together, in every sense
of the term, with newly emancipated slave
Isaac Kemp. August becomes a spiritualist who
communicates with spirits through his piano
improvisations—a talent neither he nor Isaac
are fully willing to trust.
As time and travel bond the men together,
Isaac begins to turn his affections toward Alice
Pangbom, a young, uptight and inconveniently
white governess. The three become entangled
in a secretive, complex triangle that ultimately
is tried by the fire of tragedy.
Victorian in its style, scope and politics, this
novel reflects the present turn of the century in
subtle yet undeniable ways: conflicts between
sexuality and religion, between classes and
races, between realism and spiritualism,
between one’s innate desires and one’s upbring
ing. Bram also deals head-on with the complex
and— in our society, anyway— taboo subject of
sexual love between an older man and a young
man. He seems fascinated with the collision of
creative genius and sexual desire, and here, as
in previous novels, we learn that collision
occasionally can be a volatile one.
This novel explores the necessity and price
of telling the truth, especially to those we care
about the most. It asks us to destroy the cate
gories in which we conveniently, although
detrimentally, place people: moral or sinful;
bisexual, straight or gay; black or white; real,
spiritual or fake. And luckily for us, in this era
of pop psychology and quickly wrapped-up
happy endings, Bram sticks to the compli
cated, enigmatic, truthful tale-telling that
has made him one of our finest and most
intriguing novelists.
— Glenn Williams
K osher M eat
Edited by Lawrence Schimel. Sherman
Asher Publishing, 2000; $14.95 softcover.
;?§ s a title, Kosher Meat doesn’t leave much
to the imagination. (The headless
imodel’s blue and white shirt open to
reveal rippling abs and
bulging pecs....) Yet the
back cover demurely sug
gests that booksellers and
librarians classify this item
as Literature/Judaica.
Well, there are bound to
be some paradoxes when
religion and sexuality are
juxtaposed.
Editor Lawrence Schimel has previously
contributed some very fine nondenominational
smut to various erotica anthologies, and he’s
done a lot of serious, scholarly work as well.
Who better, then, to put together a mostly-
erotic-but-not-gratuitous, definitely-Jewish-but-
still-universal and fictional-yet-historically-
accurate montage of fin de siècle gay life?
The individual stories in Kosher Meat run
the gamut in their treatment of religious tradi
tion, gay male sexuality and all the weird ways
the two intersect. Fantasy and fact, love and
lust, healing humor and old-school ortho
doxy— just think of all the permutations.
Only one of the stories strikes me as per
haps too specialized (i.e., over my gentile
head). Sex, of course, transcends cultural
boundaries, but in Kosher Meat, Judaism is nei
ther a safe haven for the Jewish reader nor an
unexplored territory for the gentile reader.
Comfortable and challenging at once, these
stories are all about men who are gay, who are
Jewish, who are human.
— CD C
in
C hristopher D. C uttone is a Portland free
lance writer.
G lenn W illiams writes poetry, prose, plays,
periodica and pom in Portland.
eating out
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