giovanni more books?

If you read the Wikipedia page for Giovanni's Room you'll see that there is a reference to it appearing on a list of "100 best gay and lesbian novels" in 1999; that list can be found here with Giovanni's Room at number 2. By my calculations (and counting The Alexandria Quartet as one, as they do here) I've read just nine of these, the ones I haven't already mentioned being A Boy's Own Story, Myra Breckinridge, The Swimming Pool Library, Naked Lunch, Pale Fire, Moby-Dick and To Kill A Mockingbird. Now you might say, as I did upon reading the list: well, fair enough, A Boy's Own Story, for instance, is pretty explicitly a gay coming-of-age novel, but the elements in, say, Moby-Dick (i.e. the whole Ishmael-Queequeg thing), are at best hinted at and not necessarily central to the plot, and I honestly (with the caveat that it must be thirty years since I read it) can't remember any in To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout is a bit of a tomboy by the standards of the time so you might argue for some challenging of traditional gender roles, but it's a bit of a stretch, unless the original text included some ferocious lesbian frottage that my 1980s Pan paperback omitted for some reason.

Anyhoo, as it happens there's been another "100 best novels" list doing the rounds this week, and it's this one from the Guardian. "Never has such a list been more needed", says the accompanying article explaining the methodology, which is a fogeyish reference to how kids today don't read books any more because they're all too busy sexting and playing Roblox, but which I also think is a bit of a stretch given how many of these lists there are out there already. The methodology is of interest, though, because this one was from a poll of novelists; others are quite commonly compiled from a public vote, and the two methods always generate quite different lists. I could have predicted in advance, for instance, that a list of novelists' favourite novels would have Middlemarch at number 1 (full disclosure: I've never read it), because they always do. Anything compiled by polling Joe and Josephine Public, on the other hand, will always feature Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings highly, among other things.

Anyway, my overall count from the Guardian list is, I think, thirty-two, of which nineteen have featured on this blog, and they are: Beloved, Pride And Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Midnight's Children, The Remains Of The Day, Lolita, The God Of Small Things, Wolf Hall, Giovanni's Room, The Leopard, Never Let Me Go, Blood Meridian, My Antonia, Rebecca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ragtime, Invisible Cities and The Road. 

There are a handful of novels which feature on the gay and lesbian list and the Guardian list; I can't be bothered to try and find them all but Giovanni's Room is certainly among them, as is Moby-Dick. One that significantly isn't is To Kill A Mockingbird, which is absent altogether from the Guardian list. I don't want to get into the game of critiquing the contents of either list (though you might have noted that I have done exactly that a couple of paragraphs above), but a measure of how surprising I find this is that I had to re-do the search a couple of times just to make sure I hadn't messed it up (it does appear on the two previous Guardian lists from 2003 and 2015 I linked to above). That's one where I would side with the public vote, which would undoubtedly have included it. 

the last book I read

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

David is an American in Paris in the 1950s, just mooching around doing not very much, and with no apparent need to earn a living thanks to occasional handouts from his father. His girlfriend Hella, a feisty modern liberated type of girl, has headed off to Spain on her own to do some exploring and plans to return to Paris in a few weeks, whereupon she and David have some vague plans culminating in probably returning to the USA, getting married, squeezing out a few babies, the usual stuff.

Having borrowed some money from his friend Jacques (who is older, clearly gay, and clearly has some designs on David which David is dimly aware of and not above exploiting) David agrees to accompany him to a bar run by Jacques' friend Guillaume. Here David meets handsome Italian barman Giovanni and experiences some troubling turmoil, you know, down there.

But actually we already know some of this, and also that something catastrophic has occurred since which has resulted in Giovanni being under sentence of death by guillotine. We know this because of the framing device, written from David's perspective some time later as he stays in a hotel somewhere outside Paris; this framing device also makes reference to some formative homosexual experiences in David's teenage years where some harmless boyish rough-and-tumble and play-fighting high-jinks and a brisk shower and rub-down afterwards led inexorably to some furious cock-gobbling, all subsequently shrugged off and forgotten about.

So there is a general sense that David's sexuality might be a bit fluid and ill-defined, even (perhaps especially) to himself. It's not surprising, therefore, when after a night at the bar, some more drinking elsewhere and a group excursion to Les Halles (this is back when it was still a market) for a breakfast of white wine and oysters, David and Giovanni end the night by heading off to Giovanni's place for a portion of Italian salami. 

And so a relationship is established, mainly conducted in various bars (including Guillaume's) and in Giovanni's room in a house near Place de la Nation. Giovanni's initial twinkly Italian charm has morphed into some slightly needy clinginess, and David is trying to maintain some arm's-length detachment in the knowledge that Hella will return at some indeterminate date in the nearish future, at which point the merde will presumably hit the ventilateur. But, armed with some newly-acquired self-knowledge, are David's previous plans with Hella for a future life together what he really wants any more anyway?

Hella eventually returns, David heads down to the railway station to meet her (without telling Giovanni where he's going, of course), and they resume their previous life of swanning round Paris together and having nice God-fearing vanilla heterosexual sex. Eventually the inevitable happens and they run into Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop. Rather surprisingly, given Giovanni's theatrical relief at David's reappearance and dismay at his having abandoned him and not told him where he was going, and Jacques' furious eyebrow-raising and Kenneth Williams noises, Hella shrugs the whole thing off as a disagreement between friends and Giovanni being stereotypically Italian and demonstrative, rather than as evidence of something rum going on. 

David subsequently returns to Giovanni's room to see him and explain to him that they can't have a future together; even in relatively bohemian 1950s Paris any official public acknowledgement of a gay relationship would be impossible. Later, while David is back with Hella, news comes through that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. After a brief period on the run Giovanni is captured and sentenced to death. Hella is sympathetic to David's dismay at this, believing that the two were nothing more than close friends, but eventually David decides he can't live a lie any more and must embrace his true identity, which he does by going to nearby Nice and hooking up with a whole battalion of sailors; while winding down with a refreshing drink after a gruelling session of being recreationally spit-roasted by the entire crew of the French Ark Royal (L'Arche Royale, if you must), who should walk into the bar but Hella, and the jig is up. She has always known, it seems, on some level at least. 

And so the collapse of David's life is complete: Hella returns to America, and sentence of death is carried out on Giovanni.

This was James Baldwin's second novel, published in 1956, and differs from his first, Go Tell It On The Mountain, in that all the major characters are white. Baldwin's stated reason for doing this was that he specifically wanted to write a novel about sexuality and didn't want another axis of oppression and struggle getting in the way. Obviously there's no reason why you have to centre black characters if you, the author, are black (as Baldwin was), any more than you can only write about gay characters if you are yourself gay (as Baldwin was). Equally there's no reason why a straight person (me, for instance) of whatever skin colour living in the early 21st century can't enjoy a book about gay life in 1950s Paris - which, as it happens, I did. Some of this stuff is universal even if some of it is also quite specific, and it is in any case possible to imagine yourself living a different life to the one you actually have; that, arguably, is the whole point of fiction. 

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is widely acknowledged as a classic of gay literature and I wouldn't disagree with that assessment; other books on this list to have featured gay relationships as a central plot point include A Stone Boat, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Days Without End and not many others that I can see on a quick scan through the archives.

One thought you might have on reading the bits in the framing sections about Giovanni's impending execution is: wait a minute, surely they weren't still guillotining people in the 1950s? It turns out they very much still were: the last person to be executed by guillotine in France (or anywhere else for that matter, if we're talking about state-sanctioned judicial killings) was Hamida Djandoubi as recently as September 1977, and the last person to be executed publicly in this way was Eugen Weidmann in June 1939, recently enough for the event to be filmed and, needless to say, available on YouTube (that video isn't particularly graphic, but does feature someone's head being cut off, so caution is advised). Execution by the literal detaching of someone's head from their body does seem more visceral and startling than, say, shooting someone, but is almost certainly quicker and more painless (albeit a bit more messy) than some of the methods still used today, mainly in the USA, like electrocution, gassing and lethal injection.

celoubrity junkeylikey of the day

Cast your mind back, if you will, to (roughly) this time three years ago, when we'd just moved house and were sifting through the mountain of junk that the previous occupant had left behind. We never actually got to meet him - the closest we got was talking to him through a closed front door when we came to do a second viewing of the house with the estate agent and found him unexpectedly at home, self-isolating after contracting COVID. Perhaps, and I'm being as charitable as I possibly can here, this disrupted his plans to do some clearing out of assorted junk in the lead-up to handing the house over and eventually led to him just saying fuck it, I'm off, and bailing out.

The aforementioned junk was all over the house, in the loft and also in the rickety metal shed occupying a corner of the back garden. The stuff in the shed probably contained the most interesting material, including a pair of handcuffs and a diary which I think belonged to the previous owner's ex-wife and seemed to have been started in the wake of her having been dumped by some subsequent boyfriend.

On a similar theme to the handcuffs, the junk in the loft contained a browned old paper CD/DVD envelope bearing the legend "ORGY" but sadly with nothing inside. Maybe this was the one item the previous owner deemed worthy of packing up and taking with him. 

Also in the loft was an intriguing sepia photo - from quite a few years back, judging by the size of the collars - which could be the previous owner, but could also, judging by the heavy-lidded eyes that have clearly Seen Too Much, be a young Lou Reed. 

Anyway, the rickety metal shed pictured above (the green structure just visible on the right of the first photo) is no more and has been replaced by something unimaginably more fabulous, which I might devote a whole future post to, if I can be arsed. 

under the bridge downtown, is where I drew some blood

This is some tremendously nerdy fun - you know those signs you get on low bridges to tell you that you, a lorry driver, are about to unzip the top of your vehicle like an old-fashioned can of sardines? Different countries have different signage to warn unsuspecting drivers of what's ahead - the yellow diamond in the photo on the right is from the USA, in particular the low railway bridge in Durham, North Carolina which is notorious enough to have its own website.

In Britain we operate a system of red signs, sometimes circles and sometimes triangles depending on some rather opaque rules, with clearance heights listed in both metric and imperial measurements. If you thought the rules governing sign shape were arcane, though, wait till you hear the rules governing the derivation of the clearance height figures. I mean, I won't go into it here but the end result is that - somewhat counter-intuitively - a single metric height can be associated with several different imperial heights, and vice versa. 

This opens up the possibility of a sort of sign-spotting subculture emerging, and, as you might imagine, this being the internet, it has. This page lists all the combinations of signs that eagle-eyed people (let's call them people, for the sake of argument) have spotted around the country.

Lest I get too snooty about others' intense weirdness and nerdery, though, I should disclose that the first thing I did, about half-way through watching Matt Parker's video, was think to myself: ooh, I bet I know where a good one is that might not be on the list. And it is in this interesting location near Bishton, just a few miles east of Newport, where a minor road crosses the South Wales Main Line via an interesting take-your-pick over/under arrangement. Head for the level crossing and you might have to wait for a train to pass; head under and you won't have to do that but beware if you've forgotten that you've got the bikes on the roof rack. I have been through the tunnel, a few years back; I can't remember which car it was in but I do remember stopping just in front of the entrance and getting out to visually inspect the clearance, just in case. I assume it can't have been the current family enormo-vehicle, a Seat Alhambra, because there's a good chance that might not have fitted under at all. Don't imagine that going over the top means you can take a fully-extended cherry-picker that way, by the way, as there is also a maximum height restriction of 5 metres to avoid getting entangled with some power lines. 

Anyway, it turns out this is already on the database as the type specimen for the 1.7m/5'6" height combination. Interestingly the type specimen for the 1.7m/5'9" height combination is only a handful of miles away in Caldicot, part of a similar choose-your-fighter under/over tunnel/level-crossing set-up. The lowest signed clearance on the list is, thankfully, not on a road but on the Bude Canal and would presumably require you to own a very low-profile boat (a punt, say) and lie down in it if you wanted to pass underneath. 

the last book I read

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. 

Subtitled Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, this is a book primarily concerned with *checks notes* sex, and the evolution of human nature. "Sex" is a slightly problematic term here for several reasons, not least because it refers to two separate but related things - the binary separation of the human species into male and female (I can sense you shifting nervously in your chair, but we'll come back to that later), but also the physical act of love, coitus, jiggy jiggy. etc. 

The whole business of combining two sets of chromosomal material - zipping each one in half, sticking them together again, ensuring all the bits line up - is quite an overhead, though, and that's before you get into the overhead of taking a lady out to dinner, maybe a movie, some dimmed lights, scented candles etc., to get her in the mood for little bit of chromosomal combining, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Compare this with just splitting yourself in half and ending up with two genetically identical clones (as some species have done perfectly happily for a gajillion years) - possibly slightly painful, but quick, efficient and no-one has to argue over who picks up the taxi fare or has to sleep in the wet patch. 

I'm being slightly flippant here, obviously, but the point is that it really is a major overhead in energy terms and would clearly be selected against by evolution were it not for the benefit that it must confer. But what is that benefit? Essentially the first half(ish) of the book addresses that question, and the second half(again, ish) explores some of the sometimes counter-intuitive ramifications of choosing to do things this way. Some of the first half of the book covers similar themes to those covered (in more detail) in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, specifically all the stuff about the gene being the principal unit of selection and reproduction, and therefore responsible for some behaviour that would otherwise seem inexplicable, like altruism in favour of close relatives (who carry a similar set of genetic material). In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I read somewhere between a third and a half of The Selfish Gene, probably 20+ years ago, but never finished it, not because it wasn't an interesting read but more than likely because some shiny and tempting volume of fiction hove into view and distracted me. 

The main benefit of sexual reproduction, it seems, in large and complex organisms in particular, is that the regular mixing of genetic material into new and unique patterns provides a means of flushing out undesirable genetic mutations, and also staying one step ahead of the massed ranks of crazed and homicidal micro-organisms (viruses, parasites, etc.) that are out to invade our bodies, kill us and then feast on our rancid liquefied remains. It's more difficult for them to get into your house, steal your stuff and shit on the carpet if you keep changing the locks.

Hoary old phrases like "survival of the fittest" encourage the assumption that it's the organisms with the "best" genetic material that get first dibs on reproducing and populating future generations, and there is a very basic sense in which this is true - those with really disastrous genetic mutations are highly likely to die before they can reproduce. But this disregards sexual selection, i.e. how organisms decide which organisms of the opposite sex to mate and reproduce with. To put it another way, how would they know who had the "best" genetic material without running extensive genetic tests as part of the courtship process? One answer is for the candidates (and it's almost always the males, it being the females doing the selecting for the obvious reason that they carry the young) to display some physical adornment that advertises the good health and vigour necessary to produce, say, absurdly long or decorative tail feathers, but also the strength to overcome the physical handicap imposed by such things and survive to robust adulthood. Indeed, the more absurd and cumbersome the decoration, the more impressive the individual's achievement in thriving despite it, and so a sort of escalating feedback loop is created. 

So in fact the organisms that do best at passing their genes on to the next generation are those who are the most successful at attracting mates, not necessarily those with the "best" genetic material, assuming that term even means anything.

That's all very well for peacocks, you'll be saying, but I don't have a massive multi-coloured fan sticking out of my arse to attract the ladies. What have I got going for me? Well, in addition to all the obvious stuff like being fairly tall, reasonably symmetrical features, relative youth, solvency, good prospects, there is a theory that part of the reason humans evolved these gargantuan brains is as a result of sexual selection. This is in conflict with the usual explanations around needing the big brains for things like tool use and most obviously language and its uses for constructing large-scale societies, situation comedies and complex hire purchase agreements. What if the large brain and its function as a generator of charm, wit and poetry was itself a sort of virtual peacock's tail? That would explain its being larger than even dealing with language would seem to require, a sort of runaway feedback mechanism limited only by the female body's capacity to give birth to large-headed babies without needing impractically large hips, and as a consequence impractically expensive trousers.

I'm not sure I completely buy that theory, but it's an interesting idea. The difficulty with all this is avoiding the charge of concocting plausible-sounding just-so stories that fit the data without hard evidence that these supposed mechanisms actually exist. To pre-empt this charge Ridley does offer a blizzard of citations in the 30-page bibliography at the end, although I have no way of distinguishing between Professor George Eminent of the University of Science and A. Dimwit from the Academy of Dubious Claims, or at least not without doing a lot of legwork I'm not prepared to do.

It's interesting while reading a science-y book like this written by someone with an obvious regard for data and evidence and try to tease out their own biases - in Ridley's case the clearest one is a general dislike for anyone who leans (in his view) too far towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture argument, in particular the pioneers of social science such as Émile Durkheim, but also some more regular science-y people like BF Skinner and the behaviourists. I'm fairly sympathetic to Ridley's views here but it is interesting to note that in the 30-odd years since The Red Queen's publication in 1993 the "everything is culture" school of thought seems to have become more prevalent.

I couldn't say whether this is a view inherently linked to what you might (inaccurately) call the "everything is genetics" viewpoint, but the other thing you occasionally get a whiff of when Ridley strays into more general non-sciencey musings about society is a slightly unpalatable right-leaning free-market libertarianism. The relevance of this is to Ridley's ill-fated tenure as chairman of Northern Rock during its time as an early victim (in late 2007) of what's become known as the 2008 financial crisis. It's highly debatable how much Ridley's own role as non-executive chairman allowed him to dictate policy but it's certainly true that statements like this (from this 2007 George Monbiot article in the Guardian and therefore second-hand, so I have to trust that it's genuine) have a bum-clenchingly Ayn Rand-ish sound to them:

Bureaucracy, he argued, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world ... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them".

The elephant in the room that I have failed to acknowledge thus far is that the unstated premise of the whole book - i.e. that biological sex exists, is a highly-robust genetic mechanism and results in two sub-categories of Homo sapiens which have identifiably different physical bodies and attributes, some of which extend to behaviour - is now controversial in some quarters. This is a problem not solved by substituting the word "gender" for the word "sex", although Ridley does this to solve the different problem of confusion between the two different meanings of the word "sex" as mentioned above.

There was a time not that long ago when doing this (i.e. conflating "sex" and "gender") would have got you scolded/abused/cancelled, the idea being that "gender" was more about your self-presentation and even self-identification, in some individuals (i.e. transgender people) differing from your biological sex. More recently there has been a move towards the scolding/abuse/cancellation stuff switching to being directed at those who insist that they're different things (and maybe even that "gender" is just a slightly woolly and artificial sub-category of the more general group of things which could be called "what you're like"), and towards the ideologically pure position being that they're the same thing. 

Expressing any sort of a dissenting opinion about this stuff is liable to have you dismissed as basically Hitler, or, worse, JK Rowling, but for what it's worth I can see, from a strictly ideological/political standpoint, why people might do this (i.e. insist that they're the same thing and both equally social constructs - "everything is culture" again, I guess), since acknowledging that biological sex exists opens the way for the establishment of female-only categories in, for example, sports, and female-only spaces elsewhere, e.g. rape crisis centres. I do think denial of clearly demonstrable reality is unhelpful and unlikely to be sustainable, though.

Anyway, back to the book - not much more to say except it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and of course significant in the context of this blog in that it represents my first blog foray into the non-fiction genre. I'm pretty happy with the decision, overall, though I'm not going to continue with the practice of trailing in advance what genre my next book is from; you'll have to wait and see.