Just like they tell me in the submission guidelines of pretty much every place on the planet, I subscribe to several literary journals a year. Of course I can’t afford to subscribe to all the journals I submit to, but I switch it up every year, changing my subscriptions to a different five or six (or seven, depending on how flush I feel), and I figure that over time I’ll eventually be able to financially support most of the great places that publish great fiction.

And it’s interesting, as a reader, to see what works and what doesn’t in different places. The Missouri Review, for example, runs author photographs alongside the Table of Contents. I like this - I think. Maybe I don’t. Because invariably, my issue arrives and I scan the names of the authors, looking for someone whose work I’ve enjoyed before - and end up making my decision about who to read first based on who looks cutest in the photographs. And since I’m a gay guy, that means I tend to start with men. How problematic!

This issue, it was Wade Ostrowski.  He looks pretty cute in his photo - so his fiction must be good, right?

Of course this is just me. And I’m terribly shallow. It’s a gay thing.

(No it’s not. That’s terrible.)

I’m exaggerating when I say I focus solely on the sexy. But there’s always a human connection that gets forged when we look at a photo of someone. And that’s nice. Maybe it’s the hotness we go for, or the wisdom or the nice smile or the lines below the eyes, or the lips coming together mysteriously.

Moving through Grand Central last weekend and there’s a sudden crush of people on the steps leading up to the Vanderbilt Entrance, and I’m stuck in the stalled mob of folks gawking to get a look at whatever’s being shot in the big bright banks of lights… and it’s Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and there’s Christopher Meloni, who is fine as f*ck, and I’m turned to stone along with everyone else, and there are sixty production assistants telling us to “keep it moving,” and there’s dozens of cops, and it’s impossible to tell who is a real cop and who is a TV cop, and I snap this photo on the fly, I’m moving and so is he, so I know it looks like he’s some kind of melting witch or angry old man… but, for real, that’s who that is.

The go-go boy walks by and leaves a cloud of bowling-alley wax smell; his body, lubed up for the lights and turned blue-and-then-red by flashing strobes, looks sticky and insubstantial.

Hungry men of all ages stare up at stuffed crotches and marble thighs. They curve dollar bills into underwear that cost as much as the boy’s weekly food budget. They leer; they stare; they feel economically superior and physically inferior all at once.

And it occurs to me: go-go boys are just naked panhandlers. They are engaging in the same basic activity: a bare-bones display of themselves, in the hopes that it will move someone to give them a dollar. And people give for a lot of reasons, with pity being right up by the top. Pity and the momentary relief of feeling like no matter how poorly you might be doing economically, there’s someone worse off - there’s a desperate human being literally begging for one of those crinkled damp singles in your pocket.

I’m not saying this to be mean to go-go boys. I work closely with and consider myself friends with a lot of people who are panhandlers, so I recognize the courage and the sense of self that are necessary for both forms of soliciting the public.

But I do find it ironic/offensive that the fine upstanding Chelsea men who are so happy to ogle a gym-addicted go-go stud will then turn around and lobby hard to oppose the opening of a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, using deeply problematic fear-mongering language about “those people” taking over “our streets,” all with a heavy, hard-to-miss racist subtext when you consider what a disproportionate percentage of the homeless community is African-American.

The club was lame. The party was lame. The go-go boys and the bad music and the anti-homeless hostility of the property-owners and “community leaders” in the city’s foremost queer neighborhood had me depressed.

At the gym I break my own rule about never ever watching any cable news programs, not on purpose, but because the least bad thing on the wall of televisions (The Two Towers) is on a commercial break, and my eyes move from monitor to monitor while I push and pull the elliptical trainer back and forth, and on Telemundo it’s some Spanish-language Survivor equivalent, with impossibly-tanned men sweating and scheming deliciously, and on TBS it’s Michael Douglas doing stupid things because he’s anxious about getting old, moving his hand through thinning hair…

… and then on CNN it’s a series of business-suited men talking about Afghanistan, a new report or handful of casualties requiring the talking heads to start spinning again.

These three, they could be the same white man at 30 and then at 45 and then at 60. They work for the Wall Street Journal or the Council on Foreign Relations; they went to Harvard and West Point. They disagree on little things and agree on the big ones. Like we need to be in Afghanistan.

Before commercial we cut to the handsomest man at the table, who says that yes, sure, of course, there are lots of reasons why the war is a big terrible mess, but that if we pull out of Afghanistan, “there will be human rights abuses that will shame us.”

From this, we cut immediately to the sharp blue star logo of Lockheed Martin, and the words WE NEVER FORGET WHO WE’RE WORKING FOR.

Who are they working for, exactly? And who is CNN working for? And who is that handsome man, who by virtue of his handsomeness becomes the one whose words matter most, working for?

This is the same day that Wikileaks makes what it is calling the “largest intelligence leak in history,” six years/91,000 documents/200,000 pages worth of reports and documents by soldiers and analysts. These pompous grave-faced men on CNN are telling us how pulling out of Afghanistan would undo all the hard work that our deal beleaguered vital ally Pakistan is doing… even though, according to these astonishing leaked documents, “Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid.”

To me, this is perfect evidence of how hard mainstream media works to keep you from understanding the realities behind the war. But then again, I already believe that this is the case, so it’s easy for me to see it. I wonder what someone who didn’t would see. They would probably see handsome confident men saying things they desperately want to believe are true.

The train comes out from the underground and we rejoice, this car full of strangers, all of us looking across at this infinity of brick and chimneys and bright graffiti, calmed, reassured, somehow, like the real world is a TV show that could have been canceled while the subway took us through dark nothing. The Bronx is immense and still, dark clouds overhead and rain impending.

The Kenyon Review, via my Google Reader, informs me that it is Dalloday - which I take to mean the day on which Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway takes place, or at least a day when people are supposed to read the book. And I realize I need to re-read it, not having done so since college. I loved it then. but could not help read it as an attempt at another Ulysses, rather than a critique of it (or maybe I did read it as a critique and could not see where it succeeds as such). What I see now is that Mrs. Dalloway is a book about people living life, in community, in an astonishing state of interconnectedness, whereas Ulysses is about people who are fundamentally alone, whose interactions and circumperambulations (not a word, I know) and encounters only serve to underscore their basic isolation from one another.

And then I’m at a funeral and overhear someone say that it’s the 118th birthday of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, and just last week I was reading about his death in prison, where he was held by a Soviet-sponsored military junta. And how when he died, his captors declared “the end of the Solomonic dynasty.”

And then I’m at Walking With Dinosaurs at Madison Square Garden, me and J. taking Christina out for her birthday, and there are ENORMOUS ANIMATRONIC FRICKIN DINOSAURS, and the place is full of squealing dinosaur-obsessed kids, like I used to be, like I still am.

But the dinosaurs are all dead now. They were awesome and huge and had big claws and fangs and ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years - and they’re gone. Everything ends. Every system eventually sputters out. No oppression goes on forever. Dynasties fall. Corporations and governments crack apart or get consumed. People die. The fat wheezing man behind us, the little kids shaking their plastic glow sticks in the row in front of us.

Everything dies, and is it any wonder we want ways to keep on living? Royal dynasties, great books we hope will keep on being read long after we’re gone? The hope that one day someone will dig up our bones and bring us back to life as robots?’

The ever-thought-provoking Jim Johnson has an interesting analysis of some of the rhetoric surrounding war photography, which does a good job at getting at some of what makes me uncomfortable around the way journalism and media discourse frames and discusses the war and the folks wrapped up in it.

Jim asks: “If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn’t it possible to see the ‘human interest’ approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?”

So much war photography serves to suck us up in the human drama, the pathos of real people in intense situations, that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We forget about the policies and the greed and the politics and the land-mine manufacturer executives and the babies buried in the rubble.

He uses the phrase “visual euphemism,” to link war images with the way we understand war journalism - as something with a fundamental underlying dishonesty, as something built up out of deliberate obfuscation and the parroting of lies - with the end result that we walk away from each piece understanding the conflict a little less.

I see an unmistakable eroticism to the way soldiers are depicted in war photography. Young, strong, brutal men, occupying a weird moral space where the normal rules do not apply. The exhibit under discussion in this post includes a series of photos of “Soldiers Sleeping,” their shirtless tattooed bodies and open guileless mouths bespeaking simultaneous innocence and heroism. This follows a long tradition in representational art, going back to The Dying Gaul and beyond (at the time of that sculpture’s creation, nudity connoted heroism, and his representation in the nude in a Roman sculpture was an uncharacteristic “memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries”).

We respond to stories. Stories help us understand otherwise unimaginable things - the unthinkable suffering of war, for example, becomes real to us through our relationship to Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. And we respond to sex, to desire. To fear. To quote a poem I quote way too often:

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart

My theory is that we are socialized to respond to these images, to men who exemplify strength and violence and brutality. That we fetishize these men who are, depending on where you stand, heroes or hooligans or cannon fodder. That we start from fear and eventually reach a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thrall to these men whose sacrifice and slaughter help keep the game going, the wealth and the poverty and the profit and loss.

Still furious about what a dreadful piece of dreck M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender was (Ebert: “”The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented”), J. and I have begun at the very beginning and are watching the entire series of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s the only way to heal the harm that’s been done to these characters we love, this story that is so smart and so challenging.

Last night we watched the fourth episode from Season One, “The Warriors of Kyoshi,” and it’s astonishing the level of storytelling that they achieve here. 22 minutes, and the writers and producers manage to pack way more character development and emotional engagement than in the entire 90+ minutes of the film.

Aang gets his first taste of Avatar fame; it goes to his head; he behaves in a selfish way that puts the entire village of Kyoshi in danger; the Fire Nation attacks; he repents; he takes a risk to ride the Unagi and put out the fire.

Sokka is a misogynist. The Kyoshi Warriors stomp him flat. He has some internal turmoil. He humbles himself and asks to be trained by them. They make him wear a dress. The training they provide allows him to help fight the Fire Benders who invade the village. He says to Suki “I treated you like a girl, instead of like a warrior.” She says “I am a warrior. But I’m also a girl,” and he gets his first kiss.

I’m going to stop comparing the show to the movie as a way of showing how great the show is, because I could compare fecal matter to the movie as a way of showing how great fecal matter is. Taken on its own merits, this episode - like almost every other episode - is a marvel. The humorous touches throughout (especially the recurrent theme of Momo eating too many sweets and then getting sick); the balancing of the Series Story (Zuko chasing Aang; Aang’s preparation for his fight with Ozai) with the Season Story (Aang’s journey north to the Northern Water Tribe) and the Episode Story - it all adds up to some of the most charged, fun, emotional television I know of - and the fact that it’s a half-hour animated series on Nickelodeon is just more proof that amazing things can come out of any system…

And it’s funny, going back to the beginning, knowing how everything will end, how much more we can appreciate the complexity of character and the choreography of the fights and the art and the music. Freed from the obsession with what will happen next.

Season Three of  True Blood is almost halfway up (Episode 5 of 12 just aired), and I’m really loving it, maybe more so than the first two, which sometimes lacked an overall weight to the way the different plot lines added up.

Eric and Sookie and The Vampire King and Jessica and Sam are all going in interesting directions. I like the werewolves. I’m very curious about what Bill’s research into Sookie’s past is all about, and what the “payoff” is, but overall I’m not finding anything in his character’s actions or emotions that I can sink my teeth into. He’s being an asshole, and he’s being remorseful, but he’s not really giving us any of the WHY - obviously I don’t want to know all the answers, but I want to get a sense from the acting that Bill knows what he’s doing and why. Which I don’t.

Sam’s dad is definitely up to some ill shit, right? like, REAL ill. Like, molest-his-own-son ill, or truck-with-the-devil ill.

Jason Stackhouse’s storyline is really stupid and I’m done with it. BUT I am a little excited about this freaky chick he’s meeting up with. I’m wondering what new element of supernatural creature she’s going to bring.

It’s upsetting to me that every one of Tara’s plotlines seems to involve her getting manipulated/kidnapped/controlled by someone else. Last season it was Maryann, this season it’s Franklin. There’s a little glimmer of hope that she’ll fuck his shit up, but there’s also a lot of evidence that they’ll do like they did last year - have Sookie or some other gallant friend intervene to save her.

I really love Pam, and I wish the show realized what a great thing she is, how much potential she has to play a real role in the story. The first few episodes held out hope for her having more to do and say, and maybe the resolution to her current situation will put her front and center and give her more of a heavy narrative lift, but it could also go SOME TERRIBLE HORRIBLE OTHER WAY that would be one more dreadful character error, on a par with Godric’s badly-dropped narrative arc in Season Two.

It’s nice to see Lafayette losing his cool! And I’m wondering when the other shoe will drop with that fine fine man who is all over him, and the dark shit he no doubt has in store for us…

Pam: “I don’t know why people feel they can confide in me. Maybe I smile too much. Maybe I wear too much pink. But please remember I can rip your throat out if I need too”

The new issue of Gargoyle is out, and it contains my short story “The Last Sleepover.”

Along with about a billion other stories and poems! Seriously, the thing is massive, and the overall quality level is very high. If you’re gonna buy a random issue of a random literary journal, there’s a good bang for your buck if you go ahead and get this one.

Here’s the opener (and by the way - in copy-and-pasting this in, I noticed a typo in the very first paragraph. dammit!):

“By the time I got to Hettie’s house, most of the blood in the seat of my briefs had dried. My watch said midnight. I crouched on her porch, hands in pockets, ear against the door. A pane of ribbed glass ra alongside it, so you could see inside but only make out light and shapes.

“Temperatures will continue to fall as the storm moves east,” said Hettie’s television. “Record snowfall tonight, so plan on staying home tomorrow. And don’t venture out unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Snow covered me. I rang the doorbell and the weather man went dead. Soon Hettie came towards the door, ghostlike, a bright glob.

“Hello?” Fear smeared her voice.

“Hettie, it’s me,” I said. “Shane. Timmy’s friend?”

No one makes dolls that look like old ladies. Babies and toddlers and buxom Barbie businesswomen, but never the aged. Yet the woman who opened the door was a doll—a tenth the size of the Hettie I remembered. Could Alzheimer’s erase body mass along with brain function? Cold wind hit her face, and she flinched.