yeah, we're just being smart.

I will defend mysteries as a genre to the death, as they make up 90% of what I read, and many are actually, you know, good books. I admit some are good reads but not good books per se, but still!

Jesse, I completely and passionately believe that every book is a real book. I was riffing on Erika.

The point being, there are books you can tell your English professor you read without flinching. Those are the Real Books, which is different from being real books.

I was very restrained today at the Strand and only bought 3 books from my TBR list, but I also treated myself to a 1959 Modern Library of Out of Africa with a fabulous dustjacket.

I am still plugging away at The Night Inspector. Really lovely language, I think people would like it. Also, Melville is a character in it, which is interesting with the recent discussion in this thread. Makes me think I should finally getting around to reading him, but not right now.

Real Person Fic!

::runs away screaming::

The hardboiled kind...Mosley, Paretsky, Grafton, Lehane. Pretty respectable stuff and still I felt like saying "I read real books, too."

Mysteries are real books. Some of them are even good. Less than I'd hope, of course, but there you are.

Mosley, for instance, rocks my world. "Devil in a Blue Dress." He rips into the world around him with such a beautiful mix of scathing intensity and deepfelt humanity, and manages to tell a ripping good yarn.

I think the term "anti-intellectual" is not the best word for the phenomenon as I understand it. What I've seen can be better described as "anti-smart." We've got the sneering phrase "Oh, you think you're so smart" for a reason. It's a defensive reaction of peple who are afraid folks with more education are somehow sneering at them. These people could not care less what kind of intellectual program you're persuing, the sheer fact that you have obscure--to them--knowledge and education and interests threatens them. They may be flashing back to a horrible school experience and never really hooked into the idea that they may be smart too.

It's also faintly un-American to be too smart. Our history and folklore are full of people who succeeded--defined as getting filthy rich--without much education, who made it by being gung-ho and clever and shrewd. "I didn't need no book-larning' to get where I am today" or "I dropped out of school as soon as I could so I could start making money" are common statements. The smart kid walking home with his books is a standard target for the good ol' boys-to-be on the corner.

I was threatened more than once in grade school for knowing the answers in class, because I made everybody else look bad. Looking back, there was a definite impression that I was getting above myself by being smart. Even my extended family though my parents were a bit weird for insisting that all their children go to college.

I am finally reading And The Band Played On. It is so hard, so hard, to read the early history. I was an adult by 1981, so I clearly remember the world pre-AIDS. When you worried about birth control, not safe sex -- girls took the Pill or used a diaphragm, and the condom was a second-best alternative, one that pissed most boyfriends off. (Sure, there was herpes, but nobody I knew worried about it.)

So reading about all those dying gay men having no idea what hit them... brrrrr. And it's (the history) only going to get worse from there.

Oh god. And The Band Played On makes me so incredibly sad and angry. The history of AIDS, especially the early history, is the one topic above all others guaranteed to bring on the tears. I just watched Longtime Companion a few months ago and was incoherent for a few hours afterwards. It's so awful to contemplate.

When Reagan died and we kept seeing his virtues extolled everywhere, all I could think was "This is the man who laughed at the AIDS crisis for the entire length of his presidency, because it was affecting gay men." LAUGHED. More than anything else, that is the reason why I don't have the slightest amount of respect for the man. How many people would still be alive today, how many would be uninfected if the US government had taken some goddamn responsibility for fighting the spread of AIDS?

Shit, and now I'm crying again.

When I first moved to SF in 1986 the bath-houses were just being closed. I remember walking through the Castro then with one of my medical school friends and she said, "Almost fifty percent of the men you see here today are infected." It was so sobering - that was a death sentence then. I know gay men in their fifties who lost their entire generation. You used to see men on the street with KS all the time - it was such a visible marker then.

It really forced the Castro to change - but there were some positives out of that too. ACT UP was effective for a few years before they went totally nutbar. But it did radicalize younger queers and it really changed the relationship between gays and lesbians in San Francisco (because so many lesbians wound up being caregivers). I've watched it go through so many cycles, from denial to bleakest mourning (so many funerals), to radicalizing, to the current group of young guys barebacking again.