We're gonna build a henhouse. I build the best henhouses. And we're gonna make the foxes pay for it! (Glenn)

Italian for beginners --- an Italian review of the Green Eyes

Cool folks, cool, we have an Italian review of the GREEN EYES in:

The downside of international fame is of course that---(terrible sentence)---that you don't understand what people are saying until you invoke Google translate---and even then. But the Italian sounds so much better.

Questa è la trama del romanzo di Michael Ampersant, ma se pensate che sia sufficiente per capire il valore, e la complessità del testo vi sbagliate. C’è molto altro in Green Eyes: c’è il sesso – esplicito e sconcio, ma no per questo volgare-, ci sono i riferimenti culturali, le citazioni, c’è ingiustizia che ancora oggi chi è gay subisce e c’è una scrittura, che nel suo stile sintetico che a me piace tanto, è in grado di suscitare nel lettore un miscuglio di emozioni e sensazioni pazzesche. 

Sono tanti, o forse è meglio dire diversi, i personaggi che John incontro lungo la sua ricerca di una vita diversa da quella attuale, ma Maurice, un turista inglese, è quello che più di tutto acquista importanza ai fini della storia. Infatti viene violentato da un poliziotto, in una scena vivida che sconcerta e fa incazzare.

Doesn't it?

The sunset this evening

We sat down with Queer Voices

Cool, folks, we have an interview with Queer Voices, a fairly large outlet by our modest standards. Have a look.

Okay, here's one question and one partial answer from the interview:

Q: Do you have a favorite author? Your writing is unique.

A: Mark Twain would be the most important author. I really aim to poke fun at the world the way he does (I must have read Tom Sawyer 20 times). My writing style reflects in some sense my difficulties with the English language; it’s not wholly intended, and it’s not Twain’s style, of course. I can construct long sentences since I’m German, but often do I stumble, and the process of getting back on my feet, that’s also reflected in my style.

Mark Twain

Why the rich need more tax brakes

Brexit (4) (Maud)

Chamonix --- Mont Blanc

We're still in Switzerland, and so we go for another excursion, this time to Chamonix, the town that hosts the Mont Blanc, the Alps highest mountain at 4,870 meters. In our days, the Mont Blanc was Europe's highest mountain, but then this James Bond movie came out, where the spy identifies Mount Elbrus, in the Caucasus, as being photographed from the wrong (Russian) side, and Elbrus is 5,642 meters high, which is unfair, and then somebody else figured that the Caucasus is still Europe.

"Sorry, Blanc, way it is."

The white stud

We receive a letter from---hold on---his pseudonym is The White Stud---and he writes: 

"I am a sexologist with a Harley Street clinic in London, where I have developed a new, you-know-what therapy based on photography. I took the liberty to download one of your pictures for my highly medical purposes. I hope you agree with the result. Sincerely, your 'Stud'." 

There you have it folks, what can we say:

And here's the original, from a recent post:

What we like about Ted Cruz

Lets get this in briefly. We hated Ted Cruz, and still do. But now we've found something we like about him. His reasons for not endorsing Donald Trump. He's not going to endorse a person, he said, who's insulting his father, or his wife. I wouldn't do so either, by the way. And the Republican Party---the party of family values---is all aflutter. Of course.

French for beginners

"HuH?"

Yesterday

We felt uninspired, and so Chang suggested we should make an excursion to Lake Geneva. We passed Montreux twice---coming and going---and so had a chance to contemplate on the life of Vladimir Nabokov, who lived his last sixteen years in Montreux Palace, the hotel.

Brexit no. 3

Good writing: About a dog --- James Joyce

We've started reading Ulysses, and we're not disappointed. Yes, sure, there's a problem with the tome in that there's a problem with literature anyhow, especially the literate sort: the writing coasts on the associative skills of the reader, and them skills tend to diminish with space-time. Hundred years later, us never having been to Ireland---or to Dublin, where the "plot" is set, mercilessly---not sharing much of Joyce's classical education, there's a lot of stuff we don't dig. Thousand years down the road, it'll be worse. But we are learning. We've begun to steal already ("in the shell of his hands" has made it into the penultimate chapter of This Is Heaven). And we feel assured; Joyce---hundred times better than us, of course---uses roughly the same observational distance to his characters that we keep when engaging them in a dialogue. 

Good writing. Here, from the first part, Episode III (Proteus), about a dog: 

A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet. 

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Still in the Valais (Chang)

You may appreciate a sign of life from us, and here it is:

Q&A about our short story "The fountain of Geneva"

Cool, folks, we have a Q&A about our short story The Fountain of Geneva on Matthew Bright's site.

The main question...

Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of/didn’t get the attention you feel is deserved?

...and so we answer this question to the best of our abilities...ever wondered about the fountain of Geneva (jet d'eau de Genève), why its there? Does it mean anything? Is it a monument perhaps? What does it commemorate? All these questions are answered by our unreliable narrator John Lee, the first-person antihero of the GREEN EYES, and by his even less reliable interlocutor Richard Zugabe, librarian of Geneva's municipal archives. And the answers? Scandalous, of course, cum-drippin,' and unheard-of. Enjoy. Here's the link again.

Brexit no.2

French for beginners

After Orlando

“Broadway for Orlando”: The Exclusive Music Video from Playbill on Vimeo.