Glossary of References
Epigraphs
Tennessee Williams & Honesty
“Perhaps you will accede to my claim of exceptional honesty, both as writer and man. ...For two and a half years I have been companioned by a stormy young man [Robert Carroll] given to verbal abuse in the lingo that he acquired during his military service in Southeast Asia. He says that he loves me. I ask myself, ‘How could he?’ ...We are both Southerners, we are both writers, and both of us are committed to honesty in our work and lives. About honesty in work: There are two kinds: honesty with taste, and honesty without it.”
- Tennessee Williams, Memoirs, p. 66.
Tennessee Williams wrote his Memoirs in the early 1970s (published 1975), when he was in a long-term relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and writer much his junior. Though they separated in 1979, Carroll is the only individual other than Williams’ sister Rose named in his will.
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Williams’ frank and open discussion of his sexuality in the Memoirs caused a media uproar, exemplified by the New York Times review:
“Now, up to this point a variety of impressions have assaulted the reader, a variety one may safely call staggering, considering the candor with which Mr. Williams unburdens himself of his sex life. But curiously enough, none of these impressions provoke judgments of Mr. Williams's sanity. For this is so distinctly Tennessee Williams talking that it never occurs to us to judge him objectively. Here is a voice so familiar- now dripping Southern charm, now stuttering anxiously, now camping it up outrageously- that we listen inside of it instead of measuring its wave lengths.
...Here is the voice's gossipness, along with its lyricism; here is its bitchiness, as well as its tenacious devotion to art. Here is its fear of aging and death, its compulsive flight from loneliness, its yearning after permanent love.
...We may grow weary of his incessant search for young men who gratify his sexual urges (though for this he apologizes in a way: ‘I am sorry that so much of this 'thing' must be devoted to my amatory activities, but I was late coming out, and when I did it was with one hell of a bang.’).
...And of course there is his homosexuality, or rather the manner in which he seems compelled to flaunt it.”
Read the full review here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-memoirs.html
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“Baby, this one’s for you,” he tells himself whenever Mr. Right Now appears, but he seems to be realistic about safe sex with strangers even before the onslaught of AIDS. Recommending “that penetration be avoided” with hustlers “as they are most probably all infected with clap,” he may be the only Pulitzer Prize winner to write about A-200, a product used for ridding your body hair of crab lice.”
- John Waters, in his essay adapted from his introduction to a new edition of Memoirs, published by New Directions.
Read the full essay here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/books/review/Waters.t.html
Susan Sontag & Camp
“25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.
41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'"
First published in 1964 in The Partisan Review, "Notes on 'Camp'" is the seminal essay on the genre.
Read the full text here: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html
from "Notes on Camp and Anti-Camp" by Bruce LaBruce
Read the full article: http://www.glreview.org/article/notes-on-camp-and-anti-camp-2/
Scene One
"Scary Movie 2"
Oh, the 2001 Horror Comedy Sequel...
"For those who helped make 'Scary Movie' the highest-grossing (no pun intended) R-rated film ever, there's more of the serial tastelessness that marked its landmark success last year and more, too, of the ridiculousness: a good-size chunk of the cast that was killed off in the first movie is back in this one."
- from the New York Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/04/movies/film-review-they-see-dead-people-and-lots-more.html
"Mrs. Gulch"
from the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz
Miss Almira Gulch is the cruel neighbor of Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry in Kansas. She threatens, with an order from the sheriff, to have Toto put to sleep for biting her. Dorothy and Toto decide to run away to escape her. She is portrayed by Margaret Hamilton, who is double-cast as the Wicked Witch of the West.
"antecubital"
of or relating to the inner or front surface of the forearm, in front of the elbow
"Book of Mormon"
The blockbuster religious satire musical had its first replica run, separate from the national tour and its Broadway opening, in Chicago, from December 2012 to October 2013. Its home, the Bank of America Theater (via Broadway in Chicago) is in Chicago's downtown Loop, and is currently hosting Hamilton.
