Reading, Watching....

My last batch of library books are all due back tomorrow, and, for a wonder, I've read them all straight through, even the Oxford Anthology of Latin Literature, and I'm ready to return them on time, without incurring any fines.  

I may have been, perhaps, a little harsh on poor maladif Edmund White (calling him an Inconsequential Faggot) who, after all, did his best to create Serious Gay Fiction, and who, perhaps, could not have done so without (living a life that necessarily entailed) contracting HIV.  On the other hand, I may just have done him the severe justice he deserves.  Personally, I dislike all of White's fiction, finding it, though gay, insipid and characterless, devoid of real passion or depth; and, while not precisely noticeably effeminate, still lacking in any understanding or appreciation of essential, innate masculinity, which, like a silly-ass neo-Marxist Feminist Social Constructionist, he seems paradoxically both to resent and to disbelieve in.  In his dispute with Gore Vidal (gratuitously sentimentalizing Vidal's relationship with Timothy McVeigh), White utterly discredited himself, as he did inversely in his idolization of the vicious and utterly negligible (albeit popularly much esteemed) Michel Foucault, and comes very close to approving of Foucault's having deliberately spread the contagion of HIV in the last two or three years of his life, once he knew himself to be infected with it; much, I fear, as White himself may have done.

Meanwhile distracting me, but seldom entertaining me, I've gone disconsolately through the latest offerings on Netflix, finding only one new movie of surprisingly engrossing depth and interest: El Niño.  So today I've re-watched Le Fils de l'Epicier, and damned if it wasn't even better than I remembered it.