The Rogation Dragon

Creatures, reason is the groin of the soul: the generative and most vulnerable part. This was my first thought as I read The Spanish Bawd, a scabrous tragicomedy from 1499 that is considered the first Renaissance work in Spanish literature. In Spain this work is known as The English Lecher.

Creatures, I’m writing this on December 24, the feast of Adam and Eve! Unofficial but traditional, like so many good things. It’s been a wild year for your dizzily dancing Dragon. I’ve spent my first year as a California girl: poppies and bird-of-paradise, fog lights and flood zones, mission churches and high schools where they dock points if you don’t use AI. Welcome to California, America’s Tomorrowland; hope you like driving. I launched a nonprofit this year, for my sins.

Way back in 2005 I was up late one night, drinking alone as one does, and I wrote this thing… this act of cultural criticism, you should pardon the expression: the past and the future are both gayer than the present … of the five senses, sight is the least gay (but watching and looking are very gay indeed) wanting what you get is gayer than getting what you want more I guess Creatures, I’ve been away for a while, partly because work heated up and partly because I was reading this vast tome...

Creatures, if this is organized crime, I’d hate to see the messy kind. ...In this edition, I revisit Raymond Chandler, play a ghost game, and offer an alternative history of gay liberation. You can consider this election counterprogramming, I guess. I’ve said my piece about the election, in the last two paragraphs here. The only thing I’d add to that is that Donald Trump and his spokesmen seem to spend a lot of time thinking up ways to make America more racist. They’ve told you want they want. Enough.

Creatures, the midnight hour is close at hand! In this edition of your devilishly dancing Dragon, some underrated horror films for your October pleasure; my 2024 Halloween playlist; and a volunteer request. We’ll do the last thing first, sorry. What Did You Learn in the All-Volunteer Army?

Creatures, the wilderness is calling us. In this edition, more of my slow-burn Plautus obsession, and notes on the first two seasons of “Yellowjackets.” Plus a small ad. Roman Laughter Is Creepy… Because Roman Everything Is Creepy I got into Plautus because of this phenomenal book by Amy Richlin, on the startling ways Plautus gives voice to enslaved people. In Plautus’ time, actors were themselves usually slaves, and some slaves would also be able to see their plays during public festivals.

Creatures, screen creatures, glowing creatures! Creatures of promise and fear! I liked Jane Schoenbrun’s 2021 We’re All Going to the World’s Fairwell enough. It had a cool look, the screenglow in the teen’s angst-darkened bedroom, and it played in unexpected ways with its central questions: On a genre level, is this horror or drama, i.e. is the creepy online game the main character is playing real or just imagination?

Creatures, I am mostly in the throes of nonprofit launching (from Gay Catholic Whatnot to Gay Catholic Throes I guess), and even my fun reading was actually a book I’ll be reviewing for cash. Secret subtext: I am still reviewing books for cash… pay me cash to review books. I should have some fun stuff for you all next week, but in the meantime, here’s a review I’ve had kicking around for a while, of a book I think many of you will enjoy. Rhaina Cohen was at a bar when it happened.

The first time I read Misery it seemed to come in flashes, these lightning shards that stuck with me for decades afterward: jagged black pilings on a beach, signifying unspeakable pain; gray scum sliding across the dirty water in a floor bucket, tipped up to force someone in a bed to drink; a phantom rising from behind a couch, misery risen from the grave. A photo album filled with obituaries, called Memory Lane.

Creatures, what are you supposed to do when people are demanding that you have tender and selfless emotional reactions, and you are actually having them, but the thing is that you’re Philip Roth? This is the dilemma of The Ghost Writer, which I knew of as, “the one where Philip Roth gets weird and sordid about Anne Frank.” Obviously it’s bad, right? Obviously this was a terrible idea, and even I, on record as a Roth-symp, would avoid it. But I didn’t, and I’m glad.