The Death of Imagination

Last night I finished Alentejo blue just to be done with it. Why do I waste so much time with second-rate books? Well, because first-rate literature is generally more challenging. I made a stab at Artemio Cruz on the shuttle home but it was dense with description and I wasn't up to it. When I got home, I had the porch to myself and a stunning view of thunderheads over the lake catching the full evening sun and it was good to have a book I could interrupt at any moment to take in another cloud vista.

It had some decent parts but she really wrecked it with her characterisation of one of the Portuguese characters. Apparently a whole chapter about the morbidly obese guy trying to decide whether or not to eat a piece of cake wasn't enough to show how obsessed fat people are with food so she had to make it the leitmotiv of her description of the local festival, where all her various narrative threads come together in one room. It felt contrived and, at the same time, unsatisfying, so I'm not sure why she bothered.

In any case, I've moved on to a book I just learned existed, 邱妙津/Qiu Miaojin's《鱷魚手記》(Notes of a crocodile in Bonnie Huie's English translation). Apparently it was a groundbreaking work in Qiu's native Taiwan, even furnishing a slang word for "lesbian" based on the protagonist's name. All the agonised talk of "sin" and shame is familiar to me from similar works, but the style is a real departure. I can see why it made such a splash in 1994 when it was published; just a little earlier and it probably would've ended up on one of my college syllabi.

Are Bert and Ernie gay? And what does it matter?

This wasn't a question I was expecting to deal with today, but then the New Yorker had to go and grace its current issue with a cover depicting the pair snuggling on a couch before a television set bearing an image of the SCOTUS. Nuphy forwarded me a picture of it when it first came out and my reaction was, "You would like that." Personally I found it pretty banal. I must sound like an insufferable hipster for pointing out that a German weekly (the Magazin am Wochenende published by the Berliner Zeitung, unless I miss my guess--Nuphy and I both kept copies) did the same sort of cover back in 1997, to much less hubbub.

Some commentators (I'm really struggling not to use the pejorative label "mommy bloggers") seem pretty exercised about the way the image "sexualises children". It's a charge I have trouble wrapping my mind around, for two reasons: (1) the automatic equation of "marriage" (or "gay"?) with "sex" and (2) the identification of Bert and Ernie as "children". Apparently, they are "developmentally modeled on seven year-olds" according to Sesame Workshop (the successor to CTW). But growing up I never saw them that way. It was obvious that Sesame Street worked very different from the quasi-suburban neighbourhoods I ran around, but even so two seven year-olds sharing their own apartment? Children live with their parents; if you live on your own with no parents around, you must be an adult of some kind, even if you act pretty childish.

But even those who aren't prone to moral panic about adolescents are asking why we have to "make every relationship between two men sexual". I more amenable to this one, because I do think it's a shame how little room there is left for homosociality in our culture. Except that qwrrty went on to make a brilliant argument about how identifying two wholesome puppets on a popular children's show as queers was a subversive act of claiming some space for ourselves at a time when healthy depictions of gay male couples were all but absent in mainstream media. Though it may have begun as schoolyard sniggering, it ended up being an affirmation to thousands of us who came out in the 80s and 90s.

So, as it turns out, I actually do have a bit of a stake in asserting the acceptability or reading them as gay. Not the necessity; the great thing about popular characters (whether from literature or television or whatever) is that you can reinterpret them to serve your needs. If you're privileged enough not to have ever felt the need to bolster your self-esteem by identifying with a foam head draped over someone's arm, well bully for you. You probably benefited from a wealth of alternatives. But I took my role models where I could find them and one of those places was Sesame Street.