|
Contact Us Table of Contents Search Site Google listing of all pages on this website Site Map Toby Johnson's Facebook page Toby Johnson's YouTube channel Toby Johnson on Wikipedia Toby Johnson Amazon Author Page  Secure site at https://tobyjohnson.com  Also on this website: As an Amazon Associate
I earn from qualifying purchases. Toby Johnson's books: Toby's books are available as ebooks from smashwords.com, the Apple iBookstore, etc. FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned
from Joseph Campbell: The
Myth
of the
Great Secret
III GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe
SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:
A
Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods
THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil  TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams  CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell
IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey
Books on Gay Spirituality: White Crane Gay Spirituality Series
Articles and Excerpts:
Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco" About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996 The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality Why gay people should NOT Marry The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage
Gay ConsciousnessQ&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness What Jesus said about Gay Rights Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"? Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality What the Bible Says about Homosexuality Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men Waves of Gay Liberation Activity Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian? The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium Easton Mountain Retreat Center Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey
Enlightenment
Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara You're Not A WaveJoseph Campbell Talks about Aging What is Enlightenment? What is reincarnation? How many lifetimes in an ego? Emptiness & Religious Ideas Experiencing experiencing experiencing Going into the Light Meditations for a Funeral Meditation Practice The way to get to heaven Buddha's father was right What Anatman means Advice to Travelers to India & Nepal The Danda Nata & goddess Kalika Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva John Boswell was Immanuel Kant Cutting edge realization The Myth of the Wanderer Change: Source of Suffering & of Bliss World Navel What the Vows Really Mean Manifesting from the Subtle Realms The Three-layer Cake & the Multiverse The est Training and Personal Intention Effective Dreaming in Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven Gay
Spirituality
|
 Only the Good Parts by Daniel Curzon Xlibris Press, 436 pages March 1998 978-0738800202 Available used from Amazon.com     This review originally appeared in White Crane Journal #38, Fall 1998 This review contains an interesting and prescient analysis of the effects of Print-on-Demand publishing. In 2016, when I am posting this for posterity from the White Crane archives, some 15 years later, it seems like my predictions have come true. This novel by veteran gay writer Daniel Curzon is noteworthy for White Crane Journal for several reasons. Only one of them has to do with the content and message of the novel; the others have to do with its style and its medium of publication. Only the Good Parts is written following the rather old-fashioned technique of presenting letters between the characters. What modernizes this rather formal, dispassionate and emotionally distancing gimmick is that Curzon’s characters are sending each other faxes and emails and notes slipped under doors. There is an immediacy to the communications which make them surprisingly compelling. This gimmick does force some contrivance in the plot. The quarreling gay couple who form the core of the novel are forced into long distance situations so that there can be written communications between them. And the reader can’t help but wonder if their quarrels might not be resolvable by just giving each other a big hug—something the stylistic convention doesn’t allow. What’s amazing is how much information can be conveyed through these little snippets passing between the characters. Eliminated are all the usual tools of the novelist: gone the adjectives and descriptive passages; gone the writer’sl yric prose; gone composition of place and character. Everything is down to the bare bones of communication about the business of the story. It makes for fast, page-turning reading. What the book’s about is gay parenting by artificial insemination. The main character, Marc Brandt, connects with a lesbian midwife because he’s realized that his being gay does not necessarily exclude the possibility of having a child (and adding his genes back to the collective pool). His lover, Gordon, something of a spoiled narcissitic bitch, derides Marc’s desires and thereby unwittingly initiates the unravelling of their relationship and of Marc’s experience of parenting. For the first half of the book, the author seems to champion gay men having children in cooperative arrangement with lesbian couples. By the second half, when one of the lesbian mothers has gotten so paranoid of Marc and so possessive of the child that she’s driven her lover into a mental hospital and is threatening to charge Marc with sexual abuse, the argument FOR having offspring this way is certainly challenged. All the Good Parts discusses the pros and cons of what is certainly one of the themes of modern gay life and Curzon explains the issues well. It’s not entirely clear which side of the argument he comes down on, but from a wheelchair at the end of the novel Marc Brandt seems much the worse for his attempt at parenthood.  Curzon’s been an important and eccentric character in gay publishing for years. Most of his books have been self-published; he’s stood as a sort of defiant maverick against the trends and fads, ups and down of the publishing business. Only the Good Parts champions a potentially revolutionary new way of publishing that truly threatens that entire industry. Modern technology now makes it possible to market books electronically, to send them as data files through the phone lines to appear on a computer screen with no “book” every being manufactured, and to manufacture books—for those who want something to hold in the hand, not just see on the screen— one at a time to order. Only the Good Parts is “published” by Xlibris.com. At the “publisher’s” website, one can find a description of the book and an excerpt. Then with a few mouse clicks, if one is interested, one can “buy” the electronic downloadable version (for $8) or a very nice hardbound version ($24.95) which will be produced and sent by mail within a few weeks. A major problem in the pubishing industry is that traditionally books are manufactured in quantity before anybody every indicates they want to read them. At the top the industry is focused on hot shot editors trying to outguess the public and upcoming cultural trends by at least a year. Publishing houses invest huge sums of money on those guesses. Of course, a whole spin-off industry exists to sell the remainders, i.e., the books that got produced but never bought, at a tremendous discount. Authors— who, after all, make up the real core of the business — suffer at least two indignities because of this. First, of course, it’s hard to get a book published unless the publisher can be sure it can get its money back. That means the industry caters to the so-called lowest common denominator reader. And too many biographies of TV and movie stars get published and too many interesting but idiosyncratic manuscripts get rejected. Second, publishers get taxed on the inventory they accumulate, so they can’t afford to maintain slow sellers in their warehouses. Books quickly go out of print, are remaindered, or are just shredded in order to control inventory costs. Manufacturing a book to order sidesteps both problems. And, in certain ways, these are especially problems in the gay genre. Big publishers require big sales figures. In fact, of course, gay people are stastistically more likely to read books, but we’re still a marginal market.What confuses matters even more is that every so often the New York publishers jump on the gay bandwagon, proclaiming a newly discovered market. This results in expansion of gay-themed books in mainstream bookstores—which threatens the small network of independent gay bookstores (that in many ways make up the backbone of the national gay community). We all think it’s nice that our literature is widely available in mainstream stores; it seems to demonstrate social acceptance. But the fact is it pulls business from gay stores, hurts gay small presses that can’t get into the mainstream stores—and it allows homosexuals access to the books without having to make the coming-out step of going into a gay bookstore and therefore discovering what the community really consists of. And, worse, when the New York publishers decide to move on to a yet newer market, the plethora of gay books disappears (into the shredders) and, in the long run, there are fewer titles available and fewer bookstores and small presses. Xlibris cuts through many of these issues. From the author’s point of view, it’s a godsend. For about $500 you can bring your own book out and market it precisely to the people who’ll be interested in it. (And $500 is easily what it costs to xerox multiple copies of a manuscript and send them to potential publishers—who are generally too busy looking for blockbusters to pay any attention to the deluge of submissions they receive.) On the other hand, this new technological trend threatens the bookstores directly by simply leaving them out of the equation completely.The gay community one could stumble upon by coming into a gay bookstore is reduced to the electronic presence on the Internet. Perhaps Daniel Curzon’s book is important more for the way it exists than for what it’s about. It’s a good book. Interesting. Provocative. For all sorts of reasons. http://www.xlibris.com Reviewed by Toby Johnson, author of Gay Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness, The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell and other novels and books |
Toby Johnson, PhD is author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.
Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.
His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.
FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.
Two
Spirits is available as an
audiobook narrated by Arthur Raymond. 