GLR May-June 2023

Believe in Fairy Tales again

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR: Amsterdam Angel & The Reverie Bubble

anthonyvanleeuwen.com @anthonyvanleeuwen

Available on Amazon “There's no other way to say it...Anthony van Leeuwen's writing is quite like magic. Whimsy, heartache and longing live in these pages. Sprookje is both Shakespearian and unapologetically queer. Anthony van Leeuwen inspires us to seek our own fairy tales, and in doing so, to f ind healing in unexpected ways.” $&(!)"+'* RAV +# ,Authorof Parade and DirtyOne

the larger issues of violation of the land and of the self. It’s a strange metaphor, and it’s surprising how well it works in these poems. The poems float between a luscious lyric language and an abrupt, declarative proclama tion. In one titled “Talking to your first kiss on this side of death,” they write: “That moon again. It is not what I’m reaching for. What I’m reaching for/ is a way to speak to you from across the distance, a way to pull/ from my memory of you everything that poisons it.” Like someone settling a new land, they in vite us into their nonbinary world to experi ence how much of who we are is driven by appetite, by our jaws, by the very act of chew ing, of ingesting, and of nourishing ourselves. In the end, their delving into the dark does offer us a reprieve: “We can say the pain stops./ we can say this world, what’s left of it, is for us,” which is to say the only way to find our truth is by confronting the suffering in our lives. B RUCE S PANG FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (Critical Lives) by Ritchie Robertson Reaktion Books. 223 pages, $19. This comprehensive study chronicles the life, thought, and times of the iconoclastic philoso pher. As an introduction to Nietzsche, it cap tures the shape of his thinking through his books and letters and considers his intellec tual influences. Author Ritchie Robertson places Nietzsche’s works into the progression

of his life. He offers interesting insights into why so many readers have engaged with Niet zsche “with a combination of enthusiasm and critical reserve,” thrilled by the breaking of traditions but frightened by the implications. While there are few revelations, the author offers some interesting and even surprising speculations about Nietzsche’s personality. Based on Nietzsche’s rigid adherence to school rules as a child, he suggests that Niet zsche may have been on the autism spectrum. He also wonders if Nietzsche’s various ill nesses, especially his debilitating headaches and weakening vision, are what led to the adoption of his signature aphoristic style. Sur prisingly, Robertson doesn’t really address the question of whether his subject was gay. In fact, Nietzsche generally comes across as het erosexual, pursuing an ultimately failed rela tionship with Lou Salome and writing proposal letters to many women. Early on, though, a friend’s story is recounted about Ni etzsche finding himself in a brothel and play ing the piano before fleeing, the claim being that “he never touched a woman.” C HARLES G REEN

Homosexual , some two decades after a stint in the pop band Savage Garden. After he and bandmate Daniel Jones sold 23 million al bums by the early 2000s, he divorced not only Jones (his “musical ex-husband”) but also his childhood sweetheart, Colby Tyler (his now ex-wife), and Columbia Records (which he alleges dropped him due to homo phobia). Payback is a bitch. On Homosexual , Hayes lays it on thick, splitting the title into two tracks, “Homosexual Act One” and “Ho mosexual Act Two.” The latter contains this jaw-dropper of a lyric: “If man was created in the image of God, then maybe she’s a homo sexual ... if love is a sin, you can count me in/ yes, baby, I’m a homosexual.” Eleven of the album’s fourteen tracks sur pass the five-minute mark: brevity and sub tlety are not in Hayes’ toolkit. Nevertheless, the propulsive beat in “Euphoric Equation” channels the Pet Shop Boys and opens up about his father’s alcoholism and abusive ness. In this trippy rollercoaster of an album, perfectly reflective of Hayes’ own life his tory, Homosexual lives up to its eye-opening title: it’s audacious, albeit a little too on-the nose. Back in 1995, the queer theorist Leo Bersani began his book Homos with the line, “No one wants to be called a homosexual.” Nearly thirty years on, that’s still true, though Hayes has boldly turned “homosexual” into something both melodious and marvelous. C OLIN C ARMAN

HOMOSEXUAL Album by Darren Hayes Powdered Sugar

Musician Darren Hayes is living proof that it’s never too late to live your truth. The fifty year-old Australian native has released the LP

May–June 2023

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