I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.
But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)
As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …
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Read MoreWhen news broke of the murder of five people and the wounding of eight more at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, TV anchors were quick to note that we did not know the motivation of the alleged shooter, Esteban Santiago. This was to damp down the rampant speculation that has inflicted the digital age, in which what is said or written is considered true by virtue of the fact that it is said or written.
Admirable as such discretion is, I’m afraid we knew Santiago’s motives even before knowing his story. ...
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Read MoreI’m reading “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, $29.99, 312 pages), which is just the kind of book I like – one in which the author takes the intellectual ball and runs with it. Darrin M. McMahon must be good at it. He also wrote “Happiness: A History.”
Genius, as he notes in his introduction, has meant many things to many different times. The word comes from the Latin, but the Romans, who cannibalized Greek culture, were really borrowing from the Greek “daimon.” Your daimon was – is – your guiding spirit, the link to the divine. Indeed, “Daimon” is the title of my unpublished novel about Alexander the Great, who like the Emperor Augustus and a host of ancient luminaries saw his daimon – his genius – as proof of his divinity. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we got the modern definition of genius as extraordinary creativity and accomplishment and not until the 20th century that we got the IQ tests that sought to quantify it.
McMahon rounds up the usual suspects... Read more
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