I added a new event to the calendar - a book group for queer youth. Is there interest in a reading group for queer men? Womyn? I used to work at Barnes and Noble and when I was there there was always talk about forming such a group but it never happened.

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I thought I’d take a moment to check in with some personal studies. I’ve had some friends (and friends of friends) over the last few years that seemed to crash-and-burn in middle age on a whole number of levels and I’m determined not to do that. To try to avoid any crisis, I’ve been studying some about men and their life stages. I finished Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation last month and really enjoyed it. It was a title I picked up when I worked at Barnes and Noble. I’d read C.G. Jung’s Man and His Symbols when I was in community college and have been interested in shared mythologies ever since.

I’m in the middle of Robert Bly’s Iron John and Mark Thompson’s Gay Soul and am really enjoying them both. I tend to read a few books at once these days. Iron John (subtitled A Book About Men) takes a single story from Brothers Grimm and analyzes and expands it through poetry (Blake, Bly, Keats, Neruda), life experiences and studies to discuss the stages of a man’s life. I picked it up for cheap at St. Vincent’s on Seneca in Eugene - they’ve a great book selection, shelved and categorized as any bookstore would be and they have a number of copies of Iron John. Bly states in the introduction that the book doesn’t specifically address homosexual men and their specific issues (my word, for lack of a better one) but that much in the book will speak to them. I’m finding that to be the case. It’s really a gem of a book and I understand the praise that is heaped upon it. I’m going to recommend it to my partner’s sixteen-year-old son after I’m done with it. He’s in the middle of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance right now.

The book Gay Soul (picked up at Powell’s in Portland) is definitely a mixed bag but I’m enjoying it as well. It consists of a number of interviews the author has done with queer thinkers, authors, poets and speakers. I started with the names I recognized (Joseph Kramer, Harry Hay, Paul Monette and Ram Dass) and am now going front to back with the other interviews.

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