As they arrived among the clutch of barns and houses that comprised the village of St-Nicolas, Adam called out: “Stop. You can drop me here.” His attention had been caught by the back view of a figure, just ahead of them, on the other side of the road. It was a perfectly ordinary back view: of a young man dressed in jeans and working boots, with a shabby leather jacket whose collar was pulled up around his ears against the cold; he had an untidy mop of thick dark hair, and was of the same trim build and medium height as Adam himself. Nevertheless Adam would have recognised Sylvain anywhere. “Thank you very much for the lift. But, believe it or not, that type over there is the person I’ve come all this way to see.”
Adam jumped down. Going in the other direction, a tractor was bumbling past. Eight other vehicles followed the tractor, at an infuriating snail’s pace. “Sylvain!” Adam shouted. “Over here! It’s me.” And between the crawling vehicles Adam caught a series of glimpses of Sylvain against the backdrop of rolling fields – as if in a sequence of time-lapse photographs: first turning, then looking, next expressing doubt, then wonder, disbelief, and then amazement and, at last, pure joy. They met in the middle of the suddenly empty little road. Too surprised, too overcome to hug or kiss, they just clasped hands.
You could imagine that they had both been carrying an unsafe quantity of treasures and keepsakes beneath their arms... <more>

I asked a landscape painter friend about this. When most of his subject matter stood conveniently still all the time – trees, buildings, hillsides – how did he deal with the ceaselessly changing skyscapes above them?
He told me politely that I hadn’t thought my question through. Everything he painted was constantly reinventing itself. The wind moved the leaves, altering shapes and colours, the sun came and went among those shifty clouds as well as modifying its position in the sky minute by minute, which in turn altered everything. This was the point that Monet was making, my friend reminded me, when he painted the intricate west front of Rouen cathedral nine times at different times of day and in contrasting weathers. His twenty-five haystack pictures likewise, to say nothing of the two hundred and fifty paintings he did of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny.
This set me think about the ‘scene painting’ that we find in books: the indoor and outdoor landscapes that serve as the backdrop to the action in novels, my own as well as other people’s.
I haven’t yet written a book set in Berlin. I visited Berlin for the first (and so far, only) time in the summer of 1989. The unique atmosphere of the divided city created an unforgettable, spine-tingling impression. The silvery clock-chimes that filled the still air in the hot afternoon in the Tiergarten. The topless sunbathers on the banks of the River Spree whose very presence was a deliberate taunt to the hot-uniformed soldiers manning the watch towers on the other side. The U-bahn trains that glided through ghostly stations in the east. The divided city went about its separate businesses with a strange outward serenity, all Technicolor in the western side, sepia-tinted in the east. The strongest impression I came away with was a sense of the permanence, the immutability of the status quo. How wrong can you be? <more>

Award winning author and Colombian born scholar Jaime Manrique is a legendary presence in the literary world and an icon to gay Latino writers and others. A former professor of creative writing at Columbia University (and elsewhere), he has crafted over a dozen fiction and non-fiction volumes such as Eminent Maricones, Twilight at the Equator, and Latin Moon in Manhattan (all by University of Wisconsin Press). During the 1970s and 1980s, Jaime befriended the exiled Latin-American writers Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls) and Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spiderwoman), before they succumbed to AIDS. These experiences, plus his fascinating research on Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, make up the backbone of Eminent Maricones—the most notorious of all his gay-themed books. Jaime’s essay, “The Last Days of Reinaldo Arenas”, has been recently republished by the University of Wisconsin Press in Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). I recently met with “Don Jaime” to discuss his literary achievements and future projects.

CV: Julian Schnabel’s movie “Before Night Falls” helped to immortalize Reinaldo Arenas; his persecution, alienation, sickness, and feverish opinions. Did you sense that Reinaldo would become a queer icon when you knew him, or did you suspect that his story would disappear, as has happened to so many renegade writers ravaged by political exploitation?

JM: When I knew him he was already a very important Latin-American writer—he had readers all over the world. Toward the end of his life he gave me a manuscript draft of Before Night Falls, his most famous book, and I realized that he’d written one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century. And although he was known as a “writer’s writer”, that book was very mainstream and was read by all kinds of people, gay and straight. <more>