Travel
Bound
by Jim Gladstone
 AIRPLANE
READ OF THE MONTH
Michael Graves makes an impressive debut with Dirty One (Chelsea Station Editions, $16. www.michaelgraves.blogspot.com), a collection of unsettling, sometimes uncomfortably funny short stories set in the blue-collar town of Leominster, Massachussetts. Told largely in the voices of adolescent boys, Graves' open-ended tales find their narrators struggling with fractured families, emerging gay urges, and a barrage of 1980s media culture. "From Kissing" finds sensitive 12-year-old Butch with a major crush on his upstairs neighbor, Milo. Afternoons watching syndicated Alf episodes turn into secret make-out sessions. When Butch comes down with a cold, we see the psychological impact of two mid-80s' epidemics—AIDS and ignorance. Upon learning about his adventures with Milo, Butch's older sister takes it upon herself to diagnose him—"You kissed a boy?…That's why you're so sick…That's what happens to boys who mess with other boys. They end up being big fairies and fudge packers. And they all die." But the story is more than an accomplished period slice of life; Graves raises it to a higher level with an unexpected twist: a panicked Butch comes out to his pediatrician who, in return, outs himself. Whether the doctor offers this information out of pure empathy or as the first step toward seducing his patient is left queasily ambiguous. Another highlight among the nine stories here is the ironic, heartbreaking "This Whole Galaxy," in which a gay teen, desperate to move away from home, steals and deals his younger brother's Ritalin, sending both his sibling and their mother bouncing off the walls. Graves tells his tales in a punchy, dialogue-driven style that keeps the pages turning, even through the direst scenarios. Dirty One is a quick read that hits hard.
 The wonderfully curated compendium of articles and essays that make up The Collected Traveler series provides a highly engaging alternative to the quickly dated data found in conventional guides. In the new Paris volume (Vintage, $19. www.thecollectedtraveler.com) editor Barrie Kerper distills reams of writing on the City of Lights into an intense literary eau de vie. From former Gourmet correspondent Alexander Lobrano's exploration of the less-touristed 10th, 11th, and 12th Arrondissements to Vivian Thomas' even more specifically focused essay on four of her favorite Paris streets (rue Mouffetard, Cour du Commerce Saint-André, Hameau Boileau, and rue LePic), to art historian Anne Prah-Perochon's lively five-page guide on what to look for when visiting a gothic cathedral, these pieces employ elegant prose to zoom in on the sorts of easily missed details that can deepen a traveler's experience of the city. Kerper (who has also edited Istanbul and Tuscany and Umbria volumes in this series) intersperses her selections with loads of smartly annotated recommendations for further reading. One would be hard-pressed to find a better single book than this one to get you into the esprit de Paris.
 If an ocean side escape is more your speed than a trip to Paris or another urban capital, you'll find the stuff of endless daydreams in Emmanuelle Graffin's Houses by the Sea (Thames & Hudson, $27.95. www.thamesandhudsonusa.com), featuring over 400 interior and exterior photos of oceanfront homes. Ranging from a rustic timbered Norwegian fisherman's cottage, and ultra-sleek glass boxes overlooking the Mediterranean in Cannes to a sprawling terra-cotta and thatch-accented getaway in Puerta Vallarta, these houses vary in style, but are united in their thoughtful linking of indoor and outdoor spaces. An appendix includes contact information for the houses' architects, just in case daydreaming won't suffice for you.
 The playful gay intellect of Wayne Koestenbaum, whose last book, Hotel Theory, found him musing on the meanings of travelers' homes away from home, is back in full force in his philosophical exploration of Humiliation (Picador, $14. www.bigideasseries.com). With this under-edited juggernaut, Koestenbaum shiskebabs the likes of Monica Lewinsky, Abu Ghraib, Craigslist, Richard Nixon, reality television, and his own seventh grade masturbatory mishaps on a single, zigzagging skewer of rhetoric. The prose here is denser and more tangled in tangents than in the gemlike perceptions that mark Koestenbaum's most successful works, The Queens Throat (about gay men and opera) and Jackie Under My Skin (about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), but there's a ranting, improvisational energy that rips through this pocket-sized volume's brief 182 pages. Reading Humiliation, you'll feel like you're surfing Koestenbaum's brainwaves in real time; roll with the tumult and enjoy a wild ride.
 This may be the first and only time a book of heterosexual smut is made note of in this column, but Nicholson Baker takes dirty verbiage to such an exuberant, exalted level in House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (Simon & Schuster, $25. www.simonandschuster.com) that attention must be paid. Baker, a frequent New Yorker contributor who is nonetheless best known for 1993's Vox, an entire novel in the form of phone-sex dialogue, whips out the cum de la cum of grin-inducing sexual description here, simultaneously poking fun at and reveling in clichéed porno tropes: a testicle is compared to "a new potato," a scrotum smells of "Rainy ruins. Frogs. Cement statuary. Gongs. Tractor tires. Mushrooms," and an ejaculation is "a heavy lasso of manstarch," followed by shaken droplets of "orgasmal dregs." Baker's loose excuse for a plot is a sort of sexual Alice In Wonderland, in which unwitting straight horndogs are sucked through surreally empowered apertures (a golf hole, a hoop earring, a statue's sphincter) and delivered to a no-holes-barred fantasy resort. While GLBT erotica buffs may not be turned on by the action, there's no denying the goofy, sex-positive pleasures of House of Holes. We need more of our own books to deliver this sort of playful vibrancy. House of Poles, anyone?
[Published:
October, 2011]
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