1 November Sunday

beautiful bright morning and warmer   My back feels better.  Was it Advil in morning and night?  Or was it atmospheric conditions, weather fronts, cosmic alignments?  Still curious now, of course, to try chiropracter.  There is one named Fagan in Meredith!  

Dennis has come forth with a response about the Disappearers.  A welcome and good one too.

"Well, I've basically had a month of sleeping and not being able to focus very well. I've gotten back to the Disappearers. What a strong book. The Murder of the man in the green jacket and the blinding of Rainer, my word, what a powerful section. What follows is so blunt and so easily understood. So many of the feelings I had going through the process of acceptance. What a strong book. Thank you for sending it. I'm only half way through, but, my word...

Why do you think, in terms of presentation, did the text of the theatre section have ragged right margins while the rest of the book conforms to standard even right and left margins being clean and straight. I'm thinking, it's the raggedness of the theatre participants, their ragged lives and the constantly changing lines. Change is ragged. I did like that visual aspect."

He's twenty years younger, from western PA, so interesting to hear that he identifies fully with the feelings of the process of being gay in a hostile world.  Did Buttigeig's generation have it that much easier?  If yes, it was class helping out much more than street demos.  

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Nate Lippens and Marlon James are two of the most prominent contemporary voices in queer literature, though they approach their themes with wildly different scales and styles. Both authors have captured major literary attention with their respective works exploring the dark, heavy, and resilient realities of gay life. 

A direct comparison of their writing styles, themes, and major books highlights how they differ:

Attribute	Nate Lippens	Marlon James
Scale & Scope	Minimalist and micro-focused. Brief, fragmented vignettes that feel like intimate, poetic journal entries.	Maximalist and epic. Massive, multi-layered, and sweepingly historical narratives with vast casts of characters.
Setting	The working-class American Midwest (primarily Milwaukee and America's rust belt).	Jamaica and the broader Caribbean diaspora spanning multiple eras.
Core Themes	Aging as an illegitimate queer artist, surviving the AIDS epidemic, recovering from addiction, and navigating misanthropic midlife depression.	Violent homophobia, historical trauma, collective memory, political corruption, and the cathartic need for revenge.
Tone	Elegiac, bleakly witty, cranky, and quietly resilient.	Intense, "in-your-face," operatic, passionate, and fiercely kinetic.
Latest Major Work	Bastards (2026), the final installment of his critically acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Wisconsin Trilogy.	The Disappearers (2026), a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel tracking eight gay men putting on a play in 1980s Kingston. -----------