Welcome to ManBug Week

It's ManBug Week here at the LBC, which means we'll have all species of posts popping up through the next few days.  Today we'll try to get some discussion going, and Tuesday I'll post a Q&A with Arsenal Pulp publisher Brian Lam and another with the man who made ManBug, George Ilsley himself.  George will, we hope, put up some of his own posts later in the week, as will various intrepid LBC members, and we'll wind things up with our now-traditional podcast interview.

I thought I'd start things off with some questions designed to get some discussion going in the comments.     For those of you who read the book and enjoyed it, what kept you reading?  What did you make of the characters and their situations?  I've said I found the narrative voice fascinating; was this true for you?

If you'd rather talk about something else, here's a topic that is central to the book and that both George and Brian address, in different ways, in their Q&As: What is the value of labels?  In ManBug, the characters try on various labels (Tom at one point calls himself a dyslexic bisexual Buddhist; Sebastian is identified as a gay entomologist with Asperger's), sometimes finding them useful, sometimes finding them constricting.  Are we in a post-label world?  What about the label of "gay fiction"?  Are you, regardless of your own sexual identification, attracted or repelled by books that are marketed as such?  Is it just a marketing category, or is it something more (or less)?

Comments

[Anne]

The book kept me reading because it's so funny and strange and the chapters are just too short enough (not grammatical, but accurate) that I always wanted to read just one more little fragment.

As for the stuff on labels, I always love stuff that "transcends" labels--be it music or fiction--but I like labels and play with them. For me, that's a lot of the fun of the book. Once you've labeled someone "bisexual" all kinds of prejudice seems to enter, but labeling him a "dyslexic Buddhist bisexual" is so specific that the absurdity takes over from the harm.

[CAAF]

Like Anne, I read for the funny strangeness. Also some of the freshest, swiftest descriptions of being in love, or intoxicated by a person, I've read.

One bit related to labels I liked is Sebastian's chagrin at coming in before the rise of both the "gay chic" and "geek chic" curves. Still to come, of course, is the "gay geek chic" curve that he is trailblazing.

What I like about the longer labels in play in the book ("dyslexic bisexual Buddhist" "gay geek chic" etc.), with their pile-ups of qualifiers, is how one gets a sense of these increasingly small Venn Diagram islands, each boasting a population of 1 or 2 lonely constituents....

[Jeff]

Labels are useful (such as using 'car' to describe those gas guzzlers we drive around in) insofar as their meaning is fixed and generally agreed upon. What's interesting about talking about, say, a 'dyslexic Buddhist bisexual' is that we're not really sure what the connotations are--those quick connections we make in our heads when someone says 'car' are no longer in play, and in fact we may make no connections at all and instead struggle with trying to generate meaning. For me, 'dyslexic Buddhist bisexual' is a kind of short hand for 'weird' 'different' 'alternative'--and causes me to reflect on the nature of labels--sometimes useful, sometimes silly.

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