The Catch Trap

[rm]

I've just finished The Catch Trap, an out-of-print Marion Zimmer Bradley book about gay trapeze artists in love in the circuses of the 30s, 40s and 50s.

It's a strange, difficult to navigate book, in that it is not always easy to distinguish from the internal tone of the book, which is quite pulpy and also set in a time both closetted and constrained, and the external tone of the book, which was published in 1979 and features a more significant disclaimer about how the book isn't making any claims about the sexuality of any real people the book might reference or have even used in the process of research. The book and the book's subjects are both daring and frightened, and this is by turns confusing, fascinating and even cloying.

That said, the book has a lot of interesting things to say about discipline, creative family, dying arts and the heavy burdens of narrow lineages, but it is hard not to read it without wondering what tone it would achieve had it been written today while retaining its original setting.

It is worth noting that I found a lot of things in the book familiar both from fencing (the fact of it and the way I often long for it to be) and from having a big, crazy Italian family and a whole lot of my own temperment. Certainly, there were things about the book that made me grok my profoundly unsteady relationship with atonement.

Good, worth finding (which is apparently incredibly difficult -- this was a birthday gift), especially if you have any interest in teh history of gay literature and identity, or, conversely, if you're just a fan writer who loves the slash and wants to get a handle on teh world before or outside.

Two pieces of trivia worth noting:

There's a circus poster on the cover of the edition I have, for a performance taking place on September 11th.

The family the book is about is the Santellis. A source of grave aggravation amongst fencers is that an equiment maker named Santelli is no more.

Both random oddities made me chuckle.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it happened with the last 3 - 5 years I think; recently enough that stuff out of various store's wharehouses shows up on Ebay from time to time so it's a sporadic source of complaining/hope.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Hm.
You know, it's funny; from the upward trend in the number of local fencing clubs (classical and sport) and the increase in size of local and regional tournaments-- and especially after the first US gold medal in Olympic fencing-- when I got out of the sport (I think it's five years since I fenced) I would have thought that it was in the midst of a revival of sorts, but that blade manufacturer went out of business about five years ago too... Strange.
I've no head for business. It's always interesting to watch an industry react to a craze-- like watching all the skateboard/rollerskate manufacturers suddenly trying to hop on the roller derby bandwagon-- but it is always so much more complex than even an interested observer can really make out.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I honestly wonder if, to a given degree, it's that the poepel going into the business of this don't know how to run businesses or find out they hate running business and what they started doing for the love becomes a big headache. Because I have to say teh customer srvice crap I've dealt with with most of the places I've had to deal with, has ben a nightmare. The people who are quasi-competent are rude and the people who are nice keep screwing up my orders. This is mostly about the sport world and protective gear, as we have the luxury of dealing with weapons makers who are known to us.