Sad news. The German science fiction icon, Eva Pflug, has died. Her ultra-modern TV series, Space Patrol, which began the year of my birth, 1966, was the Star Trek of Germany, with all that entails. I didn't know of the show at the time, of course, but came across it 30 years later, in 1996, when I was working for a TV production company in Montreal, Canada, that had been hired to translate the series into English, for possible broadcast on a dedicated science fiction channel in the US. I did some work on the show, and got to know her work then. This retro-memory, like most kitsch, leaves a bitter-sweet taste. Now, 12 years later, 30 seems as far away as some interstellar planetoid - and as likely. Time bends, indeed.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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