What We’re Reading — On the Beach, Part 2
BY Claire Potter ON June 17, 2015
This post is excerpted from a post originally published on May 26, 2007 at my blog, Tenured Radical. It recommends a wonderful book about a queer summer resort, but also suggests that writing about a queer summer resort can be fun and profitable.
Remember I said in the previous post that gay and lesbian books sell like little hotcakes? Well, the Radical’s featured book (which I am taking on my weekend retreat to the country house of another historian) is a good example. If you are, just now, choosing a dissertation topic, read this book, because it demonstrates how you can make choices (even as a graduate student, the time where it seems all choices have been made for you!) that make your life more pleasant and possibly more lucrative. Karen Krahulik’s Provincetown represents the following good choices:
1. Choosing a fun summer resort as the place to do your research. Can’t beat that with a stick. It’s almost like being a Europeanist, but without having to read bad handwriting in your second language.
2. A queer book topic that queers will buy and read in large numbers. If you can find any of the remaining queer bookstores, you will see a lot of academic stuff on the shelves that will be purchased by non-academics, often by people with no college or high school degree at all who are voracious readers. Speculation on why this is so may appear in another post, but it has something to do with a long period of time when knowing anything about any kind of homosex required research on the part of those coming out, since all information about perverse sexuality was withheld by the state, and by those agents of the state, schools and parents. And don’t forget that bookstores, even post-Stonewall, were one place where queers of any age could meet each other and have actual sex. Then maybe read about it too.
3. A book about a summer resort which anyone who lives in, summers in or visits will want to buy and/or give as a house present and/or take home as a souvenir. You could probably extend that to all of Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. And when you think of the number of academics who summer in those places, what a way to get a book into the hands of people who might learn to appreciate you. I mean, wow.
4. A book about a place that most cultural and literary historians know is important, but that no one had yet devoted the time to write a community study of.
5. A short book. Thank you, Karen. Would that other people were more like you.
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