The Swimming-Pool Library

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I found Hollinghurst's novel to be very enthralling and wonderfully erotic. It's such a fantastic exploration of what it was like to be a part of the gay community in the early 1980s, before AIDS altered the community and its image forever. By making the novel a structure of bright fragments, Firbank had aestheticized it, and in the aesthetic realm the normative claims of morality are relaxed. Firbank’s difficult inconsequential manner is part of a bigger subversion of the novel, and what is in many ways a homosexualization of the novel. (Hollinghurst 2006, 15)Interestingly, Hollinghurst introduces a subtle distinction between the “gay novel,” in which the homosexual condition features prominently, and a process of “homosexualization” that would be predicated upon a particular viewpoint, at odds with that of the majority of readers and, by extension, of society at large. It is this marginalised position which led E. M. Forster, ultimately, to relinquish the novel, as a form that could not legally treat of a subject that was of paramount importance to its author. The same prohibition drove Ronald Firbank, whom Hollinghurst elects as his literary forerunner, into a career of international nomadism. This impossibility of reconciling aestheticism and homoeroticism, within the realm of the novel, due to the strictures of a bigoted, strait-laced society, more than to the limitations of a genre which is, by definition, free and open on all sides, led to a form of ostracization in the literary creation. The homosexual topic could only be touched upon, through carefully calculated strategies of obliquity. In many regards, the merciful indirection and sexual mystery, associated with the figure of Henry James, were preferred to any explicit statements. Precisely, Hollinghurst’s literary enterprise can be best described as a wilful, deliberate decision to impose a homocentric perspective on the novel genre: “To write about gay life from a gay perspective unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position. [Something that] hadn’t really been done.” (“I don’t make moral judgments.”) Strangely though, it could be contended that this bid for novelty is, paradoxically, what qualifies Hollinghurst as a writer of the Tradition, even if it is a tradition on the margin of the mainstream. The group interchanged chants of “shame on ACC”, “save our libraries” and “save our swimming pool” as councillors got their Wednesday morning meeting underway. Hollinghurst followed with The Folding Star in 1994, which was also short listed for the Booker, and The Spell in 1998. He writes, he has said, 'at walking pace', a rate of 300 to 400 words a day, or perhaps none. His close friend Andrew Motion remarks: 'I sometimes ask him, "What have you been doing today?" and he says, "thinking".'

It is not an accident that many homosexuals should show a special preference for sailors, for the sailor on shore is symbolically the innocent god from the sea who is not bound by the law of the land and can therefore do anything without guilt. Indeed, in a book like Genet’s Querelle de Brest, the hero is at once god and devil. He is adored because, though he is a murderer and a police informer and sexually promiscuous in every sense, though, that is, he loves no one but himself, is in fact Judas, yet he remains Billy Budd, the beautiful god who feels neither guilt nor remorse, and whose very crimes, therefore, are a proof of his divinity. (qtd in Sarotte 71-72) Upstairs, he discovers Phil having sex with Bill. Disoriented, he leaves and wanders to James's and then the Corry, where Charles Nantwich reveals his designs in giving Will the diaries. Will and James go to Staines's to see a film, not a piece of pornography but an archive recording of Ronald Firbank in old age. The novel closes. it is clear he pays homage to (or how I say "name-dropping") his inspirations of Firbank and E.M.Forster throughout, his major interest while studying English in schoolIn 1988, Edmund White called it, "surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author." [1] Awards [ edit ] The book ends with the screening of a film of Firbank toiling up the hill at Genzano on an expedition to Lake Nemi (a trip that took place, according to Lord Berners’s memoir of the writer, a few days before his death). A crowd of children, attracted by Firbank’s fatally idiosyncratic walk, collects and capers around him.

Taking it away is going to be taking away swimming from nearly 100 children with additional support needs.”

Gyms, pools, pitches, courts and other facilities

Aberdeen City Council said: “The council is facing significant financial pressures in 2023/24 and is having to reduce its spending in a number of areas.

Hollinghurst, Alan. “The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Fiction of E. M. Forster, L. P. Hartley and Ronald Firbank.” M. Phil. Thesis, Oxford U, 1980. The Swimming-Pool Library won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989.But those who know him insist that underneath the erudition and the witty, high-camp banter, he is emotional; indeed, that he's a person of particularly deep emotion. 'He's a loving person,' says Alan Jenkins. 'He's very loyal. He's not promiscuous: he falls in love with people and he's had terrible heartbreaks and unhappiness. Love and affection is very central in his life and I'm sure he'd like that to figure in his domestic life.' Stroud might have been terminally inhibiting for the young Hollinghurst, but he escaped. At eight his "aspirational" parents took the curious decision to send him to prep school as a boarder. "Neither of my parents had been to boarding school, but they thought it was important," he says vaguely. From there, he went to Canford public school in Dorset, also as a boarder, and it proved an artistic awakening. "Being in a beautiful and interesting old house made a profound impression on me at an early stage." The decision to send him away was to be the making of the young aesthete, as well as the beginning of the remarkable voice. Sensationally sexy. This queer classic is really a historical snapshot of 20th century homosexuality in England. Hollinghurst masterly uses an amusing cast of characters to explore issues of class, wealth, race, identity and sexuality and its bit of a mystery and quite a lot of fun discovering how connected their lives are. Verhaeren. “Le Moulin.” The Penguin Book of French Verse. Eds. Brian Woledge, Geoffrey Brereton and Anthony Hartley. London: Penguin, 1975. 472-73.

Protesters said they won’t stop their fight, despite being unable to voice their concerns at Monday’s meeting. A Changing Places facility (opens new window)which will provide excellent personal care facilities for those who cannot use standard public toilets, making the campus accessible for everyone.

Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1954 and grew up around Cirencester, where his parents - his father was a bank manager, and he was their only child - encouraged his enthusiasm for listening to music. After public school at Canford, in Dorset, Hollinghurst went to Magdalen College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate Prize for poetry the year before Andrew Motion. 'My first impressions, which got stronger as I knew him, were that he was exceptionally clever,' Motion recalls, 'with an extraordinary range of cultural knowledge. And he spoke extremely elegantly, rather as he writes, with developed periods and an unfading, steady sense of the high style.' We've listened to what our customers want - they've asked for a learners' pool and lane-swimming - and want this new centre to help regenerate the town centre. We hope it brings more footfall to the town." I have witnessed the devastating loss that the pool would be for all ages and people of all physical abilities,” protester Jillian Burt said. The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic debut' - The Guardian Between the new leisure centre and new library are five commercial units. Currently empty, these units are set to be filled with new businesses later in the year. WalesOnline understands the new Cadno Lounge restaurant is set to fill one - you can read more about the new restaurant here - while another unit will be filled by a bilingual childcare company. Further information about businesses in the other units is expected to come later in the year.