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Why Is That Goddamned Radio On? by Jim Cory--a #bookreview #lgbt #amreading





Today, I'm sharing a review I wrote of my late friend's book Why Is That Goddamned Radio On? essays and stories Jim Cory. The Book Tube review is below, and the text of the review is posted below that.







I became acutely aware while reading the late Jim Cory's last published book, Why Is That Goddamned Radio On? Essays and Stories Jim Cory by Radiator Press, that Jim wrote about loss, about people, places, and things that no longer exist. Then I realized that this is true of most writers and writing, and that I was sad because the world no longer has Jim in it, since he died several years ago. We lost a unique, monumental, wise, wickedly clever, and profound voice—as well as an amazing human being.

 In his masterfully told stories and essays, Jim takes us into the underworld of gay bars in Philadelphia in the 1970s, including a lively dive bar named “Roscoe’s” in Center City Philadelphia, which he frequented in what became known as the era of “fag-bashing,” before the era of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) when gay men (predominantly) were dying left and right.

A Renaissance man and a lover of music, even then when he was a young man, Jim frequented this bar and was fascinated with one of the drag queens named Sarah Vaughan, who stylized herself after The Divine One.  He writes that the straight men who addressed them on the street by saying “Hey Faggot,” knew “not to fuck with drag queens” and goes on to explain:

“Some I knew opened purses to show me Bowie knives and stilettos. To say that, when crossed, they ‘had their knives out,’ is not a figure of speech. They came equipped with a kind of courage originating as anger tamed to the point where it can be unleashed and directed on command.”



In his essay “Waiting for Janis,” Jim writes of his adolescent memories of seeing the legendary Janis Joplin, whom he describes as:

“Janis at 27 had no map and a talent she was still sorting out, still looking for ways to manage. She’s climbed to that high place with no idea that it might be hard getting back down.

“What was she like? She was like the season’s first snow, or a great lay, or seeing a bird you’ve never seen and were sure you’d never see, appear on a branch ten feet away. There was something evanescent about her, something fleeting, that was discernible even then. Otherwise seeing her blown-up tabloid photo with the headline JANIS JOPLIN DEAD would have felt like a shock. It didn’t.

“Three years, even three years of stardom, is not a lot of time. She blew through life not so much as if she believed there’d always be more, but as if nothing but the moment mattered…But it wouldn’t have mattered without the other part, which is harder to pin down. Pathos and yearning, all the desperation of the abandoned, were in her voice and on her face.

Jim wrote about it all or could have if he had been given more time.

In one essay, “So What Do You Think About Concrete?” he writes about a beloved, elderly aunt who lived in Fargo, was single all her life, and remembered his rather gay-sounding exclamations from when he was a child.

“Did she, at some point, have a wild side?” he wonders.

In his essay, “Wild Children, Screaming Mommy,” which in many ways is the heart of the collection, Jim elaborates on his mother’s sparse entries in the diary that she kept and he found after her death:

“Chores, recorded here, went where she went. It isn’t the menial specifics she records, it’s that there are always more of them.”

Later he wonders, “When you’re trying to do everything, how does anything get done?”

If Jim had not been struck down early, I, along with many others, would have more books by him to look forward to, but this was not to be. But in Why Is That Goddamned Radio On? Essays and Stories Jim Cory by Radiator Press, we have one last—and glorious—book to remember him by, as we laugh and cry and nod our heads as we turn the pages.

 

This is Janet Mason with reviews for Spotify and Booktube.



 
 
 

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