Vanity Fair discusses a new biography of author John Cheever, where his daughter is quoted as saying that his love for men precluded anything swishy. "...he prided himself on maintaining a masculine front with no minty accents. Swish he abhorred. Although he loved men, she says, he feared and despised what he defined as the homosexual community; the limp-wristed, lisping men who are sometimes the self-appointed representatives of homosexual love in our culture. Men who run gift shops, sell antiques, strike bargains over porcelain tea sets."

I wonder what he would have thought of Adam Lambert...or Ryan Seacrest...or a butch guy like me? Or do I care?

Abjuring antiques and porcelain seems too great a price for anything. No wonder he took to drink.

Although he was right about gift shops.

...then again, maybe some porcelain IS just too too...

Or do I care?

Certainly the most relevant question. I remember him as rather dumpy with a beanbag face. Who or what turned him on is not on my list of questions requiring answers.

OK, hijack time.

Looks are -- at least arguably, at least later in life -- the one area where Updike may have had it over Cheever.

Their joint appearance on Cavett: http://goateedlibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/...nd-cheever.html

This is all by way of sneaking into saying that, amid the mandatory encomia following his recent demise, I felt like one of the 3 people in America who have never been able to stomach Updike. To me he was, as the to some insufferable but to me infallible Harold Bloom put it, "a minor novelist with a major style."

P.S. Contra the gladhanding on Cavett, gratuitous gossip on what Cheever really thought about Updike: http://www.nypost.com/seven/10052008/gossi...skin_132208.htm

P.P.S. Even more gratuitous link to a profile of said uber-critic Bloom: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/spec...m-colossus.html

...then again, maybe some porcelain IS just too too...

This gives porcelain a bad name. Now a porcelain tea set...that's another matter. Throw in bargaining and it's a no brainer.