iShucking & eJiving on Form and Utility
[Originally appeared in Senses, Winter 2008]
Tara Moss is not your conventional crime scribe, huddled in a dark corner of a library transferring hours, days and weeks of research into crackling prose. She is that—but one look at the pictures that accompany this story and the reader realizes there’s a little more to this successful Australian novelist than you might expect. For a decade—one full third of her life—Moss was an internationally recognized fashion model. Just don’t call her one now.
While a grim reminder of the events of September 11, 2001 stands as the cover image of The Terrorism Trap, and the book’s back cover describes it as “a powerfully argued analysis of the deeper causes and meaning of September 11,” Michael Parenti’s newest book is less an indictment of those powers at fault for the instigation of terrorist plots — specifically the World Trade Center bombings — and more a primer on the manner in which US-based big business has taken advantage of the economic ramifications of the bombings in pursuit of crass financial profit.
Fan’s of Chicago’s Drag City Records may or may not be surprised to find out that the label has a print press that has heretofore churned out a short story collection, a book of poetry, a Royal Trux comic book (written by Neil Michael Hagerty himself!), as well as the continuing evolution of the the eclectic journal Minus Times.
Drag City’s newest print release, “Warm Voices Rearranged,” a collection of anagram record reviews, brings together the spry repartee of Gregg Turkington (better known as his alternate identity, comedian Neil Hamburger) and Brandon Kearney (of Caroliner fame), which correctly posits this collection as being informed more by comedy and rock music than by literary aspirations. The quicker the reader comes to grips with this caveat, the more enjoyable the reading is. “Let us draw a chalk circle,” the authors note in the preface, “wherein we may safely rest while reviewing terms and methodology,” before going on to refer to the current era as a “post-literate age” to which this book is in small part an attempt to respond.
In the same way toys and video games keep becoming more interactive and complex, the newest children’s literature is grabbing kids’ attention with challenging subjects and arresting visual style. Issues like cultural history and the responsibility of maturity are no longer considered too weighty for young readers, nor are illustrative layouts that reference everything from classical and modern painting to photography and comic books.
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced nausea brought on by acute nicotine overdose, but it can be pretty pathetic. It is especially embarrassing for a former smoker. Nausea of any kind, of course, is physically uncomfortable. But imagine if you will the absurdity of being made ill through the smoking of a mere three cigarettes — American, filtered cigarettes, no less — in the span of an hour. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you want to remember, unless of course you are making fun of yourself in a nationally-distributed magazine, in which case it’s just copy.
Part of the success of Zadie Smith’s first novel “White Teeth” had to do with how accepting the literary public is these days of a plotless, sprawling text with no definitively central character. Readers accept this sort of thing, that is, if the wit and wealth of characterization are as forthcoming as the devices were in “White Teeth”; if it speaks so eloquently and directly to that most particularly contemporary concern, the negotiation of race and ethnicity in a post-colonial metropolis. The novel was received so well, with such an embarrassment of accolades, that it’s now difficult to assess the novelist’s second offering, “The Autograph Man,” without referring to the first.
Sarah Vowell’s second collection of essays is an examination of her own patriotic tendencies and their relation to her dubious assessment of American mythology. While she is at once a self-described “history buff” who at an adolescent age “pined to vote,” she also spends a great portion of “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” waxing bored and unfulfilled on her adult encounters with Gettysburg and Salem, the 2000 Presidential Inauguration and the legacy of President Bill Clinton.
The book’s essays unfortunately describe little more than a kind of undergraduate epiphany. As an adult, Vowell attentively watches contemporary history unfold as she also begins looking closer at the history that inspired her as a child. What she discovers is a discrepancy between popular record and fact. Disappointed that her youthful, idealistic notions about the magic of history don’t pan out, Vowell grapples with simultaneously being a flag-waving patriot and a jaded skeptic.
In the opening scene of “Prague,” five players take turns making four seemingly sincere statements to the others in a game called Sincerity. Three of the statements must be untruths; the fourth must be true. It’s an engaging setup, a prologued motif about the guarded search for honesty in a jaded and cynical setting.
The story takes place in Budapest in 1990 and focuses on a group of circumstantial friends tenuously linked a by a common language. Scott Price, the most immediately recognizable character, teaches conversational English to “the local savages.” He’s a clever, condescending malcontent hiding from his future at home. As standard a character in a novel about expatriates as Scott may be, he eventually is exposed as a far more complex individual with real reasons for avoiding his future, which is inextricably linked with his painful, abusive past.
