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Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact The Stranger. editor@thestranger.com (The Stranger Editor) webmaster@thestranger.com (The Stranger Webmaster) Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:01 -0800 Wed, 13 Dec 2017 08:00:00 -0800 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss The #MeToo Movement Changes the Way We Read Hillary Clinton's What Happened https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/12/06/25607716/the-metoo-movement-changes-the-way-we-read-hillary-clintons-what-happened https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/12/06/25607716/the-metoo-movement-changes-the-way-we-read-hillary-clintons-what-happened Christopher Frizzelle The Matt Lauer scene in Hillary Clinton's book takes on a whole new meaning now. by Christopher Frizzelle <p><span class="dropcap">I</span> had forgotten all about Matt Lauer's nitpicky, sanctimonious interview of Hillary Clinton on the deck of an aircraft carrier for NBC's "Commander in Chief Forum" in September 2016.</p> <p>As Clinton recounts in What Happened (which she <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/events/25379526/hillary-rodham-clinton">reads from at the Paramount on December 11</a> and <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/events/25542574/booksigning-with-hillary-rodham-clinton">signs at Elliott Bay Book Company on December 12</a>), Lauer began by asking about the most important characteristic a commander in chief can have. Clinton talked about steadiness. During her answer, Lauer cut in and said, "You're talking about judgment."</p> <p>"That's not what I was talking about, exactly, but it was close enough," she writes. "I've been around the block enough times to know that something bad was coming. Lauer had the look of someone proud of himself for having laid a clever trap."</p> <p>Lauer went on: "The word judgment has been used a lot around you, Secretary Clinton, over the last year and a half, and in particular concerning your use of your personal email and server to communicate while you were Secretary of State. You've said it's a mistake. You said you made not the best choice. You were communicating on highly sensitive topics. Why wasn't it more than a mistake? Why wasn't it disqualifying, if you want to be Commander in Chief?"</p> <p>Lauer did not mention that Colin Powell had used a personal e-mail address while he was secretary of state (an AOL address, no less). He did not mention it was not against policy to do so, or that Clinton's personal e-mail had never been hacked, unlike the DNC's, the RNC's, and the federal government's.</p> <p>But Lauer kept pressing. "Instead of moving on to any of a hundred urgent national security issues... Lauer stayed on emails. He asked four follow-ups." Then came a question from the audience, a question NBC had selected in advance. It was a right-winger asking why she wasn't in prison over her e-mails.</p> <p>"Now I was ticked off," Clinton writes. "Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush." When her time was up, she watched Lauer "soft-pedal Trump's interview" and fail "to call Trump out on his lies about Iraq. I was almost physically sick."</p> <p>What Happened is a book of boring sentences that nevertheless contains eye-opening details of what it was like being the first woman to get a major party's nomination. The preferential treatment of men in politics (and business, and life) is a recurrent theme. Now that we know that Lauer sexually harassed women behind the scenes at work, his over-the-top chastisement of Clinton in front of the cameras, especially compared to his treatment of the male chauvinist Republican candidate, has a whole new infuriating aspect.</p> <p>Clinton says elsewhere that she never had a story of adversity to tell voters, the way Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had. But that's not true. She did have a story to tell—she just chose not to tell it. There's an anecdote about her slapping a blind date in college when he wouldn't take no for an answer. There's an anecdote about working for Jimmy Carter's campaign, when one night one of the older male organizers grabbed her by her turtleneck and pulled her toward him and hissed in her face, "Just shut up." These are not stories she told on the campaign trail.</p> <p>When it comes to the history of women in this country, she writes, "I wish I had claimed it more publicly and told it more proudly." Me too. She essentially admits that she had left her most salient material out of her story. But you can find it in her book. <i id="recStar" class="fa fa-star rec-star" aria-hidden="true"></i></p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/12/06/25607716/the-metoo-movement-changes-the-way-we-read-hillary-clintons-what-happened/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25607716">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/12/06/25607716/the-metoo-movement-changes-the-way-we-read-hillary-clintons-what-happened/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25607716 37 Wed, 06 Dec 2017 04:00:00 -0800 The Stranger Why Do Americans Love Bullshit? The New Book Bunk Gets to the Bottom of It https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/22/25575627/why-do-americans-love-bullshit-the-new-book-bunk-gets-to-the-bottom-of-it https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/22/25575627/why-do-americans-love-bullshit-the-new-book-bunk-gets-to-the-bottom-of-it Rich Smith Kevin Young's <i>Bunk</i> is a necessary blast of truth in a world of BS. by Rich Smith <p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n <i>Bunk</i>, a thoroughly researched and consistently illuminating book of cultural criticism, Kevin Young combs through the lies, hoaxes, humbugs, conspiracies, fake news items, and general bullshitery of America's most famous and infamous bullshitters. He reveals why Americans are intrigued by and susceptible to the (often profitable) hokum produced by P.T. Barnum, Arthur Conan Doyle, JT LeRoy, Stephen Glass, Rachel Dolezal, the contemporary creators of so-called "reality" TV, and the fucking president of the United States.</p> <p>Young, who will read from the book <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/events/25340167/hinge-kevin-young">on November 30</a> at <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/locations/559878/benaroya-hall">Benaroya Hall</a>, describes many mechanisms at play here, but in general, like any con, hoaxers simply flatter their audience by telling a story that confirms deeply held cultural assumptions and personal beliefs. In his analyses of many hoaxes, Young finds they rely on the signature aspects of America's personality: racism, exoticism, strict gender roles, prudishness, homophobia, and what amounts to a profound inferiority complex.</p> <p>My favorite (if that's the word) illustration of this point is the first one Young uses: P.T. Barnum's exhibition of the Feejee Mermaid. It was a stuffed monkey's upper half with a fish tail on it. Barnum invited visitors to decide for themselves whether or not the exhibit was a real Fijian mermaid. Young points to Barnum's effective combination of flattery and exoticism (including the rather "exotic" spelling) to increase curiosity. Customers weren't mad—and they kept coming back—Young argues, because they were getting their money's worth. They got the spectacle, plus the satisfaction of correctly determining that, you know, there's no such thing as a mermaid. They, after all, would know best—Barnum christened them the experts.</p> <p>Young provides 450 pages of examples like this, where hoaxers, plagiarists, and outright liars use the greatest hits of white and/or male supremacy as a lure, or to make the story "ring true," tracking this dynamic all the way to reality TV shows, where the audience is positioned as the arbiter of truth in a completely constructed reality. Along the way, he contends that the hoax's aim transitions from "humor to romance to horror"—from Barnum's humorous Feejee Mermaid, to Arthur Conan Doyle's romantic defense of fairies, to propaganda about Hillary Clinton being a chronically ill lizard-person.</p> <p>Though he makes plenty of relevant connections between the current political hoax factory and the hoaxes of yore, Young saves much of his fire for literary liars, critiquing the millennial "narrative crisis" among memoirists who privilege the writer's sense of truth over the real story, and making useful distinctions between "remixers" like Jonathan Lethem and plagiarists like Samuel Taylor Coleridge (!).</p> <p>Though he's known mostly for writing poetry and being the <i>New Yorker</i>'s poetry editor, Young's <i>Bunk</i> marks his second foray into cultural criticism, following the well-received <i>The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness.</i> His poetic sensibilities shine through, for better or worse. Though the book is laid out more or less chronologically, Young often makes associative leaps. He digresses a lot, and keeping up with his lyrical definitions and redefinitions of the hoax and its cultural implications can feel a little overwhelming. But ultimately, <i>Bunk</i> serves as a necessary reference book you can dip in and out of as you like, or else turn to any time the president says anything. <i id="recStar" class="fa fa-star rec-star" aria-hidden="true"></i></p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/22/25575627/why-do-americans-love-bullshit-the-new-book-bunk-gets-to-the-bottom-of-it/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25575627">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/22/25575627/why-do-americans-love-bullshit-the-new-book-bunk-gets-to-the-bottom-of-it/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25575627 2 Wed, 22 Nov 2017 04:00:00 -0800 The Stranger Shut Up About Nazi-Punching and Pick Up Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/08/25539293/shut-up-about-nazi-punching-and-pick-up-antifa-the-anti-fascist-handbook https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/08/25539293/shut-up-about-nazi-punching-and-pick-up-antifa-the-anti-fascist-handbook Chase Burns The guy wrote the book on fighting fascism. by Chase Burns <p><span class="dropcap">B</span>efore their recent <del>death</del> transformation, our dear friends at the <i>Seattle Weekly</i> ran an editorial titled "Don't Punch Nazis—Yet," arguing that Seattle has not reached a place where violence is an answer to fascism—"yet." Citing vehicular homicide in Charlottesville, throat-slitting on passenger trains in Portland, and gunshots on the University of Washington's Red Square, others argue, as Primo Levi once wrote—and Incubus once sang—<i>Seattle Weekly</i>, if not now, when?</p> <p>The debate about punching Nazis isn't new, as Mark Bray explains in <i>Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook</i>. (Bray reads at the University Book Store on November 11.) The "handbook," which is really more of a textbook, describes how older Jews in the mid-1930s often criticized younger Jewish anti-fascist organizers who were "copying the Nazi violence which we loathe and detest." Their criticism did little to prevent the rising tide of fascism and the ensuing genocide. Our way of remembering this period, unfortunately, appears to be repeating this dead-end debate.</p> <p>If we're going to keep this up, can we at least start talking about, as one organizer tabulated, "the 97 percent of anti-fascist activity that doesn't involve a violent confrontation"?</p> <p>Bray's <i>Antifa</i> is a good place to start. The handbook offers readers their first "transnational history of postwar anti-fascism in English," and, according to Bray, their most comprehensive. When reading, it's quickly clear that violence is a final tactic treated as self-defense, and it's something antifa organizations quibble over, too. Reducing the entire range of anti-fascist activity—which is overwhelmingly nonviolent—to the question of a punch is far more dangerous than a fistfight.</p> <p>When we focus on punching Nazis, we fail to celebrate nonviolent anti-racist organizing (which always was anti-fascist, according to historian Robert Paxton, who argues that fascism "functionally" originates in America with the KKK), to laud the activists who convince private venues to reject white supremacist clients, and to think about the implications of doxxing white supremacists.</p> <p>As he lectures on the history of European postwar antifa up to today's antifa organizers in the Pacific Northwest, Bray touches on some of these things, as well as anti-Nazi punks, Italian feminist witches, and how the alt-right recruits dudes who like <i>My Little Pony</i>. (Seriously.) The latter half of the book reads like a Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlet, but instead of offering a Q&A about eternal salvation, Bray poses and answers questions such as "Are Anti-Fascists Anti-Free Speech?" (His short answer: Fascists aren't entitled to free speech, so nah nah nah.)</p> <p>It's unclear if <i>Seattle Weekly</i> will be able to update their "don't punch Nazis" stance. That paper, as we've known it, is now dead. But while we mull over the precise moment when "don't" becomes "do," <i>Antifa</i> urges people to organize against fascism before it organizes against us. <i id="recStar" class="fa fa-star rec-star" aria-hidden="true"></i></p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/08/25539293/shut-up-about-nazi-punching-and-pick-up-antifa-the-anti-fascist-handbook/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25539293">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/08/25539293/shut-up-about-nazi-punching-and-pick-up-antifa-the-anti-fascist-handbook/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25539293 6 Wed, 08 Nov 2017 04:00:00 -0800 The Stranger John Hodgman Invites You to Vacationland https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/01/25534390/john-hodgman-invites-you-to-vacationland https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/01/25534390/john-hodgman-invites-you-to-vacationland Erik Henriksen Discussed: Weed, death cults, and rich people problems. by Erik Henriksen <p><span id="dropcap">"T</span>his is not a book about marriage or family, both because I respect my loved ones’ private lives, and because I am very selfish,” John Hodgman writes at the beginning of <i>Vacationland</i>. “This is a book about <i>me</i>, at what I hope is the beginning of the second half of my life and not the brief, final tenth.”</p> <p>Hodgman’s latest stands apart from his previous books—<i>The Areas of My Expertise</i>, <i>More</i> <i>Information Than You Require</i>, and <i>That Is All</i>, three excellent tomes that purported to contain the sum total of all world knowledge, but actually contained a bunch of made-up facts and hobo names. <i>Vacationland</i>, on the other hand, is full of true things: memories and thoughts and jokes and essays, all of which gradually cohere into a careful, bittersweet memoir. It’s just as funny as his previous books; it’s better than all of them.</p> <p>Hodgman spends most of <i>Vacationland</i> in three places: “the green mountains of rural western Massachusetts where I disposed of my youth, the mercilessly painful beaches of coastal Maine where I will eventually accept my death, and the haunted forest of middle age that lies between them.” Despite never getting sappy (nostalgia, he correctly notes, is a “toxic impulse,” the “twinned, yearning delusion that [a] the past was better [it wasn’t] and [b] it can be recaptured [it can’t] that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News”), Hodgman is keenly aware of how past losses reverberate into our futures, and how lives rarely go as planned, even for those, like the author, who ended up on the lucky side of that “nauseating chasm of class and privilege.” “Thus we come to the central conflict of my life and this book,” Hodgman writes. “<i>I OWN TWO SUMMER HOMES</i>. Are you enjoying my very relatable book of essays and reflections?”</p> <p>Unlike other books by rich white dudes, <i>Vacationland</i> really <i>is</i> enjoyable, in no small part thanks to stories like Hodgman’s recollection of getting high and spending hours stacking rocks in a riverbed with Jonathan Coulton (“Sometimes Jonathan Coulton would bring his family up to visit ours. Jonathan is a musician and my best friend. I hope he does not read that last part”). But there’s sadness here, too, and a deep-rooted knowledge that none of us are as special as we think. “There are times when all the lies you have told about yourself <i>to</i> yourself just fall away,” Hodgman notes. “In your twenties, you tell yourself the lie that you are unusual, unprecedented, and interesting,” while in your thirties, “you tell yourself the lie that you are still in your twenties. Many in their forties tell themselves this same lie, until a moment like this, and suddenly you see yourself clearly.”</p> <p>Self-reflection—and reflections on family, and death, and what it means to be a white man in 2017—are at the core of <i>Vacationland</i>, except funnier than I just made them sound. At first, Hodgman doesn’t even seem to <i>like</i> the places he’s ended up (“the beaches of Maine are made out of jagged stones shaped like knives,” and sure, there are also lakes, but “you do not want to swim in them either, because lakes are disgusting”), but he does know that we can learn from such places, and that we can teach ourselves while in them. “Maine is not a death cult,” he promises toward the end. “I mean, it is. But it’s a slow one. It creeps in like the tide, and without your even noticing, the ground around you is swallowed by water, until it is gone.” <img src="/images/rec_star.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="recommended" border="0" /> </p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/01/25534390/john-hodgman-invites-you-to-vacationland/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25534390">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/11/01/25534390/john-hodgman-invites-you-to-vacationland/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25534390 1 Wed, 01 Nov 2017 15:28:14 -0700 The Stranger The First Black President Changed Ta-Nehisi Coates's Life https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/25/25488331/the-first-black-president-changed-ta-nehisi-coatess-life https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/25/25488331/the-first-black-president-changed-ta-nehisi-coatess-life Charles Mudede A review of the essay collection <em>We Were Eight Years in Power.</em> by Charles Mudede <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>a-Nehisi Coates, the most prominent black American writer of our moment, opens his new book, <i>We Were Eight Years in Power</i>, with a quote from Jay-Z, one of the most overrated rappers in history. Jay-Z rapped in the 1996 track "Dead Presidents II": "We don't just shine, we illuminate the whole show." I have no idea why this line is at all interesting or worthy of being repeated. Maybe Coates wants to look like he is down or something—I do not know. But Jay-Z is no hero of mine.</p> <p>So we have a bad start to a book that is actually brilliant. It contains nine essays, eight of which cover the eight years that Barack Obama was at the center of our global civilization. With the exception of the last essay, each is introduced with notes that are personal in tone and describe where Coates was in his career at the point of the essay's conception and composition. (<a href="http://www.thestranger.com/events/25340164/sal-presents-a-conversation-with-ta-nehisi-coates">Coates is reading</a> as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures on November 5 at <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/locations/559878/benaroya-hall">Benaroya Hall</a>.)</p> <p>The first collection of notes, before a fascinating essay on Bill Cosby, explains how Coates in 2007, the year before Obama was elected, was broke, unemployed, and on the dole. He had no idea what the future of his profession might bring. He had a few ideas in his head and not much else. The essay on Bill Cosby, however, inaugurated his relationship with the <i>Atlantic</i>, the publication that would make him famous. The first notes also contain this pivotal claim: Coates's rise from the unemployment office to international celebrity owes much to Barack Obama's success. When he became the first black president, the writing market opened for Coates and other black writers. And so this book is in one sense a letter of thanks to Obama for—to use the words of Milk Dee—"knowing the time."</p> <p>The book, however, has a clear mission. It wants to understand two things that took Coates by surprise: One, the arrival of the first black president (Obama) and, two, the arrival of "the first white president" (Trump), the subject of the book's last essay. How did Coates fail to see or predict either of these events? The first surprise revealed he was too pessimistic, the second that he was not pessimistic enough. How was this possible?</p> <p>The explanation, which is the book's narrative motor, is found in the myth of progress. It goes like this: Obama ran for president when the country was in deep shit. The economy crashed, people were scared, and white Republicans were offering no real solutions. America turned to the black man in an act not of enlightenment but of desperation. This desperation has an echo in the dub of US history. During the Civil War, Coates argues, blacks were enlisted by the North only when it was clear that the war was becoming longer and more deadly than expected. After the war, progress appeared in the form of Reconstruction, but it took only a few years for the society to revert to its white-supremacist ways. This, Coates thinks, is what happened with Obama. Not long after the danger was defused and the economy stabilized, society reverted to business as usual.</p> <p>So there was no progress, just the illusion of it. <i id="recStar" class="fa fa-star rec-star" aria-hidden="true"></i></p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/25/25488331/the-first-black-president-changed-ta-nehisi-coatess-life/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25488331">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/25/25488331/the-first-black-president-changed-ta-nehisi-coatess-life/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25488331 17 Wed, 25 Oct 2017 04:00:00 -0700 The Stranger Joe Hagan on the Rise of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25464890/joe-hagan-on-the-rise-of-jann-wenner-and-rolling-stone https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25464890/joe-hagan-on-the-rise-of-jann-wenner-and-rolling-stone Jenni Moore <i>Sticky Fingers</I> is a crawl through rock & roll journalism and American history. by Jenni Moore <p><span id="dropcap">D</span>uring my college days at the University of Oregon, one of my favorite journalism professors, Tom Wheeler, told my class about the time he interviewed Keith Richards for <i>Rolling Stone</i>. I always thought it would be rad to contribute to such an iconic publication, and to meet and interview popular artists. Now, as a working music writer, I was immediately drawn to Joe Hagan’s <i>Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine</i>, which promised interviews with the likes of Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, Elton John, Lorne Michaels, and Annie Leibovitz.</p> {{image:1, align:right, width:250}} <p>Knowing virtually nothing about how <i>Rolling Stone</i> or its co-founder Jann Wenner rose to success, I dove into the book and quickly got stuck in the mud. It’s not the easiest read—I had to google often while trudging through all the names—and with all of the backstory provided for Wenner’s family, friends, ex-girlfriends, and their family members, I had a hard time deciding if my experience was more like reading a textbook or crawling down a Wikipedia wormhole.</p> <p>From the beginning, Wenner is painted as a sort of leftist, pro-establishment Trumpian icon: fame-obsessed, manipulative, wealthy, and highly concerned with elevating his social status within rock ’n’ roll and youth culture. As the book points out, Wenner is actually the same age as the president and the two have a few things in common, despite their different politics: They’re both “deeply narcissistic men for whom celebrity is the ultimate confirmation of existence.”</p> <p>Even from childhood, <i>Sticky Fingers</i> shows Wenner was on track to become a Slytherin-esque evil genius, citing a year-end review from one of his teachers, who said he was “unusually intelligent but with a compulsion to violence,” and “in group situations he tries to dominate, withdrawing when the group does not recognize his leadership.”</p> <p>While the book doesn’t shy away from Wenner’s many unflattering angles, and the fact that his unshakeable arrogance often made him unlikable, I could relate to and empathize with other aspects of his identity and vision—like his deeply repressed homosexuality in a time when coming out wasn’t an option, his neglectful Jewish parents, his unavoidable and ambitious fanboying, and his passion for legalizing psychedelics. I found it interesting, too, that Wenner never saw the Beatles live (he once traded two tickets for 30 hits of acid), was quoted as having mainstream musical taste, and was “not a deep musical person. I was a fan.”</p> <p><i>Sticky Fingers</i> is more than just a book about how Wenner came to know Mick Jagger and John Lennon, own multiple magazines, help establish the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and capture and assisted in defining an entire counterculture in print. It’s also a good refresher for the timeline of the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War, youth-driven drug and counterculture, as well as civil and women’s rights. Though it’s a dense read, as an alt-journalist with a <i>clear</i> slant to her writing, learning about <i>Rolling Stone</i>’s strong ties to the Democratic Party and how it became an influential and respected beacon for intelligent, critical culture writing was well worth the slog. <img src="/images/rec_star.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="recommended" border="0" /> </p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25464890/joe-hagan-on-the-rise-of-jann-wenner-and-rolling-stone/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25464890">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25464890/joe-hagan-on-the-rise-of-jann-wenner-and-rolling-stone/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25464890 2 Wed, 11 Oct 2017 14:34:00 -0700 The Stranger Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach Gets Good on Page 362 https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25457521/jennifer-egans-manhattan-beach-gets-good-on-page-362 https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25457521/jennifer-egans-manhattan-beach-gets-good-on-page-362 Rich Smith That's when something finally happens in this Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning novelist's new book. by Rich Smith <p><span class="dropcap">J</span>ennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for a collection of linked short stories called <i>A Visit from the Goon Squad.</i> She's rightfully lauded for writing literary fiction that incorporates the carnal pleasures of genre fiction without sacrificing her considerable formal or linguistic powers. So when her latest book, <i>Manhattan Beach</i>, was long-listed for this year's National Book Award, the fact registered as a happy inevitability: Egan has written another excellent book, and we all must read it.</p> <p>But a full third of the way into this very obviously well-researched, immersive piece of historical fiction, I started feeling the sensation I feel when I watch a classic movie I'm supposed to like: When is this thing going to get good? When will a character make the gesture that pulls me into the world and keeps me there? When will a scene pulse with metaphorical resonance? With the exception of a few false leads, Egan steadfastly refused to make such a move until the last few chapters of the book, which is only sort of defensible given the novel's structural obsession.</p> <p><i>Manhattan Beach</i> is a book about edges, so a certain "edging" quality to the narrative might be forgiven. Most of the action takes place in New York City during World War II, right when the United States is on the edge of victory in the European theater. Locations include the titular beach, that battleground of land and sea jutting out from south Brooklyn and into the Atlantic, as well as edgy nightclubs and smoke-filled side rooms. As a roving close-third narrator, Egan slings out 1940s slang, lists a bunch of card games nobody plays anymore, and indulges in the occasional "toots." There's joy in reading lines like "Dexter smelled a rat before he'd even reached the boat house," even if the language itself is just on the edge of parody.</p> <p>The main characters live on the edges of life. While heroically enduring or otherwise bucking the patriarchy in its various and pernicious forms, Anna pursues her high-risk dream of becoming a diver in the service of the war effort, an alien-looking suit the only thing separating her from death. The existence of her father, Eddie, is constantly in question, as is the viability of her profoundly disabled sister, Lydia. The other main character, Dexter, is a veteran gangster experiencing a midlife crisis. He wants to give up the game for honest work, but that's proving difficult.</p> <p>Despite all this edginess, the prose bloats with beautiful but somewhat boring technical descriptions of diving equipment, whole chapters feel like fruitless diversions, and in general the story's mysteries lack suspense. Egan is in command of her sentences, and her control of the mind's camera is masterful. But the blood doesn't quicken and the mind doesn't race until some serious business goes down at sea, and even then the story gets stuffed with superfluous literary allusions. Egan's greatness is apparent in these moments, but it just takes too long to get there. <i id="recStar" class="fa fa-star rec-star" aria-hidden="true"></i></p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25457521/jennifer-egans-manhattan-beach-gets-good-on-page-362/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25457521">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/10/11/25457521/jennifer-egans-manhattan-beach-gets-good-on-page-362/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25457521 0 Wed, 11 Oct 2017 04:00:00 -0700 The Stranger Art Garfunkel's Memoir Is a Truly Bizarre Document https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/09/27/25432927/art-garfunkels-memoir-is-a-truly-bizarre-document https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/09/27/25432927/art-garfunkels-memoir-is-a-truly-bizarre-document Sean Nelson <i>What Is It All but Luminous</i> is printed in a font that's a digital version of Art Garfunkel's handwriting. by Sean Nelson <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>his probably doesn't place me in a supermajority, but the news that Art Garfunkel had written a memoir struck me as thrilling. Finally, I thought, we'll get to read a thorough account of just how intensely he and Paul Simon loved and hated and needed and rejected each other, and why, and when, and how much, and how often.</p> <p>We'd get a firsthand account of what happened when Mike Nichols cast both Simon and Garfunkel in <i>Catch-22</i>, and then changed his mind and fired Simon, thus hastening the duo's first breakup. Perhaps we'd even get some insight into the necrophiliac climax of <i>Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession</i>, the Central Park reunion, the condition of having lived long enough to stand astride multiple generations of pop culture relevance.</p> <p>But Garfunkel had a different kind of memoir in mind. Actually, it's difficult to know what he had in mind, because <i>What Is It All but Luminous</i> is an unprecedentedly bizarre book. It's more akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald's posthumous <i>The Crack-Up</i>—a compilation of disconnected epigraphs, partially related thoughts, and (Garfunkel's term) "poetic bits"—than to, say, Keith Richards's <i>Life</i>.</p> <p><i>Luminous</i> lies somewhere between a mischievous subversion of rock star autobiographies and an "Oh, shit! My book's due tomorrow!" notebook scraper. There's no shortage of poem fragments, sexual braggadocio, and reading lists, but every time he gets close to being fully interested in a perspective, he digresses. Also, it's a bit hard to read because the font is a digital version of his handwriting.</p> <p>He's now touring the country reading aloud from it. He tantalizes with lots of Simon, but the stories always stop short of a meaningful analysis. Maybe he can't or won't reduce their complex dynamic. When he gives voice to their mutual frustrations and eternal interdependence, he does so with rhetorical questions and enigmatic lines like "The falcon cannot hear the falconer."</p> <p>It is one of those books that you want to be about one thing, only to find it insists on being about something else. A short note on page 35 makes you wonder if perhaps <i>Luminous</i> is more like a test balloon than a tell-all. Having described his life thus far as a two-act play, with <i>Bridge Over Troubled Water</i> (1970), his last album with Simon, as the act break, he finally asks and answers the question that will have been troubling any discerning reader thus far: "What is this book? It is Act II." Oh. Right. Okay.</p> <p>"Someday," Garfunkel muses, "I'll write the show-off book." Which makes this one, what, exactly, one wonders? A prelude? A throat clearing? A descant? Frankly, if that's what it takes to make Garfunkel feel like singing, I am there for it. I wouldn't blame anyone else for waiting for a book that deals less glancingly with the more heroic sections of his life, but I can't deny a certain admiration for his willingness to hold a little something back in the verse. How better to make the chorus really pop? <i id="recStar" class="fa fa-star rec-star" aria-hidden="true"></i></p> <br /> <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ho92k2CKNh0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p><br /> <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cGyQmH9NZcw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/09/27/25432927/art-garfunkels-memoir-is-a-truly-bizarre-document/comments">Comment on this story</a> ]</p> <p>[ <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&amp;oid=25432927">Subscribe to the comments on this story</a> ]</p> Books https://www.thestranger.com/books/2017/09/27/25432927/art-garfunkels-memoir-is-a-truly-bizarre-document/comments https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Rss.xml?id=comments&oid=25432927 2 Wed, 27 Sep 2017 04:00:00 -0700 The Stranger
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