Links
Archives
Thursday, June 02, 2005
|
LIST, LIST, O, LIST UD offers an antidote to that strange list of “the ten most dangerous books” that Human Events recently put out. The list UD is about to link you to - Salon magazine’s list of the worst books of 1997 - is much more fun to read, trust me. Here are some of my favorite tidbits from it: [He] turns on his irony super-collider and tries to smash big, bad America to teeny-tiny bits. I read every paragraph and footnote, and now wonder if book reviewing might be one of the activities a dominatrix requires her clients to perform. Her prose ("The exhaustion of withstanding his desire is not supportable") is so enervated that every sentence could use its own fainting couch. If this is how she writes about a life-changing experience, I'd sure hate to see her grocery list. [This is a] true story that reads like a steaming heap. … [He] milks his background for all it's worth, overwriting shamelessly about details like the holes in his mother's sneakers (they're mentioned at least three times) and how she scrimped to buy him a class ring made of genuine metal and red glass. Eventually, he saved enough money to buy his mother a house, with real windows that open and shut and everything. There's a strain of consciously transgressive fiction that works so hard to shock that rejecting it can make you feel less prudish than accepting it would. Admitting that you're shaken up by a pretentious stinker like Gary Indiana's Resentment means admitting that you're willing to be a con man's mark. When you read a scene where one guy buggers another with a Snickers bar and then eats it, you've got two choices: You can be disturbed, or you can shrug and figure sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don't. |