Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Brainiac's bedside table, week of 7/22/07

I recently mentioned a few books -- some new, some old -- that I've been reading while vacationing in the Berkshires. Here are a few more new books that I'm excited about reading this month.

* "Lost Between the Edges" (Semiotext/e Native Agents, distrib. MIT). Described by the publisher as "a new classic of symbolic warfare waged in the street and the mind," this novel by Toronto-based author and artist Eldon Garnet concerns the efforts of X, a "renegade academic and punk intellectual," to put a Holocaust denier out of business, permanently. I enjoyed Garnet's 1995 novel "Reading Brooke Shields: The Garden of Failure" (also from Semiotext/e), and I've long admired Chris Kraus's Native Agents imprint, so this ought to be a good read.

* "The Poetics of DNA" (Minnesota), by Judith Roof. According to Roof, a professor of film studies and English at Michigan State, formerly discredited Western ideologies about identity, gender, and difference have made a comeback in recent years thanks in no small part to wrong-headed analogies, metaphors, and other "figurations" of DNA. Roof blames not only science writers, however, but scientists: After all, she points out, "selling the project of mapping the entire human genome is easier... if we conceive of the ultimate product as the book of life, a tidy tome with affinities to a cookbook, a manual, and the Bible, rather than the molecular topography of of incipient protein production." Peddlers of pseudoscience, beware!

* "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories), edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck still haven't made a movie of Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," like they said they would, but now we have "Voices," a CD of 16 readings selected from that book. If you liked Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in "Lord of the Rings," you'll love him as Bartolome de Las Casas, providing a 1542 eyewitness account of how Columbus devastated the Indies. Also included: John Sayles as Mark Twain commenting on the Moro Massacre in 1906, plus Lili Taylor, Sandra Oh, the divine Marisa Tomei, and others.

* "The Fun Never Stops" (Fantagraphics), by Drew Friedman. Friedman needs no introduction -- although he's the darling of alt.culture magazines and journals like Raw, Weirdo, and BLAB!, his comics and illustrations have appeared in mainstream publications like SPY, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, and The New York Observer for years now. Those of us who can't get enough Friedman are in luck: Here's an anthology of his work since 1991. It includes the amazing strip from Raw about Buddy Rich, in which Rich nearly kills a stranger who suggests that Gene Krupa is the world's greatest drummer; the New Yorker comic "Cooking with Genius," in which Beckett waits for 3-minute eggs to boil and Einstein's 5-alarm chili erupts in a mushroom cloud; and even Friedman's "Toxic High" drawings for Topps. Thanks, Fantagraphics; I'll be poring over every panel for weeks.

* "Critical Americans" (North Carolina). Leslie Butler, an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth, celebrates the ambitious liberalism of the late 19th century, when the Cambridge, Mass. circle of George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton articulated political ideals and cultural standards that seem impossibly utopian at our own particular moment. Down with American racism, materialism, and jingoism? Up with educative citizenship and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy? Please tell me that our next president will share these sentiments.

* "The Act You've Known For All These Years" (Canongate), by Clinton Heylin. Heylin is the author of far too many books -- over a dozen biographies and histories of the Velvet Underground, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan (a few times), Sandy Denny, the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., and Joy Division. But of course all the research the British author has done must make it easy for him to knock off a book like this one: a biography of a single album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," which as we know, was released 40 years ago this summer. "Sgt. Pepper's" was inspired by Beatles friends and rivals like Dylan, the Beach Boys, and Pink Floyd. "It was precisely the fact that 'Pepper' was a clever collage of all the most up-to-date innovations of others," writes Heylin, "that made it sparkle so brightly." Which innovations were appropriated for which Beatles songs? Now you'll know.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:33 PM

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