goodbye, village voice

I don't remember when I first read the Village Voice, let alone when I first saw it. But growing up in New York it was ubiquitous. I remember buying copies when I could find them upstate from the mid-70s through the 80s, and for a time when I lived in New Paltz, I had a subscription that, I remember, promised--and made good on--delivery by Saturday after new issues came out on Tuesday.

Here's what I remember best about it. There was a sense that, by cracking open the pages, you were plugging into a source, if not of Truth, then of Questing. I learned about new things, new outrages, new music, new movies, new books, new ideas that I couldn't locate anywhere else. It's the reason why if I'm in any new town I look for the local cultural weekly. And while I couldn't always take part in them--rarely did films like The Little Theif make it upstate--sometimes I could. I took the trip down to The City (and reading the Voice you always thought of it as The City) to see that Truffaut, and somehow Stranger Than Paradise made it up there. When it did I knew I was seeing a movie by a new talent with absolutely new ideas about filmmaking and what constituted a story. By age 24 I'd seen enough explosions and guns going off. I was ready for nuance.

I read all the greats in the Voice: Mailer, Christgau, Sarris, Hentoff, Bastone, Feiffer, Stamaty, Mack, Willis, Goldstein, Johnson, Plachy (okay, I looked at her stuff, but I drank it in like it was written), Barry, Rall, Barrett, Hoberman, Brown, Indiana. Listen how those names trip off my tongue! I knew I was part of a special constituency. I read Ellen Frankfort's histrionic The Voice and Kevin McAuliffe's Great American Newspaper (which was already sounding the Voice's death knell in 78). I stuck with it through the Murdoch years and when it was funded by the sales of flea collars. I stuck with it through the disgraceful firings of Eddy, Christgau, Goldstein, Hentoff, Feingold and Musto. I even stuck with it through the painful constrictions online as it became a watered-down spacewaster where, at best, one could mine it for little nuggets of tough observation.

But no more. The final sole reason I've continued to read it online, Roy Edroso's weekly Exploring the Right Wing Blogosphere, has departed, vanished, disincorporated. It is a late column. Runnin' Scared, the blog where Edroso's column appeared, is still there, and one can read archived columns. But it's not the same. I'll continue to occasionally skim Runnin' Scared, because I like seeing what the miscreants back in The City are doing. But as a regular weekly destination, as a place where I will wait up til 10 on a Sunday night because 11 east is when he updated, it will no longer exist for me. Village Voice, I shake the dust of you from my shoes.

intercourse this book

I spent part of my afternoon at a bookstore, a passion I have, and was excited when I discovered that a book I'd heard of, Under the Overpass:  A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski, was there.  I found the copy and settled into one of the overstuffed chairs that seem to have become rare in many of the chains, expecting to read through at least a chapter, maybe two.

But I barely had opened it when I growled "bullshit" and slammed it shut and replaced it on the shelf.  On the third page ran this exchange:

That's when the chaos hit.

"Who you think you are? You piece of...!" Marco, the undisputed leader of the gang at the mouth of the park, was screaming at a guy in front of him.

I frowned.  I don't know anyone who has spent any time on the street who would stop himself from saying "shit," assuming that's the word Marco was about to use.  Then I flipped through the pages:  not a single "shit," "piss," "fuck," "bastard," "asshole," or "damn." Not even a "hell" in the whole intercoursing book. 

That's when I saw this "Note to the Reader" nestled between the forward and the story proper:

Before you take the first step on this journey, I need to tell you something. Common street lingo isn't pretty.  People can pack more explitives and profanities into one sentence than you'd think possible. Vulgarities and crude insults become part of everyday conversation, even between friends.  But out of respect of our readers and the standards of this publisher [!], this element of street life is not present in the pages you're about to read.

Well, fuck that shit.  He presents a solid image on the cover above, looking for all the world like a real traveling kid straight out of LATFO.  But Such neutering goes beyond mere toning down:  for the past century writers fought a hard battle to present the language of the people as they speak it.  Even in the 30s and 40s we had authors using "sh_t" and "d_mn" in order to fulfill their contractual agreement not to sear the eyeballs of virgin readers.  No one in contemporary America is more subject to the whims of authors who are not members of their tribe than the homeless, hustlers, buskers, travelers and assorted street denizens.  To misrepresent their voices in order to save the wilting flowers of Multnomah Books embarrassment is not is not on a par with, say, causing them bodily injury, but it is like spitting in their eyes.

Mike Yankoski, you are not worth my time.

Update:  Would it suprise anyone that Multnomah, publisher of Under the Overpass, also published this book within our lifetimes?

you're not worth my time

likely because we had tickets to the science museum of minnesota's king tut exhibit--which, despite their cost, we did not end up using because my wife developed a debilitating migraine, and I'd rather eat $100 than have her in misery for an afternoon--I grabbed an elizabeth peters mystery on my way out the door to an errand that involved sitting for an hour and a half. it was called the hippopotamus pool and it was execrable.

I should qualify that. the 1st 50 pages were execrable. the rest might be spectacular but I'll never know. I give any book an hour and if it doesn't make me want to keep reading after the 1st 50 pages I give it up. I noted on my facebook page that peters is an exceptionally bad writer but that's not really true. she's a very clever writer who probably can write well, perhaps for her more contemporary mysteries or her supernatural novels under the name barbara michaels, but she tries to make her amelia peabody novels a pastiche of the writing prevalent of the time in which they take place--the turn into the 20th century--and she gets some things right but the spirit wrong. as a person who reads a lot of novels from that period I'm familiar that there's a certain feel to the writing that readers come to expect, a certain verbosity and ornateness and unwillingness to name unpleasant things for what they are. I'm not certain attempting to write in that style by contemporary authors is necessary, although some--nicholas myers, laurie king, alan moore, julian barnes, anne perry, and of course george macdonald fraser, among others--do it very, very well.

it is usually sex that leads to trouble in these things and peters has made an especially unhappy attempt to invoke it, at least here. it's not a bad thing to want to go against the received wisdom that proper victorians were not the sexless prudes we've imagined them--indeed, frank harris made a cottage industry debunking that--but it is bad to suggest it with a fist made of ham and pork, which is the case here.

"I now make certain that the buttons on emerson's shirts are sewn with double thicknesses of thread, since they were always popping off when he disrobed in haste or when he expanded the impressive breadth of his chest. this was an old shirt; the buttons slipped handily out of the holes, and as he extended his arms to their full length, quite a large expanse of his person, smoothly tanned and artistically modeled, became visible.

"'really, emerson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,' I said. 'if you think you can distract me from my maternal obligations in that crude, unsubtle fashion--'

"'unsubtle? my dear peabody, you don't know what you are saying. now if I had done this...or this...'

"leaving the cat anubis to the sitting room, we retired to our own."

this book is not worth my time.

"beating the gre 2010"

my wife will not be happy to read this, convinced as she is of the rightness of any attempt to better one's chances--specifically, my chances--at improving scores on tests, but the sad, simple truth is that the unabridged "beating the gre 2010," the online advertisement of which reads like it was cut-and-pasted by a committee for which english was not its native language and the audiobook of which she gave me to listen to while in the thick, is a tremendous waste of time. I know she won't believe me but I really did give it a try. I have listened to its 1st 2 hours--well, all right, I have skimmed through the 1st 2 hours--with the intent of finding anything worth listening to for more than a minute at a time while I was out walking and I must say I was more inclined to listen to the dogs barking in the distance and the nearer whine of chainsaws.

between being condescended to ("we know most of you would rather be at the beach, reading a good novel [?], or playing a video game than studying for the gre"--no, anyone who would rather do those things is doing them; anyone listening to this perky chippity voice regurgitating blase information from various websites devoted to "beating" the exam is presumably doing so because his school has been convinced of the fictions that the gre is an important test and that the better he does on it the better his chances of grad school success, so accord us the respect of listening because we want to) and being given the brushoff that "later on...later on...later on..." the service will tell us something important, there is absolutely nothing important to hear and no new information to be given.

I am not some neophyte bedazzled by the notion of the mysteries of graduate school. I took the gre nearly 30 years ago, having been driven to the testsite in connecticut by my parents because I couldn't sober up enough to leave on time and without having studied for it, and I passed it with a slightly above-average verbal score and a slightly below-average analytical score. a week ago I took a practice swipe at it again and had almost the same scores. in each case I did no figuring for any of the math, simply guessing at answers; if anything, my verbal scores have improved. trying to improve on simply passing is a waste of my time.

there are legitimate questions about the accuracy of the gre in predicting either success or scholarship potential, and at the very least there is great reason to suspect that pigeonholing students using quantitative measures is ineffective. I refuse to work myself into a lather about taking the exam. my wife is convinced that our doing well on the gre will increase the likelihood of our receiving scholarships for seminary. that may be so. as I see it, doing well may be a good thing and it may make no difference at all (friends report their gre scores having no effect on their scholarship monies). at best I am in no worse place than I am now; taking the practice exam cold after 30 years of having not thought about any of this and guessing shows me passing. doing poorly on the exam will be a button off my shirt.

perhaps most telling: I stopped listening after the perky voice switched a number used in an example from "720" to "702" between the beginning and the end of the sentence. the answer might be the same--that "702 [or 720] is divisible by 9"--or it may not. but if it wasn't important enough for someone at the company to listen to for errors before it was released, it isn't important enough for me either. I echo frank's opinion.

inaugurating "not worth my time"

for the second time in 11 years I have tried to read lee seigel's love in a dead language, and for the second time I have been thrust unceremoniously out of the dream by the pedantic and officious dead language of the book. I really want to like the book, and at least this time I made it through the foreward and to the end of the third chapter, but even that was only page 18. peeking ahead I find no change in the silly language that is too redolent of love poetry written by 60-somethings about 20-somethings, all "her thighs, her lips, her breasts, the way she says 'fuck'". there is something to be said for the veracity I suppose that siegel brings to this novel of a one-sided love affair and its results, but the something I would say is that it is too much about too little. at least this time I enjoyed the time given over to wordplay, such as the following:

"while roth certainly knew how to type, and he did use a computer for correspondence, university documents, academic papers, and other projects, he undertook the composition of the present manuscript in longhand, using a koh-i-noor fountain pen. 'you'll understand, saighal,' he grinned almost demonically shortly before his death, 'it's one of those charades that we've talked about: penis--pen is.' 'a pen is required to write' equals 'a penis required to write.' paper is womb, ink indelible sperm, and the charade proves it--'ink is semen: drip erotic all mankind!' equals 'in kiss, emend ripe rot: I call man "kind."'"

clever, but too clever by several degrees, and it's in the form of a footnote. feh. for the loss of an hour of my life I'll never get back and an expenditure of my wee bear brain in useless travesty, I award lee siegel's novel a zappa.