Cardinal Column #15: The Final Countdown

(Editor’s note: This was my final column for the Cardinal, written hoping to get a better sense of closure to my project and talk about two of my favorite books. By picking the two, I was – as I said in my writing – genuinely surprised and pleased to find common links and be able to elaborate onto them. Not much else to say here as this was a column written as my own reactions, so I have no other reactions to add to those.

With the posting of past columns completed, don’t think this will mean I have nothing else to say – I hope to move onto printing new content fairly soon, once my relocation to Portland, OR gets sorted out. Stay tuned for more than partial excitement!)

Les is no more: a tearful farewell to our book worm

Originally published in The Daily Cardinal, April 26, 2006

As Mr. Fitzgerald put it, “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past …” Yes dear readers, the time has come for my final chapter, and the last installment of “The Lesser of Two Equals.” Next year, I move on to greener pastures (or at least sleeping Monday nights with no deadline) and my deviant typist photo will be retired.

I thought long and hard about this final column, and doing justice to the best writing experience of my college career. First, I thought I’d list off my favorite books and authors and be culturally relevant, but my fellow columnist Pudas beat me to that idea—and even took the closing line I wanted. First he makes me overdose on gin, and now this.

Then I decided to turn to the old reliable of addressing readers’ concerns, except for the sad fact none of you seem to have any. In 14 columns I’ve received five e-mails, most of which were, instead of personal questions and literary debate, bitching at me for not being harder on the lying author Nasdijj and praising my knowledge of “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

There are two questions, however, that I’ve been asked before this column started and increased during publication: what was the first book you ever read, and what’s your favorite book? I tend to give evasive answers to these questions (i.e. bullshit my way out) because my book collection is ludicrously difficult to decipher, but for my denouement I thought I should try to answer them both.

My first book (cue tender music) was a children’s book by Marilyn Sadler, called “It’s Not Easy Being A Bunny.” In it, P.J. Funnybunny grows tired of being a bunny and takes off to live with other animals, ranging from birds to beavers to skunks. However, when he learns he can’t fly or work hard or stand the smell, he realizes he’s happiest being a bunny and goes home to the family burrow.

Hearing this at a tender young age, free from college cynicism, was one of my best youthful experiences and I both read and had it read to me many times. In addition to a simple format—P.J. moving from one animal to another, rejecting each one and building up a list of past efforts—it had a gentle theme of finding yourself and appreciating what you had. Additionally, the image of a tiny rabbit making moose calls is still one of the cutest things ever.

Keeping to my sympathetic side, this book still holds a close place to my heart—on my desk back home in Brookfield, where it remains safe from my college excess. Even now on vacations, I still pick it up late at night and peruse its well-taped pages, harkening back to the days when my vocabulary had 20 words and being you mattered most.

After remembering this from 15 years ago, I was struck by the radical shift to my favorite book (cue orchestral crescendo) and the only book I own multiple copies of: Hunter S. Thompson’s drugged-up epic “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” I first read this on a drive to Indianapolis, and the trip we were taking to a gaming convention was quickly displaced by a head-trip of literature.

Beyond the fact that this was the first book to make journalism look like a cool profession—Raoul Duke and his attorney driving around in convertibles, loaded on amyls and acid and not paying for any of it—it was also one of the few books to jar me into alternate perspective. Not only was it original, but its fluid, stream of consciousness format passed my ultimate test: I not only wanted to read more of this, I wanted to write like this.

Making these two choices was difficult, but it also birthed a startling question—how did I go from a white rabbit with bird aspirations to an acid-fried attorney demanding “White Rabbit?” Were these themes of brazen individuality, trips saluting the fantastic possibilities of life somehow connected? Did reading P.J. Funnybunny make me more receptive to Raoul Duke, and did this mean Sadler was inadvertently guilty of corrupting the youth?

Personally, I see it as a salute to the tangled web of literature that is out there. We’re all drawn to common elements in the books we read, and finding what those are elements is one of the best parts of developing our reading style. When we look back and find these threads, it’s not only an amusing coincidence but a sign of how our reading tastes are birthed very early in life.

Thanks for following along with me this year, and if you see me perusing in a Madison bookstore or library, don’t hesitate to say hello.

Book Review: Ultimate Excursions

Ultimate Excursions

By Alan Gottlieb

Published January 2008

Paandaa

328 pp.

ISBN 0-977-41882-0

Reviewed April 23, 2008

Originally reviewed in: BookReview.com

Tim Lake, the main character of Alan Gottlieb’s novel “Ultimate Excursions,” is a character with little to recommend him – “asshole” is probably the most appropriate adjective. He shuns all social relationships, drinks enough scotch to fuel a van and is given to ranting after appropriate amounts of self-pity or cocaine. He doesn’t like himself and gives no reason to be liked, beyond being glad your life isn’t his.

Tim’s purgatory stems from a traumatic experience during a stint with the Peace Corps in Ecuador, when he saw a friend fatally overdose on cocaine in front of him. Agreeing to a cover-up by a Corps official, Tim is unable to move past his guilt and spends the next ten years simply existing, living on sullenness and wasting away in low-level reporting jobs.

So why is this life such a darkly captivating novel? Tim may be miserable, but Gottlieb gets deep into this misery to create an excellent character study, detailing it without being melodramatic. A disadvantaged character such as this is naturally opposed to the outside world, leading to priceless scenes such as a horrifically awkward dinner in a housing project and almost homicidal descriptions of his co-workers.

Tim’s life, and by extension the novel, takes a new direction when he is recognized by a former member of his Peace Corps team and is forced to reconnect with people and places he hasn’t seen in over a decade. He finds them turned into new-money yuppies or followers of alternative religions, with families or faiths startlingly different from what he expected.

This change of pace also allows “Ultimate Excursions” to expand in terms of narrative. Tim returning to the real world means he’s forced to interact with others, and like the housing project dinner they are all entertaining settings: a Florida bar with a hitchhiker, a Montana doomsday cult and a climax in South America’s alleys and jungles. Gottlieb loses some momentum when Tim rants to others – with so much inward focus stumbling is inevitable – but the sharp details and reactions more than restore it.

Special mention goes to Tim’s desperate attempts to feel anything, where he embarks on darkly vivid experiences such as watching cockfights on a heavy dose of cocaine and a Frisbee game on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Drug writing is easy to do poorly but Gottlieb’s is adroit, with short fast sentences for cocaine and swirling contemplation for mushrooms.

Though the ending doesn’t seem to provide Tim with full closure, this book is not about complete redemption – it’s about showing what forces people into the lives they’ve made and how hard it can be to break away. The ultimate excursion referred is not across continents, but the journey inside Tim’s head, a journey that makes a moody and utterly enthralling thriller.

Cardinal Column #14: Performance of Literature

(Editor’s note: I’m running out of comments to say about my early columns, but as I’ve said about the latest ones this one has a great style to it and I like the tone of voice I fell into. I was also able to reference past columns in a sign I was building up a body of work, and draw on a lot of personal examples which really helps to put a strong face on the column.)

Chappell sees a voice – of the best authors

Originally printed in The Daily Cardinal, April 19, 2006

Recently, in the spirit of shared weirdness and as an alternative to productivity, my friend Pat loaned me a recording of William S. Burroughs’ live readings. The albums, leaping through Burroughs’ heroin-induced library of works like “Naked Lunch” and “Exterminator!” are a stirring cross-section of one of this country’s most original writers.

While I personally find Burroughs so powerful and disjointed I have to take his books slowly—I can’t stomach more than a few stories at a time—I could listen to an entire disc of those recordings without fail. Burroughs has an inimitable voice which is strong and raspy at the same time, a New York accent reeling off drug and sex acts like cynical advice to the youth.

Regular readers of this column may recall I once voiced distaste for digital books—to the tune of “I’m personally happier keeping my library on a shelf than on three CD’s”—but there’s a big difference between audio recordings and performance literature. When an author reads his own work it’s a different animal, a move that elevates the relationship between reader and author.

Turning reading into a performance is one of the oldest concepts in literature. The legendary blind poet Homer got his start traveling around Greece to read stanzas from the “Iliad,” and the Aztec codices—long, illustrated encyclopedias—were stretched out several meters long and read as a group. To these audiences, storytelling was the key factor, and the tone of the reader’s voice made as much difference as the right word choice.

Today, adding a performance angle to a book lets the audience hear what the writer’s thoughts sound like for themselves as opposed to interpreting them silently. Last year I saw Chuck Palahniuk read from his collection of stories “Haunted,” and his tone—starting out measured, rising and falling like a heartbeat in a haunted house—was so captivating I riveted my eyes open in awed surrender.

Granted, the stories had vivid details like fat men boiling alive in sulfur springs and cramming sex dolls with razor blades, but I hold the inflection of his voice made it all the worse to hear.

At least half a dozen audience members walked out on Palahniuk during that reading—a reaction he seemed very proud of and which exemplifies the power of audience reaction. Readings are the best opportunity an author has for critique, as a gushing book jacket quote can be solicited by any publisher—wide-eyed audience members clapping or fighting off vomit are harder to replicate.

In fact, the best writers can take this reaction a step further and use it to cultivate their own image. On the rare occasions when he did public speaking and recorded an audio version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Hunter S. Thompson spoke in Southern tones that were as staccato as his writing, while nonfiction’s Judas James Frey was apparently good enough at his talks he could make anyone believe his story.

Of course, being able to present their work in a public format is by no means a qualifier for success. Bob Dylan used Sean Penn to record his autobiography “Chronicles: Volume 1,” and it doesn’t dent the book’s quality (stepping back was actually a smart move, as Dylan’s ‘voice of a generation’ is lately in bad shape). Good writing will always stand on its own merits, and the written word can still have more impact than the spoken.

Anyone who can cultivate performance, however, will find themselves in one of the most comfortable positions a writer can find: able to interact directly with their work and see how it affects an audience. And, for fun, they can write about bloated warts and leeches and watch the book fans squirm.

Book Review: I Hear Voices

I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio

By Jean Feraca

Published August 2007

University of Wisconsin Press

176 pp.

ISBN 0-299-22390-6

Reviewed February 11, 2008

Originally reviewed in: BookReview.com

Most anyone who listens to Wisconsin Public Radio has, at one time or another, heard the voice of Jean Feraca. As host of WPR’s “Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders,” she is advocate and educator, an expert at mixing international issues with culture and aesthetics. An example of the program’s diversity can be seen in any random week’s schedule: this week features the presidential election, climate change, travel for women, love sonnets and natural aphrodisiacs.

Now, Feraca has turned her craft on herself with “I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio.” She traces her own life and craft through a collection of personal vignettes, retrospectives that consider the people who have shaped her and her journey to become a writer. The end result is a fantastic, often haunting autobiography that unites a fascinating life with a voice gifted enough to provide all the details.

Feraca’s life is as mixed as the selections of her program – growing up in an Italian-American New York family, courtship in a monastery, a Jewish wedding in a nightgown, poetic rebirth in Italy with a sick child. She skims over her messy divorces and personal loneliness in favor of the epiphanies that saved her, concerned with the positives and the process. Readers are also treated to the aesthetic side of Feraca’s work: the book is peppered with asides such as a commentary on California wine, tips on writing poetry and a report on South American tribes

The book is written in the exact style you expect from someone with decades of experience in public radio, a calm and literate voice which feels like it can nurture and inform on any topic. Her words evince her other career as a poet, filled with “liquid gold” by family stories and her veins running with “quicksilver” anger over her ex-husband. Feraca knows exactly what she wants to say, is talented enough to say it right, and not afraid of saying what most keep private.

Her writing’s potency is also attributed to the characters she writes about, practically forces of nature in their own right. These include a brother who holds Sitting Bull and Mussolini in equal regard, a mother whose mind is rapidly deteriorating but exerts a manic energy, a poetry teacher more comparable to a master craftsman and an aunt consisting of ethereal sweetness. There is a mix of frustration at how difficult growing up with these people was, tempered with a wistful gratitude at being able to grow up with them.

Although she listens too closely in some cases – the last chapter on marriage and God feels almost thick after a glorious odyssey to an Amazon clinic – “I Hear Voices” is a memoir worth reading in depth, both for its burnished prose and the startling life it recounts. Feraca’s life is as much a story as any of her show’s topics, and deserves equal time and attention.

Book Review: Sex and Isolation

Sex and Isolation

By Bruce Benderson

Published October 2007

University of Wisconsin Press

208 pp.

ISBN 0-299-22314-0

Reviewed February 6, 2008

Originally reviewed in: BookReview.com

There aren’t a lot of writers left who can hold the titles of bohemian and iconoclast, but Bruce Benderson is still one of them. Well-known for his novels “The Romanian” and “User,” Benderson lived through the darker days of Times Square when it was a home to pimps, drug dealers and hustlers, a rabble William S. Burroughs once called “hipster-bebop junkies.”

Benderson didn’t just write fiction about this world, he also wrote several scholarly essays and profiles which have been collected for the first time in the book “Sex and Isolation.” Together, they are history, literary and social review – a fascinating cross-section of a world most people wouldn’t dare to get to close to when it was around and will never have an opportunity to experience again.

Benderson’s essays are certainly not conservative: he makes no attempt to hide his distaste for the tourist-friendly version of Times Square, explicitly describes his online sexual encounters and speaks affectionately of random drug use and promiscuity. What makes them work so well is that he’s not pushing them out of rebellion, but nostalgia: it was this culture that helped him find out who he was.

In the bookending essays of the collection, Benderson’s attitude results in an elder’s cultural indictment. The title essay is a scathing analysis of how the information age changed sex, providing new freedom but stripping it of the self-discovery that made it so important to gay men of his generation. “Towards the New Degeneracy” builds on fifty years of counterculture through literary analysis of Norman Mailer and Max Nordau, arguing the loss of poverty and societal fringes stripped us of our most prosperous vein of art.

Benderson’s viewpoint is advanced by terrific writing skills, and he argues his case with both creativity and dexterity. In many ways, he’s a “new journalist” giving a first-person report on streetwalkers and AIDS – a Tom Wolfe for disillusioned social outcasts. A particularly delightful extended metaphor turns computer viruses from unsafe chat rooms into our generation’s STDs, and the essay “America’s New Networkers” is written as a rant against young ‘artists’ who think contacts are today’s only factor for success.

His emotional side is clear with the second section, “Men in My Life.” A collection of shorter profiles, these essays look at the epic figures of Benderson’s bohemian culture: Latin American literati, garish French nightclub owners, boxing hustlers and ambitious transsexuals. These essays are not only descriptive but vivid – the human face on Benderson’s fading culture, people who lived lives none could gracefully live today.

It’s Benderson’s care – for the people, for the world, for the experiences – that turns “Sex and Isolation” into something more than basic social study. This book is a eulogy for a lifestyle, equal parts mourning and celebration for what has passed. He is ambivalent on what will come next, but anyone who reads these essays will want to tap the energy he thrived on.

Cardinal Column #13: Mixing Reading Genres

(Editor’s note: The result of a burnout during finals season and an idea from a Cigarro and Cerveja comic, I had a lot of fun writing this one. I got to be particularly schizophrenic in my style, splicing together what I was reading at the time and channeling my desire to be William S. Burroughs. I’m a huge proponent of the cut-up technique and how something new can come from mixed sources, and how when you hear something it can be rewritten a different way – often to a much better result. I have a mix of those experiments, some of which will soon be finding a new home on a new blog.

The first paragraph is particularly twisted, taken from my cookbook, cuts from my Journalism 560 and Art History 354 texts, Steven Levitt’s “Freakonomics” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” I was giggling like crazy while putting that together.)

Forget everything you know: Enter Les’ genre tornado

Originally published in The Daily Cardinal, April 5, 2006

“With the oven preheated to 350 degrees the New Yorker is run by decayed whores pouring over J. Walter Thompson advertising. Bernal redefines ancient models for advertising Aunt Jemima pancakes as electric snakes in the sky study how drug dealers still live with their moms. You can cook better pasta, and cook with glowing red rocks and metallic shrubs! Zip! Crack! Ow!”

What is this jumble, you may ask? Perhaps the latest mumblings from Scanner Dan between corncob pipes, or a waterlogged textbook with smeared type? In fact, it happens to be the first paragraph of an essay I was working on for art history, only four words of which can even be used in the final draft.

To answer your second question, I was not on drugs when I wrote this statement and I did not use a random word generator online in the hopes of digitally replicating a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters. Rather, I fell back on my more dangerous habit—mixing literary genres when reading and hoping I could absorb it all at once.

Being a university student naturally means you’re going to mix genres, as I can’t think of a single course at this school that doesn’t have at least one reading assignment due a week. These reading lists set traps for students that actually want to do well—either they’re crazy like me and consider reading assignments a challenge that needs to be met on time, or they put it off until the end of the year and overload.

Trips to the library for extra reading usually accentuate this problem, as I consider it a challenge to reach the university’s limit of 250 books checked out at one time. I stock up on almost every book I can get my hands on—I actually have so many right now my bedroom door doesn’t close fully—and promise myself that I’ll read them all before I go over six renewals and the librarians shoot me into the lake via trebuchet.

This blend of books results in a reading order that borders schizophrenia—a section of a textbook, a few chapters from one of the books on my reading list, a philosophy essay and then finishing a library book when I wake up from the philosophy essay. Add this to undergraduate insomnia, and the odds are your thought processes will resemble a Jackson Pollock painting by morning.

So why do I keep doing it? I have two reasons: first, an almost masochistic drive to finish as many books as I can and add them to my list of favorites on Facebook. When finishing a book there’s always a sense of personal accomplishment, and if you get all the way through you can pick up on enough little details to make yourself a formidable force in literary discussion.

The second reason is a bit more personal, and requires a passion for the absurd: mixing genres can often lead to more fun than reading books alone. Reading political commentary with cookbooks can make you very passionate about your next meal, while blending graphic novels and economic texts leads you to question exactly how superheroes can afford their headquarters and shiny gadgets on the unpaid intern’s salary of saving the world.

It’s not for everyone, but with a balance of books and sleep deprivation mixing genres can lead to some of the most interesting reading experiences ever. Just try to pace yourself when exams come—professors are not yet ready for a single term paper on MAD Magazine, Watergate and the conquest of the Incas.

Book Review: Neitherworld Book One Akiiwan

Neitherworld, Book One: Akiiwan

By Scott Baker

Published September 2007

Lulu.com

533 pp.

ISBN 1-430-31253-X

Reviewed January 8, 2008

Originally reviewed in: BookReview.com

The setting is Blue Heron, a small island in Northern Minnesota. Is it an archaeological site, renowned as the home and resting place of legendary Native American shaman Voice-in-the-Sky? Or is it a radioactive anomaly, generating power that could explain the growth of the universe? Or is it a gateway to a world beyond ours, a world only visible in the visions of a shaman?

It may be all of these or none of these, and the search to find out which is the nexus of “Akiiwan,” the first book in Scott Baker’s “Neitherworld” series. A novel that fits into mystery, science fiction and historical genres, “Akiiwan” focuses on the archaeological team of Doctor Samantha Horner and their research into an obscure Ojibwe sect native to the Blue Heron. The end result is a brilliant, elemental tale that defies description as much as the island does.

All of the characters have a different explanation, and their diversity is the first strength of “Akiiwan.” In one chapter a professor of cosmology explains how astronomical constants and constellations are tied to the island, while a paleontologist interprets a boulder of Native American pictographs only a few chapters later. Mixed with the natives’ fantastical prophecies and traditions of Ojibwe culture, characters – and readers – have to look closely for the right answer.

A genre hybrid like this runs the risk of collapsing into obtuseness – especially at over 500 pages – but Baker holds the text together with a strong narrative and thorough detail. The particulars of exactly what Voice-in-the-Sky represented and the truth of his teachings unfold gradually, and we learn what happens at the same pace as Samantha and her team. Several scenes build an impressive level of suspense, including various attacks by wild animals and a rainstorm on a primordial scale.

To further break the uniformity of a long novel, Baker incorporates several structural alterations in the form of illustrations. These are not complicated paintings inserted to distract from poor writing, but simple black-and-whites which adroitly reinforce a reader’s mental images. Text is altered in an interesting manner as well, with the closing chapter including of a 1600s French lieutenant’s diary physically printed in an antique-style type.

“Akiiwan” does experience a few bumps here and there – a slimy government official feels like too much of an archetype, and an oral history in Ojibwe fashion isn’t exciting enough to open the book – but those are unimportant next to the myth that Baker has created. It’s three times as long as most novels, and yet right after finishing it I wanted to delve right into the second volume.