|
Book Rate: December 20, 2006
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Posted: December 20, 2006
Note: The following entries come from Matt
Borondy
Books covered this week include:
Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
American Genius, A Comedy
by Lynne Tillman
Drawing Dead
to a Gutshot by Brant Janeway
Dirty
Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
(Faber and Faber, 292 pages)
  |
Courtney Love, it could be stated, is the Hillary Clinton of rock.
The two women ascended to fame in the early '90s largely because
of their marriages to powerful men, becoming feminist role models
as they stepped outside the shadows of their iconic spouses and
built their own distinctive careers in traditionally male occupations.
As is typical of driven people who go against the norm, both the
rock star and the senator tend to be either hated or adored. It
makes sense, then, that the most appropriate piece of Courtney Love's
diary—a beautifully constructed, simultaneously embarrassing
(think junior high poetry) and brilliant (think “Doll
Parts”) scrapbook put out last month by Faber and Faber—is
a color photo of the First Lady of Grunge standing next to the First
Lady of the United States and smiling benignly (or not-so-benignly?).
In the photo, the much taller Courtney draws a halo over her head
and devil horns on Mrs. Clinton and places a heart between them,
and on the next page she describes “the virus of the matriarchy”
of which Hillary is a part. It's that “virus” that enables
Courtney to “be whatever it is that I want to be,” and
Dirty Blonde affirms what pretty much everyone already
knows: what Courtney wants is to be famous, to be loved, and to
be dirty. That doesn't make her much different from anyone else,
really—Christ, look at the blogosphere—it's just that
she has the extreme ambition, transparency, and, perhaps, amorality
to accomplish those goals.
Dirty Blonde, a direct look at Courtney's life assembled
from her massive personal records, features some real gems: a photo
of Kurt Cobain with William S. Burroughs, a rejection letter from
the Mickey Mouse Club, correspondence from David Geffen re: negative
press and the birth of Frances Bean, striking photos of the author
herself with the likes of Milos Forman and Drew Barrymore, a letter
to her deceased husband, and more. It includes an understanding
introduction from Carrie Fisher which points out that Courtney is
now a “practicing
Buddhist” and has moved on from her druggie years (which
are pretty much entirely excluded from this book). If you can get
past the bad handwriting (the diaries, as a whole, are a bit excruciating
to read, unless you're a middle-school English teacher accustomed
to that sort of thing), there is much to be learned about Courtney
the rock star, Courtney the wife and mother, and Courtney the human
being. Sure, it's not all pleasant, but that's the price of honesty
and self-exploitation—and most certainly the price of fame.
-Matt Borondy
____________
American
Genius, A Comedy
by Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull Press, 292 pages)
  |
The fifth novel from New York writer Lynne Tillman is the kind
of story you might like to read if you answer yes to the question,
“Are currently taking any prescription medications?”
(That's a good thing.) It's a crazy-insightful sort of book, mapping
the brain of an institutionalized middle-aged woman who is obsessed
with skin and spends her massive mind-energy waxing philosophical
about farts and other disgusting and/or banal aspects of existence.
George
Saunders calls the narrative voice “loopy,” which
is 100% correct. Here's a random sample of what to expect from any
given sentence in this one: “It's easy to imagine the pain
of having your underarms waxed, but I can't imagine and never want
to, because it would be very much worse, being a captive, hooded
and locked in a hot or cold room, since suffocation is terrible,
and asthmatics must understand the experience of being hooded without
wearing a hood, or people with chronic eczema, who are imprisoned
in their skins, condemned to scratching their itchy flesh until
it bleeds, requiring some to be strapped down and disenabled from
clawing the disturbed flesh from their bodies.”
Lynne Tillman's previous novel, No
Lease on Life (1998), earned great recognition from the
NY Times and the National Book Critics Circle, and this
new release, which comes from one of our
favorite publishing houses, is worthy of equal or greater praise.
-Matt Borondy
____________
Drawing
Dead to a Gutshot: The Poker Lingo You Need to Know to Talk Like
a Pro
by Brant Janeway (Barricade Books, 127 pages)
Much like any subculture, the poker world boasts its own special
language, which players inevitably begin to speak after just a short
period of time at the tables. Brant Janeway, an East Coast publishing
exec who plays regularly at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, has
compiled this helpful compendium of poker phrases he picked up via
research and through his own countless hours of checking, betting,
and folding in poker rooms across the country. As Janeway said in
an interview, “I think the language of poker says a lot about
those who play the game. It's clever, topical, interesting, a little
salty, and ever changing, just like the players themselves.”
The lingo covered in Drawing Dead to a Gutshot includes
important game-playing concepts like “implied odds,”
online poker acronyms like “nh” and “gg”
(“nice hand,” “good game”), and obscure
hole-card nicknames like “German Virgins” (which stands
for pocket nines in hold'em—Janeway explains: “What
do German virgins say? 'Nein, nein.'”). It's a great book
to help enhance the poker-playing experience of both novices and
professionals.
Janeway also produces Poker
Flash Cards and publishes a poker
blog.
-Matt Borondy
____________
Want more? Head over to our What
We're Reading blog or see last
edition of Book Rate (actually from two weeks ago).
|
