Fame Shark

                                                                                                              photo: Amanda Segur
Royal Young’s Fame Shark  should really be called Fame Piranha since it describes the sensibility of an omnivore and polymath who is plainly intent on gobbling up reality. Even though it’s a memoir Fame Shark reads like an old fashioned bildungsroman and aficionados of Yiddishkeit will appreciate the comparison between the Lower East Side that Young (aka Hasak Brozgold ) describes and the immigrant world of the Henry Roth classic Call It Sleep. Fame Shark is really American Psycho meets Call It Sleep with a little bit of Frank Harris’s My Live and Loves thrown in to the extent that it’s a no holds barred saga of the extremes a human being can go to in his or her quest for attention. Ultimately Fame Shark is a book about a life and Young’s is a life that has the precocity and audacity of a Shelley who also had a considerable amount of what euphemistically used to be called “experience” at a young age and the fearlessness of a Philippe Petit.

The Digital Faust

Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough to Last"

In an article in Foreign Affairs (“The Rise of Big Data, May/June 2013), Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger make the following comment, “In the third century B.C. the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world to give every person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria’s entire collection—an estimated 1200 exabytes’ worth, If this information were placed on CD’s and they were stacked up, the CD’s would form five separate piles that would all reach to the moon.” There is a famous Twilight Zone, “Time Enough to Last," where Burgess Meredith plays the role of a man who just wants to be left alone with all his books. He gets his wish. The problem is that he is nearly blind and as he is about to sate his desire, his glasses crack. Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger describe the advent of a condition which is a little like the effect global warming has had on weather and the environment. Shrinkage of polar ice caps have unleashed huge amounts of water which affect sea levels and inevitably in a kind of domino effect air and water currents (like El Nino), ultimately resulting in many of the explosive, tornadoes, tsunamis and severe tropical storms from Katrina to the recent debacle created by Sandy. In a short period of time the information explosion created primarily by digitalization, the internet and most importantly by what Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger term “datafication,” (in their words “a far broader activity: taking all aspects of life and turning them into data. Google’s augmented reality-glasses datafy the gaze. Twitter datafies stray thoughts. LinkedIn datafies professional networks.”) has reached tsunami levels. It’s as if we are drowning in information, with only soothsayers aka search engines like Google, who themselves are driven by mysterious algorithmic forces that few really understand, providing a beam of light. It’s Faust all over again. Mankind has sold its soul in his quest for ultimate knowledge. Will the price for the striving be a form of ignorance in which the brain, like old car radiators, boils over and finally quits? It’s a theme that Jorge Luis Borges developed in his famous story "The Library of Babel." You can know a lot about a little or a little about a lot. But it’s virtually impossible to know a lot about a lot.

Make Love and War

photo: Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich)

Back in the sixties the only way to get laid was to join a demonstration against the war. Life was actually quite simple with a clean demarcation between the love children and student protestors and the defenders of traditional values who still used expressions like family values and pre-marital sex. Of course there were those who couldn’t even get laid in the aftermath of civil rights and war protests, but such unfortunates tended to be the exception rather than the rule. What was most liberating about the years following the war was the breakdown of this simple dichotomy. Sexual freedom was one of the few rights that was won by the student movement of the 60’s, though it was deemed a pyrrhic victory in the mind in the mind of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In One-Dimensional Man, he coined the term “repressive desublimation,” which, in a nutshell, means that once you get your rocks off you don’t want to do anything but cuddle up and sleep in. Now of course we are free to be as right wing and warmongerish as we wish without sharing the fate of the men in Aristophanes' Lysistrata who were deprived of sex as a protest by women against war. In fact, love is not exactly free in the left wing camp today, where political correctness rules and a heightened awareness of role playing often inhibits the animal in man, or woman.

The Mexicanadian Threat

European and Middle Eastern countries are often bounded by hostile neighbors. The Battle of Britain was a turning point in the Second World War. Yet if the English had lost the Germans still would have had to cross the Atlantic to invade the United States. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines the colonization of America by the Axis powers. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, it’s a homegrown fascist backlash that makes the country vulnerable. But before we feel a smug superiority to the geographic turmoil abroad, we should be aware of the threat of invasion from the South or the North, from Mexico or Canada, who someday may turn into the equivalent of the Axis powers. While the landmass of Mexico or Canada might not rival Russia, China or even India, they are both greater than Japan, Italy and Germany, our enemies during the second world war. Why are we being complacent? Why are we not arming ourselves against an invasion, particularly by the Canadians? Back in the 50’s there was a popular television series called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. The series was a thinly veiled manifesto of Canadian superiority. Remember Canada boasts Alice Munro one of the greatest short story writers in the world and lest we forget Dan Aykroyd emanated from Canada. The Canadians will start by taking over organs of culture like The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories have appeared, and SNL which Aykroyd once dominated and before long their will be mounties and dogsleds lined up along our borders. It might seem like an unholy alliance but who is to say that one day Canadian short story writers and humorists won’t join forces with the followers of Mexican culture heroes like Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. In a deadly pincer movement Canadians and the Mexicans will place their puppets in The White House.

All We Need of Hell

Harry Crews

Harry Crews’ Karate is a Thing of the Spirit was the literary man’s version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. All We Need of Hell is another war novel by Crews, who died in 2012. It's no longer in print, but deserves to be reissued. When we say war in relation to Crews we are talking primarily about inner turmoil (though there is occasional sniper fire). Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a another version of this kind of interiorized banter. Duffy Deeter is Crews’s anti-hero and one might suppose alter ego. We meet him fantasizing about Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz in order to prolong his orgasms with his coke tooting mistress Marvella Sweat. “Nothing centered a man like pain, “ is one of Duffy’s mantras (he’s a practitioner of Zen) who has a gym in his Winnebago where he also stashes a copy of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. During a particularly violent handball game, he delivers a Okinawan roundhouse reverse to a football star named Tump Walker, an acquaintance of his law partner, Jert McPhester. Jert’s a former University of Florida, All American who suffers from a severe case of coitus interruptus when Duffy finds him in bed with his wife, Tish. Duffy’s son, Felix, is a momma’s boy who favors Baby Ruths. Tish, a former gymnast, files for divorce when Felix hurls after an exhausting workout in which Duffy tries to shape the boy up. Crews pulls no punches. He’s the Ur-intellectual shock jock (not that there really have been any since him) and yet underneath all the fascination with pain and the courting of it, is another kind of pain that his character hardens himself against. And that’s the disappointment in love. “Could you love someone who constantly revolted you,” Duffy muses about his son. It’s a question that could be asked about any of the people Duffy encounters, including himself. In his search for redemption, Duffy Deeter does have something in common with Graham Greene “whiskey priest." Here however is Tump Walker, who turns out to be a great bon vivant and lover of life, on the subject of death: “The thing that pisses me off is that you got to die in the middle of something, you dig? Unfinished. You pick up a fine looking bitch in a bar and you’re on the way to her apartment to get in her pants and you get run over by a truck. That’s annoying. Yeah. Or you order the best steak in the place and while it’s on the way to your table, you pitch forward in  your salad, dead. That’s annoying.” The only annoying thing about this ribald and hilarious novel is that it too must come to an end.