This Was Your Life

Nothing makes the soul sink faster than witnessing the conversion of youthful idealism and passion into new ways of getting yet more money from our wallets. In the midst of a world that is insane with immoral wars, terrorism, and increasing occurrences of natural disasters, we seem ready to have our past sold back to us, and worse, retold to us, as if our own recall and reports from the front lines were inadequate for the purpose of History. Apparently, you can sell refrigerators to Eskimos.

No matter, I suppose, it's a discussion I'll join anytime, venturing forth opinions on The White Album being a greater double record set than Exile on Main street, whether Dick Cavett was actually any smarter than Johnny Carson, or if Norman Mailer ever got those bossy feminists about what's really important in this man's world. We are eager to surrender our disbelief and fight the battles over again, reciting song lyrics and mounting arguments about the inevitability of a Revolution that will change the meaning of everything. Everything has changed, yes, but not even remotely as we might have imagined. So the passing of every artifact and every minor player from the Fifties and Sixties becomes significant, if for no reason other than to remind us that we all inch nearer the end of our individual tethers. So we distract ourselves and glory over the memories of the formerly great and the inconsequential with the same indiscriminate vigor.

Presently we are in a moment of time when Bob Dylan is set to be deified; a benediction is underway. His memoir, Chronicles Volume One, sold well in hardcover and has just been released in trade paperback, Martin Scorsese has prepared an extensive documentary on his life and career that will be broadcast over PBS at the end of September. Perhaps a Supreme Court nomination should be offered to cement the idea in place that Dylan has become the most overexposed and overpraised man of verse since the glory days of Robert Frost. The mention of the evokes so many associations that have little or nothing to do with his art, songwriting that we are in danger of losing all honest perspective on his writing, and the elements that gave it the power to begin with.

Someone posted his lyrics to his middle period song "Shelter From the Storm" online as a way of commemorating the ghastly devastation of New Orleans, something I thought suspect because this happens to be particularly weak lyric; unfocused, unsterilized, cryptic without being evocative, the cliches and the desperate overwriting to avoid cliche make this a twisting bitch of tune to parse in any convincing way. I was about to write something to this effect when the same person posted a stronger lyric, the brilliant "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall". The strength of Dylan's best writing became clear again, momentarily liberated from image, innuendo and celebrity worship.

"Hard Rain" is one of Dylan's greatest lyrics, and certainly packs more poetic power than the much later "Shelter from The Storm". "Hard Line", inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis, was written in a pitch of national anxiety as to whether we were about to enter a Third World War, a fact that gave Dylan's lyrics a honed edge and a kind of Biblically inspired surrealism whose images suggest the sorts of undreamed things occurring just prior to a last day of reckoning. We might have averted the nuclear holocaust back in the day, but the song's genius is such that speaks over the decades and resonates louder and less ironically than it did in 1963; it is potentially even more political today than it was so many years ago.

"Shelter from the Storm" is much later Dylan, and it has never sounded more than someone trying to get up a full head of steam again, only to end up parodying their own best work. It might seem weird today, but I could never figure out what it was Dylan was talking about, or why any of the rustic fantasies and idylls that dominated much of his middle work were worth constructing. Suspend my disbelief as hard as I might, I could never buy into the image of Bob Dylan as a wayward traveler, rambling from town to town, taking odd jobs and having strange affairs with cryptically inclined women who end their affairs with morals that are enshrouded in magic-ball vaporings. It's not that the lyrics in "Shelter" were merely enigmatic--that would be a relief--but that there's an implausibility so conspicuous that I sometimes wondered about Dylan's mental health. It occurs to me that such worries demonstrate a inner stability on my part, and that is something I ought to thank Dylan for someday, but not before I max out yet another credit card acquiring as much thirty-year arcana as a man in his early fifties can stand to have.

Poems and Prayer

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've sober nearly twenty years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

The key distinction between poems and prayers are that poems are almost invariably written from within experience, and as a form, is under no obligation to detail and highlight it's rhetoric toward any obligatory pitch or prejudice. The poet, distinct from the praying person, has the freedom to invoke God or invoke him not at all; the poet might even insist that the wonders he or she comes to write about are phenomena in and of itself, independent of anything divine.

Poetry allows for the religious, the agnostic, the atheist and the indifferent with regards to God. The single requirement is that the poem meet the needs of literature, however the poet lands on the issue of the divine; what constitutes literary value, of course, is subject to a discussion that is nearly as abstruse and premised on unprovable suppositions as theology, Literary criticism might be said to be it's own sort of religious dogma.

Prayers, in contrast, start outside human, terrestrial experience and beseech a higher power to intervene in human affairs. While poetry , in general, glories in all things human and is obsessed with the mystery of perception (finding that miraculous enough ), prayer assumes human experience is flawed, in error, and needs a strong hand to right itself to a greater purpose. Prayer in essence is an admission of powerlessness or one's situation and one's instincts to cope with the difficulties presented; the varieties of spiritual inspiration vary and are nuanced to particular personalities and finer or lesser nuanced readings of guiding sacred texts, but prayers share a default position that human existence sans God is incomplete and in need to surrender itself to the Will of a variously described God.

It is possible to write a poem that addresses god that is not an entreaty, finding His presence in the world as we already have it, not as we think it was.
"Question" by May Swenson does this.

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?


It's a fine poem, and Swenson is speaking from within experience, finding something wondrous in the world as it is. Her poem is about finding God in the details of this existence, and does not beseech a higher power for guidelines about how to live a more righteous life according to
scripture. Prayer assumes that human life, in essence, is merely an audition for a seat in Heaven. Swenson assumes we already have our seat and seeks God's inspiration in making the place where we live purposeful and fuller.

Hemingway and the heart of the matter

Now and then, in passing, not intended to start a war of any dimensions, someone remarks about how Ernest Hemingway is overrated, his books kept in print and his reputation buoyed by conspiracies of tired white academics that yearn, in secret, for another “good war” for America to again assert its virtue. I get irked, bothered, pissed off royal when someone baselessly derides Hemingway’s accomplishment as a storyteller and stylist (but none as a thinker), but I do see the point about the cult of Ernest who’ve come to regard him as a stalwart of honor and reserve forged by the sacrifices of having lived through a World War when the enemy and the Evil they presented to America wasn’t the least ambiguous or murky with runny metaphorical drift.
Now and again I recall essays and lectures about bad wars and bad faith and bad character for the citizenry as a result, and even sighing in exasperation as otherwise intelligent people suggested that America could use a good war, a “just” war in moments of low national mood so that we might collectively have something to rally around, some shared values to swear to protect, some duty to perform. This is a slippery slope to fascism, yes?

I say leave Hemingway out of the war drum circle and concentrate instead on how well his stories convey the experience of a generation of Americans suddenly thrust into and upon the world, pulled from Wisconsin farms, Bronx tenements or California movie lot, and marvel as well at the economy with which he did it. As the moral authority of governments gave way to chaos and slaughters that only burned the earth, ideas of what were of value were internalized, personalized, nearly becoming part of the nervous system. Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of post-humous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment. His writing is about trying to learn to be a man when even the teaching father is a madman sacrificing family for blind patriotism. It’s precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction, is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.

Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.

Prospecting for insight through Kerouac’s' journals will be give scholars reason to devastate another section of prime forest, but his novels remain , inspite of it all, maddeningly inconsistent in their best forms, and progressively unreadable in later writing years. Kerouac had his moments of divine lyricism, I admit, but the cult around his grey, sotten visage is nearly as objectionable as the devotion many give to Ayn Rand: the matter is not how good the writing was, but what the author stood for. Once the chatter about writers drifts, or jumps desperately, from concerns with style in the service of great storytelling and lands in the odious camp that insists that a writers' primary task is only to reaffirm a readers' shaky self image of being a rugged and forward thinking individualist, I reach for a good book, or ponder taking a nap. Either option is more fruitful, or both are more interesting endeavors. It galls me that comparatively little attention was given to the passing of William Burroughs, the one true genius of the Beat group, while the easily assimilated rebellion of Ginsberg and Kerouac claims the top half of the literary pages.



Delillo’s work, it seems, will survive the withering dismissals of affected yokels, and "great American novels" continue to be produced yearly, quite despite our obsession to narrowing the field to only a handful of worthies who fulfill criteria no can state for sure. But DeLillo stands poised for world-greatness because he brings Americans into the larger world,where qualities of being American, imagined by our civics teachers as being divinely granted, has no bearings in a world that seems incoherent and supremely foreign. DeLillo's work, in "The Names", "Mao II", "Players", have Americans of a sort--professionals, artists, intellectuals, poets, usually white, privileged--losing themselves amid the shifting and renegotiated narratives, collective and personal, that are repeated, ala mantras, to give the world as sense of reason and purpose beyond the hurly-burly of the phenomenal world. This is a sphere where the sense of the world, our strategies and accounts to deal with it, are fed to media and then sold back to us with conditions attached. I imagine a work that is equal parts Henry James, for the aspect of Americans confronting the non-American world, and Orwell's "Animal Farm", where we have the pigs, in the dead of night, with ladder and paint brush, changing the wording on the social contract painted on the side of the barn.


As has been said, there is no "last analysis" to be had just yet, and for DeLillo's sake, I hope he writes a few more novels before we start issuing forth career-ending appraisals of his body of work. I am an obvious DeLillo partisan, but I don't think everything he's done is fully rendered, satisfying every idiosyncratic standard a "serious" reader might contrive, but the fact is that DeLillo is not a novel-a-year contestant with Updike or Joyce Carol Oates, or recently, Mailer, all of whom seem in a rush to consolidate reputations and make themselves nice and shiny for Nobel consideration. DeLillo has published a mere 11 novels since 1969, hardly an overload for almost thirty years as a professional writer. That he has themes that re-emerge from work to work is to be expected from a writer, and for DeLillo, his investigations into what we too- easily refer to as post-modernism (yes, I am guilty as charged) and it's accompanying paranoia have produced major fiction, which is about, in too-broad a summary of his work, the difficulty of living in a world that has been stripped of any resonance of meaning, any suggestion of Truth, capital "t". This is a kind man-made environment that stems from the make-it-new innovations of High Modernism, and entering the next century with a sense that we have not learned anything despite high-speed technologies that shoot raw and indigestible mounds of data from one place to another.



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It's not a matter of us finding our "Moby Dick" for this century, because that places a false premise from which we expect writers to operate from. Yes, there is the anxiety of influence and the desperate writing younger scribes do to escape from under the long, inky shadow of the geniuses of the recent and less recent past, but I think each period is unique, and that great work is produced in some concentration of creative frenzy that dissolves the anxiety. Readers looking for another "Moby Dick" for this century are better served to consider their period unique and regard the tradition as a lineage that is not a straight, paved highway that vanishes into a classically defined set of particulars every would be master adheres to, but is rather a broken, dotted line that threads and weaves through a loose cluster of tendencies in the culture, filled with writers who redefine themselves and their art each time out. Melville himself had to break with his own habits, transcending his discipline as a clever crafter of sea stories, a venerable genre he arrived at, to write the masterpiece called "Moby Dick".

The best writers today do no different, living up to the nothing else other than the authenticity of their process. Faulkner and Joyce have comparable greatness, I feel, but I cannot escape the feeling that Joyce was the brainier of the two. Joyce’s' infinite layering of literature, history, theology and myth in to the molecular structures of Ulysses and Finnegan’s' Wake demonstrates someone with a sensibility that subtly wishes to have Art supplant the Church as the institution men may comprehend a Higher Truth( what ever it turns out to be). His own dialectic method, perhaps.

I agree with the remark of Faulkner being much blunter, though he is scarcely a brute: the sensationalism Faulkner could give into was also linked to a patch of swamp that released his language, and allowed him to master the interior monologue. This gave us novels like "Light In August" and "Absalom, Absalom" that had with diverse psychological density.

The human heart at war with itself.

Ann Coulter plays the cheap seats

It's official now, Ann Coulter has given up the illusion, believed or otherwise, that she is an important political intelligence and has now acknowledged her status as a Republican party clown. Calling Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards
a "faggot" at a recent conservative convention, her routine becomes transparent, and she now becomes the equivilent of a third rate stand up comic who never got their shot on the Tonight Show, trading in the same boiler plate tastelessness for a
marginalized crowd of like minded dimwits.Witness this nitwit's floundering quip here, courtesy of Salon.

Perhaps is the neocon version of bad poets and gratingly neurotic bohemians sitting around cafes flattering each other with quaint left wing jargon, horrendous poesifications of so-called verse and various versions of how "The System" is keeping everyone in the toilet. Coulter seems the first instance of a generation of right wing shills who, having no second act, will join the assorted other "edgy" alternatives in the vast dustbin. But not before she can squeeze a few more dollars from her pose and convince herself a few minutes longer that she's still relevant.

I suppose she's trying to pass herself off as being edgy against "political correctness", but that's a standard complaint that has lost an urgency in the godawful long time since right ring attack radio took up the call. Coulter is for hire for anyone who will pay her to do her tricks and recycle her bile. It's someone's idea of fun, I suppose, though one can't shake the feeling that there's anxiety thick enough to spread with a shovel inside that equine face of hers. Two things are clear in view of her use of the F word against Edwards:

1.The shriller she gets, the more her Adam's Apple bobs.
2.One remembers Truman Capote describing a best selling woman author from the Sixties as resembling "a truck driver in drag."

LED ZEPPELIN and others...

It was after I slid into my forties where the other songs and albums by Zeppelin reemerged on my radar and revealed a band that was more diverse, musically, than the popular invective allows. Where I lived at the time, Zeppelin fans were just as likely to be listening to the Band, Van Morrison and CS&N, along with other folk "sissy" artists as they were the macho sounds of hard rock. Now in my mid fifties, how I perceived the world at 18 - 21 is irrelevant to the fact that they've made some good, sometimes brilliant tunes. Hardly perfect: the lyrics are an embarrassment, but the band is about riff and sound.It was after I slid into my forties where the other songs and albums by Zeppelin reemerged on my radar and revealed a band that was more diverse, musically, than the popular invective allows. Where I lived at the time, Zeppelin fans were just as likely to be listening to the Band, Van Morrison and CS&N, along with other folk "sissy" artists as they were the macho sounds of hard rock.
Zeppelin was uncanny in their ability to keep it simple and yet seem sophisticated musically;it is something I think is crucial to their rock and roll success: riffs and sounds over laid on a varied set of styles and influences that work, sonically, more often than they don't. The lyrics, with the vocals, were just part of the overlay, a part of the texture, the assault on the nervous system that gives us pleasure and empowerment. Dispite the interest in musical ideas far afield of the blues, the band kept it visceral, punchy. They were like a friend of yours who was already ready for brawl.

Like the Beatles, or Steely Dan, Zeppelin was a studio band, where the studio was the proverbial third instrument. Live, they were one of the worst bands I've ever seen--though they sounded pretty damned good when I saw them in '67 (?) on their first US tour with Jethro Tull--but in the studio , their music was finessed and honed, typical in those days. For all his faults as a faulty technician in live circumstances, he is a producer who brought a fresh ear to the recording process, and came up with ideas that circumvented the routine dullness and rigor that's become the bane of less able hard rock and metal bands after his Zeppelin's break up.
Led Zeppilen 1V is their high water mark for track-by-track knockouts and variety of sounds, but Houses of the Holy is where the band really stretched beyond the comfort of the hard rock style they created. I think they do reggae fine, and "The Crunge" is quite funked up-- Plant's Brown vamping is inspired, and the lyrics are , in turn, somewhat surreal with out losing a greasy, fry-cooked crease in the seam. The Song Remains the Same is an unfortunate release , album and film, and confirmed my feeling that Page had devolved to the worst live rock guitarist extant. The BBC sessions, recently released on a two CD effort, shows Page and the boys in full throttle: the guitar work is rangy but crisp and cutting. Plant, likewise, is in full voice, a plus if you liked the way he sang.

The attraction, though, is the guitar work.The only real bad after shock of Sgt Pepper's and other "concept albums" from the period was the mistaken notion by other artists that there had to be one grandiose and grandiloquent theme running through out both sides of their albums in order for the their work to be current with the mood of the art rock of the period. The Beatles succeeded with "Sgt.Pepper", "Magical Mystery Tour", and, and "Abbey Road" ( easily their most consistent set of material, I think) because they never abandoned the idea that the album needs to be a collection of good songs that sound good in a set: over lapping themes, lyrically, are absent in the Beatles work, unless you consider the reprise of the Pepper theme song on a leitmotif of any real significance (it's use was cosmetic), although musical ideas did give the feel of conceptual unity track to track, album to album.

Lennon and McCartney and Harrison's greatest contribution to rock music was their dedication to having each one of their songs be the best they could do before slating it for album release. For other bands, the stabs at concept albums were routinely disastrous, witnessed by the Stones attempt to best their competitors with the regrettable "Satanic Majesties Requests". The Who with "Tommy" and "Who’s Next" and the Kinks , best of all, with"Muswell "Lola", Hillbillies" and "Village Green Preservation Society" , both were rare, if visible exceptions to the rule. "Revolver" and "Yesterday and Today" are amazing song collections, united by grand ideas or not. I buy albums with the hope that the music is good, the songs are good, not the ideas confirm or critique the Western Tradition.


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What makes The Beatles' "Revolver" an album? Good, varied songwriting, inspired performances, and production that rises to the task at hand. Albums have always been song collections, regardless of what the current press hype might have been. What Brian Wilson introduced with the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" introduced were specific musical and production techniques that changed the sound of rock albums to come after his pioneering work, but the work on "Pet Sounds" and other releases are linked sets of songs, period. The genius is what he does within each song, and where those songs get placed on the album. And actually, that is not that much different than what artists and producers had been doing all along. The crucial distinction is that the artist finally had some say in what was released under their name. Authenticity is such an elusive quality that it's mostly useless when judging as subjective as whether someones music is legitimate. It's a nice way to chase your own tail, though, which is what many like to do. Better to consider whether the music is at least honest, or better yet, if it's done well: whether music , lyrics, voice, style work on their own terms, makes for a more interesting set of topics, and a more compelling record collection. Interesting art doesn't “make you work”, but it does render more rewards if one considers it at depth deeper than a Rate-A-Record session on American Bandstand. But for rock and roll, the interesting "art" ought to be imbued with significant amounts of fun that should , seriously, inspire nothing more in a listener than to dance, thrash, get wild and make a fool of themselves, with the hopes they don't get killed in such a
lowbrow rapture.

Two by Don DeLillo

*The Body Artist
by Don DeLillo
*Cosmopolis
by Don DeLillo
__________________
DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork "Underworld" made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age. A central concern in DeLillo's novels has been a perfect description of what his characters surround themselves with as they construct an integrated identity within an existence, creating a poetry as those items fall into disuse or are fetishized to the point where there is only faint nostalgia , not a direct address of a romantically conceived world. Melancholy pervades DeLillo's work, even his comic ones , as the material things that are made, sold and purchased fo the purposes of fixing individuals coherently in communities large and small are
reduced to competing streams of wishful thinking.
The Body Artist has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritutalized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event.

DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud.A short, haunted masterwork.
Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers around the events of an eventful day in Manhattan.


Cosmopolis makes the same obsessions with the erosion of certainty into a bizarre comedy of bad habits and quirks.Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the constant, ghostly electronic feed of news of pending financial disaster, a young billionaire asset manager limousines uptown to get a haircut in order to embrace his sense of inevitable, personal apocalypse. DeLillo's writing is outstanding, funny with a cool lyricism, poetic when you least expect it.

The brillance here, as with "White Noise" and especially "Mao ll" is the way characters seek to reconfigure their metaphors, their assuring base of references , once their world view is rattled and made less authoritative by unexplainable events and human quirks. This is semiotics at its best, an erotic activity where DeLillo probes and glides over the surfaces of ideas , notions, theories and their artifacts, things intellectual and material emptied of meaning, purpose.

It's a hallmark of DeLillo's mastery of language that he gets that psychic activity that constantly tries to re-infuse the world with meaning and purpose after the constructions are laid bare; Eric, here in this world of commodity trading, which he regards as natural force that he's mastered and control, attempts to reintroduce mystery into the world he is trapped in. He is bored beyond the grave with the results of his luck.

His efforts to live dangerously , spontaneously and thus get a perception he hadn't had and perhaps secure a hint of a metaphysical infrastructure that eludes, all turn badly, but for DeLillo's art it's not what is found , discovered, or resolved through the extensions of language, but rather the journey itself, the constant connecting of things with other things in the world; this is the poetry of the human need to make sense of things in the great , invisible state beyond the senses, a negotiation with death.

His majestic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the the hydra-headed strands of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself.

"Fight Club" By Chuck Palaniuk

A contemporary masterpiece. An underground fight club goes from a way for frustrated men to vent their rage over the variety of emasculations they think they've suffered and becomes a stealthy, destructive movement sworn to topple a false and dehumanized consumer culture. In the thick of the anarchism is the mysterious Tyler Durden, who's
charismatic brand of evangelical destruction alternately attracts and repels. Clearly , he is someone you cannot take your eyes off of as he exhorts his troops to
pull the rug from under the engines of Industry. Chuck Palaniuk's satire is vicious, masterful, a vision of a bloated culture set on the cutting board , inspecting with a dissecting eye.

This is the perfect novel of terrorism, and Palaniuk extends the violence aesthetic of Mailer's "White Negro" and the various therapies encouraging the psychically wounded to vent until they heal or when the things that are killing them disappears. In both instances, the aim is to free the body from the sterile consumerism its shackled to and to feel alive, and advocates of this sort of expulsion would be quick to add that the violence assumed in their rants and manifestos is metaphorical only; poetry to make a point. Paulaniuk , though, is having none of this grandstanding equivocation on the point; a male either feels that he's had his manhood commoditized and removed from his being, or he does not, and he's willing to take direct action against the symbols and systems of oppression, or there are complacent with a status quo and, hence, part of the problem.

The genius of the novel is the author's decision to take the talk of mortal liberation at face value and to follow the logic. Aggrieved males attacking each other , fighting as hard as they can, blows to the body, the head, the groin meant to help them feel something real and independent of programmed responses and advertised results, and in achieving a bond and formed a community, there becomes the united purpose of bringing down the towers of business, the arrogance of faceless, soulless capitalism. Palaniuk's novel is fiction and it is satire, but it is also potent social criticism and disturbingly presents a mindset of a collective for whom acts of grandscale violence, of terrorism are the only sane action possible because they are the only things one can do that means anything. Fight Club is a rousing, disturbing read.