Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
by Jennifer Baumgardner
(FSG) $24
Coauthor of the third-wave handbook Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner (the one who was dating Amy Ray, not the one who had an abortion) has written one of the first general-interest books on female bisexuality. It's ridiculous that it's taken so long. Popular terms like "girl crush" (which Baumgardner, a former Ms. editor and second-waver in spirit, professes to find "cloying") and LUG (lesbian until graduation) are politically incorrect acknowledgments of an easily observed truth: Female sexuality is fluid and adaptable. It doesn't take a jail cell or a whaling vessel to turn a straight girl on to other women, whether it's for a semester or 50 years. The converse, while even touchier, is also true: Self-professed lesbians stray every day. Drawing lightly from psychoanalysis (Freud via Marjorie Garber) and heavily from her own life, Baumgardner breezes from the political lesbianism of the '70s to the sudden efflorescence of pop-culture bisexuality in the '90s. She attempts to recuperate bizarro Anne Heche, lavishes perhaps too many pages on confessional CEO Ani DiFranco, and tells her own story in serially monogamous anecdotes. In the exhausted tradition of consciousness raising, Look Both Ways is ultimately more memoir than treatise. But it's still a provocative heads-up. ANNIE WAGNER
Jennifer Baumgardner reads from Look Both Ways at University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400, on Thurs March 15 at 7 pm; and Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, on Fri March 16 at 7:30 pm.
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
(Knopf) $30
Add to the growing list of civil rights surveys The Race Beat, which purports to tell the stories of the newsmen who chronicled the historic drama during the 1950s and '60s. Given the media's role in the civil rights struggle (indeed, it's no stretch to say the movement would never have succeeded if front pages and TV screens hadn't given us Emmett Till's mangled face and Bull Connor's police dogs), an account of the press is overdue. Unfortunately, this book does a lackluster job documenting the stories behind the news stories. And so, while we get perfunctory details about reporters, it's still the legendary events themselves—the showdown in Little Rock, the disappearance of three voting-rights workers in Mississippi, and the Billy clubs in Selma—that provide this book's energy.
Interestingly, by casting reporters as the heroes, the authors do manage to tweak one traditional reading of the civil rights story. Birmingham '63, with fire hoses blasting black protesters, has long been the era's defining moment—raw hatred exposed. But in this telling, a new defining moment emerges: the white riot that struck the University of Mississippi in 1962. Here, with besieged reporters on the scene being bullied out of upholding the First Amendment—one reporter is murdered—mob rule routs federal troops and Mississippi's delinquent governor thumbs his nose at the federal courts. Racism's larger threat to America, the unraveling of the Constitution, is laid bare. JOSH FEIT
The Show I'll Never Forget
Edited by Sean Manning
(De Capo Press) $16.95
When you go to a music show, what do you remember? You might remember how the bouncer treated you when you walked in or the decorative cleavage of the bartender. The music itself is more difficult to remember, because music is temporal. You have trouble remembering live music because you do not interact with it—it is played for you.
This is a main theme with The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience. The stories, some great and some terrible, have almost universally one thing in common: They don't talk about the music. And if they do, it's very boring. Instead, it's a compilation of coming-of-age tales, falling-in-love tales, and other incidental stories. One of my favorites is by David Gates, who saw James Brown at Boston Garden the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Gates remembers very little about the actual music, but his feelings about the show are unadulterated and clean. "I remember thinking that as soon as James Brown took command of the stage, such considerations of race and class went away for all of us." Also great: Maggie Estep on Einstürzende Neubauten ("We tried like hell to come up with words to describe what we'd just witnessed, but it was bigger than either of us") and Harvey Pekar on Joe Maneri ("Before he played, he recited a poem in a language that he'd made up himself"). ARI SPOOL
Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women
by Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju
Translated by Don Mee Choi
(Zephyr Press) $16
In a poem called "Night Owl," Ch'oe Sung-Ja writes "Someone pissed/on top of my already dead body/and then left whistling." It's a representative slice—horrific, wry, and bodily—from the whole of Don Mee Choi's excellent anthology of Korean poetry Anxiety of Words.
The three poets Choi translates—Ch'oe Sung-Ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju—each have distinct voices and consciousnesses, but they are bound together by their nationality (Korean), their gender (female), and their generation (born 1952–55). Choi presents Ch'oe, Kim, and Yi within this political and social context, but, following the poets' leads, she does not let the context overwhelm the work. The translations render each voice distinctly, with a consistent precision and grace that makes the struggles of a people feel personal. The overall effect is a gripping mix of Plath and K-Horror, totally outside of the Korean nationalist literature that Choi tells us in her introduction wants its women poets to "evoke something gentle and motherly."
"Mother sighs, mumbles something," Yi writes, "then shoves her dead baby into a garbage bin, rolled up in newspaper." TRAVIS NICHOLS
