by Adrianne Harun
(Mariner Books) $12
In this collection, Northwest author Harun compiles 10 stories from a range of perspectives--from a young child grieving his parents' divorce to a cat confused by the absence of his 16-year-old master (who has recently run away). The settings Harun chooses are equally varied: an ancient fishing village near a desert, a private school in Connecticut, and (in a number of the stories) Salish Bay, a fictional place loosely based on Port Townsend, where the author resides.
Although the plots present different issues and settings, similar themes work throughout The King of Limbo: loneliness, desperation, alienation, that sort of thing. "Accidents" follows a woman trying to forget the death of her premature baby by fleeing her boyfriend. Glimpses of her trauma are relayed in memories after she is literally stopped in her tracks, crashing her car into a creepy old couple's house, where she is nursed through the night. "The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus" depicts an alienated widower who becomes a town hero by penning letters to the editor of the Salish Recorder under a fake identity.
It's not that I didn't like these stories. I did--perhaps too much, since I felt frustrated by their abrupt endings. I don't like it when characters simply "walk off into the night." I need just a little more to feel fulfilled. Not necessarily a happy ending--I'm way too Generation "Whyyy"--but a little more explanation about the interactions would be nice, or else the stories end up being simply... weird. ALLEGRA WIBORG
Pacific Bell: The Dream of the Cold War, Pt 1
by Grant Cogswell
(10th Avenue East Publishing) $10
Grant Cogswell's credentials: He's a former cab driver who ran a serious and dedicated campaign against McIver for City Council last year; he's a veteran contributor to The Stranger's news and arts sections; he's responsible for our city's best recent populist movement (he coauthored the monorail initiative); he has an artist's insight into the guts of Seattle; and he has a passion for the more obscure side of the city's and the region's histories.
Cogswell is also a poet, and his new and (as far as I know) first book of poetry, Pacific Bell, is a challenge to Seattle. Its five long poems at times knell a death toll for a region that has not recovered from its lost wars: salmon, Native America, and the dream that was the Cold War ("The war we imagined, the war we dreamed,/ The war that never awakened us"). It questions the validity of our position in such a context of loss, without reference to or mention of the city's unprecedented economic prosperity and cultural popularity in the '90s. The poems present a contemporary Seattle that is unusually precarious and directionless: "We're in the future/This is where America looks down at its feet."
As a poet, Cogswell pays attention to the details--of his history, of his words--and is lucky enough to have found similar sentiments in his publisher and designer, 10th Avenue East. As a book, Pacific Bell hides nothing: It is bound with miniature screws and bolts, and half-transparent covers that were hand-screened by designer and co-publisher Evan Sult. As Cogswell writes, "We are made to the measure of our times." MEGAN PURN
Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
(St. Martin's Press) $23.95 hardcover
Life doesn't get much weirder than it did for the young Augusten Burroughs. Born to a violent alcoholic father and a free-spirited mother with a penchant for poetry and psychotic episodes, Augusten was placed in his early teens in the care of his mom's psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, a jovial megalomaniac running a family-operated loony bin/flophouse out of the family's home in the Northeast. Running with Scissors tracks Augusten's teenage years as he scurries between his dangerously crazy mom and Dr. Finch's whacked-out world, during which time he sees and experiences enough fucked-up shit to ruin a thousand lives and fuel 1001 seasons of Jerry Springer.
Lucky for us, Augusten Burroughs survived this amoral upbringing with his wits about him, and it's a testament to his remarkable talent that Running with Scissors transcends its sensationally perverse subject matter to offer a rich and deeply funny account of a life way less than ordinary. From his mother's violent upheavals of insanity to the doctor's psychic reading of feces to his own deeply iffy (though apparently consensual and doctor-approved) intergenerational romance with a mentally ill drifter, Burroughs recounts everything in the even tone of a grateful survivor.
The fact remains that in this age of garish first-person tell-alls, anyone with Burroughs' history could have landed a book deal. But it takes a true literary talent to render such exploits with as much wit and heart as Burroughs crams into Running with Scissors. DAVID SCHMADER
Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing
by Abram Shalom Himelstein and Jamie Schweser
(New Mouth From the Dirty South)
$10
There are few segments of the population more annoying than punks who shove their ideas on How the World Works down your throat. While punk is supposed to be about expanding the concepts of music and pop culture, the PC police rain on that parade by gabbing too much about their reactionary rules for the rest of us.
Writers Abram Shalom Himelstein and Jamie Schweser take PC punks to task in Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing, a fictional collection of the memoirs, letters, and zines of a high-school graduate named Elliot Rosenberg. Elliot leaves his hometown of Wilson, Tennessee, in the early '90s to become part of a punk collective in Washington, D.C., eschewing college life to explore what it means to be a musically minded activist.
Once in D.C., he falls in with the extremists of the socially conscious scene, and his humorous initial observations concern the complications between his gut emotional desires and his friends' personal/political rulebooks. One of Elliot's primary attempts to resolve these opposing forces is through his relationship with Christa, an evangelical riot grrrl who constantly comments on how men are inherently sexist pigs. "It's good to be challenged so that I think a lot about the words that I say and what they mean," Elliot writes in his journal. "The bad part is: it's impossible to put the moves on someone when you are completely paranoid of them thinking you're a pig."
Elliot slowly comes to realize the hypocrisies within his peer group: the "progressive" health food stores that mistreat their workers, the "progressive" households that backstab their residents, the subjective distinctions between the boozing "class of '77 punks" and the straight-edge brigade, and the white kids who move to rundown neighborhoods and then bitch about gentrification.
While Himelstein and Schweser make some funny, astute points about political punks going overboard, they make the mistake of going overboard with the stereotypes themselves. By the end of the book, the characterizations--especially of the feminist riot grrrls--are so over-the-top that they become as annoying as the people the authors attempt to condemn. JENNIFER MAERZ
Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs
by Douglas Husak
(Verso) $18
Animals Like Us
by Mark Rowlands
(Verso) $18
Philosophy professor and author Colin McGinn is the editor of Verso's fine Practical Ethics series, which is inaugurated by Legalize This! (which makes a rational case against anti-drug laws) and Animals Like Us (which makes a rational case against eating meat and the meat industry in general). McGinn promises us that his series will go far beyond this initial offering of philosophical discourses on animal rights and the drug war to cover other humanist matters like racism, poverty, abortion, and terrorism.
I sure hope so.
If the first two books are an indication of what is to come, then we should expect very clear, simple-to-read, information-heavy, fun-to-thumb-through critical arguments. Legalize This! is authored by a no-nonsense intellectual, Douglas Husak, who lucidly explains the terrible social consequences of legally punishing recreational drug use. Mark Rowlands' book lucidly argues against modern meat consumption by describing in detail, with great determination, the horrors of meat production.
The secret is that while the books teach the reader about a particular topic, they also give a general course in logic and ethics--without letting on that they're teaching people how to think in such a way.
Wonderful!
If Mr. McGinn and his series of philosophers can transfer through such big issues (race, animal abuse, abortion) valuable (and also very traditional) intellectual skills to the rest of us' then I can only wish them the best of luck. PAUL ROSENTHAL
