The usual full disclosure: Kwame is a friend of mine, and he gave me a copy of the book as a comp for proofreading some of the galleys for him and hashing through some of the ideas with him during the authorship. So you won’t get an impartial review out of me. Search the Internet if you want that; I’m sure it has plenty to say on the subject.
What I will say is that the book is at its best when Kwame is just storytelling. The theoretical stuff is almost all framed in first-person participant-observation ethnography, which is fancy sociologist speak for saying that Kwame rapped as Mad Squirrel in the San Francisco based Forest Fires Collective and then wrote about it. So, among all of the general and specific postulations about race and class and gender in The Scene are a lot of stories: stories about battles between white and black emcees at house parties, stories about Filipino youth finding a national identity through hip-hop, stories about what happens when a woman tries to participate in a male-dominated open mic. Like the best underground hip-hop itself, it’s the art of storytelling that makes the message shine.
And at least for me, it is the storytelling that draws me to some of my favorite hip-hop. Love or hate Slick Rick, but you can’t deny that he spins a good yarn. Even for acts as popular as Public Enemy, it’s the songs like Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos that people remember. El-P’s Stepfather Factory is by far the most memorable cut from Fantastic Damage. And even in the genre of gangster rap, touchstone songs like Ice-T’s 6 in the Mornin’ and N.W.A.’s Fuck Tha Police are built around narratives. There’s just a lot more to that vein of rapping than there is to some fool shouting rhymed couplets about bitches and ice.
It’s probably not far off the mark to say that we, as a species, are wired for storytelling. I’m sure that a hundred anthropologists have written a book on that very subject. Storytelling seems to be a foundation of culture. Would it be possible to have anything that we could call a “culture” that didn’t include some type of common narrative? I’m not sure. When we say the word “culture”, it’s one of the first things that comes to mind. When we imagine our stereotype of “primitive peoples”, we imagine them sitting around the communal fire, the elders telling stories. Stories about the creation of the world, stories about the origin of humanity, stories about right and wrong and the consequences of each. There’s something fundamentally human about participating in that.
Hip-hop, as a culture, is no exception. It has its creation myths — poor urban kids stealing power from the streetlights to run turntables, switching back and forth between records, making beat breaks for people to dance. It has its pantheon of primal gods — DJ Red Alert, The Sugar Hill Gang, MC Busy Bee, Kool Herc, etc. Like every culture, it has its charlatans who try to claim direct lineage from those gods. And it has its modern-day chroniclers, people like Kwame, who retell (and relive) the old stories and create new ones to keep the culture alive. Hip Hop Underground is a contribution to that storytelling tradition.
There’s a lot to love and a lot to hate in Evasion, and I’m quite certain that the author wouldn’t want it any other way. He squats, shoplifts, train hops, dumpster dives, and scams his way around the country without apology. The main targets of his ire are consumerism and corporate waste, and some of his best methods are using corporate policies against the corporations that make them. Things like pulling receipts from the Barnes & Noble trash can, grabbing the corresponding books from the shelves, and then taking them to the service desk to return them. The clerk knows that he didn’t buy the book, the clerk knows that he should throw the bum out, but Corporate Policy says that they need to honor the return with receipt, and the clerk’s common sense is subservient to Corporate Policy, so they have no choice but to hand over the cash.
So, on the one hand, I find it easy to love the prodding at the weak spots of consumer capitalism, as they so often richly deserve that prodding. On the other hand, there are things to hate. The first is the fundamentalist perspective. We always give the conservative fundamentalists a hard time, but I think the ‘liberal’ fundamentalists get off too easy. Being a free-range anarchist punk is a great thing; looking down your nose at everyone who isn’t is just silly. Every 19 year old thinks they have everything figured out — I certainly did. Not every 19 year old manages to write a book about it, and on that count the author is one-up on most of us. But the attitude that ‘everybody who isn’t like me is ignorant and wrong’ is exactly what the religious fascists peddle, and it’s unfortunately also what the author of Evasion peddles.
It’s that sort of fundamentalism that encourages us to poke about for hypocrisy and revel in it when we find it. If the guy down the block gets busted for some transgression involving drugs or sex, we’re maybe embarrassed for him, maybe even feel bad for him. But when fundamentalist pastor Ted Haggard gets caught doing crystal meth with a gay hooker, then goes through a three week program and emerges “completely heterosexual”, we have a field day with it. It’s because he’s been condemning the rest of us for what he would have us believe are our sins, while cooking up with teenage boys after church. Evasion has me looking for similar falls. Like, if you’re stealing all of this stuff from Barnes and Noble to buy punk records, then what are you doing with the records? Not carrying them around on trains, I know that. Mailing them home to Mom in the suburbs? It’s not crystal meth with hookers, but neither is it the property-free, consumption-free ideal that the book puts forth. As for me, I don’t give a damn if you have a thousand records or seven big-screen televisions. You’re still the guy who owns a bunch of property, and trying to make a big deal of not being that guy makes you look foolish.
But arrogance and hypocrisy aside, Evasion is a hell of a book for a kid to write, and it gets respect for that. It’s about a guy who’s not afraid to live big stories, and not too lazy to write about them and put them out there to inspire other people to live big stories, too. In that sense, it’s a success. It reminds me of every time I passed by a hotel to go sleep in the woods, every time I scored enough food or flowers from the dumpster to eat for a month or decorate my entire house, every time I caught a lift from a stranger instead of shelling out for a bus ticket. Not because any of those things make me morally superior (or maybe they do, but that’s not why they’re interesting), but because they just make for better stories than checking into the Best Western, buying grocery store food under bright fluorescent lights, or sitting on a bus with headphones trying not to make eye contact with anyone. If our life is the stories we make, then the author of Evasion has lived more life than most Americans ever will, and for that he is to be commended.
As a strange aside, I just realized that this book is for sale at Barnes and Noble online. According to the page, “Customers who bought this also bought: Going Rogue by Sarah Palin.” I just… I don’t even know where to begin…
Writing is always to some degree about artifice. Even journalistic narrative is still an exercise in representation — wanting to represent truthfully, usually, but also wanting to represent artfully. Nobody wins a Pulitzer Prize for mere sequential exposition of facts; people win Pulitzers for artful arrangements of facts that show us some greater truth beyond the facts. All writing strives for it; some writing succeeds at it.
And in some writing, the artifice is more important than the story it tells. An Italian sonnet must be a sonnet. You can’t slip an extra line in if there’s something else you remembered that you wanted to say. The greatness of a successful sonnet is that it says what you wanted to say while adhering rigidly to a form that exists independently of the content.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler works a bit like that. Calvino has a clever form that he’s created for himself. The challenge that he’s created is to try to tell a story within that form, such that the form becomes the story. It’s the sort of experiment upon which Calvino has built his literary reputation. As an experiment, it is clever — a book about a book that is never finished, but becomes a different story every time the reader picks it up. Calvino writes with the second-person pronoun, so ‘you’ are the protagonist, and ‘you’ are reading a book about the book that you’re reading.
While it is clever, I don’t know that it’s actually all that readable. It’s all form and so little story. The problem with the second-person narrative is that it’s impossible to build any empathy or antipathy for the protagonist, because you are the protagonist. It has the unexpected effect of actually making it harder to relate to the character.
Too much cleverness can be a bad thing. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a book that gets wrapped up in itself, in the vanity of being a book about itself, and it ends up missing the sort of base sincerity that would actually draw me in. It’s like the kid who awkwardly uses big words just to show that that he knows big words. Give me a pure heart and plain speech, and I’ll pick that almost every time.
It’s rare for me to start a book and not finish it. I don’t know if it’s virtue or vice, but once I’ve started reading, I generally plow through to the end, no matter how bad the book. I guess I always hope for a payoff at the end, even if it seems unlikely. But this time, I just couldn’t do it. Two hundred pages into The Making of Ireland, I had to stop. I just couldn’t go any further.
I don’t know if it’s a “bad” book, necessarily. It’s incredibly thorough, very well researched, and remarkably detailed about those parts of Irish history over which most other books quickly skip. Where other books skate from the druids to the first English settlement in a chapter or so, The Making of Ireland spends hundreds of pages on it. The problem is that the attention to detail is mostly just attention to names, dates, and battles. Frankly, I didn’t know that anybody wrote that kind of history anymore. It’s exactly what I was trained not to do in my graduate history classes. There’s virtually no analysis, no social context, no thematic connecting of events. Just a massive litany of who fought whom on what battlefield in which year, who got appointed to which political office, and how many heads of cattle were seized by which governor. It’s all What and no Why. It’s not even really the trap of Whig history; it’s more like reading an almanac or encyclopedia.
In contrast, Ireland Now is an absolutely fascinating slice of modern life on the Island. To be fair, it’s more sociology than history, but the quality of the storytelling is also vastly better. Ireland Now avoids the clichés of mystical Ireland, English-oppressed Ireland, Celtic tiger Ireland. Instead, it tells its stories by way of case studies. It answers the question “What is rural life like in modern Ireland?” not solely by statistics and dates (although it uses those, too), but primarily by interviewing Irish farmers and letting them tell their stories. It does the same for immigrant Ireland, Irish musicians, and the Irish clergy. The end result is a portrait painted by the subjects themselves, with the connections made less by the author’s words than by the sequencing and the editing of the first-person stories.
For me of course, the most interesting chapter was the one on Irish music. Flanagan skips right past generalizations about tradition and authenticity — notions over which trad musicians often get themselves into a huff — and bravely takes Riverdance by the horns right out of the gate. Traditional musicians sneer at the mention of it, and yet it continues to sell out shows all over the world. It’s the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. What do you do with Riverdance?
I was talking to a music sociologist friend of mine about what he has heard described as “the set list from hell”. The set list from hell is that set of songs or tunes that have become so successful as to be known by people outside the musical subculture, but which no self-respecting musician inside the subculture still plays. So, “Danny Boy” for Irish musicians, “Rocky Top” and “Dueling Banjos” for bluegrassers, “Freebird” or “Stairway to Heaven” for rock musicians. It’s not that any of those are bad songs; on the contrary, they are fine songs — good songs, even. But they’re so well-tread and so oft-requested by the punters that you can’t play them without slipping into parody. The purists just won’t do it.
And yet, you can’t talk about the Irish music diaspora and ignore Riverdance. When we say the phrase “traditional Irish music and dance”, the first image in the minds of most people in the world will be Michael Flatly in a mullet and tight pants prancing about in a multi-million-dollar stage show. (Skip ahead to 4:46 to see what Irish step dance would have looked like if it had been birthed in Las Vegas.) There’s almost nothing “traditional” or “authentic” about the production, but because of it, Irish step dance classes were full for years throughout the world. Whether the purists like it or not, it becomes part of the tradition, part of the storytelling. Traditions are living things, and the stories are never over and are constantly being written and revised. Ireland Now does a fine job of telling some of those stories, while The Making of Ireland mothballs them and renders them dead things.
I flew into Italy last week without a book, the idea being 1) not to carry anything extra and heavy and 2) to force myself to study vocabulary during my reading time. That worked well enough; I reviewed my phrase book during the flight, and while I certainly don’t speak Italian, I was at least able to get around OK, stay fed and sheltered, and have a good time in the process. For the flight home, however, I would need brain fuel. So, in Florence, I set out to find an English language bookstore.
As it happened, there was one near the home of a certain Dante Alighieri, a couple of blocks from the chapel where he first laid eyes on his beloved Beatrice and where Beatrice lies entombed to this day, receiving the prayers of stricken lovers with a pure and reproachless heart. I had my own mystical experience with Beatrice at the chapel (a story for another day), which prompted me to track down La DivinaCommedia at the bookstore shortly thereafter.
It’s of course grossly unfair to read Dante in English and make any assessment of the quality of the language. So I won’t. Having read The Inferno years ago, it wasn’t until I read The Purgatory on trains and buses across Tuscany and Umbria that I started to see what Dante was up to. Not just language, although I expect that shines as well, and not just an epic allegory, although it’s that, too. What first struck me was the painstaking attention to structure and symmetry — the structure of the cantos laid out with numerological significance, each of the three books (the trinity) ending with the same word (stars), the mirroring of each of the cardinal sins with a corresponding beatitude, ad infinitum. The Divine Comedy isn’t just an epic, but a clockwork machine, a catalog of antiquity, a political treatise and the shaping of modern Catholic thought. It’s poetry of such a completely different character than that of impressionistic lines dashed in a beat café. Dante is no mere poet — he’s an astronomer, a theologian, an historian, a politician, a bibliophile and perhaps above all else, a lover, loyal beyond marriage, loyal even beyond death. As when I read so many other great writers, I am utterly humbled to understand even a portion of what’s he’s up to. It’s like seeing a watchmaker create a timepiece from ore and sand — it seems impossible, but the product is undeniably real.
Hip Hop Underground
Evasion
So, on the one hand, I find it easy to love the prodding at the weak spots of consumer capitalism, as they so often richly deserve that prodding. On the other hand, there are things to hate. The first is the fundamentalist perspective. We always give the conservative fundamentalists a hard time, but I think the ‘liberal’ fundamentalists get off too easy. Being a free-range anarchist punk is a great thing; looking down your nose at everyone who isn’t is just silly. Every 19 year old thinks they have everything figured out — I certainly did. Not every 19 year old manages to write a book about it, and on that count the author is one-up on most of us. But the attitude that ‘everybody who isn’t like me is ignorant and wrong’ is exactly what the religious fascists peddle, and it’s unfortunately also what the author of Evasion peddles.
The Making of Ireland
Dante Alighieri