Salon.com > Matthew DeBord

The Believer

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 09:00:00 +0000

As soon as I was spotted with the Believer on a Brooklyn subway platform, I was promptly accosted by a dark-eyed woman in her 20s wondering where she could find the debut issue. It didn't take long for word to get out that the new literary/cultural magazine published by the McSweeney's collective in San Francisco had hit the bookstores.

Already, the power of the Believer is strong.

The magazine, as has been reported elsewhere, is the brainchild of novelist Heidi Julavits, author of "The Mineral Palace," and Vendela Vida, who wrote the female rites-of-passage investigation "Girls on the Verge," and is, not incidentally, Dave Eggers' fiancée.

From “Bright Lights, Big City” to gamay Beaujolais

Mon, 20 Nov 2000 09:58:00 +0000

People my age fall into two camps when it comes to Jay McInerney: They either recall with misty fondness reading "Bright Lights, Big City" one swift afternoon back in the '80s, or they hate his stinkin' guts and wish he would go away forever. I tend to fall into the first camp. There are times, however, when I drift toward the second (though not to an extreme degree). McInerney is a gifted writer (and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise), but he can seem lazy and self-derivative, as if he's coasting. Sometimes, he disappoints.

This was the case with his last book, 1998's "Model Behavior," which contained a short novel with the same title that was essentially a reworking of "Bright Lights, Big City." The characters were all older, though not much wiser, and McInerney's signature theme -- the corruption of youthful idealism by the cold reality of affluence -- was present, but otherwise the effort felt phoned in, a bit tired. And 1996's "The Last of the Savages," his last real novel, was ambitious but also meandering and, for a hillbilly aesthete such as me, irritating in its preposterous depictions of Old South gentility colliding head-on with the counterculture. In fact, the last McInerney offering I truly dug was "Brightness Falls," his 1992 response to Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

Hang it up, Tom

Mon, 06 Nov 2000 09:49:00 +0000

Here's how it goes with Tom Wolfe: You were in high school, you stumbled across "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" or the "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" while killing time in the fluorescently depressing library stacks. That prose! That frantic, amped-up, rollicking, vigorous language! Who was this guy? And the payoff? He wrote for Rolling Stone, your pimply adolescent bible. You were captivated. This was not your father's journalism. You checked out everything you could get your hands on and didn't leave your room for a week.

That's how it goes with Tom Wolfe, for young men who came of age in the '70s, who were weaned on the New Journalism; in fact, who didn't even know that there was any other kind of journalism that could be written. Tom Wolfe was a touchstone, the nonfiction equivalent of Thomas Pynchon and Jack Kerouac, a dandified brother to Hunter Thompson (who young '70s men would discover soon enough). Tom Wolfe didn't write about boring crap; Tom Wolfe wrote about the Merry Pranksters and whether you were on or off the bus, and about dropping acid, and he wrote about surfers, and he wrote about cars, man, and he wrote about those superbad mofo Black Panthers and it was all so ... unbelievably exhilarating. He had no respect for grammar, his syntax scintillated, it sparked, it throbbed. He threw around exclamation points and capital letters with efflorescent abandon. He broke the rules. He looked frooty in that white suit, but so what? He was massively, unquestionably cool.

“Assassination” by Miles Hudson

Tue, 25 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

It's an Ethics 101 classic: If you could have assassinated Hitler in 1938, would you have? Few would argue against a premature death for Hitler. But would eliminating him have prevented World War II and the slaughter of millions?

In "Assassination," Miles Hudson sets out to determine whether the violent removal of a critical historical figure at a crucial historical time makes any difference. To do so he has assembled 18 assassinations, ranging from that of Julius Caesar to that of Jesus Christ (though it's an asterisked one, a "judicial execution" rather than an assassination proper), and asked whether they worked.

Hudson, a conservative British political intellectual who now lives as a farmer, concludes -- unsurprisingly -- that assassinations almost never influence historical outcomes. "In over half the assassinations studied," he writes, "the result was the exact opposite of what was intended; in one-third of the cases nothing much happened; in one case, something else, a world war, was the result; and in only one instance can it be said that the assassin's sponsor succeeded in his political aims."

Saucy soccer moms

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue -- annual apex of service journalism for boys -- is supposed to bring every red-blooded straight male, or his trousers, to his knees. And yet, the specially wrapped pack o' porn, accessories included, did nothing for me this year.

There was no pop-eyed lust, no furtive boner, no drooling over dusky bazooms and stiletto gams. I could not be moved by Teutonic nubility, taut bellies or thong-flossed buttocks. In fact, the entire 3-D section conjured up only the grim image of nearsighted shut-ins with red and blue cardboard glasses perched on their trembling noses, soiled BVDs clumped around their varicosed ankles.

I tossed my copy on a groaning pile of erotically benign rags: Harper's, the New Yorker, Golf Digest. I was saving myself for the superior stroke book, my own true erotic bible, the glossy guide to honeys most likely to succeed with me, myself and a box of Kleenex: The Lands' End "America's Ultimate Swimwear" catalog, demurely billed as "26 pages of the kindest cut anywhere."

“Shopping” by Gavin Kramer

Tue, 09 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

More than half a century after incinerating two of its cities and then turning the entire country into a war-spoiled quasi colony, Westerners like to think that they get Japan -- that a smooth continuum of cultural understanding bridges the Pacific, neatly joining Tokyo and its PlayStations to the Port of Los Angeles. "Shopping," Gavin Kramer's debut novel, sets out to show that we couldn't be more wrong. Short-listed for the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Prize, "Shopping" goes out of its way to depict how utterly bizarre and awkwardly, bafflingly symbiotic the relationship between Japan and its World War II foes is. As far as Kramer is concerned, the war never really ended -- it merely shifted to less violent, more ambiguous battlefields.

The plot is minimal: A jaded, expatriate narrator recounts the collapse into debauchery and near-madness of Meadowlark, an uptight, dim and lunkish fellow Englishman who finds himself slip-sliding uncontrollably across the alluring neon surfaces of Tokyo's "nightless city." "Of the young professional expatriates," the narrator says, "it was clear to which category Alistair Meadowlark belonged. They were here against their will, condemned to serve in this city because of the vast, unified effort ... to plug a once bomb-levelled country into the very heart of the worldwide money machine."

Swag hags

Tue, 28 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It is the week after Christmas. My mother and I have driven to my place in Brooklyn for a little extra family togetherness. Against my better judgment, I have agreed to put my mother up in my apartment, rather that stashing her in a hotel, the usual program when she comes to town for a visit. This is her first glimpse of my new Brooklyn digs: a bigger, shabbier apartment than the one I rented in Manhattan for a couple of years. My outer borough bachelor pad. My grungy castle. My down-at-the-heels domain.

She's not exactly pleased with what I've done with the place. She has -- surprise! -- her own ideas about how her adult son's apartment should look. She has sinister plans for my wall-to-wall collection of back issues of Sports Illustrated.

I'm not a guy who completely lacks a design sense. I know the difference between McCobb and Wakefield. For me, the word "Shaker" does not automatically imply that it's time to break out the vodka and vermouth. I purchased my first piece of antique furniture (a desk) when I was 20. I own a set of Michael Graves coasters.

“Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market” by Walter Johnson

Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Compared with their European counterparts and their colleagues in literary studies, American historians are grinders, and they're not usually showoffs. They tend to focus on the slow accumulation of documentary evidence rather than on madcap flights of speculation. So it's surprising that Walter Johnson, an assistant professor of history at New York University, has written "Soul by Soul," an account of life in the New Orleans slave market in the years before the Civil War that leaps from disengaged historical judgment to social and psychological conjecture about the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike.

At the center of Johnson's book is the slave pen, a sort of jail modified for the peculiar needs of the trade and located in downtown New Orleans, surrounded by walls as high as 20 feet. Outside the pen, slaves were publicly displayed, dressed in blue suits and calico dresses in the hopes of attracting buyers. Within its confines, slavery was privately negotiated -- and, according to Johnson, not merely in financial terms. Johnson's central argument is that slavery was as much a socially and psychologically constructed institution as one that relied on overt physical bondage. "In the slave pens," writes Johnson, "the yet-unmade history of antebellum slavery could be daily viewed in the freeze-frame view of a single transaction on its leading edge -- a trader, a buyer, and slave making a bargain that would change the life of each." Chains, in a manner of speaking, were always in the process of being imagined and reimagined, manacles broken and reattached in a three-way chattel dance among seller, master and slave.

“Rembrandt's Eyes” by Simon Schama

Thu, 18 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

It's unlikely that Simon Schama will ever produce a book anyone
accuses of being too short. The Columbia University history professor and
author of the widely praised "Landscape and Memory" and "Citizens:
A Chronicle of the French Revolution" is among the reigning champions
of the lush and massive tome. Schama doesn't so much write books as
deliver immense objects to his readers.

His latest undertaking, an investigation of Rembrandt van Rijn's intricate
connection to another 17th century master, Peter Paul Rubens, is close to
the heftiest volume I have ever read. This is a 728-page
book, sized to fit 359 illustrations. The pages, when not simply walls of
print, are walls of print broken only by densely painted Baroque
masterpieces, reproduced in full color. Visual overload is always just a
licked fingertip away.

Which is just the way Schama wants it; overload is his accomplice. This
is the kind of monumental undertaking most historians would gladly trade
their rustbucket Volvos for a shot at. But would their ambition be the equal
of their envy? Schama, after all, is the jet set, the Mac Daddy of historians. He gets to write gargantuan books because he delivers the goods.

From girl games to glamour

Thu, 24 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Theresa Duncan's widely praised CD-ROM games for girls have sported whimsical, fulsomely cute titles -- Chop Suey, Smarty, Zero Zero -- and have struggled to offset the splatterfest tit-show that governs much of the current gaming scene. But Duncan is no soft-focus cornflower scourge to the platoons of polygon-wielding code boys. Nor is she the pigtailed digital minx -- Silicon Alley's dream girl -- who coolly winks from the dozens of photos that have graced reviews heralding her narrative-intensive projects as the kinderfeminist's answer to Maximum Barbie.

She is instead a thoroughly savvy and, by her own admission, predatory businesswoman who just happens to possess a spunky narrative sense and an affection for old-school children's books, as well as chutzpah by the gallon. Spending an hour with her in the Manhattan offices of her stakehorse, Nicholson NY, you can almost hear the pitter-pat of the business-magazine profile writers in the distance. With her streaky blond hair, braided in signature twin tails across her strap-halter-encased collarbones, thick stripes of black eye shadow and Paper magazine wardrobe, she could be a Condi Nast scout or a stylist for Marc Jacobs. Duncan's image is just that, however; beneath lurks the spirit of a true player.

Consciousness dethroned

Wed, 08 Jul 1998 21:46:00 +0000

Popular science writers are an excitable breed. They have to be: If they fail to infect readers with their giddiness over complex theories and frequently radical ideas about the world as we know it, then science might as well be left to the encastled brain lords who do it for a living.

Unfortunately, in their rush to craft a compelling story, science writers often do as much damage as good, slipstreaming for quick consumption issues that science still doubts. The danger is that this meta-narrative will then supplant wisdom -- prompting, say, rotten blockbuster movies about asteroids decimating the Earth, or bogus legends about life on Mars based on observations of structures that only look like canals.

Tor Norretranders is the Danish James Gleick -- a writer who knows a Big Idea when he sees it and possesses the skill to neuter that idea's thorny patches without babying his readers. His "The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size" -- a bestseller in Denmark following its original publication in 1991 -- is the result of just such a science writer's "eureka!"