Salon.com > Tom Bissell

Destination: Central Asia

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Within the nations collectively known as "the 'stans" one can sense the still-cooling results of numerous historical collisions, not all of them figurative, seeing that an active fault line runs straight through the region. (Uzbekistan's capital, Tashkent, was earthquake-flattened as recently as 1966.) Central Asia is where Europe abuts Asia and Christianity smashes against Islam, where Alexander the Great was stopped dead in his tracks and Genghis Khan and Tamerlane staged their conquests of the known world. The region received one of its first known English visitors in the 1500s, and his subsequent report was measured in its enthusiasm: "These merchants are so beggarly and poor, and bring so little quantity of wares ... that there is no hope of any good trade there to be had."

Variously ruled by Arab conquistadors, Mongol horsemen, Persian meddlers, a series of cruel but sometimes enlightened despots, czarist Russia and, finally -- and most disastrously -- by the Soviet Union, Central Asia is the geographical equivalent of an oft-forwarded parcel bearing the traces of each of its temporary holder's stamps. It is home to despairingly vast deserts, several large inland seas, endless steppes, beautiful mountainous valleys, and some of the world's least inspiring governments. Its religion is predominantly Islam, but a softer, less ideological incarnation than that which is typically encountered in Arab states, and its culture is a curious agglutination of Soviet, Turkic, Persian and Mongol influences.

Destination: Vietnam

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

"Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there." So ends Michael Herr's 1977 memoir "Dispatches," a nearly perfect synthesis of war reportage and lysergic impressionism. If one understands Herr as referring to a frantic state of mind in which nothing is as it seems, then yes, we have all been there. If, however, one understands Herr's incantatory triad as an actual place filled with real people, then no, most of us have not been there. The war has thus obliterated Vietnam twice, the first obliteration resulting in so many books that, for many, Vietnam is less a country than an autopsy.

Average Vietnamese today are not much interested in what they call the "American War," and many Westerners have traveled to Vietnam to discover the ancient, jungly, beach-edged and, above all, shatteringly beautiful nation that the war's tangled legacy continues to obscure. (In the early 1970s South Vietnam's Ministry of Tourism, a sodality of optimism if ever there was one, was already anticipating such souls: "Vietnam," one of its come-on slogans read. "You've heard about it. Now come see it.") Yet Vietnam's wars are many. The people of ancient Vietnam, for instance, resisted and defeated all three of their Mongol invasions at a time when literally half of the world had fallen to Mongol occupiers. Vietnam has additionally suffered 11 invasions by China, the most recent of which was in 1979. In 1954 the Communist-nationalist mélange known as the Viet Minh defeated the French after a brutal nine-year war. And, of course, the forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong stalemated the United States and then toppled the American client government of South Vietnam in 1975. This makes Vietnam the only nation on earth that can claim to have militarily defeated three of the five permanent sitting members of the United Nations Security Council. A study of the wars that shaped Vietnam may not provide the roundest lens through which to view it, but there is no question that modern Vietnamese culture has formed around a violent, molten core.

“Articles of War” by Nick Arvin

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:45:00 +0000

War has devastated most human endeavors, but it has been good to literature. If, that is, one can forget all the potential novelists and poets (not to mention the potential accountants, musicians and fathers) floating in the bloody surf at Omaha Beach, lying facedown in the jungles of Indochina, or blown in two along the highways of Mesopotamia. What we write about when we write about war is ... well, which war? Readerly expectation differs from war to war. It took the World War II novel 15 years to travel from the realism of James Jones and Norman Mailer to the surreal bedlam of Joseph Heller. Vietnam and the Gulf War, on the other hand, underwent absurdist dissection relatively quickly. For the soldiers who fought, however, one doubts that Vietnam and the Gulf War felt any more morally bizarre than World War II. The Greatest Generation massacred more than its share of civilians on the way to global salvation. Nevertheless, recent years have seen collective sainthood bestowed upon American soldiers in general and the dogfaces of World War II in particular.

Gameboys

Thu, 27 May 2004 20:00:00 +0000

HITMAN: CONTRACTS (Eidos Interactive)

Jeff: Agent 47, how do we love thee?

Tom: Let us count the ways. Actually, let us not. But he kicks more ass than any other video game antihero, that's for certain. I think he may even be better than Max Payne.

Jeff: I love Max, but he wouldn't stand a chance against 47. Agent 47 could kill Max with a rusty lock-pick. "Hitman 2": the greatest game we've ever played?

Tom: Man, I don't know, but it's up there. Why don't you clue everyone in on old 47?

Jeff: He's a trained killer with the sense of duty of a British soldier circa 1841 and the sense of mercy of Lucifer. He's bald, wears a black suit, and has a bar code on the back of his head.

Tom: This is because 47 is a clone.

Jeff: Yes. But most of his line is dead now. He's one of the last cloned hitmen left. The last game saw him trying to abandon his assassin past and living as the groundskeeper for a quiet church in Italy. That didn't work out too well for our 47, or ultimately for the fools who kidnapped his church's priest.

Gameboys

Thu, 20 May 2004 22:11:00 +0000

CHAMPIONS OF NORRATH: REALMS OF EVERQUEST (Sony)

Tom: Our first foray into the world of video game D&D-style role-playing. Ominously, the instruction booklet for "Champions of Norrath" is about as thick as a Chuck Palahniuk novel.

Jeff: Only better written.

Tom: Jeff, I honestly don't know if I'm up for this. It's been a long time. I associate D&D with too many unpleasant things: acne, chronic masturbation, Renaissance fairs, the lute. You know I once had a woman almost not sleep with me because I admitted I dabbled some in Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid?

Jeff: I can think of much better reasons not to sleep with you than that. You should calm down. Role-playing is not evil devil-worship. It's a small, pleasant escape nook for social rejects and the overly imaginative the world over. And really, who are we to judge?

Tom: You've reformed quite well, you know. I've always admired that.

Jeff: What do you mean?

Gameboys

Thu, 13 May 2004 22:41:00 +0000

Jeff: Atari is back!

Tom: Yeah, it's pretty great to see that good old distinctive Atari logo on a game again. Especially when that game is "Transformers."

Jeff: So you were a big Transformers fan?

Tom: Hell, yes. I loved Transformers. I used to pit my hapless Go-Bots against them in these massive cross-genre robot holocausts.

Jeff: Uh huh.

Tom: I loved toy miscegenation. The best for me was G.I. Joe versus the Transformers. The Joes and Cobra had to make an emergency pact to fight off the invading Transformers. My god, I used to go on epically playing for days. It was like my own little David Lean film.

Jeff: G.I. Joe fought against Cobra, right?

Tom: Yeah. And what the heck was the deal with Cobra's command structure? You had a supreme neo-pagan king in Serpentor, and in Cobra Commander you had a commander-in-chief-type figure who may or may not have had authority over Serpentor, but then you had all these secondary leaders like Destro and Major Blood and the Baroness and Zartan and Storm Shadow.

Jeff: Zartan was...?

Tom: Zartan was the swamp guy. He changed colors in the sun.

Jeff: Right.

Gameboys

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 21:25:00 +0000

JET LI: RISE TO HONOR (Sony)

Tom: They say movies are getting more like video games, but here's a video game that's practically a little movie.

Jeff: I can't decide if it's brilliant that Jet Li is leading the action-film-star pack by appearing in a video game built around him or merely succumbing to the first stages of career stagnation.

Tom: I haven't seen any big action-movie appearances by him lately, come to think of it. I think his career may have peaked when it was rumored he was going to be Boba Fett in "Star Wars: Episode III."

Jeff: Only you would regard rumors of an appearance in George Lucas' diminished franchise as a high point in someone's career, particularly a performer as cool as Jet Li. Anyway, he's still huge in Asia.

Tom: So that's a billion fans right there. And this game, I think, was explicitly made for the Chinese market, seeing that all of it is actually in Cantonese. A brave choice not to redub it for the American audience, I would say.

Jeff: Not so brave is your refusal to buy a new television, you self-styled literary intellectual, which is so small we can't read the subtitles.

“Everything or Nothing”

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:05:00 +0000

Jeff: Before we begin, let's play a game, shall we?

Tom: A game, I assume you mean, that doesn't involve pushing buttons or manipulating joysticks.

Jeff: Exactly. An old-fashioned battle of wits I call "Beatles Song or Bond Movie."

Tom: Go for it.

Jeff: "Tomorrow Never Knows"?

Tom: Beatles.

Jeff: "Tomorrow Never Dies"?

Tom: Bond! My turn: "From Russia With Love"?

Jeff: Bond. "Back in the USSR"?

Tom: Beatles. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"?

Jeff: Oh, too easy! Beatles again. "The Man with The Golden Gun"?

Tom: Bond. "Happiness is a Warm Gun"?

Jeff: Beatles. "Goldfinger"?

Tom: Bond. Badfinger?

Jeff: Er--

Tom: Aha! Beatles-produced group! How about "Live and Let Die"?

Jeff: Very nearly both.

Tom: All right. The game is loaded and here we go: Electronic Arts' feverishly anticipated new James Bond title, "Everything or Nothing."

Jeff: You really loved the Nintendo 64's "Goldeneye," as I recall.

Gameboys

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:00:00 +0000

"Mafia" (Illusion Softworks)

Jeff: Based on the box and instruction booklet, "Mafia" seems heavily reliant on "The Getaway" for its overall look and feel.

Tom: "The Getaway" itself having leaned conceptually hard on "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." Both are terrific, sui generis games, though. I don't blame people for copying them.

Jeff: Everyone wants to be a gangsta. "Vice City" had the pastel-clad crime world of 1980s Miami, and "The Getaway" gave us the underworld of contemporary London. "Mafia" takes us back to the mythic roots of the genre -- into the world of American organized crime circa 1930. I'm thinking Capone, Cagney . . .

Tom: If this is a 1930 "Grand Theft Auto," then I assume we can look forward to dancing the Lindy, sleeping with flappers, running moonshine, stuffing ballot boxes for Mayor Daley and tommy-gunning snitches.

Jeff: We open with some truly beautiful cinematic flybys of the awkwardly named little neverland of Lost Heaven, where "Mafia" takes place.

Gameboys

Sat, 20 Dec 2003 22:08:00 +0000

"NASCAR Thunder 2004" (Electronic Arts)

Tom: As this loads up, I have to ask: Are we ashamed, at our age, of playing video games?

Jeff: Not completely. I liked video games when they looked terrible. Now it seems like we're living in some kind of golden age.

Tom: Think of the other things we could be doing. Sitting in a bar. Walking outside.

Jeff: Having meaningful relationships.

Tom: Here we go! "NASCAR Thunder 2004." My first thought: Terrible, sub-Korn, alterna-rock soundtrack.

Jeff: I was expecting, at the very least, Kid Rock.

Tom: The default state for when you create your own racer is Florida.

Jeff: Let's not create our own racer. Let's just race. Look at all the racers you can pick from!

Tom: Normally in an E.A. sports game you're selecting from an impressive pool of ethnically diverse young princes. These guys are all Ray-Ban-wearing, sideburned honkies.

Jeff: It says here you can do full races, in real time. A real-time NASCAR race would be what ... five hours? That's just how I want to spend my Sunday -- "trading paint" in a real-time NASCAR race.

Night flight to Tashkent

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:00:00 +0000

April 2001

Anyone parted from his land will weep seven years. Whoever is parted from his tribe will weep until he dies.

-- Central Asian proverb

April 2001

The night was hot or cold, depending on where one stood. In this it was not unlike swimming in the ocean and feeling across one's belly an amniotic warmth followed immediately by a freezing underwater gale. I paced around on the tarmac, examining the plane that had touched us down safely in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. The flight in was much fuller than I had expected, and my fellow passengers had disembarked. Most were, like me, standing on the tarmac and looking at the plane. It was dark, and there was not much else to look at. The plane was a fine gold-and-black Lufthansa jumbo jet. Lufthansa was the least dicey airline to fly into Tashkent, though Uzbekistan Airways, the national airline, was also quite good -- internationally. Uzbekistan Airways' international flights employed Boeing and British-made jets easily as splendid as Lufthansa's. Uzbekistan was the only former Soviet republic other than Russia to have ever been allowed regular direct flights into the United States, something of which it was deservedly proud. On internal flights, however, Uzbekistan Airways sealed its passengers inside shaky old Russian-made Aeroflot propjets. One rumor I hoped to confirm on this trip was that, before takeoff on these internal flights, Uzbekistan Airways stewardesses poured everyone a heaping shot of vodka, including the captain. Including themselves.

Freddy, Jason, Megadeth and me

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 20:00:00 +0000

About one hour into "Freddy vs. Jason," my repast of sour Skittles and a depth-charge-size drum of Diet Coke long consumed, I am forced to conclude that I am ashamed of myself for dropping $10 to sit here for this. The premise is compelling, in a jackknifed-semi sort of way: Freddy Krueger has dispatched Jason Voorhees on a mass-murdering errand to 1428 Elm Street in order to resuscitate memories of the now-forgotten Freddy, thereby allowing him (Freddy) reentry into the nightmares of the young. But other than enabling me new insight into Friedrich Engels' core theory that quantity affects quality -- the profoundly unselective Jason is the proletariat, while the fussier Freddy is deeply bourgeoisified -- the film has all the charm of a machete to the clavicle. I will be seeing it again early next week.

I’d prefer not to

Tue, 28 May 2002 16:33:00 +0000

"When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once ..."

-- James Joyce, "Ulysses"

Whether one chooses to admit it or not, every reader has a secret list of writers one is, for whatever reason, incapable of reading. To get it over with, what follows is my own: Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett ... already embarrassment keeps me from going on.

For a long time, I was careful to keep this information from falling into the wrong hands -- praising Faulkner, comparing work unfavorably with Beckett's, nodding indulgently at mentions of Morrison. But secrets are nothing if not what we carefully choose to share, and thus I would, if pressed, admit that Morrison, excepting her strong early work, struck me as suffering from a terminal case of allegorical bloat; that Faulkner, perhaps the streakiest writer to have ever lived, seemed to me only intermittently good; that, despite his staggering descriptive gifts, even James' shorter work left me feeling as though a very large screw indeed were turning into my brain; that Austen made me certain I would never care this much about my own wedding, much less the weddings of people who do not exist; and that not even Beckett's inarguable brilliance could relieve me of the suspicion that his godless pose was one of effortful heresy.

Thanks. A lot

Tue, 19 Mar 2002 21:32:00 +0000

The rise of the acknowledgments page in the world of literature is mirrored by many wider, often unlovely trends elsewhere in the arts. Movies, for instance, once ran their credits upfront, including only the relevant heavy lifters (director, producer, screenwriter), yet we now endure a Talmudically lengthy crawl of names at any film's end. Multimillionaire benefactors shamelessly demand that museum wings bear their names. Authors now habitually close the curtain on their books with acknowledgments of law-review density, a horror to which historians are particularly prone. Colleagues, researchers, editors, even whole libraries, are lined up against a wall of blank white paper and slathered with the balm of Gilead.

All this acknowledgment -- it turns the stomach. The reflexive politesse of the acknowledgments page has, for too long, stifled its potential as an explosive art form of its own. One writer and one writer alone has seen through the transparency of the acknowledgments page and, like Prometheus (or whatever), freed the trapped energy of its possibilities. This is Elizabeth Wurtzel, who in the course of her three works of nonfiction has somehow become indebted to (by rough estimate) 165 people -- not including her cat (one Zap), the Simon & Schuster production department (or "the poor, beleaguered people in Simon and Schuster's production department") and the "the entire hospitality industry" (you know -- them).