If you read my last post of four essay reviews, you'll remember that I borrowed the title of the post from Mindy Kaling's blog. Well, it's a new fucking year, and I've decided that it's going to be Kaling free. I never liked her, her blog, her comedy writing, or her acting in the first place, so says the position I am now taking. I lied to all of you. (Still, her prose is sharp.)
Kaling aside, a select group of essays need to have some things said about them. As such, I've alloted this space to do just that.
1. "Colby Buzzell's State of the Union 2008," by (who else?) Colby Buzzell. Esquire, February 2008. - Can somebody please tell me when it will become officially trite to send a reporter around (parts of) the country so as to gather a so-called definitive perspective on how things are and what people are thinking? Oh, it's already trite? Perfect. Then this is just stupid writing and bad editorial practice. Can this stated intention even be successfully accomplished in essay form? The answer, of course, is no. If you want such a product, read On the Road (1957) or Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), or find a similar, book-long consideration that follows the tested and true Kerouac/Steinbeck formula. But don't patronize me with eight and a half pages. C'mon, Buzzell - stop going straight for the stereotypes. Oh, they drink and hunt heavily in Texas? I had no idea. Thank God you were there to witness this anomaly of culture. My advice: read the first two pages, get it, and then move on. (On the positive: Do consider with care Paula Scher visual map work, which is fresh, and clear evokes the influence of Jasper Johns.)
2. "The Lost King of France," by Michael Paterniti. Gentlemen's Quarterly, February 2008. You've heard a similar story before: a rogue member of the royal family leaves or flees or is disposed from the country for which he is the rightful heir to the throne. Years later, one of his children returns, bring with him much ado, to reclaim what is rightfully his. (You haven't heard this one? Well, stop being ignorant and read some Shakespeare or any other English courtier story.) So what's the new twist for a new reader in the new age? The rightful heir to the French throne (which no longer exists) is a 48-year-old, brown-skinned Indian lawyer, living where Indian lawyers live - in Bhopal, India. Informed nearly a half-century into his life that he is first in line for kingship (should the monarchy ever be restored), the nobleman? undergoes a pathetic psychological transformation. It is a story of one man's real and imagined identity, the ramifications of race in royalty, the self-destructiveness of a particular self-image, misplaced ethnocentrism, and basic human hypocrisy. And it's simultaneously fantastic and heartbreaking.
3. "Violence of the Lambs," by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Gentlemen's Quarterly, February 2008. - I'm a sucker for "When Animals Attack!!!" anything, so it really is no surprise that this is the first feature I read when the Feb GQ arrived in the mail earlier this month. (I even skipped the surprisingly nonsexual Rachel Bilson interview, which, for a moment, made me actually want to rent "The OC.") Really, it is that good. Hell, the teaser title abstract reads, "The greatest threat to civilization in the next half century is not nuclear arms or global warming or a superresitant virus that will wipe us out by the millions. John Jeremiah Sullivan contemplates the coming battle between man and beast." C'mon! How apocalyptically gripping is that? Particularly when it is taken in tandem with the opposite- and full-page image of a lamb, whose maw (literally) is smeared with blood, obviously fresh from the kill. Wait - the lambs are now carnivorous?!? See, I haven't even read one word of the feature and already I've committed to the last sentence. That's a helluva hook.
Pair the titillating subject with Sullivan's Revelation-like tone and you have for yourself a delicious narrative, complete with real-life news accounts, terrific characters, and the prospects of an interspecies conspiracy. The turn at the end is questionable, but I can't fault Sullivan for that. He took what could have been an average list of coincidental "accidents," and turned it into a decisively fear-evoking-for-all-the-right-reasons flashing red warning light. If only all writers had his cuts and creativity.
I don't know why this essay isn't online; I've looked, and I've failed to find you, dear reader, a suitable link. So shell out the $3.99 and buy Miss Bilson's cover copy. After all, you really are reading it for the articles.
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