Finally a book that deals with a whole group of people near and dear to my heart— the 13th generation. Not the Baby Busters(although busting the Baby Boomers in the mouth has crossed my mind not a few times), not the Lost Generation, not Generation X. 13 generations, after the founding father, created the old U.S. of A. along come we, along come me. This book has indeed become my bible and became my salvation from the Boomers and their incessant prattle about their greatness and our disappointment. They bring up our pathetic SAT scores and our geographical ignorance and I’ll take haven between the covers of this book and it’s reams of counter-intelligence to place my feet back on the ground and blow a gaping hole in their smug skulls. The authors reach through the muck of conflicting studies, conflicting opinions and conflicting generations and produce a workable synopsis of our generation and it’s problems as well as it’s accomplishments. NO WOODSTOCK PLEASE!! We actually reside in a niche, albeit a precarious precipice between boomer arrogance and exponential global change, but the adaptability to changing conditions hails as the greatest accomplishment of the 13eeners. The ability to adapt and conquer is there, just more sublime. We party heartier, shoot up more heroin, become more incarcerated, and commit suicide with more success than any other generation in history. We will also be changing the Boomers Depends when they become decrepit and will be fixing their wretched excesses of the 70’s and 80’s for well long after they are but a mere smear on a timeline. This book did really open my eyes to the fact that some of the things I do that I thought were just my own idiosyncrasies are really 13th generation habits and mindset. And that in itself will provide me with the greatest piece of mind. - Luke M.
 
APOCALYPSE CULTURE
ed. Adam Parfrey
Feral House, $12.95
Just before that last mushroom cloud wipes everyone off the face of the earth, things are bound to get a little bit crazy. Adam Parfrey and contributors claim that the crazy times are upon us and as examples they present some of the most intriguing essays about freaks, degenerates, and false messiahs I’ve ever read.
Inside this nicely bound book are interviews with the likes of G.G. Allin, the punk star who promises he’ll commit suicide on stage (as soon as he gets out of his Michigan Federal Prison, that is), “Frank” the editor of a newsletter that describes the most effective methods of mass murder, Fakir Musafar the legendary grandfather of body modification, Karen Greenlee the self-proclaimed necrophiliac, among others.
Juicy essays address such topics as aesthetic terrorism, the self-castration movement, and the onslaught march of the Christian Right. This book exposes people and topics the corporate newspapers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot word processor. After reading this one, you can’t help looking out your window expecting to see that final mushroom cloud taking shape. - Gus Calandrino
The Pirates’ Who’s Who
Philip Gosse
Rio Grande Press
Tradepaperback $12
First published in 1924 and now available in trade paper, The Pirates’ Who’s Who covers hundreds of the nastiest, cruelest, most notorious and free-spirited pirates and buccaneers in world history. All the familiar culprits, like Captain Kid and Blackbeard, are included here, as well as more obscure pirates whose daring exploits, naughty deeds, and plain orneriness make for swashbuckling history.
You’ll want to meet folks like Captain Mission, who set up a utopian pirate colony on the island of Madagascar and had a renegade priest for his second in command. Or woman pirate Anne Bonny, a heroine in some feminist circles, who raided ships off the Carolina coast during a piratical honeymoon with her husband Calico Jack. Or Captain Ben Johnson, who once raided the gold-laden Buddhist temples on the Island of Omalee, where he put to death thousands of priests and cut off the noses and slit the lips of hundreds of the temple dancing girls. The playful Mr. Johnson died a natural death while living in lavish retirement in Turkey.
Most of Johnson’s seafaring compatriots, or Brethren of the Coast, as they liked to call themselves, didn’t die so nicely. A quick check through birth and death dates listed here shows that the average pirate died in his early twenties. The usual causes of death: hanging by the neck from a prison gallows, bleeding from a sword wound in the chest, and drowning in shark-infested waters. Piracy was a dangerous, money-grubbing profession, but that didn’t mean a pirate couldn’t have class. Gasparilla, a pirate who terrorized the west Florida coast, for example, wrapped himself in an anchor chain, jumped overboard and drowned rather than be taken prisoner.
The Pirates’ Who’s Who is arranged alphabetically by the pirate’s last name,with each entry giving the career highlights of the pirate being discussed. Some of the writing is dated -this is reprinted from the 1920s edition, after all - but Philip Gosse’s ironic tone makes the book a timeless classic. - Thomas Wiloch
Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories
by Boris Vian, translated from the French by Julia Older.
University of Nebraska Press, 1992. cloth $19.95
During the 1950s, Boris Vian was a Renaissance figure in Parisian artistic circles. As a novelist, critic, dramatist, poet, song writer, jazz musician, and film actor, Vian displayed an incandescent range of talents. Since his early death at the age of 39, a continuing cult of followers has developed in France, where his books have never gone out of print. As a part of its ongoing series of modern French literature in translation, the University of Nebraska Press has published the first English-language edition of Vian’s 1949 story collection Les Fourmis—the only story collection published while Vian was alive—as Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories.
Reading the stories in Blues for a Black Cat is an unstable, tricky business akin to walking through a funhouse. The floor bucks and twists, the walls tilt, furniture hangs upside-down from the ceiling, and unexpected gusts of air shoot up your pantlegs. Vian’s prose forces the reader to pay careful attention to what he reads lest his logic slip and fall. This can be fun, as in the opening to the story “Blue Fairy Tale”: “At eighteen kilometers in the afternoon, that is to say nine minutes before the clock strikes twelve, because he was doing 120 kph (and that’s in a car), Phaeton Goodfellow stopped on the edge of the shady road, obeying a thumb extending from an attractive body.”
Vian’s dark humor is evident in many of these stories. A woman in “The Plumber” announces: “My seven children have drowned. The two oldest still are breathing because the water’s only up to their chins. But if the plumber still has work to do here, I don’t want to disturb you—.” Or in “Cancer”: “He took a large knife and cut off his head, dropping it into the boiling water with a few crystals to clean it without altering its weight. He died before he’d finished, because this was in 1945, and medicine wasn’t as advanced as it is today.”
This dark side works best in the story “Pins and Needles,” a description of the Normandy landing of World War II. The unstable, shifting nature of Vian’s prose—alternating here between deadpan serious and craftily naive — perfectly captures the confusion of the battlefield, rendering the horrendously violent subject matter as black humor of a deeply chilling variety. More than a parody of battlefield horrors, unnerving enough as that may be, the story turns one of the most hallowed battles of recent history into an absurdist melange of death, dismemberment and pain, signifying nothing. An excerpt: “We got behind the tank. I went last because I don’t have much confidence in the brakes of those contraptions.... But I don’t like the tank’s manner of reducing corpses to a pulp with the sort of noise that’s hard to remember—at the time you hear it, though, it’s pretty unmistakable.”
Ultimately, Blues for a Black Cat is a collection of moral fables, fables told in a cynical, mocking voice and set in a skewed version of the real world. Under the surface absurdity and verbal play, they offer serious indictments of human weakness and pretensions. Further, they reveal the spiritual emptiness just beneath our civilized facade. — Thomas Wiloch
