A look at the aborted Best American Fantasy 4 shortlist and where these authors are today (Part II)

This is what I said last month when I was doing a follow-up on the authors I had selected for consideration for the later-cancelled Best American Fantasy 4 anthology:

It was around 18 months ago that the decision was made to put the Best American Fantasy series on hiatus.  I was the new series editor at the time and I had just compiled a list of 66 print (and a couple of online) works (Alan Swirsky I believe handled all but a handful of the online submissions)  that I thought were worthy of the guest editor Minister Faust's consideration for the final list of 20-25 titles.  Glancing over that list, I found that there were several emerging voices to go with the more established writers and I thought that it might be a good idea to make a post listing these authors and recent publications, in case a few want to check out their works.  Order is based on the listing I did in August 2010, which was by order of story read:

Now, later than I had planned, here is the second half of "what have they done" post:

32.  Viet Dinh.  He has had several stories published in several leading literary journals/magazines and has been working on a novel that apparently hasn't been published yet.

33.  Stephen Marche.  Marche's most recent book was How Shakespeare Changed Everything, published in 2011.  He has had other novels and stories published in years prior. I have an e-book edition of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea to read in the future.

34.  Traci O. Connor.  Connor published her debut short fiction collection, Recipes for Endangered Species, in May 2010.  May order this shortly.

35.  Adam McOmber.  He has a blog, plus his debut collection This New & Poisonous Air was published in 2011. His debut novel, The White Forest, which seems to already have comparisons to Erin Morgenstern and Sarah Waters, comes out in September.  I see his Amazon page notes the shortlisting for BAF 4, which is very cool.  I bought an e-book edition of This New & Poisonous Air to read later.

36.  A.C. Wise.  Wise also has a blog, which lists her published stories, but no indication there if she's had a story collection published yet. 

37.  Teresa Milbrodt.  I reviewed her debut collection, Bearded Women, back in November 2011.

38.  Karen Russell.  Russell's Swamplandia! (which I read, mostly enjoyed, but didn't write a formal review) came out in February 2011.  She was chosen as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers during the summer of 2010.

39.  B.R. Smith.  Could not locate a blog, but did notice that he's working on a novel, based on the short bio at the end of his "Caregivers," which is the story I chose for consideration.

40.  Joe Meno.  Meno is an established author, who had two books come out since early 2010.  I bought his collection Demon in the Spring and his novel The Great Perhaps came out in 2011.

41.  Judith Cooper.  Her "Sister Light-of-Love Love Dove" appears in the anthology New Stories from the Midwest.  Could not find more information when I searched.

42.  Kelly Luce.  Luce has a blog that highlights her work.  No collections published since early 2010, however, although her 2008 book, Ms. Yamada's Toaster, is available on Amazon.

43.  Gilbert Allen.  This is the only information I could find on him.  It seems to be out of date, as nothing is listed after 2007.

44.  Sean McMullen.  Interesting, as I seem to have listed an Australian SF writer here, but his site does list his works.

45.  Wayne Wightman.  Wightman has released several of his short fictions in e-book format over the past year.  This link will take you to his Amazon page.

46.  Elizabeth Hand.  Hand is an established writer who has two novels coming out this year:  Available Dark, released last week, and a possibly YA-marketed novel, Radiant Days, coming out in April.

47.  M. Rickert.  Rickert is an award-winning SF/F short fiction writer, whose latest collection, Holiday, came out in December 2010.

48.  Damian Dressick.  Dressick has a site and apparently his debut collection, Fables of the Deconstruction, was to be published in late 2011 by Spire Press, but I haven't yet found a link to where I could purchase it, as it is not on Amazon.

49.  Anthony Farrington.  Could not find a site/blog for him and it seems he has no collections or novels released.

50.  Melanie Rae Thon.  Thon has had several books published, including a novel (The Voice of the River), which I've purchased as an e-book, and a story collection (In This Light), that came out in 2011.

51.  Debbie Urbanski.  Could not find information as to whether or not she has had any collections or novels released.

52.  James B. Pepe.  Could not find information as to whether or not he has had any collections or novels released, although I did see he received an Honorable Mention for Best Horror of the Year, vol. 2.

53.  Richard Parks.  Parks has had several collections and other short fiction and novels released in both print and e-book formats over the past few years.  Here is a link to his Amazon page that highlights this.

54.  J.W.M. Morgan.  Morgan has a site that lists his publications, but no collections nor novels listed there.

55.  Blake Butler.  I reviewed Butler's excellent There is No Year back in July 2011.

56.  Brad Modlin.  Modin is a poet and writer, but no collections seem to have released yet.

57.  Adam Peterson.  Could not find any definite news as to whether or not he has had a collection or novel released.

58.  Micah Rieker.  No information on whether or not he has had a collection or novel released, but there is a little bit on Cincinnati Review about his short stories published there, plus his inclusion in an anthology linked to above in Judith Cooper's entry.

59.  Laura C.J. Owen.  Owen has a site that lists her publications, but no collections or novels.

60.  Tabaré Alvarez.  I found a short bio sketch that lists Alvarez's publications through 2009, but nothing newer than that.


Hopefully, some of these authors and their works will lead to further explorations by readers here.  While I am still sad that BAF had to be discontinued, hopefully this look back at the longlist I developed will underscore the reasons why Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and the original BAF series editor, Matt Cheney, felt it was important to have this anthology series founded in the first place.  Even though BAF 4 will not be, the first three volumes are out there for readers to discover other authors (and some of the ones mentioned in these posts of mine also appeared in those volumes) and perhaps new favorites.

Reviews of mine elsewhere over the past month

For those who don't follow me over on Gogol's Overcoat or Weird Fiction Review, I have written several columns/reviews over the past month that may be of interest to you:


Weird Fiction Review:


"Julio Cortázar:  Examining the Strange Transformation of 'Axolotl'"

Forthcoming:  A column on Mercé Rodoreda that should be up shortly, as it's already been edited; working on pieces on Jean Ray's "The Shadowy Street" and Eric Basso's poetry.


Gogol's Overcoat:


William Faulkner, Sanctuary

"1961 Nobel Prize Finalists:  E.M. Forster"

Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain 

William Faulkner, "Barn Burning"

William Faulkner,  Light in August

William Faulkner, "Red Leaves"

William Faulkner, "Shingles for the Lord" and New Orleans Sketches


Forthcoming: Faulkner article on Pylon, Nobel piece on Lawrence Durrell, review of Hurston's Seraph of the Sewanee, among others.


Let me know if you're reading along over at these sites or if not, what you thought of the reviews that I hoped you just spent a few minutes reading via the links above.

What I've been reading, watching, and buying this week

I haven't been in a posting mood for about four days now. Lots going on, none of it really bad, but just not feeling like posting, even though I know I need to get a few reviews written in the next 24 hours (I hope to have the Faulkner Friday post live by Friday night my time, although I might have to play with the submission time a bit), but I've been stuck contemplating a few matters. In order to try to ease this block, I've been reading and, in one case, watching a few things. Not counting the e-books I've been reading while I exercise on a stationary bike, these are what I have been reading, watching, and buying these past four days:

Shortly I plan on writing a piece on Jean Ray for Weird Fiction Review's 101 Weird Writers feature.  In order to prepare for it, I have re-read his only novel, Malpertuis, and watched the Director's Cut edition of the 1972-73 movie of the same name.  Maybe later I'll have something to say about both, but for now, I'm using these excellent works more as supplementary materials for the column I'm trying to finish writing this weekend.

I've been dipping into Jenny Boully's excellent 2011 take on Wendy and Peter Pan (and a whole lot more on matters of imagination and gender roles) for the past couple of weeks.  I first read an excerpt from this book, whose title is taken from Barrie's classic, when I was doing selections for BAF 4 and I was entranced then.  The full work so far justifies that initial response.  Fuminori Nakamura's The Thief is a review copy that I hope to finish shortly, as it seems to be a literary/crime novel set in Tokyo.  It's coming out in the next few weeks in translation and is promising so far.

I'm beginning to read more Spanish-language contemporary fiction and when I saw these two Rosa Montero books at McKay's on Wednesday, I thought perhaps these will do for new readings over the next couple of weeks.

Antonio Machado is one of my favorite early 20th century Spanish poets.  Curious to see how his poetry for children reads.  Don't know much about Yasmina Reza's play, but the title grabbed my attention.

Speaking of intriguing titles, these two novels by Muriel Barbery and Robert Olen Butler caught my attention when book buying Wednesday as well.  Perhaps I'll get around to them in the near future as well, although lately I haven't been able to finish that many books due to dipping in and out of a dozen or more in a cycle lasting the past couple of weeks.

"Ken Lee," Language, and Pop Culture

It seems Dubravka Ugresic's Karaoke Culture is inspiring several posts these days.  This one deals with a Bulgarian, Valentina Hasan, who appeared on Bulgarian Idol (itself a progeny of the British and American Idol programs) in 2008 to sing Mariah Carey's "Without You," except Hasan refers to it by part of its refrain, "Ken Lee" (can't live).  This video clip went viral shortly after:

From there, the discussion went from Bulgarian/Balkan channels (Ugresic notes that there was a back and forth between Bulgarian, Turkish, Gypsy, Greek, and Macedonian commentators about which group to which she belonged, with pejoratives and denials of association with Hasan's ethnicity) to French (where TV people try to bait Carey herself into commenting on Hasan's "cover" of her song) to Spanish (which Hasan speaks fluently after living and working in Spain for four years at the time of "Ken Lee") to ultimately English-language YouTube clips, with subtitles superimposed in order for Anglophones to understand what had transpired.

There are several things that can be taken from this.  One is the sadomasochistic quality of the initial event.  We see someone who "bravely" (I believe those were the used used by Carey and others to describe what Hasan does in the first clip) attempts to interpret another's song through an alien idiom.  She does not have a grasp of the lyrics, only of the approximate sounds made by Carey in the original.  Hasan's singing, when reduced to sound replication, actually comes somewhat close to what Carey originally sang.  Listeners familiar with the original likely could recognize Hasan's a capella rendition as being at least an attempt to sing "Without You."  If we stop and think back to when we were trying to learn the lyrics to our favorite songs, chances are high that we (even those of us who speak natively the language being sung) have to hear the song several times before full lyrical comprehension sets in (nearly twenty years later, I would still have to look at a lyrics sheet to understand just what in the world Snow was singing in "Informer").

Hasan's butchering of the lyrical content thus is not surprising when considered in this context.  Ask me to sing "Te ví" (or rather "Un vestido y un amor," which is an easy mistake to make, as Hasan did with her titling of "Without You" as "Ken Lee")   from memory and I will likely produce sounds that might approximate "que llorar o salir a matar" but which would not have the intelligibility of those lyrics for a native Spanish speaker.  In listening to this, it was easy to have sympathy for her attempt and to feel some disgust toward the responses of the judges and of the French host who appears to be baiting Carey into belittling Hasan.

Yet if we look deeper into this, we sense that this performance and the resulting response is part of a larger game.  The various Idol shows draw their family and notoriety not from the Carrie Underwoods or Adam Lamberts that stand out for their singing or showmanship abilities, but for that loser, that dork, that hopeless wannabe that fails.  There is a cruelty about this new pop culture, one which Ugresic notes that people like Valentina Hasan are acting as "both an active consumer of this culture and a potential participant."  We all seek our Warholian 15 minutes of fame, yet we also desire to see the comeuppance of our fellow everyperson competitors.  How easy it is to look at some poor schmuck, say Jersey Shore's The Situation, strut about and act as though his vain shallowness were a desirable trait.  Oh how we might cackle in our minds or to others, "That dumbfuck is going to be on Celebrity Rehab in a few years!"  In today's pseudo-reality culture, where we know the events and characters have been gamed to spark outrage and commiseration despite our inner awareness that this is somehow "fake," homo lupus homini est truly reigns.

In prior generations, faux pas (if we can even call Hasan's butchering a faux pas) were generally localized.  Sure, there might have been some ridicule, yet there was not as great of a sense that those enacting in the ridicule were performing a role in which they, the Greek Chorus of condemnation, might step out and take the place of the tragic hero.  Yet today, these roles are all conflated.  There are few restraints on our ability to make a name for ourselves; even the negative consequence of ridicule has in some quarters become viewed as a sign of validation.  Twenty years ago, Hasan's performance would not have been aired on TV and later on YouTube for tens of millions to experience in a plethora of languages.  If she were to have sung "Ken Lee" back even in the early 1990s, she likely would have received a smattering of "polite applause" and she would have walked off that stage no ironic hero of amateur hour.  That is, of course, if she even felt compelled to go out there and sing for a national or even local audience.  Today, this has changed.  William Hung is now a poster child for a new pop cultural model in which the supremely untalented are as at least as likely to gain some modicum of fame as those who actually can sing or dance worth a damn.  Ugresic views this as one more sign of an emerging global culture in which:

"Valentina, 'the people's princess,' inadvertently carnivalized a body of authority (a Bulgarian television jury [ed.- replete with a female judge who bears more than a passing resemblance to Paula Abdul, it might be noted]), inadvertantly knocked a 'queen' (Mariah Carey, the queen of pop) from her pedestal, and then made one final gaff:  like a modern Eliza Doolittle, she knocked the English language off its pedestal."

Much could be said about this transposition of carnival values into the cultural thoroughfares; after all, who hasn't gawked at the original geeks?  Yet today, it seems the geeks have gained the upper hand.  Performances that were once considered gauche are now heralded for being a symbol of that ultimate transgression, that against the limns between "professional" and "amateur."  The floodgates are open, the bon ton are in full flight, and anarchy may yet rule supreme over what constitutes popular culture.  Interesting times are ahead for us.  We are left only to wonder what will come after the flood.

Dubravka Ugresic on the state of literature today

Her Karaoke Culture is proving to be a memorable, quotable book:

It is unfortunate that today, thirty years later, Danojlić is a half-forgotten author, and that his novel, together with the time and context in which it was written, is completely forgotten.  Criticism has changed.  Today no one dares set out the differences between master and amateur, between good and bad literature.  Publishers don't want to get involved; they are almost guaranteed to lose money on a good writer, and make money on a bad one.  Critics hold their fire, scared of being accused of elitism.  Critics have had the rug pulled out from under them in any case.  No longer bound by ethics or competence, they don't even know what they're supposed to talk about anymore.  University literature departments don't set out the differences – literature has turned into cultural studies in any case.  Literary theorists have little to say on the subject – literary theory is on its deathbed, and the offshoot that tried to establish "aesthetic" values long in the grave.  Critics writing for daily newspapers don't set out the differences – they're poorly paid, and literature doesn't get much column space in newspapers full-stop.  Literary magazines are so few as to be of no use, and when and where they do exist, they are so expensive that bookshops don't want to stock them.  Tracy Emin's bratty retort – What if I am illiterate?  I still have the right to a voice! – is the revolutionary slogan of a new literary age.  The only thing that reminds us that literature was once a complex system with in-built institutions – of appraisal, classification, and hierarchy, a system that incorporated literary history, literary theory, literary criticism, schools of literary thought, literary genres, genders, and epochs – are the blurbs that try and place works of contemporary literature alongside the greats of the canon.  Vladimir Nabokov is the most blurbable of names.  But if so many contemporary books and their authors are Nabokov-like, it just means that literature has become karaoke-like. 

So much of this rings true, based on personal experience as much as some observations of trends related to the pop culture and book markets.  It has always amused me when some irate readers call what I write "elitist," because I know better.  I know that what I write is a pale shadow of the richness of commentary that used to be prevalent in book reviews a century ago.  In a world of the culturally blind, the one-eyed shall be king?  I don't know about that, but there is that sense that something vital is lacking in our cultures today.

And now on to read her comments on fan fiction.  This might get interesting.

More critical quotes and a few thoughts

In-between a host of other writing projects (this is beginning to turn into a full-time, albeit very low-paying job), I have been reading the five finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, which will be awarded March 8.  Based on what I've sampled so far (at least 50 pages for each of them), it is going to be very difficult to judge which book is most deserving of this honor, as in different ways each of them is generating a wealth of thoughts on a variety of issues.  Below I'm going to post my highlights from four of them (I already made a dedicated post quoting from Dubravka Ugresic's Karaoke Culture) that I have saved on iBooks or my Kindle for iPad app:


Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence:

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted.  The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.  In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright.  It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity.  In fact, it is neither.  Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil:  He favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely, as nature intended.  His conception of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."  This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole; second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea.

Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition:

If something occurs that moves me deeply – the kind of experience that might provide inspiration for a poet – my instinct is to articulate and analyze it in an essay.  I feel at home in essays.  They're what I most enjoy reading and writing.  When I left university I thought being a writer meant you wrote novels; either that or you were a critic who wrote about writers' novels.  A few years later, during what I still regard as my period of most intense intellectual development (aka, living on the dole in Brixton), I discovered Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Raymond Williams, and, crucially, Berger, and realized there was another way of being a writer, one that I might aspire to.  Like Aldous Huxley, then, I consider myself "some kind of essayist sufficiently ingenious to get away with writing a very limited kind of fiction."  The life of the long-haul novelist, moreover, has never seemed as attractive to me as one made up of all sorts of different kinds of writing, including periods of fictioning.  What could be nicer than one day to be writing a review of a novel or exhibition and the next to be going off to Moscow to write about flying a MiG-29?  Put like that, the pipe-smoking scribe with leather patches on his elbows might seem like a relic or fossil from a bygone era of literariness; on the other hand, this style of freelancing represents the contemporary embodiment of a deeply traditional idea of the man of letters.  Would it be immodest to claim that this book gives a glimpse of a not unrepresentative way of being a late-twientieth-early-twenty-first-century man of letters?

Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps:  Ellen Willis on Rock Music: 

Dylan is not always undisciplined.  As early as Freewheelin' it was clear that he could control his material when he cared to.  But his disciplines are songwriting and acting, not poetry; his words fit the needs of music and performance, not an intrinsic pattern.  Words or rhymes that seem gratuitous in print often make good musical sense, and Dylan's voice, an extraordinary interpreter of emotion though (or more likely because) it is almost devoid of melody, makes vague lines clear.  Dylan's music is not inspired.  His melodies and arrangements are derivative, and his one technical accomplishment, a vivacious, evocative harmonica, does not approach the virtuosity of a Sonny Terry.  his strength as a musician is his formidable eclecticism combined with a talent for choosing the right music to go with a given lyric.  The result is a unity of sound and word that eludes most of his imitators.

***

If Dylan manages to predict the next day's [September 11, 2001] news by once again tapping into the language of millennial apocalypse, he also captures contemporary anomie (his own, ours) by inventing a narrator – or narrators, it's hard to tell – who descends into the hell, or purgatory, or limbo, of America's mysterious rural past, which seems to be located mainly in the South.  Contemplating the "earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone," "goin' where the wild roses grow," following the southern star, crossing rivers, staying in Mississippi a day too long, staying with his not-real Aunt Sally, dreaming of Rose's bed, proposing to marry his second cousin, our hero (or is it heroes?) (or antihero/antiheroes?) walks the line between love and battle, not that there's much of a difference.  Between "Don't reach for me, she said/Can't you see I'm drowning too?" and "Sugar baby, get on down the road, you ain't got no brains nohow/You went years without me, might as well keep goin' now" falls a manifesto of sorts:  "I'm not sorry for nothing I've done/I'm glad I fight, I only wish we'd won."  By the end, the topical is slowly submerged as the timeless closes over our heads.

David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?:  Translation and the Meaning of Everything:

It's a well-known fact that a translation is no substitute for the original.

It's also perfectly obvious that this is wrong.  Translations are substitutes for original texts.  you use them in the place of a work written in a language you cannot read with ease.

The claim that a translation is no substitute for an original is not the only piece of folk wisdom that isn't true.  We happily utter sayings such as "crime doesn't pay" or "it never rains but it pours" or "the truth will out" that fly in the face of the evidence – Russian mafiosi basking on the French Rivieria, British drizzle, and family secrets that never get out.  Adages of this sort don't have to be true to be useful.  Typically, they serve to warn, console, or encourage other people in particular circumstances, not to establish a theory of justice, a weather forecasting system, or forensic science.  That's why saying a translation is no substitute for the original misleads only those who take it to be a well-known fact.  It's truly astounding how many people fall into the trap.

Each of these quotes capture something that I have been reflecting upon even prior to reading them.  Creativity certainly is an elusive entity.  Sometimes, I almost want to recognize that there just might be Muses out there (Cleo?  Calliope?) that serve to spark some thought that had lain dormant in my thought before the propitious time of its emergence.  Like Dyer, I have seen myself as a writer, but not of fictions (I did briefly try my hand at that, had some positive feedback, but abandoned it because my love was elsewhere).  There is something to be said for interpreting thoughts, of engaging in "love and theft" (also the title of the Dylan album Willis discusses in the second excerpt) and "stealin' a few licks" and creating something that is greater than the original.  This perhaps is a simultaneous echo and rejection of the Ugresic quote from Karaoke Culture that I posted yesterday.  Appropriations distort, they do not provide true vivaciousness to what results from this failure to internalize and adapt what was taken from another.  Translation appeals to me because here is "love and theft" at its deepest level:  transforming a text during the process of "bearing it across" from one linguistic shore to another.  Bellos is right; we substitute all the time and sometimes those substitutions appeal to us greater than the originals.  After all, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are more memorable than the source stories from which that play is derived.  Creativity is a precious thing; no wonder societies seek to protect the cultural investment these authors have made.  Yet in that "ecstasy of influence," as Lethem titles the key essay in his eponymous non-fiction collection, there is a sense of danger, that those who try to take that sacred Promethean flame may singe themselves and others around if they cannot corral and make their own the elements so freely lifted from another's inspiration.

Over the next couple of weeks as I finish reading each of these five finalists (with likely reviews in the days leading up to the awards announcements), there will be more to consider, no doubt about that.  Hopefully these quotes and the short commentary I provided will spark some reaction within you.  Maybe you'll see things from a new perspective, go listen to a favorite artist again (as I have been with Dylan lately), or maybe you'll string some words together to create something beautiful or illustrate a vision or sing or declaim to your heart's content.  Writings like these are like manna from heaven for those of us who love to think and to move in the world about us, experiencing a wide array of emotions and events that will serve to transform us and others around us.  This is truly something to celebrate and hopefully these few paltry words at the end will help facilitate this.

This little quote might generate some discussion

This is from the National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated book by Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (itself a fitting title for what she discusses in her introduction):

Amateurs, Keen claims, devastate systems that are based on expertise and destroy the institutions of author and authorship, information (newspapers are slowly disappearing, blogs are taking over), education (Wikipedia, the work of anonymous amateurs, has replaced encyclopedias, the work of experts), and art and culture (amateurs create their own culture based on borrowing, expropriation, appropriation, intervention, recycling, and remaking; they are simultaneously the creators and consumers of this culture.)

Alan Kirby, an Oxford professor of literature, maintains that this new culture is in need of its own "ism," and as a provisional term suggests "pseudo-modernism."  "this pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterizes the pseudo-modern cultural world.  Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity.  In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism.  You click, you punch the keys, you are 'involved,' engulfed, deciding.  You are the text, there is no-one else, no 'author'; there is nowhere else, no other time or place.  You are free; you are the text:  the text is superceded."

There is a lot to digest in just those two paragraphs near the beginning of Ugresic's introductory essay.  A lot of it rings true to me, but there are still places where I'm skeptical (perhaps the essays to follow will elaborate on this "karaoke culture," or "Generation Re-Run" as I like to think of recent trends to recycle and appropriate older narratives and symbols) of the extent to which this is happening/has happened.  What about you?  What are your immediate reactions to this quoted passage?