Book Review: Beer and Loathing

This spring break I read two things: Sartre’s What is Writing? and a novel entitled (no joke) Beer and Loathing in Panama City: A Bloodthirsty Spring Break Exodus, by Keith Strausbaugh. Sartre says of the poet, “one might think that he is composing a sentence, but this is only what it appears to be. He is creating an object.” In other words, literature is the creation of an object outside of the self. Then again, from another point of view literature is an encounter with another self.

Strausbaugh’s book fails on both counts. Though his unpleasant self is spattered across the pages of Beer and Loathing, he doesn’t give the reader any reason to want to keep the encounter going. And he certainly doesn’t go far toward creating a credible artistic object. His parody of Hunter S. Thompson soon degrades into a parody of himself, leaving the reader with a plotless mess of flat characters.

Beer and Loathing in Panama City is not a good book. What fascinates me is the fact that Keith Strausbaugh wrote it. He created a fictional proxy for himself, sent this self-object on a wild ride through the soul-destroying emptiness of spring break Panama City, then wrapped it up in a cheap paperback and self-published it. What impulse drives a human being to do this?

According to Sartre, “the function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world.” Strausbaugh certainly burns with this desire for “disclosure,” in Sartre’s words. His abrasive style builds to an angry diatribe against traditional morality, but the form can’t bear the weight of the content.

Bad art fails to turn the creator’s need for expression into something that can affect the beholder. Tomorrow I will forget Beer and Loathing in Panama City and so should you. But you won’t forget Sartre once you’ve read him, even if you want to.

Strausbaugh’s failure and Sartre’s success both prove that this need for disclosure is a force to be reckoned with. Something inside of us yearns to be expressed, but once it’s out it becomes an independent thing-in-itself. Or, from another angle, we strive to create self-transcendent beauty but then find that our creations reveal us in unexpected ways. No matter how many different ways we talk about it the final point is that we can’t stop talking. Literature is an essential act.

The Bail-Out

If you read only one thing about the financial crisis, read this CBS interview with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.  Really.  Fed Chairmen almost never give interviews, but since these are extraordinary times, he did it anyway.  He explains the crisis and the government’s response to it in very approachable terms.

Sonnets: Loss=Transformation

I

In Praise of Forgetfulness

A patterned absence: shadow leaves on snow,

A strain of music on the wind, a wisp

Of something in my mouth. The subtle gifts

Are given in his place, and somehow known

As traces, tracks left by the animal,

Who, great as men are great, would naturally

Impress himself on his surroundings, we

Reason, not willing to admit that all

The tears aside, a door will be a door

Without his heavy knock, a book will be

A book without his voice. The way we see

Him missing in the kitchen’s dirty floor

Persists, as dirt persists, but then again

Did not the dirt itself once pass—to man?

II

The Birdmen Lose Their Wings

It was difficult at first without the wings,

The feeling was all off, the balance wrong

As if we’d lost the tunes to all our songs

But something still impelled us all to sing.

We leapt off cliffs and balconies and dropped

Like stones in water through our native air,

Then higher, higher climbed, high as we dared,

Till even the most desperate had to stop.

We walked for several days on bloody feet,

Like animals, all shackled to the earth

Back packed with all the others lame from birth.

Till drawn by some starred piper to the sea,

We dreaming limped through dark awaiting night

And plunged into the cool, deep, secret flight.

III

After the Ascension

Angel: Why stand you staring after him?

He’s gone but he will soon return again,

And you will drown in floods of glory when

He rends the earth’s thin veil, but do not swim,

Inhale. Yet while you breathe stale air, I say:

Do not forget what wonder round about

Enshrines your dry dust path. Soon you will doubt,

It will be long, you will not know the way

But do not be so foolish as to think

That dust is dust, and not the stuff God’s hands

Made into you, that man is only man,

And not the image of the great unseen.

So now go forth, shake temples, shudder kings.

Go forth! Your world must shatter ere it sings.

Hey look, a blog!

Well, akidabroad.wordpress.com and I have had a varied relationship. We started off with my adventures in Scotland, then we worked together to publish bits of fiction for a while. After that we were briefly in the political satire business. Then I abandoned the partnership and went to the Dominican Republic.   So I haven’t written here in a while, but I think I might like to return.  Spring break is upon me and I’ll be going backpacking with my dad.  Maybe I’ll take some sweet pics, or even better, write some poetry.  Anyway, I might just make that part of my life public knowledge on the internet.  Why not.