Vonnegut’s Time

A professor once told me of his reaction to the idea of teaching Kurt Vonnegut’s work in college English classes. “What is there to teach?” he asked. He thought Vonnegut’s books were sufficiently easy to understand that readers shouldn’t need guidance to get through them.
Perhaps with the passage of time that has changed. Readers in the Vietnam War era of the 1960s and 1970s found parallels between their experiences and the World War II events Vonnegut depicted. Maybe young readers need to know a bit of history to grasp what Vonnegut was doing and why it resonated the way it did.
What they don’t need, I contend (and I think my old teacher would agree), is for anyone to rummage around in Vonnegut’s biography in order to make sense of his writing. Yet this is precisely what several misguided books do. I discuss the problems with their approach in an essay in Logos: A Journal of Modern Socity & Culture.

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Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm’s obituaries invariably mention the historian’s “Age of…” series — The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, The Age of Empire: 1874-1914 and The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. Those books do make an impressive set.

It was his essays, however, that I found myself returning to, having recalled Hobsbawm insightfully remarking on subjects I also chose to address. Open Letters Monthly, for instance, published (under a title I never liked) something I wrote about jazz festivals in which I cite Hobsbawm’s 1994 essay “Jazz Comes to Europe.” A piece I composed concerning Labor Day (forthcoming in Cream City Review) is informed by another essay collected in Hobsbawm’s Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz.

The Guardian reports that Hobsbawm submitted a manuscript to his publisher a few months before his death. It was a collection of essays.

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Downtown Boxing Gym in Critical Moment

Critical Moment, a publication billing itself as Detroit by Detroiters, chose to include an article of mine in the summer 2012 issue. The title put above my piece, “Success at the Downtown Boxing Gym,” pretty much sums it up. The CM website has more details about the issue, including the release party at the Cass Café.

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Remembering the Graystone

The Metro Times added to its Detroit Music Map a short item about the Graystone, a venue where I spent much time as a teenager at shows, including some mentioned in the piece (Black Flag, Corrosion of Conformity, Die Kreuzen, the Descendents, Seven Seconds) and others unnamed (Suicidal Tendencies, Butthole Surfers, Gang Green, the Offenders and many more). It brought to mind an old essay of mine, published by Slow Trains Literary Journal, in which I reflect on both that hall and my 1980s Detroit punk scene experiences. Ah, the memories.

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May Day, Labor Day & Me

 

Word came from Wisconsin in time (or close enough anyway) for the international workers’ holiday that Cream City Review will be publishing my “Labor Day Ironies” in a forthcoming special “Labor” issue. My essay surveys the origins of May Day and Labor Day and some attendant peculiarities, not the least of which is that Labor Day became a holiday only after a disastrous failure of a strike. The president who signed off on it did so only to mollify workers anger by the harsh tactics used to squash the labor action. A Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one, if you ask me, but some fascinating history all the same.

 

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My Detroit

The May/June 2012 issue of The American Interest contains my take on several Detroit-related books, including Scott Martelle’s Detroit: A Biography, John Gallgher’s Reimagining Detroit, John Carlisle’s 313: Life in the Motor City and Scott Lasser’s Say Nice Things about Detroit, among others. The first few paragraphs of the essay can be read online (follow link below), but I encourage folks to seek out the magazine in print because it also features photographs of the city by my father, J. Gordon Rodwan.

 

http://the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1236

 

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Christopher Hitchens, Essaysist

Christopher Hitchens’s greatest achievements were as a literary stylist rather than as a political thinker, or so I contend in an essay that can be read over at Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture: http://logosjournal.com/2012/winter_rodwan/.

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Remembrance of Holidays Past

Though Christmas is now safely behind us for another eleven and half months, that doesn’t mean readers can’t reflect on holiday memories – specifically mine.

Near the end of 2011, Monkey Puzzle Press released Christmas Things, a personal essay of musings prompted by a holiday visit to an eccentric couple’s house. The nonfiction chapbook, in either print or electronic format, can be ordered directly from the publisher by following this link: http://monkeypuzzlepress.com/books/christmas-things/

Enjoy!

 

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Essays of Illness Yet Again

Back in August 2010, I predicted – correctly – that one of Christopher Hitchens’s Vanity Fair essays on his cancer would end up in The Best American Series. Editor Edwidge Danticat selected “Topic of Cancer” for the 2011 edition of the anthology, which, as usual, also features several other pieces on medical matters, such as Katy Butler on the perversity of a healthcare system that extends suffering in pursuit of profits, Victor LaValle on his life (or, more specifically, his sex life) before and after major weight loss, Bridget Potter recounting an abortion she had as a teenager in 1962, and Rachel Riederer describing recuperating after being run over by a bus.

Although Hitchens refers to his illness in the introduction to Arguably (and thanks his doctors in the acknowledgments), he did not include the Vanity Fair essays of illness in the collection. He reiterates his goal of wanting to “write posthumously,” and I can’t help suspecting he envisions the eventual appearance of at least one more volume, gathering his personal reflection on mortality, perhaps. I make no prediction this time, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

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Jaguars’ Fighting Chance

Jaguars are awesome creatures. Anyone who has read my book Fighters & Writers knows of my personal interest in them. In the essay “Ink” I liken the cats to boxers, specifically comparing their fierce aggression to heavyweight Joe Frazier’s relentless ringmanship. A fascinating story in the October 2011 Smithsonian also makes the feline/fighter connection. Journalist Sharon Guynup describes a team of researchers in Brazil examining a tranquilized jaguar:

It takes five men to heft the cat onto a scale: He weighs 203 pounds. They measure his length, girth, tail and skull. He bears evidence of fighting, probably battling another male over territory. [Veterinarian Joares] May dabs salve on half-healed cuts covering the cat’s massive head and paws. He’s also missing half an ear. The team nicknames him “Holyfield,” after Evander Holyfield, the boxer who lost a portion of his ear to Mike Tyson’s teeth in 1997; certainly the jaguar’s compact, muscular body radiates the power of a prizefighter.

Regarding the much-needed conservation efforts Guynup chronicles, one of her sources reflects, “the jaguar really has a fighting chance.” Sounds about right.

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