A Con's Eye View

I never thought that a book about vermin would make me homesick, but Robert Sullivan's Rats (Bloomsbury $23.95)
did just that.

RatsStill does. Immensely. It even kinda makes me miss rats. Real rats. I mean, the rats in this hokey pokey—two-legged, dim-witted, two-faced—can't compare to Sullivan's city slickers. Cunning, indeed. Like this read. Which is at once a love letter to the Big Bad Apple and a respectful salute to the critters that gnaw at its very core.

A rat sneaks its way into the middle of Sabina Murray's creepy-cool A Carnivore's Inquiry (Grove Press $24), but in this case the rat doesn't stand a A Carnivore's Inquirychance. Nor do the succession of men made by the very inquisitive Katherine Shea, who never met a cannibal tale she didn't like to recite. Or relive. Goya's Saturn, Gericault's Raft, Dali's Autumn, Dante's Count, the Donner Party—they're all here, and more, a carnivorous continuum of uncommon place. It's as if a footloose Flannery O scripted Eating Raoul. Kinda makes me wonder what's in those boxes that come to the kitchen marked For Institutional Use Only.

While I don't dare institutional meat, I did dare David Dress Your Family in Corduroy and DenimSedaris's rather dangerous Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Little Brown $24.95), the danger here being that one of my, er, colleagues might find out what I'm reading. Really. The laughing out loud only compounded the risk. I say so what. So what if some dumb thugs make the Holy Roman Rollers look like gay advocates. Sedaris is funny—and smart—and I'll be damned if I let a loada bigotry get between me and some peachy-keen good humor. From the chart-topping looks of things, I'm not the only one who finds dear David to be one fun son. So there.

A Brief History of the SmileAnd it was with this great good grin that I approached Angus Trumble's A Brief History of the Smile (Basic Books $26). I'm still grinning, albeit a bit more knowingly. From laughing clubs to laughing gas parties, lethal grinning matches and the grimace of lockjaw, through the grinagog and the sheela-na-gig, to the soft smile of saints and the smirk of the Sardinians (from which springs sardonic), Trumble's work is a copiously-illustrated, rigorously-researched, eminently-learned tribute to the crack and crevice that anchors what Hogarth called "the index of the mind." I'm talkin' about the face, natch, and what we wear upon it. As Jim Thompson so simply summed-up: The man with the grin is the man who will win.

ResistanceAnd I don't mean the grin and bear it. Though prison is a place where resistance is basically futile, I found Barry Lopez's Resistance (Knopf $18) to be anything but. These are my kinda outlaws. Not the bang-bang, shoot-em-up baddies of Hollywood lore, nor the cut-throat kill-anythings found on American streets (and behind American bars), but the outlaw of living off the grid, away in a way of their own.

Lopez begins with a bundle of mail (always of special interest to a con) and in this bundle a letter from some sinister outfit called Inland Security. Seems in the interest of hegemony, all free thinkers—no matter their thoughts, let alone their geography—are now suspect and scheduled for interrogation. The recipients, artists and artisans from all walks of the world, are forced to flee into the new dark night. These are their parting shots. Beautifully-rendered words from the ever encroaching front. It's all about "the quality of the conversation," not the intensity of the confrontation, "mak[ing] something beautiful, so the enemy will have one less place to stand." Presence. In resisting "the Idiots of Light" (so called "for the way they are dazzled by their god"), Resistance is compulsory.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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