Andrew Leland: The next Howard Hampton?

From Goodjobbb:

That’s why I use AmandaPeetMoss

roman a Wycleff Jean

Weekend Table-Talk for July 26–27, 2008

Congratulations to Dzyd Douglas, whose Reading Comics has won the Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book!...Where did July go?...Not me...Atmospheric disturbances: Ridiculously great over-the-top cloud formation in this photo by Brit in Brooklyn...Best correction (in the Sunday NYTBR):

Correction: July 27, 2008
An illustration with the Up Front column last Sunday was published in error. The Howard Hampton it depicts is the leader of the New Democratic Party of Ontario, not the reviewer with the same name who was profiled in the column.

This week's review features a review of Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them, by Charles Taylor...not that Charles Taylor!...Too high, too far, too soon? You decide! Mandy Moore's cover of "The Whole of the Moon" (via Whatever)...Dzyd Rachel in the Times on peope who don't want to leave town once college is over. Best quote, from a guy who graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in West African film and literature: “That’s pretty much saying: no jobs ever”...

Mutant energy

Howard Hampton reviews Mark LeVine's Heavy Metal Islam in the NYT Book Review. (That there's even a brief "Up Front" with H.H., featuring a squinty caricature, makes me think this could be the start of a good trend.)

Not quite as much of the trademark Hampton high-low punnery as we're used to, but a feast nonetheless!

Perfect circle

An inspired pairing for this review: Howard Hampton's Born in Flames and Luc Sante's Kill All Your Darlings (need to get this one!)

Covering essentially the same time period, both collections represent their writers' contributions to every major independent publication from the [PTSNBN] and Bookforum to The New York Review of Books and The Believer.

[...]I would be remiss if I didn't remark on the titles of these two collections: Born in Flames and Kill All Your Darlings create a perfect circle� Birth in one, death (murder) in the other. What does this suggest about pop culture and history and their constant cycles of creation and destruction? Why this preoccupation with being born or slaying something to get to the truth?

—L.A. City Beat

Born in Dizziness

Update: Literary dizziness in the aforementioned L.A. Times. My PKD piece is in this latest installment, which I just discovered also has a piece by (LATBR editor) David Ulin on (Dizzyhead!) Howard Hampton's Born in Flames (considered along with the latest by Joan Acocella)...and BiF is a book that contains several pieces I edited...OK, I need to sit down.

Here's a bit from the Ulin:

With "Born in Flames," Hampton moves from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to Thomas Pynchon, from the Clash to Plastic People of the Universe to Tiananmen Square. In one essay, he compares the proto-punk band the Mekons with "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson's "ornate, pitiless mausoleum of a book." [...] When, in an essay on Los Angeles music, Hampton cites the fictional Lola Heatherton, "the greatest of [Catherine O'Hara's] SCTV characters, the second-tier alcoholic-pillhead singer-dancer-actress par excellence," to illuminate the kitschy power of singer-songwriter Dory Previn, we get a vivid glimpse of the critic's mind at play. This is writing that exposes an imagination's workings, overlapping, a floating stew of reference points that encompasses high culture, mass culture and everything in between.