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Into the Weeds Wednesday
Aug. 30th, 2017 05:11 amWhat I’ve Finished Reading
How To Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass by Aaron Foley is just what it says on the box – a partly funny, largely earnest beginner’s guide to Detroit real estate, culture, and politics, heavy on the lists and organized bathroom-reader style with huge fonts and lots of conversational section headers. It’s geared primarily toward cheap-rent and cutting-edge-seeking young entrepreneurs and artists with vague ideas about “revitalizing” neighborhoods with their presence.
Foley is a funny and affectionate chronicler of Detroit and Detroiters. It’s nice to read a book that’s honest about the real problems of the area without being cynical or despairing, and optimistic without being willfully naive. For me it’s also a source of that simplest of pleasures, Places I Recognize! In A Real Book!
My only real complaint is about the chapter called “Being A Woman in This Town.” Foley, a gay man, opens by declaring his unfitness to write this chapter and his total lack of the titular experience. But since the chapter title has already been written, he goes on to fill it out with 1) some fairly dubious greeting-card boilerplate about the unusual capacity of black women for love and 2) a brief biography of Monica Conyers, a Detroit city councilwoman convicted of corruption. IN CONCLUSION, being a woman in Detroit is pretty rough sometimes, but also women are strong, so this is for all you ladies out there being strong and not taking bribes! Foley! If you were dead set on including this chapter, maybe you could have invited a guest writer?
Nothing much happens in Less Than Angels, but it’s oddly cozy and enjoyable in approximately the same way Supergirl is enjoyable – right down to the ubiquitous clumsy relationship talks, though in this case the clumsiness and the clichés are clearly a deliberate attempt to portray uncertain people struggling to express themselves, rather than having been written by an algorithm or whatever is going on with Supergirl. The anthropology department’s golden boy leaves his older live-in girlfriend for a naive young undergraduate who admires him, and meanwhile the wealthy grant-fund donor skips town before any grants can be awarded. A guy who has been sitting on his notes for years finally burns them and feels better about the book he isn’t going to write. There is a small Greek chorus of undergraduates spouting their callow worldly-wisdom about everything that happens. I’ve already forgotten most of it, but not in a bad way.
The anthropology stays pretty non-specific throughout. Hardly anyone goes anywhere paritcular or learns anything about it; they all do field work in “Africa” and “Africa” is just a metonymy for the characters’ own failure to see themselves with objectivity, or something like that.
What I’m Reading Now
Room at the Top by John Braine! This is a book about social climbing, I guess. The main character has just moved from a shabby mill town to a considerably less shabby town with more than one industry. He’s just gotten a new job and he’d like to start having nice things and keep on having them. He isn’t going to be a zombie like the rest of his living dead ex-neighbors. This use of the word "zombie" ten years before the Romero Revolution sent me to Wikipedia for likely zombie reference points. The 1932 movie White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as an evil mill owner using reanimated corpses as cheap labor, might be a good candidate.
Joe is doing all right in his new life. He’s met some flirtatious older women and he’s about to take a girl to a show. A rich girl! Whom he’s determined to steal from her rich boyfriend! I don’t know, this is starting to sound like a prequel to Look Back in Anger. I hope that’s not what it is because everyone was miserable in that play and no one ever got any sleep with all the shouting and trumpet playing.
What I Might Read Next
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny, about a perpetual student who gets mixed up in . . . something strange? I'll find out soon. Plus more of Freedom Riders, which I'll write about eventually.
How To Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass by Aaron Foley is just what it says on the box – a partly funny, largely earnest beginner’s guide to Detroit real estate, culture, and politics, heavy on the lists and organized bathroom-reader style with huge fonts and lots of conversational section headers. It’s geared primarily toward cheap-rent and cutting-edge-seeking young entrepreneurs and artists with vague ideas about “revitalizing” neighborhoods with their presence.
Foley is a funny and affectionate chronicler of Detroit and Detroiters. It’s nice to read a book that’s honest about the real problems of the area without being cynical or despairing, and optimistic without being willfully naive. For me it’s also a source of that simplest of pleasures, Places I Recognize! In A Real Book!
My only real complaint is about the chapter called “Being A Woman in This Town.” Foley, a gay man, opens by declaring his unfitness to write this chapter and his total lack of the titular experience. But since the chapter title has already been written, he goes on to fill it out with 1) some fairly dubious greeting-card boilerplate about the unusual capacity of black women for love and 2) a brief biography of Monica Conyers, a Detroit city councilwoman convicted of corruption. IN CONCLUSION, being a woman in Detroit is pretty rough sometimes, but also women are strong, so this is for all you ladies out there being strong and not taking bribes! Foley! If you were dead set on including this chapter, maybe you could have invited a guest writer?
Nothing much happens in Less Than Angels, but it’s oddly cozy and enjoyable in approximately the same way Supergirl is enjoyable – right down to the ubiquitous clumsy relationship talks, though in this case the clumsiness and the clichés are clearly a deliberate attempt to portray uncertain people struggling to express themselves, rather than having been written by an algorithm or whatever is going on with Supergirl. The anthropology department’s golden boy leaves his older live-in girlfriend for a naive young undergraduate who admires him, and meanwhile the wealthy grant-fund donor skips town before any grants can be awarded. A guy who has been sitting on his notes for years finally burns them and feels better about the book he isn’t going to write. There is a small Greek chorus of undergraduates spouting their callow worldly-wisdom about everything that happens. I’ve already forgotten most of it, but not in a bad way.
The anthropology stays pretty non-specific throughout. Hardly anyone goes anywhere paritcular or learns anything about it; they all do field work in “Africa” and “Africa” is just a metonymy for the characters’ own failure to see themselves with objectivity, or something like that.
What I’m Reading Now
Room at the Top by John Braine! This is a book about social climbing, I guess. The main character has just moved from a shabby mill town to a considerably less shabby town with more than one industry. He’s just gotten a new job and he’d like to start having nice things and keep on having them. He isn’t going to be a zombie like the rest of his living dead ex-neighbors. This use of the word "zombie" ten years before the Romero Revolution sent me to Wikipedia for likely zombie reference points. The 1932 movie White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as an evil mill owner using reanimated corpses as cheap labor, might be a good candidate.
Joe is doing all right in his new life. He’s met some flirtatious older women and he’s about to take a girl to a show. A rich girl! Whom he’s determined to steal from her rich boyfriend! I don’t know, this is starting to sound like a prequel to Look Back in Anger. I hope that’s not what it is because everyone was miserable in that play and no one ever got any sleep with all the shouting and trumpet playing.
What I Might Read Next
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny, about a perpetual student who gets mixed up in . . . something strange? I'll find out soon. Plus more of Freedom Riders, which I'll write about eventually.
