OCTOBER b. ¿007 ¡UStPUtj«,
-
books
Squish^est Harvest Party
Saturday, OcL 13“ 3pm - 8pm
Rant and Rave
This is your chance to experience crush
at an urban winery. Come on down and
get sticky with the Hip Chicks!
Chuck Palahniuk's latest is a pulpy pleasure;
Nobody Passes is a must-read
Rant
by Chuck Palahruuk;
Doubleday, 2007;
$24-95 hardcover
The latest novel from
Fight Club author, self-styled
provocateur and
queer
Portlander Chuck Palahniuk,
Rant is written in the style of
an “oral biography”—an
interview-based, sound byte-
driven narrative technique
popularized
by George
Plimpton in his biographies
of Truman Capote and Edie
Sedgwick. Palahniuk fiction
alizes this documentarian
approach to problematize
the mystique of Rant’s
primary character, Buster
“Rant” Casey. Casey, whom
we never hear from directly,
is a character conjured
through the testimony of
friends, enemies, family and
neighbors, with all the
contradictions endemic to
such a subjective mode of
storytelling.
It’s for the best that
Palahniuk has chosen to go
a less-typical route with
the form of Rant, because
the content is somewhat
Palahniuk-predictable: The
setting is a dystopian,
vaguely familiar near-future,
where Casey, the product of a squalorous, hypo
critical small-town upbringing, escapes to the city
and finds a surrogate family in a violent subculture.
This time, instead of forming fight clubs,
Palahniuk’s sexually polymorphous disaffected-
youth set allow themselves to feel something by
“party crashing,” an elaborately circumscribed
game of cat-and-mouse using real cars and real
roads. (One cannot help being reminded of J.G.
Ballard’s infinitely more serious Crash.) The party
crashing is concurrent with other speculative-
fiction plot elements with which Rant is packed:
the division of the human population into “night
timers” and “daytimers,” a rabies epidemic, wide
spread addiction to virtual-reality entertainment,
time travel, etc.
Pahlaniuk is better at thrill-seeking than social
commentary. Despite his quasi-iconic status, his gift
is less a literary one (his prose is never really more
than serviceable) than an instinct for the sensa-
tionalistic, pulpy and propulsive. But hostile
hipsters and angry teens probably need their own
Stephen King, and Pahlaniuk is the man for the
job. Rant, with its campy, overstuffed quality and its
generous helping of gallows humor, is best taken on
guilty-pleasure terms. The less seriously you take it,
the more page-tumingly enjoyable it is.
—Christopher McQuain
Admission is $10 and includes wine tasting,
light appetizers, grape juice tasting, punch
down the cap and grapes galore!
Nobody Passes:
Rejecting the Rules
of Gender and
Conformity
• Winery and Tasting Room Open Daily nam - 6pm
4510 SE 23RD AVE. PORTLAND • 503-234-379O
Edited by Matt Bernstein
Sycamore; Seal Press, 2006;
$15.95 softcover
www.hipchicksdowine.com
(see our website for directions & events)
Nobody Passes: Rejecting
the Rules of Gender and
Conformity is an incredible
anthology that tackles the
complex issues surrounding
the ideas of passing and
explores the impact that
various forms of passing have
on the lived experiences of
its contributors. Editor Matt
Bernstein Sycamore, aka
Mattilda, has previously
edited other books including
That’s Revolting: Queer
Strategies for Resisting
Assimilation.
Nobody Passes is a collec
tion of ruminations on the
idea of passing. The book
probes the complexities of
queerness and seeks to ana
lyze the ways in which race,
class, gender, presentation,
ability, etc. intersect with
one another.
If you can get past the
first few pages, you are in for
an incredible and thought
provoking read. The intro
duction, however, is little
more than narcissistic ramblings by Mattilda where
she rages against her publisher, publishing as an
industry, academia and those who she refers to as
assimilationists. Unfortunately, her valid critiques
get lost in this less-than-lucid attack on anything
and anyone she deems as being not radical enough.
However, once beyond her tirade, one can only
marvel at the diversity of experiences represented
in the contributors and the array of powerful,
complex issues explored within these pages. The I
topics include an examination of what it means to I
pass as heterosexual when you and your partner are I
in reality very queer; femme as a genderqueer I
identity; and the politics of being disabled and I
passing as able-bodied.
Nobody Passes seemingly flows effortlessly from
complex yet accessible academic analyses of pass-
ing as a social phenomenon to raw and emotional
accounts of the effects of different forms of passing.
The various contributors also challenge readers to
lixik at their own internalized assumptions relating
to other members of the queer community. This
book forces readers to examine their own privileges
and the impact those have on themselves and oth-
ers. Nobody Passes is a must-read for anyone hoping
to gain a more nuanced and inclusive understand-
I
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ing of who is part of the queer community.
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—Sassafras Lowrey O I
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IN SELECT THEATRES FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5™