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The Short Version: An ABC Book (New Star)
Many reviewers of Stan Persky's The Short Version: An ABC Book will begin by mentioning Persky's new collection of memoirs and opinion pieces is supposed to be modeled on Czeslaw Milosz's two-volume work Milosz's ABCs in which the late Polish Nobel Prize winner, in his mid-eighties, provided a miscellany of literary profiles, reflections and recollections, in alphabetical order.
Some reviewers will also mention that many of Persky's ruminations and ramblings have been initially posted on the Dooney's Café website managed by his friend Brian Fawcett in Toronto. Or they'll quote Persky's own obtuse explanation for his A-to-C litany. "An ABC book is perforce the short version of another, conceptually amorphous entity, just as life itself is the short version of the dream of immortality. That entity is one that includes both a database-the sum of all my vocabularies-and the events of my life; together, they provide a locus in which I experience the world.";
All of which just gets in the way. Whether Stan Persky is writing about Athens, Woody Allen or AIDS; describing sex-acts in a Bangkok nightclub or providing a paean to his former mentor/lover Robin Blaser; or discussing Canada or Chicago, his amalgam of seemingly informal A-to-C chatter is mostly a lot of fun.
Clearly Stan Persky is not writing a book to change the world, or even an insightful self-portrait. He's amusing himself. And the undeniable intelligence of his amusement is infectious. Reading The Short Version is like being in the presence of a confident joke-teller. Even though one suspects Persky's easy-going style is an illusion, we want to believe the rabbit really does come out of the hat, as if he's just making up his prose as he goes along, effortlessly and without artifice. It's a clever act to follow. The Short Version is a one-man show in which Persky is free to be an enthusiast, indulging in the comfort of his memories and intellectual discoveries with all the zeal of a record-collector putting on tracks from his favourite albums. Spalding Gray-like, Persky could easily perform excerpts from this book as a one-man play at the Fringe Festival, and Balding Gray would be a hit.
Persky's flirtations with the mainstream are apparently over. He won't be writing any populist paperbacks about the Gordon Campbell government, as he did in the old days of Bill Bennett. That would take a lot of work. Instead The Short Version enables the now-venerable Capilano College professor and habitué of Berlin to explore the self-satisfaction of his accumulated riches. The Short Version: An ABC Book presents Persky the philosopher king, unplugged, unfettered, counting his chips, with the insouciance of Jabba the Hut. A is for Art and Auschwitz. "Theodor Adorno sternly declared in the wake of the Holocaust that lyric poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. I think that the best way to interpret that remark is not that good poetry can't be written after Auschwitz, but that good writing now requires an understanding of the Holocaust.";
B is for Bald. "My father was bald, and I inherited, along with much else from him, his standard male pattern baldness. I fretted about it, mainly worried, I suppose, about its potential effects on my sex life. For years, I fought a losing battle by arranging my hair in a desperate 'comb-over,' attempting to disguise the obvious. What an extraordinary waste of time, of mirror gazing, of brilliantine and gels occasionally, walking around the streets, when a breeze comes up and riffles through my fringe, I forget that I'm bald, and like people who have lost an arm or a leg are said to experience a phantom limb, I experience some imaginary hair. Then I run my hand over my crystal-ball-shaped dome, and move on.";
C (at the end of the book) is for Continued. "I remember how thrilling it was as a child to come to the conclusion of something I was reading, a story or a book, and discover, at the end, it wasn't 'The End,' but that there might be more to come. More Walter Farley Black Stallion stories, more Wizard of Oz books, more John R. Tunis sports novels or Amazing Adventures. Ever since I began to write, I've always wanted to end a book with the magical promissory words: to be continued.";
It adds up to a smorgasbord, not a five-star restaurant. You can go back and forth along the line-up, dismissing some dishes, finding delight in others. The spice of candour is Persky's most consistent quality, whether he is hyping Chicago Cubs' shortstop Ernie Banks or the influence of French heavy-hitter Roland Barthes. (Discovering the latter's posthumous, alphabetically-ordered book entitled Roland Barthes, we learn, was "an indelibly liberating experience"; that encouraged Persky to embrace himself as a subject, leading him from his breakthrough homosexual memoir Buddy's, and now onto The Short Version.)
You don't have to be previously committed Stan fan to appreciate someone who admits, "My books, like late-medieval chrestomathies, are a patchwork of books."; To emphasize his point, Persky proceeds to provide a six-and-a-half page bibliography of his favourite books and authors. He's telling us everything he wants us to know, and very little otherwise. 1-55420-016-4
[BCBW 2005]
Some reviewers will also mention that many of Persky's ruminations and ramblings have been initially posted on the Dooney's Café website managed by his friend Brian Fawcett in Toronto. Or they'll quote Persky's own obtuse explanation for his A-to-C litany. "An ABC book is perforce the short version of another, conceptually amorphous entity, just as life itself is the short version of the dream of immortality. That entity is one that includes both a database-the sum of all my vocabularies-and the events of my life; together, they provide a locus in which I experience the world.";
All of which just gets in the way. Whether Stan Persky is writing about Athens, Woody Allen or AIDS; describing sex-acts in a Bangkok nightclub or providing a paean to his former mentor/lover Robin Blaser; or discussing Canada or Chicago, his amalgam of seemingly informal A-to-C chatter is mostly a lot of fun.
Clearly Stan Persky is not writing a book to change the world, or even an insightful self-portrait. He's amusing himself. And the undeniable intelligence of his amusement is infectious. Reading The Short Version is like being in the presence of a confident joke-teller. Even though one suspects Persky's easy-going style is an illusion, we want to believe the rabbit really does come out of the hat, as if he's just making up his prose as he goes along, effortlessly and without artifice. It's a clever act to follow. The Short Version is a one-man show in which Persky is free to be an enthusiast, indulging in the comfort of his memories and intellectual discoveries with all the zeal of a record-collector putting on tracks from his favourite albums. Spalding Gray-like, Persky could easily perform excerpts from this book as a one-man play at the Fringe Festival, and Balding Gray would be a hit.
Persky's flirtations with the mainstream are apparently over. He won't be writing any populist paperbacks about the Gordon Campbell government, as he did in the old days of Bill Bennett. That would take a lot of work. Instead The Short Version enables the now-venerable Capilano College professor and habitué of Berlin to explore the self-satisfaction of his accumulated riches. The Short Version: An ABC Book presents Persky the philosopher king, unplugged, unfettered, counting his chips, with the insouciance of Jabba the Hut. A is for Art and Auschwitz. "Theodor Adorno sternly declared in the wake of the Holocaust that lyric poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. I think that the best way to interpret that remark is not that good poetry can't be written after Auschwitz, but that good writing now requires an understanding of the Holocaust.";
B is for Bald. "My father was bald, and I inherited, along with much else from him, his standard male pattern baldness. I fretted about it, mainly worried, I suppose, about its potential effects on my sex life. For years, I fought a losing battle by arranging my hair in a desperate 'comb-over,' attempting to disguise the obvious. What an extraordinary waste of time, of mirror gazing, of brilliantine and gels occasionally, walking around the streets, when a breeze comes up and riffles through my fringe, I forget that I'm bald, and like people who have lost an arm or a leg are said to experience a phantom limb, I experience some imaginary hair. Then I run my hand over my crystal-ball-shaped dome, and move on.";
C (at the end of the book) is for Continued. "I remember how thrilling it was as a child to come to the conclusion of something I was reading, a story or a book, and discover, at the end, it wasn't 'The End,' but that there might be more to come. More Walter Farley Black Stallion stories, more Wizard of Oz books, more John R. Tunis sports novels or Amazing Adventures. Ever since I began to write, I've always wanted to end a book with the magical promissory words: to be continued.";
It adds up to a smorgasbord, not a five-star restaurant. You can go back and forth along the line-up, dismissing some dishes, finding delight in others. The spice of candour is Persky's most consistent quality, whether he is hyping Chicago Cubs' shortstop Ernie Banks or the influence of French heavy-hitter Roland Barthes. (Discovering the latter's posthumous, alphabetically-ordered book entitled Roland Barthes, we learn, was "an indelibly liberating experience"; that encouraged Persky to embrace himself as a subject, leading him from his breakthrough homosexual memoir Buddy's, and now onto The Short Version.)
You don't have to be previously committed Stan fan to appreciate someone who admits, "My books, like late-medieval chrestomathies, are a patchwork of books."; To emphasize his point, Persky proceeds to provide a six-and-a-half page bibliography of his favourite books and authors. He's telling us everything he wants us to know, and very little otherwise. 1-55420-016-4
[BCBW 2005]
Submitted on October 18, 2005 in By David.
