David L. Ulin

  • culture May 17, 2012

    In One Person by John Irving

    Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period.

    Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, "a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s] disappearing in rain."

  • culture July 26, 2011

    Millennium People by J. G. Ballard

    When J.G. Ballard died in April 2009, he left behind a body of work dominated by a few key ideas. First were the erotic possibilities of violence, as embodied by his 1973 novel Crash. Equally important was his sense of suburban life as not just soul-dead but also dangerous.

  • culture August 31, 2010

    Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz

    "On the day I turned twenty-five," Julia Wertz tells us at the beginning of "Drinking at the Movies," her charming graphic memoir, "I came to consciousness at 3 a.m. in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Brooklyn, New York, eating Cracker Jacks in my pajamas. … To understand how I got there, we need to go back one year… "

  • print June/July/Aug 2008

    Go Start Anew

    Not long ago, at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, I saw a guy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. Actually, it wasn’t a Che shirt per se, although it did bear his image; rather, it meant to offer a broader social comment, declaring revolution is evolution in Courier font across the front. A number of oddities and ironies emerge here, beginning with the fact that “Revolution is evolution” was a coinage not of Che’s but of Emma Goldman’s boyfriend Alexander Berkman. “Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point,” he wrote in his 1929 treatise What Is Communist

  • print Sept/Oct/Nov 2007

    Roamin' Legions

    A friend of mine once met Jack Kerouac. This was in 1968, in the Carolinas somewhere; my friend was a college student, and Kerouac, well, Kerouac was playing out the string. He was forty-six (the age I am now), broken-down and bloated, a barroom brawler discontent with his legacy. In September of that year, he would appear on William F. Buckley Jr.’s television show, Firing Line, along with the Fugs’ Ed Sanders, whose work and politics he’d disavowed. To look at footage of that appearance is instructive— Kerouac drunk in a checkered jacket, smoking a cigarillo and tossing off non sequiturs,

  • fiction Apr/May 2007

    Missed America

    Jim Crace opens his ninth novel, The Pesthouse, in a place not unlike what Greil Marcus once called "the old, weird America," a nation of folk traditions and superstitions, of bindle stiffs and highwaymen. This is the land of Boxcar Bertha, the country Mark Twain captured in the river odyssey of Huck and Jim. It's a mythic territory, dark and apocalyptic, one that seems forever lost to us beneath the slick culture we now occupy. For Crace, however, the old, weird America is not just where we've been but where we're going. It's our history and our destiny all in one.

    The Pesthouse takes place