Book Reviews: November 2013
Blitzkrieg, A cross-genre collection by John Gosslee
The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned, Nonfiction by Daniel Campo
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Blitzkrieg
A cross-genre collection by John Gosslee
Rain Mountain Press, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-0989705110
$10.00; 60pp.
Reviewed by Natalie Sypolt
Blitzkrieg, a thin volume by John Gosslee, is hard to define. The core of the book is a series of thirteen poems, all centered around “Portrait of an Inner Life,” a poem that Gosslee says changed his writing style and inspired this collection. But this isn’t a collection of poetry.
The bulk of the book is comprised of an essay that follows the progression of “Portrait of an Inner Life” from creation, through rejection, to eventual success, though the journey is far from over. Gosslee tells us how this poem came to life in his kitchen and became more for him than just lines on paper. It haunted him; he couldn’t let it go, even after it was accepted for publication. Eventually, the poem did more than just take on life of its own. It became alive.
Gosslee then created stickers of the poem’s text and sent them to accomplices across the country to post in public places. Along with a friend/filmmaker, Gosslee “assaulted” each city he visited with the stickers and each river he crossed with “poems in bottle” (though he acknowledges this is breaking the law). Through photography we see the poem in parking garages, on soup cans in grocery stores, on gas pumps, and in restaurants.
The poem became many things. There is a film (with a link provided in the book), a musical score, two sets of illustrations, photographs, and essays (all part of this book). One of this project’s most beautiful and engaging aspects is the community Gosslee created around his work. He brought people from various mediums together, each one willing to share their work—their art—with the world because they wanted to, because they were inspired. That, in itself, should be motivational for any reader or fellow artist.
So, what is this book? Maybe the more important question is “Why does it matter?” Blitzkrieg transcends genre and tries to evoke in the reader an understanding of something larger. Maybe that something has to do with art, with the power of words, with collaboration. That’s for each reader to decide. The final line of “Portrait of an Inner Life” is “a frame / without a door.” Instead of trying to unlock the riddle of the poem—what does it mean?—perhaps we should embrace the idea that it could mean anything. It could be anything. A frame without a door might symbolize a lack, something missing, but it could also symbolize the unlimited possibilities of thinking outside of the traditional. Any frame could have a door. Blitzkrieg is a book of possibilities: those that have already been fulfilled, and those to still be explored.
The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned
Nonfiction Daniel Campo
Fordham University Press, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-0823251865
$32.00; 272pp.
Reviewed by Daniel Pecchenino
To a generation of hipsters living in gentrified pockets of cities across the country, Brooklyn inspires a mixture of envy, desire, and crippling inferiority. In 2002, everyone seemed to have a friend living in Williamsburg or Park Slope who saw the Strokes play before they were played out. A few years later, Jonathan Ames’s HBO show Bored to Death did anything but bore with tales of a wine-guzzling soft-boiled private dick slouching his way through cases that made the borough look every bit as narratively compelling as Manhattan. And today Brooklyn is home to a professional basketball team and Martin Amis. To quote Charlie Sheen, Brooklyn is “winning” the 21st century.
But this is a relatively new story, one that starts after 9/11 and that ignores Brooklyn’s neighborhoods where people live in housing projects, not renovated brownstones; where they’re more likely to have gone to war or prison than Harvard or Columbia. Daniel Campo’s The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned tells us about one plot of land on the Williamsburg waterfront before, during, and after the neighborhood’s transformation into America’s hippest urban hamlet. Campo isn’t interested in the cool kids though; rather, his book explores how those living on the edges of respectability—skateboarders, an anarchist marching band, fire spinners, installation artists, Vietnam vets, migrant workers, and working class townies—fashioned a truly public space out of a stretch of private land that no one in power really knew what to do with.
The Accidental Playground relays what Campo witnessed while hanging out at the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT), “a vacant waterfront railroad yard on Williamsburg’s Northside,” where he talked to the various parties responsible for making the site usable and useful through temporary alterations to the lay of the land. From his insider’s vantage point, Campo, who used to work in the New York Department of City Planning, builds his book around a simple premise, yet one that has an important effect on our built environment. He writes that the “basic human impulse—to shape and reshape, to arrange and rearrange, to destroy and rebuild—is not fully appreciated by architects, planners, and those who build and control the public spaces of American cities.” Compared to the unregulated vibrancy of BEDT, most traditional parks are static, with any changes the result of decay and disuse. This hardly seems like a sustainable model.
As someone who has never lived in Brooklyn, I worried that Campo’s book would be interesting for about 75 pages and then go the way of repetition and unnecessary theorization. However, unlike many academic books, The Accidental Playground is every bit as rooted in the vernacular world as BEDT itself. In clear, unpretentious prose, Campo uses narratives to bolster his central point, and he has no illusions concerning what a place like the BEDT can teach us about land use in already gentrified parts of town: “The accidental playground that evolved at BEDT could not have been designed or planned for, and the evolution of similar experiences will likely be unforeseen. However, certain aspects can inform how we build and use public spaces and more broadly impact the allied design and development arts.” This is a decidedly modest proposal, yet one that offers us another way to think about tensions fundamental to our contemporary moment when traditional power structures often feel antiquated.
The free-market Valhalla envisioned by many libertarians is every bit as problematic and utopian as the Swiss-watch precision many central planners dream about, but we’ll continue to get the worst of both worldviews if we never bother to think about how to make plans that account for human flexibility. The Accidental Playground is the start of conversation that needs to happen if we hope to make our cities more livable places for people other than those who can afford to move to the next hot neighborhood. In other words, pretty much all of us.
Reviewer Bios:
Natalie Sypolt lives and writes in West Virginia. She received her MFA in fiction from West Virginia University and currently teaches creative writing, literature, and composition. Her fiction and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, r.kv.r.y., Superstition Review, Paste, Willow Springs Review, and The Kenyon Review Online, among others. Natalie is the winner of the Glimmer Train New Writers Contest, the West Virginia Fiction Award, and the Betty Gabehart Prize. She also serves as a literary editor for the Anthology of Appalachian Writers; is co-host of SummerBooks, a literary podcast; and is currently the special guest prose editor for Banango Street Review.
Daniel Pecchenino is LAR’s Assistant Book Review Editor. He teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. His poetry and criticism have appeared in American Literature, The Los Angeles Review, Flaunt, and Turnstile, and he blogs about higher education, literature, and pop culture at The General Reader. He lives in Hollywood where he’s allegedly working on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter Benjamin, and the Hays Motion Picture code.