BIBLIOFILE
On Bullfighting
by A. L. Kennedy
(Anchor Books,
165 pages, $11)

Bullfighting carries the kind of emotion, mystique and blatant religious symbolism that makes authors drool. Notables, from corrida-crazy Hemingway to Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, found in the sport a venue for some of their finest writing. So for A.L. Kennedy--a good writer searching for a good subject--the corrida seems a natural place to turn. At least, her editor thought so.

At the onset of On Bullfighting, Kennedy finds herself perched on a ledge, toying with the idea of taking flight. Instead, she takes her editor's advice and--without knowledge of the sport--tackles bullfighting, as a means of convincing herself that she is still a capable writer.

Kennedy is very capable. However, her ambitious goal--to uncover some meaning in life, death and honor through a sport founded on these ideals--is never realized. Attempts to draw parallels between the corrida and her struggles with a failed romance seem stilted and forced. Passages describing the corridas effectively convey the pomp, blood and rarefied grace present, but seem oddly uninspired. Ethereal performances by toreros Enrique Ponce and "El Juli" finally provide flashes of brilliant prose, but the book, disappointingly, soon closes.

The corrida's physical world has been more gracefully rendered, the often short-lived celebrity of the matador described with more poignancy, and the unpleasant hypocrisy of the sport scrutinized in more thoughtful detail than here. However, Kennedy's intention isn't to write another chapter of the corrida, but to recover her own lost self by witnessing and participating in the ultimate blood ritual. She still hasn't jumped, so, perhaps, she's succeeded. Drew Cherry

Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry
by Jon Lewis
(New York University Press, 377 pages, $26.95)

OSU film professor Jon Lewis has an earth-shattering thesis he'd like to share: Hollywood's primarily interested in making money, not art! That's the mind-blowing point of the surprisingly dry Hollywood v. Hard Core.

Lewis' book takes 300-plus pages to show how the MPAA rating system allows Hollywood to (a) circumvent government censorship and (b) manufacture product that's tame enough to be distributed vertically through the entertainment money machine.

If you find yourself muttering, "No [expletive], Sherlock," you're not alone. Pages 1 though 135 are a Bataan Death March of prose, an excruciating (though impressively researched) slog through the Red Scare's Hollywood blacklist, and a century of court cases dealing with smut, which sounds salacious but plays like C-SPAN. The text drowns in a dull soup of regulatory-agency acronyms and judges' dissentions. But starting with Chapter 4, the book's petals begin to open. I'd argue that this chapter marks the starting point of a good, focused short essay--about the public's fleeting interest in adults-only "art films" and the subsequent legal smackdown of same--that Lewis decided to build a book around.

From that point, Lewis spins "small stories with big implications" that succeed in making the principled rantings of those who rail against the ratings bogeymen sound naïve. Also, the appendix--which details the specifics of various production codes--makes for hilarious reading. But the book's opening and closing anecdotes about Eyes Wide Shut are flawed: First, no one's made "laserdisks" [sic] since 1999 or so; secondly, the NC-17 cut of EWS isn't available in the United States
on DVD, nor will it be anytime soon. Alexandra DuPont

The Penny Dreadful #14
Edited by Mark Russell
(The Penny Dreadful, 46 pages, $2)

Here's further proof that there's no end to the weirdness in Portland. Amidst the clog of local zines, The Penny Dreadful has been chugging along the past few years gaining a steady audience as it goes. The captain of this strange mission is Portland's Mark Russell, whose concoction has the intimacy of personal zines like Cometbus and the poetic strangeness of humor zines like Farm Pulp.

Highlights in Issue 14 include Russell's whimsical short comics as well as Chapter 7 of his ongoing "Video Store Journal," an essay called "There Is No I in Teamwork: A Half-time Pep Talk" (which digresses into a hilarious ramble concerning various anagrams), and even an eight-page mini-biography of Andrew Jackson. Russell fills each little story with a parade of over-the-line images--there's a very homoerotic pinball game with a construction-worker theme, two guys who buy security-guard uniforms from a thrift store and hang out at strip mall businesses, a
3-inch man created in a laboratory,
a corpse that won't decompose, and a slow-witted boy who does garage-sale jigsaw puzzles--with somewhat symbolic missing pieces--so he can give them to his pastor.

One of the great examples of Russell's wry and pointed humor comes in a piece called "Wink Knowingly: Some Tips for an Engaging and Memorable Dinner Party," when he says, "If someone shows you a photograph of their soon-to-be-married daughter, try describing her as 'medium beautiful.'"

Not only is The Penny Dreadful's easygoing oddness a surprising pleasure in its zine format, but the website (www.hevanet.com/pendread/) is also a museum of mischief.
Kevin Sampsell