Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses

Howard Hampton's "Born In Flames," is so vividly written, each sentence like a crazed aphorism on some bleak American-gothic apocalypse just this side of redemption-via-imagination, a creatural re-imagining beyond the blood darkness, effluvia, and debris of our times and ordinary lives. One could study how to write essays and to organize cultural collections around wild tropes by such a book. Not sure the introduction gets at what the individual essays are doing alone or in the aggregate, but it is a book that calls out for one to come to terms with it, as a way of reading film and music and US culture as such, as crazed intervention, as a will to create and transform the ordinary in style and cultural-extremity production. He can get from moments in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to larger shifts in the culture, and from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia to the blood poetry of some US frontier apocalypse, still to come. That book so wrought is probably more crammed with speculation and implication than whole issues of PMLA in their professionalized repetition of approach and language. That cover screams out against lifelessness and routine modes of writing or being. This is a quest for rebirth, life "born in flames" not death or negation or the will to demean...