Customer Reviews

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

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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...

I am not one to write reviews....and I don't believe I have ever taken the time to write a bad one.

I still can't fathom how a writer could push me toward writing a very negative review but that's how passionately ticked off I feel about this book.

This is a collection of totally random and uncoherent reviews of mish mash pop culture. Now, I enjoy learning about underground or underrated works of art and I appreciate a good critic. I picked up the book hoping that I would discover new things. But here, you can tell the writer enjoys being obscure for the sake of being obscure and relishes in the use of painstaking references. I just couldn't enjoy the read as all I could focus on was not the subject matter but Hampton's arrogance and air pseudo-superiority. This was so painful that I gave up.