The Peterson books have sharp observations of big-city government. Here, Klavan is acute on the cankers and serpentine deals of small-town politics. In upstate New York, a county election is looming, and Sheriff Cyrus Dolittle is calling the shots. He has the goods on everyone – the model citizen who’s a wife-beater or a flasher or a drunk driver – and won’t hesitate to use them. His real opposition isn’t a pol but the local bureau chief for a downstate newspaper, Sally Dawes. The two have a bitter history and so, it turns out, does the county, rife with land scams, drugs and the odd homicide.
Dollops of humor and sex relieve the bleakness. Best of all is the pitch-perfect dialogue of people on the fringe, such as this two-bit pusher, testifying about a murder: “So, okay, so I get in the backseat with Billy . . . And I can see close up that he has no, like, face or anything on that part of him, his face part. And, like, his insides or what you would call his stomach is all open and there is all blood.” In the right hands, gore can be great.
title: “What S In A Name " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Gia Nelson”
NUMBER OF NEW TRADEMARK FILINGS PER YEAR 1994 1995 1996 Web 95 673 1,213 .com 4 294 831 Cyber 200 631 698 Internet 89 338 523 2000 305 390 461 Global 273 323 401 Planet 124 252 308 Extreme 80 142 170 Asia/Asian 37 50 84 Millennium/Millennia 5 18 24
Source: Dechert price and roads
title: “What S In A Name " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Cathy Macias”
Johnson’s best work–“Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” for instance, in his 1992 story collection “Jesus’ Son”–often takes a sudden skyward leap, powered by his intuition. You find yourself pulling G’s–your intellect wants to stay earthbound–then looking down in wonderment. That’s what happens in the last three pages of “The Name of the World”: the narrator has changed his life, he’s looking down from a helicopter (I won’t spoil it by saying more), and you’re with him, hanging for dear life. He couldn’t get away with this–if he does–if he hadn’t made his narrator’s voice so intimate and trustworthy. And without fancy-schmancy writing: in one of the most thrilling lines, his narrator simply says, “I’ve implied I’d had nothing to do with women since I’d lost my wife. That’s not true.”
Readers who associate Johnson with the slackers in “Jesus’ Son” (recently filmed by director Alison Maclean) may find this narrator, Michael Reed, surprising: a 53-year-old ex-Senate staffer, teaching at a Midwestern university after his book proposal is turned down. (“I’d offered to witness to power’s corrupting influence, but apparently no such witness was required.”) Thanks to that car crash, though, Reed’s spiritual condition will be familiar: “I took each step entirely out of a dull curiosity, not as to what waited ahead, because I didn’t care, but as to whether or not I could take one more step.” The convulsions that shake Reed are mostly internal, and far from “grand”: he loses his job and hastily backs away from making love to a female grad student. Yet the book’s headlong momentum may thrust you back against your chair for its whole 129-page run. Here’s another passage–a freaked-out Reed driving a borrowed BMW–that sounds like a description of the book itself: “Like the rider on an amusement, I had that strange satisfaction that it was all designed to be scary, to be fun, and would soon be over.” How much fun it is depends on your literary sophistication. But with “signals of distress, of helplessness” everywhere it sure gets scary.
When the ride’s over and Johnson lets you go, you still may not know quite where you’ve been. After Flower Cannon–grad student, performance artist and stripper–tells the story of her name, a story suggesting she was sexually abused as a 4-year-old, why does Reed realize his daughter’s death “was going to break me”? (I get it that his daughter was 4 when she died. But still.) In fact, why the title? (I get it that he writes this phrase when Flower asks for a sample of his handwriting. I get it that both Flower and Reed’s daughter Elsie renamed themselves. I get it that the act of naming is arbitrary. I even get the allusion–page 100, if you want to check me out–to Hemingway’s Denis Johnson-like 1933 story “The Light of the World.” But still.) At this point, though, I’m glad to give my intellect a breather, trust Johnson’s intuition–this stuff will either dawn on me someday or it won’t–and say thanks for the lift.
The Name of the WorldDenis Johnson (HarperCollins) 129 pages. $22
title: “What S In A Name " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Livia Carver”
But with attention comes a vexing PR problem: the word “cornhole” is also scatological slang for a certain puckered body part, and if you make it into a gerund, it’s another word for sodomy. “My father would probably roll over in his grave if he knew I was president of something called the American Cornhole Association,” says ACA founder Mike Whitton. The potential for misunderstandings has divided gamers into two camps: those who support the old name, and commercially minded enthusiasts who prefer the more marketable tag Baggo. “Which would you want your kids playing?” asks Kirk Conville, head of Baggo Inc., an Arkansas-based company that sells trademarked game sets. But Whitton would rather fight a cross-country public-relations battle than change the name and flout tradition. His prime weapon? A “canned little speech” on the game’s wholesome, straightforward name: “You throw a bag of corn into a hole. Cornhole.” If that fails, he could always point out that Baggo carries its own risk of promoting unclean thoughts. Its national distributor is Dick’s Sporting Goods.
