Colby Buzzell

[FlyingJ]

http://books.google.com/books?id=ssPpi--2gK8C http://www.flickr.com/photos/colbybuzzell/page11/ I just got done with "Lost In America; A Dead-End Journey". It's a dog's breakfast of a book by Colby Buzzell, a guy who did a pretty good nonfiction account of serving in Iraq called "My War". He's very honest-or blunt, how after he gets his contract to write a roadtrip in Modern America book he has no idea what he's gonna do. Then his mom gets cancer. Then his wife is pregnant, has a baby boy, & when the kid's a week old he takes off in a '64 Mercury. Since he professes great respect for Kerouac, the whole theme is a feint. He starts off crashing in random towns along I-80, doing weird jobs like Barbara Ehrlich's "Nickeled & Dimed", working as an Ice Cream Man, Salvation Army store clerk, staying in flophouses & getting drunk with the locals. Kerouac was a lot more fascinated by this country & people than Buzzell seems, he ends up more like Henry Miller to me. Boring, depressing. Since we see this from a mile away, the book's theme is Everything Sucks so of course his path wildly diverges @ the halfway point to where he decides he HAS to come to Detroit. Despite his random Kerouac references there's not even any acknowledgement of an Edie Parker touchstone, but rather crashes out in an Army buddy's finished basement in Troy then moves downtown into a Holiday Inn Express before heading over to the Park Avenue Hotel, whose owners he seems very taken with. It seems very important for him to get inside the Michigan Theatre, so he does. He drinks @ the adjacent Town Pump. He drinks @ the AFB. He picks up a bicycle to ride into the Cass Corridor & take Ruin Porn & stopping @ party stores to buy smokes & booze. He helps out some scrappers in the Grand Trunk Warehouse[[!) who tell him they've been hired by the owners to help ready it for demolition by removing all the copper pipes because they "have acid on them". This seems pretty incredulous to me, but he takes it @ face value. He says Tyree Guyton[[never formally identified by name-laziness or legal reasons?) blew him off for not arranging an appointment to discuss The Heidelberg Project. It seems important 4 him to break into the Packard Plant & MCS[[he calls it "Grand Central Station"-as I inferred there's an annoying lack of fact checking here-for all Buzzell goes on about people living online instead of actually traveling & seeing for themselves his reporter's methodology is to whip out his iPhone on the street & look up everything) so he does. He rides his bicycle to a "Harvest Festival" block party on Farnsworth where he's shocked the locals are intellectual types, before he decides to drink because he can't identify with them. We end up @ a Strip Club in Greektown where the strippers explain they aren't making any money & they're working here because there's no work anywhere else-huh? Then there's a whole dopey bit where he bicycles to try & find Indian Village's Time Magazine House so they can hire him & an extended fantasy about how they'd treat him, and his disdain for them, but when he gets to the house he loses his nerve. There's stuff about the lack of cabs @ Detroit Metro, & America In Decline before he tacks on an ending by recounting his son's birth, goes to his mom's grave on Mother's Day & decides not to drink on the plane & smile like his mom wanted. I really dunno what this thing is supposed to say about Detroit-or Jack Kerouac, for that matter. Like the pavers on the Road To Hell, i think Buzzell means well, but this book is a mess.

[Meddle]

but this book is a mess.

Speaking of messes .... are people supposed to be able to read that cluster of words?

Paragraphs make a world of difference.

[canuck]

Yup Meddle, cant agree with you more... Plop plop, fizz fizz, gimme some Rolaids.

[FlyingJ]

jeez, the AutoSave took a dump on me so I did a down & dirty rewrite. I didn't know Buzzell had a new book out 'til I heard him on the radio out here comparing Detroit to what he saw in Iraq. In a day or 2 we'll re-paragraph the whole thing for ya.