|
|
chicago home
events calendar
bars & clubs restaurants specials best of chicago 
art
film and video food and drink music and clubs stage style words sports features |
|
|
 Click for words events Funky Buddhism Getting under Don DeGrazia's "Skin"
In the middle of our interview, Don De Grazia hands me an ordinary-looking business card with this chant written on it. We are eating in a Korean vegetarian restaurant, a place that's nearly silent except for the piped-in lite rock, and I eye the card, trying to recognize where I've seen the words before. "This is in your book, right?" He answers yes, and I remember the passage in his novel "American Skin," recently published by Scribner. "I sat there... before a giant, rather ornate version of Marie's bedroom shrine, chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo... the basic premise of the atheistic religion, as explained to me in extremely broken English by our youth group leader -- a tiny, burstingly energetic Japanese Lady named Mrs. Kabushit -- appealed to me greatly; the karmic philosophy being that whatever good or evil you did would come back to you tenfold." Certain elements of De Grazia's past have been repeatedly trolled in the complimentary press that came in the wake of both the U.K. release of "American Skin," published by Jonathon Cape in 1998, and the subsequent American version. Such as: He was a bouncer at the sticky-floored Metro when Smashing Pumpkins and other bands played there as kids waiting for a break; he spent his last $75 sending his manuscript overseas to Cape, a romantic embellishment that any good writer should have in his menagerie between fact and fiction; and that he dabbled, in search of a makeshift family, in some sort of skinhead culture, the de facto ruling class of the Belmont-Clark area in the late eighties. The first and third descriptions are things he shares with the protagonist of "American Skin," Alex Verdi. It is a book of episodes: Alex Verdi, the impressionable and idealistic protagonist, storms through rites of passage in manic bursts of youthful transgression and passions that mar and transform his malleable character. "Everyone's journey from 17 to 23 is epic," De Grazia affirms. And "American Skin" doesn't shy away from carrying the self-important feel of an epic, but it doesn't plug away at it in the usual lock, stock and barrel melodrama of so many epics we love to hate. Instead, the epic quality quietly and relentlessly ticks in the background, a constant undercurrent of worry, fear and anticipation for Alex, who seems to precariously sway between being a promising young man who made some bad choices, and promising young man defined by his those bad choices. One review, from Laurence O'Toole of the London Independent, compares the book to the warrior journeys of Homer. When I point this out to DeGrazia, he tells me that, of all the reviews he's read so far, that one is his favorite. When I first started to become good friends with De Grazia, after taking a few of his classes at Columbia College, where he is now a full-time professor, he told me two things about himself that both intrigued me greatly and threw me off. For one, he lived at the Y. Voluntarily. "At the time," he explains to me now, "it was a very calculated move in going there [the Y]... In my mind it was very temporary -- just until I sold my book. But you could see on people's faces though, 'Jesus Christ, he lives at the Y?'" De Grazia, who once admitted to me it was no surprise to catch neighbors masturbating in their open rooms, moved into these sour dorm-like conditions in order to still live on the Near North side, without working heavy hours that would take away from writing time. The other appealing, but perplexing confession he offered was that he practiced a strain of Japanese Buddhism known as Nicherin. I remember thinking that Buddhism seems to attract a strange combination of those looking for redemption after fucking up in ways both multitude and miniscule, and those who wander there as carelessly as they wind up in a bad outfit, following a trail of moonlit bread crumbs of California dreamin'. Rock stars like Leonard Cohen, who created the shambled-hotel dystopia of "Death of a Ladies Man," a seeming last hurrah to his life of anti-climatic drugs and nameless women, turned hardcore Buddhist. Did De Grazia match this profile? The guy who often tore through the fiction department hallway of Columbia College in a Hawaiian shirt, unshaven and wearing a serious scowl that just begged to be softened up, Buddhist? "This [Buddhism] was the central basis of my life when I was writing 'American Skin' and putting it out. I was living at the Y, and the room was about the size of five of these tables." De Grazia shapes his arms to indicate the size of the restaurant's typical four-seaters, "and I had my desk and my computer and my chair, a wooden piece of shit chair, and behind that I had my shrine, my Buddhist shrine. I'd actually write and then turn around and chant for awhile." "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" is what he would chant. On a Website that explains Nicherin Buddhism, featured is a quote from a Talking Heads song: "Once in a lifetime/Water flowing underground/As stars go by/Water flowing underground/Same as it everwas/Same as it everwas." The site, www.homestead.com, breaks down the chant nam-myoho, etc., syllable by syllable, and they use this quote to illuminate "kyo," the syllable at the end that means, well, many things, but to sum it up: everpresent life in the form of eternity and that all phenomena are teachings. Life is a cycle, an episodic rapture of living life and learning from it, just like how De Grazia wrote his book in cycles of writing and chanting. Writing and chanting. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. "American Skin" by Don DeGrazia Scribner, $13, 295 pages
Also by Margaret Wappler RESTAURANT REVIEW
RESTAURANT REVIEW
Flash 'em
Toy stories
Flash 'em
Toy stories
|
|
about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment |
