Book shorts

Star Culture
edited by Mark Sanders and Jefferson Hack (Phaidon, $39.95)

The celebrity interview isn't exactly our richest source of literary art. But for coffee-table art—now we're talkin'. After all, no matter how good the writing in England's The Face or America's Interview may or may not be, those magazines are creatures of their art directors first and foremost. So it fits that Star Culture, a new collection of interviews from the UK monthly Dazed & Confused—which competes with The Face for its international jet set audience and the proletariats who love 'em—is published by Phaidon, one of the largest art-book publishers in the world. If you're going to adorn your efforts in fame worship with upmarket respectability, you might as well outfit yourself completely.

Star Culture, then, is a book you pick up because it looks good, or at least interesting. Its cover and title pages are designed with eye-straining op-art patterns. But once you figure out what the hell those letters are, hey!--there happen to be plenty to actually read, without even forcing you to bump up the date of your next visit to the optometrist. And that reading is extraordinarily varied. Several of the 38 interviews collected here pick up on Interview's tradition of reporting celebrities' conversations with each other: a relaxed conversation between literary extremists Irvine Welsh and Dennis Cooper about work methods; a worshipful Bj�querying German musique concrete pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen; a wonderfully bitchy exchange between David Bowie and fashion designer Alexander McQueen. (Bowie: "Are you gay and do you take drugs?" McQueen: "Yes, to both of them." Bowie: "So what are your drugs of choice?" McQueen: "A man called Charlie!")

The more traditional Q&As, between anonymous interviewer and hallowed subject, are something of a catalog of '90s pop cool: hip-hoppers Ice-T and the Beastie Boys, artists Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman, political dissidents Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, actor Vincent Gallo and Italian porn-star-turned-politician Cicciolina. This mixture, of course, just about defines the pop-art m.o. adopted by Dazed & Confused, alternating silly with serious and giving equal weight to both. Whether Star Culture does anything more than that, however, is entirely up for debate.

Michaelangelo Matos

Pure
by Rebbecca Ray (Grove Press, $13)

Rebbecca Ray was only 16 when she wrote Pure. That fact alone might cause you to pick up the book, as I did, marveling at how one so young could have the determination to write a 400-page novel. Ray's prose is plain and straightforward—hardly a line in the book seems artful or even memorable—yet the London-based author is able to sustain our curiosity with her increasingly disturbing story about a 14-year-old girl.

Contrary to the book's pleasing title and packaging (the front and back covers are filled with images of daisies), the unnamed teenage narrator has a disarmingly kinky bent. In school, she lets boys feel her up during lunch and develops a reputation as "the kind of girl you fucked." She reveals that when she was younger she played out rape scenarios with a girlfriend: "We'd bang our hips together for ages and it felt nice even though it hurt. It felt good and I didn't want to stop. . . . And there was nothing friendly about it, or pretty or nice." Finally, she becomes sexually involved with an abusive man more than twice her age.

Surrounding all this is the diseased relationship of her parents, who seem to go at it every chance they get. Petty arguments about what to eat or watch on TV turn into ugly shouts or tearful silences. Clearly, each wants out of the marriage but is too dependent on the other to leave.

Pure is a challenging read, with very little joy in it. Each chapter adds another dimension to the book's darkness, but Ray doesn't sensationalize any of the perverse events, nor does she sentimentalize with florid self-pity. Given the unnerving character of the narrator's experiences, Ray makes a wise choice to withhold details. She leaves just a little bit for us to imagine, and that bit is enough to cause worry.

Soyon Im

The Mother Trip: Hip Mama's Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood
by Ariel Gore with illustrations by Ellen Forney (Seal Press, $14.95)

"Children need interesting mothers," Ariel Gore writes in The Mother Trip, quoting a feminist scholar. Lord knows, Gore has lived up to that maxim. In 1989, she was 19, pregnant, and a high-school dropout roaming around Europe. Eleven years later, she's not only an author but a cult phenomenon: a curly haired, tattoo-wearing, unabashedly sexual single mom who runs the print and Internet 'zines Hip Mama (and who definitely bears no relation to Al).

Published by Seattle's Seal Press, Gore's mothering guide uses examples to convey its author's message to other moms. To paraphrase slightly, Gore's message is: Women don't have to check their personalities at the maternity-ward door. It's strange that this needs saying, but it does. In the cultural imagery, mothers have a blank face, referred to mostly when being told how they should raise their kids. "Forget the rules," Gore intones. Dump the guilt. Nurture your creativity and your dreams, as well as your children.