January 13, 2005: Headlines: COS - Uzbekistan: Writing - Uzbekistan: Village Voice: Although Tom Bissell himself served a brief hitch in the Peace Corps, his characters in "God Lives in St. Petersburg" are seriously altruism-challenged
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January 13, 2005: Headlines: COS - Uzbekistan: Writing - Uzbekistan: Village Voice: Although Tom Bissell himself served a brief hitch in the Peace Corps, his characters in "God Lives in St. Petersburg" are seriously altruism-challenged
Although Tom Bissell himself served a brief hitch in the Peace Corps, his characters in "God Lives in St. Petersburg" are seriously altruism-challenged
Although Tom Bissell himself served a brief hitch in the Peace Corps, his characters in "God Lives in St. Petersburg" are seriously altruism-challenged
Bloc Heads
Ugly natives and uglier Americans in Tom Bissell's fiction
by R.C. Baker
January 13th, 2005 6:18 PM
Ghosts of empire—past, present, and future— haunt God Lives in St. Petersburg, Tom Bissell's debut story collection. His journalists, war vets, aid workers, and gangsters are sand caught in the grinding gears of the Great Powers' machinations. "Death Defier" (about a photojournalist who, like Thomas Pynchon's slovenly lothario Tyrone Slothrop, avoids death as it rains down all around him) begins, "Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks." The vivid color contrasts signal harsh events to come in this post-9-11 war, while Afghanistan's omnipresent dust and malarial fevers befog Westerners, who irritably question why a people who can stave off "several of the world's most go-getting empires [cannot] find it within themselves to pave a fucking road?"
In "Expensive Trips Nowhere," a trust fund couple from New York hikes through Kazakhstan's rocky wastelands, guided by a gruff veteran of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Brutalized by that campaign, which was marked by Russia's ignominious defeat at the hands of American-backed jihadists, Viktor's ill-hidden contempt for his soft-bodied charges dovetails bluntly into his attempt to seduce the wife: "You sleep with me in my tent tonight. Your oaf is asleep."
Although Bissell himself served a brief hitch in the Peace Corps, his characters are seriously altruism-challenged. The wastrel American protag of "The Ambassador's Son" embodies the Seven Deadly Sins, drunkenly shepherding a fallen missionary to a nightclub where "techno-bass pound[s] in Kong-summoning booms," and then into an abyss beyond the redemption of all but God. The three U.N. scientists of "Aral," en route to the environmental holocaust sparked by Soviet-era irrigation projects that transformed a once thriving "sea of plenty" into a "shrinking pestilent bog," snipe viciously at one another. Only when one of them is stranded on the sun-riven, vestigial seafloor, stripped of her passport and referred to simply as "the American," is such self-absorbed backbiting exposed as yet another arrogant luxury defining the world's reigning empire.
When this story was posted in January 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:
| Latest: RPCVs and Peace Corps provide aid Peace Corps made an appeal last week to all Thailand RPCV's to consider serving again through the Crisis Corps and more than 30 RPCVs have responded so far. RPCVs: Read what an RPCV-led NGO is doing about the crisis an how one RPCV is headed for Sri Lanka to help a nation he grew to love. Question: Is Crisis Corps going to send RPCVs to India, Indonesia and nine other countries that need help? |
| The World's Broken Promise to our Children Former Director Carol Bellamy, now head of Unicef, says that the appalling conditions endured today by half the world's children speak to a broken promise. Too many governments are doing worse than neglecting children -- they are making deliberate, informed choices that hurt children. Read her op-ed and Unicef's report on the State of the World's Children 2005. |
| Our debt to Bill Moyers Former Peace Corps Deputy Director Bill Moyers leaves PBS next week to begin writing his memoir of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Read what Moyers says about journalism under fire, the value of a free press, and the yearning for democracy. "We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country," he warns, "or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia." |
| Is Gaddi Leaving? Rumors are swirling that Peace Corps Director Vasquez may be leaving the administration. We think Director Vasquez has been doing a good job and if he decides to stay to the end of the administration, he could possibly have the same sort of impact as a Loret Ruppe Miller. If Vasquez has decided to leave, then Bob Taft, Peter McPherson, Chris Shays, or Jody Olsen would be good candidates to run the agency. Latest: For the record, Peace Corps has no comment on the rumors. |
| The Birth of the Peace Corps UMBC's Shriver Center and the Maryland Returned Volunteers hosted Scott Stossel, biographer of Sargent Shriver, who spoke on the Birth of the Peace Corps. This is the second annual Peace Corps History series - last year's speaker was Peace Corps Director Jack Vaughn. |
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Story Source: Village Voice
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Uzbekistan; Writing - Uzbekistan
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