The Beat Goes On - Sarah Vowell's Cannoli
There's a group of gen-x writers who, in the footsteps of their beat predecessors, have made it hip to be disillusioned again -- SUVs and tech jobs be damned. Good writing or marketing? Considering how deep I dug to uncover names and work, probably the former. This is the first of three articles spotlighting women of this "New Beat" and their remarkably good prose.
Sarah Vowell, a star in this somewhat unheralded set, trades on razor neat social observation and rapier-like wit in her stories about nothing and everything.
I found her by accident the day Waylon Jennings died. I was scrambling to memorialize him, thinking the words to remember him by were clotted up somewhere in my rubber grip Bic. Cruising the internet looking a lyric to inspire me, I discovered a little archived essay on Salon called "Sound Salvation":
"He sang, not with any sweeping macho swagger, but with a timeless toughness. He'd raise his head occasionally, into the light, the movement having a kind of dignified rage about it, as if he had no idea why any of the smiling nice folks in the audience would find this entertaining...Still, he was undeniably cool, a film noir antihero plopped down in a shiny fake farce."
"Thud!" went my sails - the wind ferociously sucked out.
I clicked a link in the essay and landed on an excerpt from Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, Vowell's second and wildly entertaining collection of essays. With the deflated energy of a late arriver, I read on, Vowell killing me softly. For starters, I really like The Godfather. If anyone is going to discuss how Puzo's violent ode pays homage to the family-value set in a smart yet funny way, it should be me! And wait - my husband is a Cowboy fan - I should be writing about existentialism and Tom Landry. And here's the killer - I was a band geek, too, for crying out loud. I'm the one who should be telling droll marching band anecdotes, right down to the technically terrifying Tico Tico xylophone solo it seems we both delivered fairly accurately at half-time! The more I read, the more indignant I became. This Vowell had kidnapped my life. She was telling my stories, and writing them exactly the way I had hoped I would learn to write mine someday. I grew up in a small, quirky town. I had a devout Republican father. Is she kidding me? I was so mad I bought her book. And now, grudgingly, I have to rave.
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