Jul 30

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BOOK REPORT: A MASSIVE SWELLING

A Massive Swelling
Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

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When Salon.com launched in 1995, editor David Talbot was heard waxing righteous on the state of modern newspaper writing. “Where are the colourful columnists?” he demanded. Good question. Talbot may be comforted to know they’re certainly not hiding up here in Canada, where our dailies read like feel-good pamphlets for the greedy and stupid, our columnists locked in a sort of arms race of neoconservative ’tude.

Over the years through which Salon has grown from a plucky and ambitious upstart magazine into a bland ‘bobo’ playground, one of its consistently fine features has been Cintra Wilson’s hugely entertaining, fiercely colourful column. Like her professed gods Lester Bangs and Hunter Thompson, Wilson is blindingly talented and wholly fearless, flinging open her personal life (at one point she had written her way off of speaking terms with her entire family), dissing the powerful and kicking those wearing undeserved celebrity in the nuts.

Some of those columns form A Massive Swelling, at once a delicious fury of verbal dexterity and a lame repackaging of material already available online. Book publishers, heads firmly up their butts, have yet to see that the reliable no-brainer of gathering print journalism into book form is simply at odds with the hyperlinked, instantly tapped Web. It’s the author who suffers here: in its zeal to convert writing into money, the publisher has released a product that is going to tank, Wilson will be seen as a failure, conceivably never to be paid the fortune she deserves to calm down and write a real book.

Nonetheless there’s great stuff here. Wilson wades into the creepy, moist obsessions of preteen girls and grown women found in a box of New Kids on the Block fan mail. She skewers – no, eviscerates – animatronic divas Barbra Streisand and Céline Dion, and characterizes Barry Manilow and David Copperfield as two halves of the same gay man, the magic side having “enacted a ridiculous beard deal with cyberkraut model Claudia Schiffer, who everyone knows was built by professional scientists and has no distracting human emotions.” Girl, you have got to learn to form an opinion.