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"Meinhof had always known that grenades were approximately the same size as a human heart.But, for the first time, she realized that a heart could cause as much destruction." - The Baader Meinhof Affair - Erin Cosgrove.
"Performance Artist" (and is there any other kind, really?) Erin Cosgrove, whose name sounds familiar to me, though perhaps it just sounds like the name of an artist, you know, has written or is writing a series of seven romance novels that combine the "radical chic" of late 60s terrorist groups like Baader Meinhof or the Weather Underground with the rhetorical stylings of a Juditz Krantz romance novel. Fabio guests on the covers.
While it may seem as though the these two lifestyles are worlds apart, what the leftist terrorist and the romance writer (though Cosgrove styles herself a "romance provocatuer") have in common is an obsession with Commodity Fetishism. That is, the narrative of the typical romance novel* and the manifesto of your typical radical leftist group of the late 60s early 70s share a zeal for tracking just how the production of goods, especially luxury goods, occurs, and how these luxury goods acquire their value, and what the interdependent system (semiological - early Baudrillard, and I apologize for symplifying so much but it's been years) of signs constituted by the acquistion of specific goods mean. Read correctly (...), Judith Krantz provides the same sort of commentary on the capitalist status-system that, say, Bret Easton Ellis does, only with less (overt) violence against women.
In any case, let me hit you up with a long quote from the Voice article linked above, about the characters in the novel:
Cosgrove's soap opera characters are trapped in the art house: Mara, the petite, curvy heroine, is the new girl at an exclusive New England college, where she's immersed in serial killer studies. Enter Regan, the tall, passionate co-leader of the campus Baader-Meinhof reading group. She seems like Mara's friend, but is it all an act? (Hint: Her name is pronounced like the "former puppet president.")
And then there's Holden, the "rich" (naturally), "handsome" (of course), "tall" (check), "sexy" (bingo) leading man. A former flame of Regan's, he now consorts with her only to honor their joint respect for all things Baader and Meinhof. Finally, what diabolical game are Mara's dorm "friends," Penny and Tippy, playing? As Penny says of her surgically enhanced bosom, "If these are fake, then everything is fake. And then what do we have to live for?"
Dude, how could this possibly not rock, really, really hard?
In any case, the hard-rockingness or lack thereof of the book notwithstanding, what do you think of the project itself? It seems pretty canny to me, but (I will preface this by saying that the only things I really know about Baader-Meinhof are from Luke Haines and Gerhard Richter), you know, the RAF seem to me to have been bad people, and perhaps a critique of commodity fetishism (if this is one; it may not be.) would do better without using them as counterexamples in "an extended aesthetic anti-agitprop enhancement," to quote the author.
* Okay - confession - I've only read one, Princess Daisy, during a Modern Novel course in University where we also did P.K. Dick, Pynchon, Woolf, Nabokov, Jim Thompson, and a bunch of others, which was taught by Scott Bradfield, whose debut novel The History of Luminous Motion was really, really good, despite the slightly offputting premise (8 year-old serial killer with a friend who is found of quoting Adorno, IIRC). I think, however, that Princess Daisy is probably emblematic of the genre, and fuck, why have a "genre" at all if you aren't going to pigeonhole it? |
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