All joys equal in this critic's book
IF any contemporary working writer can be called a critic's critic, it's Howard Hampton. Los Angeles novelist Steve Erickson, essayist Sarah Vowell and political critic Paul Berman are among those who have praised the individuality of Hampton's voice. Yet he has never held a staff position at any publication.
Prompted by a letter Hampton wrote to him in the early '80s, the cultural critic Greil Marcus encouraged Hampton's writing and put him in touch with Kit Rachlis, then arts editor of the Boston Phoenix. Hampton made his professional debut in those pages and has contributed to publications such as the Village Voice, Film Comment, LA Weekly, the Believer, Artforum, the Boston Globe, the New York Times and many others. He doesn't live where plugged-in critics are supposed to: Hampton, 48, lives 90 miles northeast of L.A., in Apple Valley.
If his byline isn't as familiar as it should be to a general readership, the publication of his first book, "Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses," stands to change that. A collection of 41 pieces, originally published from 1987 to 2005, that Harvard University Press is bringing out next month, "Born in Flames" finds Hampton pinging from subject to subject, writing like a man having a great time while keeping his footing atop a careering pinball.
"Born in Flames" encompasses literature and movies, television, the jazz of Anthony Braxton and William Parker, the post-punk of Wire and Essential Logic. It's one thing to make seemingly wild connections among genres, artists and epochs, pairing "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" with D.H. Lawrence's "Studies in Classic American Literature" or "Apocalypse Now" with Nirvana. It's another to make those connections stick. Hampton is alive to the excitement of pop culture but also hip to its dross.
"Passion," he writes, "is not the same thing as a bottomless enthusiasm for white-haired kung fu masters, samurai Morse codes, Nancy Sinatra B-sides, or Sonny Chiba's greatest smacks." He refuses to treat "high culture" as cultural dead matter while being wary of the cant its gatekeepers employ to keep out the rabble. Best of all, he's fun to read.
Hampton and I have communicated via e-mail and phone for the last several years (I'm both thanked and chided in "Born in Flames"), though we've never met. I reached him by phone at home to ask him about the new book.
