The Short Version: An ABC Book (review)

You can take the professor out of the university, though not, it seems, the university out of the professor. This is so even if that professor happens to be Stan Persky, activist, perennial anti-corporate (and, unfortunately, losing) candidate for the chancellorship of the University of British Columbia, self-admitted cruiser of boy-toys. 'Kiss and tell,' in scholarly circles, has metamorphosed, in case no one has noticed, into 'kiss, tell and theorize,' a genre with, perhaps, more momentum than broad appeal (the locus is the small presses instead of Jerry Springer). It has been embraced by Robert Lecker (Dr. Delicious) and Jane Gallop (Thinking through the Body), to name two academics who quickly come to mind (but do not, to my knowledge, have any gossip-column connection to one another).

Previously, in Autobiography of a Tattoo, and now in The Short Version, Persky offers a salmagundi of approaches to who he is, whom he has been with, where he has travelled, and whom he has read. The former was held together by an autobiographical motif with some insightful essayistic excursus into such topics as the importance of gay pornography for those coming of age in the pre-Internet era and the state of the university in postmodern times. The latter has only the alphabet and Czeslaw Milosz's version of this genre, Milosz's ABC, to buttress its unity. Despite this and the fact that a good many of the entries would work better as (more ephemeral) blogs rather than a book's odds and ends, Persky intermittently fulfils the mandate he sets for himself: 'to make up for the author's obscurity, the writing would have to be interesting.'

He achieves this, in segments devoted to Dave Barrett, Roland Barthes, David Berg, and Robin Blaser, by combining personal recollections with incisive readings of, in the cases of Barthes and Blaser, their works and, in the cases of Barrett and Berg, their political and social impact. The section on Blaser is especially poignant. Although, surprisingly, 'I intend to draw the proverbial curtain around our private life, treating it as simply that, private,' Persky lingers lovingly on Blaser's poetry ... and even on his house. He also expands his focus to present the figure of a first reader, the person to whom the poem is initially given to confirm that it is a worthwhile poem, who reads it before it is read by 'the readers of the poem.'

Persky is also fresh and lively on the years during which Dave Barrett was the 'first social democratic premier' of British Columbia. Here, the short version could have given way to a longer one – an ampler account of those heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as the social and cultural transformations of the period. It would have been interesting, too, to get a better sense of Persky's own involvement in the progressive and anarchistic movements that flourished then.

In addition to specific forays, two things stand out in The Short Version. One is the calm, inquiring, respectful tone that Persky maintains here (and in Autobiography of a Tattoo as well). References to students as 'ignorant' notwithstanding, Persky nowhere howls at, say, the homophobia that he has no doubt encountered, preferring to try to understand those with whom he probably strongly disagrees. Another is his love of reading. 'Bibliography' here appears before 'Birth,' an accident of the alphabet that permits the recognition that much of what he has become is a result of what he has read. Chicago, the place of his birth, for instance, registers itself as much via Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March – 'I am an American, Chicago-born – Chicago, that somber city' – as via the things that happened to Persky in that city.

One final note, a cautionary one: as with, say, Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, a writer risks potshots by jaundiced critics who find a too easy target in a title that raises, however indirectly, the issue of a reader...