Editors: John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, Sabin Streeter. Gig. 2000.

Updated version of Studs Terkel's Working

I've had the opposite experience, but this may be the first time I've tried first to read a large anthology by jumping around, then decided I needed to read it straight through so as to be sure not to miss a single page. I can't express my delight and awe of this book, this is the purest literature I have ever read, and they should throw me out of the academy right now, because I'll take this book of transcribed spoken commentary by people who decidedly do not think of themselves as writers over the entire Sun & Moon catalog. It's a book about real workers marketed apparently (judging from the cover) to New York hipsters, and in the chasm between these worlds it falls into my hands.

Nothing Stephen King ever wrote can compare to the bracing horror of some of this, and no number of tongues in the cheek could reproduce the cutting multilevel ironies of the juxtaposition of these straightforward and mostly unaffected personal narratives. Not even a team of language poets could simulate phrases as asyntactic, paratactic, or decontextualized as some of the fragments that fill these pages. It is scarcely conceivable that even the most elaborate multiply authored interactive real time performance art or web piece could seem more collaborative or grassroots (save for the fact of there being a central editor). Gig would rank alongside Invisible Seattle and Taxi Driver Wisdom as literature collaborative to a utopian degree: collaborative writing that actively seeks the input of people who aren't writers, which must surely involve moments of discomfort for those doing the legwork.

For fun, don't read the names of the workers before reading their testimonials, and notice the point when it becomes clear whether they are male or female. For even more fun, don't read the name of the job, and try to figure it out. And for extra credit, guess the race of the person speaking (you may never know).

I've learned a lot about America from Gig, but not in any controlled, predictable, or summarizable way.