While awaiting proofs for our Summer 2013 issue, due out in May, we CR editors decided to write a little something about our favorite pieces. Here’s Assistant Editor Brian Trapp:
As soon as I read Michael Reid Busk’s faux-encyclopedia entries from “The Eighties: A Brief Primer,” I forwarded them to Managing Editor Nicola Mason with pleas to accept. Busk’s entries are strange, comic love letters to the decade of my birth, a nostalgic tribute to ’80s cultural detritus. What I love about them is that they are so smart. Busk could have written a cultural critique connecting suburban banality with the rise of horror movies or the decline of blue-collar jobs with the rise of over-muscled, professional wrestling.
Thankfully B
usk chooses to write these poetic short-shorts instead, employing fiction’s strange and vivid details for tonal complexity. In my favorite of these, “Wrestling ’80s,” Busk crafts a mythic origin story close to my eight-year-old heart: Laid-off factory workers, watching their forearms shrink and their families decline, find comfort in Fight Club-esque ultraviolence, meeting in their town’s nighttime decay for gladiatorial combat. Busk comically heightens the violence until the premise turns, and their rage is commodified by businessmen into the WWF fantasy we know and love. This economic windfall is both a happy ending for the men and a great loss, as Busk provides a last line so brutal and honest that it seems affectionate. Throughout these pieces, Busk ultimately interrogates our nostalgia, making the ’80s both ridiculous and menacing.
Busk references other encyclopedic entries such as “Brian Boitano ’80s” and “Computer ’80s.” I thought they were just some intertexual joke, but no. He’s published these pieces in journals such as Folio, Fourteen Hills, and Prism International, and I hope there is a book on the way. In the meantime, I’m going into my parents’ basement to dig out my Hulk Hogan thumb-wrestling figurines.
’80s both ridiculous and menacing’ Yeah really interrogating.