{"id":138,"date":"2003-07-17T18:21:34","date_gmt":"2003-07-17T22:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=138"},"modified":"2003-07-17T18:21:34","modified_gmt":"2003-07-17T22:21:34","slug":"red-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=138","title":{"rendered":"Red Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a sucker for “true crime” books, and Aphrodite Jones<\/a> is, to my mind, the true mistress of the genre; she does for crime reporting what Jerry Springer<\/a> does for live television. So I was excited to read Jones’ new book, Red Zone<\/em><\/a>, about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago where a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs belonging to her neighbors. I wasn’t disappointed. As always, Jones delves into the sleaziest and most sensational aspects of the case. She focuses especially on the fantasy menage a trois<\/em> – maintained through letters, photographs, and drawings – between the lawyer couple who raised the killer dogs and the white supremacist prison inmate who was their legal owner. It’s never clear how much of this was just pornographic fantasy on the part of the three, and how much involved actual incidents and practices – up to and including bestiality – but Jones insinuates where she is short on concrete facts, effectively maintaining a feverish atmosphere for her portrayals. The dog owners come across as arrogant megalomaniacs without a shred of remorse, whose fanatical self-righteousness ultimately leads them into a state of absolute delusion. Jones’ writing, as always, is itself deliriously non-linear, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose style combines the hyperboles of yellow journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. Occasional sentences take my breath away, they are so brilliantly off<\/em>: “”To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature” (243); “Noel’s act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel’s charming smile away” (259). I could never myself invent, nor find in even my worst students’ papers, “bad writing” that resonates in quite this way. Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose. Do I need to reiterate how much I love<\/strong> this book, both for its content and its style?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a sucker for “true crime” books, and Aphrodite Jones<\/a> is, to my mind, the true mistress of the genre; she does for crime reporting what Jerry Springer<\/a> does for live television. So I was excited to read Jones’ new book, Red Zone<\/em><\/a>, about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago where a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs belonging to her neighbors. I wasn’t disappointed. As always, Jones delves into the sleaziest and most sensational aspects of the case. She focuses especially on the fantasy menage a trois<\/em> – maintained through letters, photographs, and drawings – between the lawyer couple who raised the killer dogs and the white supremacist prison inmate who was their legal owner. It’s never clear how much of this was just pornographic fantasy on the part of the three, and how much involved actual incidents and practices – up to and including bestiality – but Jones insinuates where she is short on concrete facts, effectively maintaining a feverish atmosphere for her portrayals. The dog owners come across as arrogant megalomaniacs without a shred of remorse, whose fanatical self-righteousness ultimately leads them into a state of absolute delusion. Jones’ writing, as always, is itself deliriously non-linear, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose style combines the hyperboles of yellow journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. Occasional sentences take my breath away, they are so brilliantly off<\/em>: “”To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature” (243); “Noel’s act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel’s charming smile away” (259). I could never myself invent, nor find in even my worst students’ papers, “bad writing” that resonates in quite this way. Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose. Do I need to reiterate how much I love<\/strong> this book, both for its content and its style?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}