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Evan
read and liked
Jon Bruenning's
review of Pimp: The Story of My Life:
"I blew through this sucker in no time. And I apologize if the lexicon slips into this ‘review’. Books like this have a tendency to do that to me. I find myself writing and speaking with the language and cadence of books I am reading. I am like a ...more
I blew through this sucker in no time. And I apologize if the lexicon slips into this ‘review’. Books like this have a tendency to do that to me. I find myself writing and speaking with the language and cadence of books I am reading. I am like a literate/literary Rich Little. I cannot believe people pay to watch parrots perform. I did give a guy a buck once after his bird called me a cocksucker. That seemed worth it.
This book has a glossary but it is not really needed. When you get into the flow of the writing it all starts to make sense. The context is well developed and certainly is ingrained into our collective memories. For some of us more-so than others, probably. The language is fun. It is not an overly complex invented construction, say, like Riddley Walker. It does not take work to derive meaning from it. It comes almost immediately. And the Stud can write. Sometimes he gets carried away, and his con seeps into his descriptions of his experience. The game comes out. The world he has constructed is a scaffold to prop up that Stud way above all the other hustlers running the fast track. That is what makes him Iceberg though. The book is a con. It does not just stop at the embellishment of language, but he embellishes his experiences to the extent of it blending into the realm of fiction(he is gonzo before gonzo existed -- Fear and Loathing in the Crevice of a Hooker After a 12 Hour Shift on the Track). How could the life of Iceberg Slim not go there though? It is part of the con that drives the pimp game. Pimps gotta have a front to pull a whore. The front does not have to be real as Slim demonstrates all through the story. He is gaming his whores. So all the straight suckers out there reading this book, slapping down a fin outta our mitts, are just adding girth to that roll of scratch taped to Slim’s thigh -- part of Slim’s stable. A large stable of tricks eating up what Slim is selling us.
You gotta have a sense of history. It puts a smile on my face to think of Slim writing this book. He spent his whole life hating the white man, and trying to get a piece of that pie, that luxury, that he felt the white man was keeping from him. He was a smart Stud and coulda made his scratch in positive and beneficial ways to society. You can read for yourself why he found himself deciding to line his pockets using that black-gold mined from the innocent and gullible young women of poor black neighborhoods. More on that later. But I picture an old and reformed Slim sitting writing this book trying to figure out the angle, figure out how to game suckers into buying into Slim as an icon. The literary straight man. And still couch it in terms of The Life being a sucker’s game. Kinda brilliant in a way. The Pimp is still in him. If you don’t believe me, just read homeboy Chris’ review at the top of this book's review list. And look at all the frontin’ straight suckas on MTV trying to sell themselves as a reincarnation of Slim with that opaque veneer of Mad Men marketing; selling big fluffy pimp hats and plastic pimp cups to all the white dudes like Chris going to shitty hipster parties in Williamsburg smoking shit-brick Mexican brown weed out of skull faced bongs and slippin’ ruffies to unsuspecting “hos” in their slutty best vines.
Wuddup pimp.
Not to be hypocritical because I ate this shit up. It was damn entertaining. Slim did not even have to mainline a speedball on the inside of my thigh to get me to buy into his game. I was a willing participant...but still very uneasy. I became interested in the book after reading Robert Greens’s 48 Laws of Power. I really like intelligent strategy books, like Art of War and The Prince. Green makes mention of Slim in a number of places in the book. So I read it with my own angle. The manipulation necessary to excel at this game should be beyond the level of comfortability for anyone that realizes this shit is real, and is not a fuckin’ pimp and ho party on your college campus. These young women being turned out and made completely vulnerable is not the stuff to laugh at. It is not funny. It is real shit. And it is all the more disturbing that it is entertaining on some level. And has had a trickle down effect of ethical and cultural laziness on successive generations. It does disturb me. But here I am calling women bitches and whores in a review. All-be-it in a completely literary and relative manner. Wink. Wink.
Because my mom would kill me if she read this.
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