Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (Crown Journeys)
Product Type: Book
Product Price: $16.95
Manufacturer: Crown
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Description
Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk’s tonsils currently reside?
Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets?
Curious about Chuck’s debut in an MTV music video?
What goes on at the Scum Center?
How do you get to the Apocalypse Café?
In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America’s “fugitives and refugees.” Get to know these folks, the “most cracked of the crackpots,” as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to “a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly, sincere, fascinating people who maybe should’ve kept their mouths shut.”
Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers’ sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe’s famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo.
Oh, the list goes on and on.
It's rare to find a travel guide and a memoir joined neatly together in a single, highly readable 176-page volume. But Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby) is a writer of rare talent and his home of Portland, Oregon, is a city of rare wonders. In Strangers and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Palahniuk goes beyond the AAA handbooks to reveal the places, people, and legends of Portland that have long been known only to locals. The reader learns the location of the legendary Self Cleaning House, where to find the restless ghost of the founder of Powell's Books, and why feral cats are such an important part of Portland baseball. Portland, it seems, is also a highly sexual city and Palahniuk dutifully dissects the specialties of each strip joint as well as discussing Mochika, a zoo penguin with a real fetish for black boots. Along the way, he includes "postcards" from his life in the Rose City dating back to 1981 when, as a 19-year-old, he dropped acid and accidentally ate part of a woman's fur coat during a laser show of Pink Floyd's The Wall. As Palahniuk matures, the postcards reveal the author becoming increasingly a part of the city's scene, culminating with a wild and wooly Millennium Eve celebration at the Bagdad Theater that featured a screening of the film version of Fight Club. Fugitives and Refugees is a must for anyone who may, in their lives, go to Portland. But its appeal should reach beyond Oregonians. Palahniuk's love of the city is so great, and his stories so weirdly wonderful, it makes one want to get out of the house, get in the car, and drive to Portland right away. Just remember to pack the book. --John Moe
Reviews
Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2009-11-05
Summary: "A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia"
A (brief) review of chuckpalahniuk's FUGITIVES AND REFUGEES: A WALK IN PORTLAND, OREGON
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
A transgressive travelogue is a seductive, though hardly original, idea. A "guide" that would document the underworld of a city, all of its forbidden zones, its sleaziest grottoes --- how fascinating! FUGITIVES AND REFUGEES, unfortunately, is nothing of the sort. It is, rather, a lifeless catalogue of a few tacky tourist attractions, none of which is particularly "transgressive" or subterranean.
In the most blaise manner imaginable, the book mentions some of Portland, Oregon's oddities: the world's largest hairball, a strip-club run, a "strip-bingo" tournament (it's not as interesting as it sounds). All of this is written in a prose that is both dead and deadening.
Our Virgil nominates himself a "novelist." Any genuine novelist, however, knows that his/her task is to bring an imaginary world to life, to make chimeras breathe and talk. FUGITIVES AND REFUGEES is not vividly composed. It is not even detailed.
We (readers) get the impression that our lazy and ill-informed guide has never even visited most of the places that he mentions. Otherwise, he merely lacks descriptive power. If that's the case, then he's not a genuine author.
The entire book has a "grocery-shopping-list" feel and look.
chuckpalahniuk seems to feel that his life is, a priori, interesting to his readers. But his anecdotes ("postcards") are hardly captivating. He seems to feel that a writer is a writer even before s/he has written. But the work gives birth to the writer, not the other way around.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2009-09-06
Summary: "A fun tour"
This is much, much more than a travel guide; it's practically a personal conducted walking tour of the less-conventional side of Portland, Oregon by the cult author, who's also a native.
There's a minefield of information: from a quick guide to local slang, to the best food recommendations (including recipes), right down to the names and contact numbers of the operators of strange museums, a self-cleaning house, haunted hotels, sex clubs and even the individual animals at the Oregon zoo.
What is unexpected (or perhaps totally in keeping with Palahniuk's quirkiness), is how he wraps each attraction with a story of the place or person he talks to and personal nuggets in the form of a postcard entry at the end of every chapter.
As he says at the end of the book, "This book is not Portland, Oregon. At best, it's a series of moments with interesting people."
Palahniuk not only participates in local customs like the outrageous Santa Rampage (the cover pic of the author in full garb as proof), he also gatecrashes a Rose Festival parade with a mannequin to upstage the parade princesses on floats, chews up a lady's fur coat sleeve in a drugged out state at the Pink Floyd laser light show.
The reader gets to ride along on these whacked-out adventures and go under the skin of the man (just a little bit) behind his iconic works.
Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2009-08-21
Summary: "not bad"
it was ok, but who the hell am I to judge? I'm not god. at least I don't think I am. who am I to say that? I'm not god. etc.
Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2008-10-28
Summary: "A different type of travel guide"
This book is something different from Palahniuk, a view from his point of view about his town of Portland, Oregon. It's very different in the fact that he includes phone numbers and addresses for many of the places of interest that he speaks about, and between each "chapter" (rather categories of what to do) he includes a short peice he calls a postcard from the past, written at some point in his history in the city. All in all it's a good read, and something different but just as good from Palahniuk.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2008-09-05
Summary: "Great Glimpse into a Great City"
If you like Chuck Palahniuk and have been to Portland, you will love this book.