Organ Grinder: A Classical Education Gone Astray

In this nonlinear memoir, Fishbone, a classical scholar, translator, and sometime bouncer, merges the lyre of Ancient Greece with the roar of a Harley to fashion himself as the classic literary tough guy. The brief span of pages motors from a jeep crash in Venezuela to a cross-country motorcycle odyssey—from NYC to Death Valley—prompted by a mysterious inner voice “from beyond.” Along the way, Fishbone addresses plastic surgery, an autopsy, violent death, and sex of the extremely sweaty variety, each louche anecdote filtered through a hodgepodge of references that include Plato’s Phaedrus, Easy Rider, the skepticism of Diogenes, and a YouTube video of a chimpanzee molesting a frog. Fishbone moderates his highfalutin asides with earthy language and subject matter (bikes, women, booze). Frequent philosophical asides show impressive historical range but rarely surpass stoner profundity, and Fishbone displays more than a smidge of self-aggrandizing machismo in his detailed exegesis of a woman getting off as she clings to him on a bike, or his recounting of the number of times he has looked death in the eye (Fishbone includes the sentence: “It’s nothing but luck that I’m still here”). Yet to reduce Fishbone to a chest-thumping intellectual gorilla would shortchange the real pleasures of his bold yawp.[em] (Apr.) [/em]