Synopses & Reviews
On a warm summerandrsquo;s night in Athens, Georgia, Patrik Keim stuck a pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Keim was an artist, and the room in which he died was an assemblage of the tools of his particular trade: the floor and table were covered with images, while a pair of large scissors, glue, electrical tape, and some dentures shared space with a pile of old medical journals, butcher knives, and various other small objects. Keim had cleared a space on the floor, and the wall directly behind him was bare. His body completed the tableau. Art and artists often end in tragedy and obscurity, but Keimandrsquo;s story doesnandrsquo;t end with his death.
A few years later, 180 miles away from Keimandrsquo;s grave, a bulldozer operator uncovered a pine coffin in an old beaver swamp down the road from Allen C. Sheltonandrsquo;s farm. He quickly reburied it, but Shelton, a friend of Keimandrsquo;s who had a suitcase of his unfinished projects, became convinced that his friend wasnandrsquo;t dead and fixed in the ground, but moving between this world and the next in a traveling coffin in search of his incomplete work.
In Where the North Sea Touches Alabama, Shelton ushers us into realms of fantasy, revelation, and reflection, paced with a slow unfurling of magical correspondences. Though he is trained as a sociologist, this is a genre-crossing work of literature, a two-sided ethnography: one from the world of the living and the other from the world of the dead.
What follows isnandrsquo;t a ghost story but an exciting and extraordinary kind of narrative. The psycho-sociological landscape that Shelton constructs for his reader is as evocative of Kafka, Bataille, and Benjamin as it is of Weber, Foucault, and Marx. Where the North Sea Touches Alabama is a work of sociological fictocriticism that explores not only the authorandrsquo;s relationship to the artist but his physical, historical, and social relationship to northeastern Alabama, in rare style.
Review
"Taussig's latest work continues his anthropological research among the inhabitants of Colombia's western coast. Taussig's ethnography critically reflects on the representation of Colombia's past embodied in the Gold Museum in the Banco de la Republica, which, in his view, fails to address the history of slavery and exploitation surrounding gold mining, and further obscures the reality that cocaine has replaced gold as the nation's principal product. The exhibits in Taussig's own museum give glimpses of the effects of cocaine production on the lives of his informants. But while the ethnography provides portraits of Colombians caught up in the violence and danger surrounding cocaine production, the lives of those producing and controlling the production of cocaine remain in the shadows. In place of the details surrounding the production of this elusive commodity, he provides philosophical reflections on the more mundane realities of the western coast rain, heat, and wind. Taussig's museum appeals to a wide audience, including those inside and outside the discipline of anthropology." Reviewed by David Strohl, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"Whats an anthropologist to do in a country where life is magic? This question shapes Columbia professor Michael Taussigs My Cocaine Museum. Taussig has spent much of the last three decades in Colombia, where he has been everywhere and, it seems, met everyone, from the descendants of African slaves who pan for gold on the coast to the ministers in Bogota, digging in their cabinets for missing files. My Cocaine Museum is a report from the field, but it is hardly traditional fieldwork. Taussig begins with a description of the Gold Museum in Bogota, a collection of golden artifacts plundered from the inhabitants of pre-Columbian Colombia. What follows is a kind of anti-museum, made of meditations on the uncollectible phenomena he has encountered on the countrys remote Pacific coast: rain, stone, lightning, boredom, moonshine. My Cocaine Museum tells the story that the Gold Museum hides, about the difficulty of life in the place gold (and now cocaine) comes (Paul LaFarge, Voice Literary Supplement, May 19 2004 )
Review
"What's an anthropologist to do in a country where life is magic? This question shapes Columbia professor Michael Taussig's
My Cocaine Museum. Taussig has spent much of the last three decades in Colombia, where he has been everywhere and, it seems, met everyone, from the descendants of African slaves who pan for gold on the coast to the ministers in Bogota, digging in their cabinets for missing files.
My Cocaine Museum is a report from the field, but it is hardly traditional fieldwork. Taussig begins with a description of the Gold Museum in Bogota, a collection of golden artifacts plundered from the inhabitants of pre-Columbian Colombia. What follows is a kind of anti-museum, made of meditations on the uncollectible phenomena he has encountered on the country's remote Pacific coast: rain, stone, lightning, boredom, moonshine.
My Cocaine Museum tells the story that the Gold Museum hides, about the difficulty of life in the place gold (and now cocaine) comes from, a swamp where it rains three feet a month and the heat never goes away. This story remained untold, Taussig suggests, because gold and cocaine have tricked human beings into putting it out of their minds. . . . Gold and cocaine lead people to forget time and place, cause and effect, maybe even to make basic geographical mistakes. You might think that a dose of the good old cause and effect would be the best antidote to this befuddlement, but Taussig disagrees. He constructs his Museum in accordance with the spellbound logic of gold and coke; each chapter mixes natural and human history, fiction and reportage, with the manic associativeness of, well, a coke fiend. . . .
My Cocaine Museum is intended as a counter-enchantment, to free the reader, if not all Colombia, from the magic of two commodities that have had a profound and malign effect on the nation's history. It's an ambitious task, but Taussig invokes some powerful spirits to help him, notably Walter Benjamin, who believed (or maybe believed: Benjamin is tricky) that words have a magical connection to the world, even if this connection is also historically and politically determined, i.e., not magic at all (tricky, tricky). . . .
My Cocaine Museum. . . . is a daring immersion in a Colombian mode of thought."
Review
"[Taussig] has taken his cue for this new book from the Gold Museum in Colombia's capital, Bogota, where the treasures of the indigenous Indians before the Spanish conquest have been installed in the depths of the National Bank. Many stories and much history have been washed away to display the country's proud heritage. Taussig has undertaken to tell a contrapuntal tale of slavery and intoxication, of power and cartography, perverted culture, lost peoples, tyranny and material survival at the bottom. . . . More psycho geography than ethnography, a travel journal striving to the condition of prose poetry, an indulgent and enraptured trip to the ends of the earth by a writer aspiring to join the lineage of other voyagers to the extremes somewhere close to hell (Rimbaud, Celine, B. Traven)."
Review
and#8220;Dense, wildly digressive, and divided into topical microchapters that cite more than 100 endnotes sometimes only loosely connected to the text, Sheltonand#8217;s singular blend of art-, lit-, and pop-infused intellectualism may not draw a wide readership, but those who enter will find an invigorating analysis of death, art, friendship, and self-discovery.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A gripping story, a memoir of sorts, a retrospective critique of an artistand#8217;s work, a requiem with no choral amen, a ghost story, an unnerving mysteryand#160;
sansand#160;solution, a chronicle of and#8216;the not quite deadand#8217; and, along with all this, a sociological treatise. Shelton is a genuine craftsman. His prose glows like glass pulled from the furnace. This reader couldnand#8217;t watch from a safe, inflammable distance. By the end, Shelton became my significant other. Experience, knowledge, labored thought and honestyand#8212;what a generous gift he offers the humble reader.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Shelton may be a sociologist by trade, but he is a writer of Southern Gothic at heart, and here he successfully taps into a Southern imagination that exists only in memories turned ghosts (or vice versa). His book is a mesmerizing weaving of biography and cultural analysis, and it bears patience and attention without being "difficult" in the sense you might expect from a book published by an academic press. If you open your doors to the ghosts he has conjured, they will linger a while.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;The sometimes abrupt shifts in subject matter make this a book that has to be read slowly to take in Sheltonand#8217;s arguments. Fortunately this close reading is rewarded, especially in the moments when Shelton moves from more analytical passages to personal reflections, synthesizing the theories heand#8217;s discussing. . . . What makes this book so strangely wonderful is how Shelton moves from the abstract to the personal.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A powerful, deeply original, and deftly constructed combination of fiction, readings of the work and lives of everyone from Walter Benjamin to Franza Kafka, and contemplations of artist Patrik Keimand#8217;s departure from this world and the violent, beautiful artwork he left in the hands of the bookand#8217;s narrator. The universe ofand#160;
Where the North Sea Touches Alabamaand#160;is an uncanny iteration of our own.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;Allen C. Shelton is really special. From the layering and subtlety of his writing to his sense of geography, intimacy, and sensuous detail, I don't know anyone who writes quite like him. These interwoven narratives of the dead and the living form a boundary-crossing work of worlding, a productive new type of critical engagement; Where the North Sea Touches Alabama is not just a remarkable book, but a fresh genre of writing.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;This is a beautiful and brilliant book. . . . The lives of Allen Shelton, Patrik Keim, Walter Benjamin, and many others intersect in these pages, rubbing up against each other, drawing on each other to evoke layers on layers of worlds in which objects, color, and texture are everything. Sheltonandrsquo;s writing is masterful.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Allen C. Shelton is a provocative writer whose prose grapples with a lot of ideas we donandrsquo;t usually allow ourselves to think about. Readers will have to think hard, but their efforts will pay off in new knowledge and insight: I felt that I knew a whole lot more after reading his book than I did before and I donandrsquo;t often feel that way, nor feel that way so strongly.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Reading this book and thinking it fiction I came, reluctantly, to see that it is not. The import of that sentiment eludes me as I continue to read this settling, unsettling book.andrdquo;
Synopsis
In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la Repanduacute;blica, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years.
Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine.
This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.
About the Author
Michael Taussig is the Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of ten books, including What Color Is the Sacred?, Walter Benjamins Grave, and My Cocaine Museum, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note: A User's Guide
Gold
My Cocaine Museum
Color
Heat
Wind and Weather
Rain
Boredom
Diving
Water in Water
Julio Arboleda's Stone
Mines
Entropy
Moonshine
The Accursed Share
A Dog Growls
The Coast Is No Longer Boring
Paramilitary Lover
Cement and Speed
Miasma
Swamp
The Right to Be Lazy
Beaches
Lightning
Bocanegra
Stone
Evil Eye
Gorgon
Gorgona
Islands
Underwater Mountains
Sloth
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index