NO SENSE IN WISHING

A spry application of pop-culture criticism to “path-altering episodes” in the author’s life.

Working out of Baltimore, Burney begins this set of essays with a thoughtful piece on activist-in-song Gil Scott-Heron, who earned a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins. By Burney’s account, Scott-Heron resented the fact that although he was still very much alive, by the turn of the 21st century he had been “conveniently relegated to the past tense,” even though he still had much to say. Exploring Scott-Heron’s life leads Burney to his own family, his mother a former singer and his grandfather a guitarist who once opened for Scott-Heron. That in turn leads Burney, in a winding narrative that never loses focus, to his experiments with bohemianism among “people who performatively smoked cigarettes, obnoxiously ate vegetarian crepes, and went to see seventy-year-old movies at the art-house theater.” Burney’s essays explore his falling away from organized religion, working with “no interest in excelling” in a stultifying desk job at the Social Security Administration (where, he confesses, he passed his time watching episodes of The Wire on his phone), and visiting South Africa, whose Black population “are the only ones on this landmass who constantly interact with white people at every level of society,” giving them a point in common with American Blacks. While celebrating Black culture and icons (including the pre-deranged Kanye West), Burney dismisses Black supremacist claims such as the notion, advanced in a documentary film, that Japanese ninja culture originated in Africa, a bit of cultural appropriation about which he remarks, sagely, “It’s a hard pill to swallow that we’ve been fucked over, but the answer to that dilemma isn’t to go around and do it to other people.”

Fluent, sometimes nerdy, and often funny observations about the power of art to add meaning to one’s life.