Compilation spotlights skin art
By Jane Muhlstein
Few practices have had such fluid roles throughout different cultures and eras as tattooing. Tattoos have the ability to inspire sentiments of rebellion, commitment, pride, disgust, permanence, solidarity and regret.
"Dorothy Parker's Elbow," edited by Kim Addonizio and former Santa Clara English professor Cheryl Dumesnil, is a new anthology of stories, poems and memoirs addressing the age-old practice of tattooing. Classic and contemporary authors alike have contributed to the book, commenting on various aspects of tattoos. Although the only common subject shared by all the works is tattooing, other recurrent themes are parental approval, religion and tattoos as displays of commitment.
"Once the terrain of drunken sailors and circus freaks, in the past 20 years the American tattoo parlor has attracted individuals as diverse as our nation's population," states the book's introduction. Fittingly, its excerpts represent the perspectives of tattoo artists, outcasts, rebels, Holocaust victims and breast cancer survivors.
Contributing authors include such well-renowned names as Ray Bradbury, Frank Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Rick Moody, Flannery O'Connor and Herman Melville. Each shares a specific perspective on tattooing, whether it is through fiction, poetry or memoir.
A refreshing aspect of the book is that it presents its audience with diverse opinions on tattooing; it is not an overwhelming praise of the art. True, there are many depictions of tattoos as a positive form of self-expression, but there are also stories depicting it as a terrible disfiguring process.
In an excerpt from Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," a tattoo machine is used to carry out a death sentence by repeatedly inscribing a condemned man's crime deeper into his skin. An excerpt from Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" describes a man so haunted by the tattoos of his youth he spends his days hiking without a shirt in the scorching sun, hoping that somehow his tattoos will melt away.
Other works describe making the decision to get a tattoo, the process of actually creating a tattoo and the reality of living with tattoos permanently. Because the anthology includes very recent works, stories dating back to the 19th century and everything in between, it presents an insightful picture of how the process of tattooing and the social acceptance of tattoos have evolved over the last century
The diverse collection of works in "Dorothy Parker's Elbow" unites to form an entertaining, moving, thoughtful anthology. A reader does not need a previous interest in tattoos to find this anthology an enjoyable and thought-provoking compilation of great literature. A