I, Tania: a novel

By Brian Joseph Davis

America lies in ruins during an age of decline, despair, and death. The year is 1975 and a radical far-left group has kidnapped a young woman from one of America’s richest families. She will later join their cause and will eventually be arrested and convicted of armed robbery. She will claim it was a “different personality” that robbed the bank. The jury didn’t buy it, but author Brian Joseph Davis did. The important difference is: Davis thought her “different personality” was more interesting and deserved her own fake memoir. Welcome to I, Tania, a book that uses the memoir format just enough to spin off into a crazed, bawdy, and seditious charge through pop culture, politics, and the meaning of fiction itself. I, Tania begins by recounting the highly fictionalized true story of the rise and fall of the Symbianese Liberation Army, as it never happened. Brainwashing will never be as much fun as when Tania takes you on an armed-to-the-teeth trip through one of the strangest episodes in history while writing her memoirs in the year 2005.

Tania may have survived bank heists and open relationships, but will she be able to survive the savage world of contemporary book publishing and promotion? More than just a run-of-the-mill fake memoir, I, Tania will blast you into a million little pieces with:
• The hidden Marxist meanings behind Cujo
• Why John McEnroe is scarier than Ian Curtis
• How Don DeLillo can kill . . . with his mind
Do violent debutantes have a place in political struggle? After Tania and Katie Couric’s climactic talk show, you’ll know the shocking, surprisingly funny answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9781554902941

Brian Joseph Davis

Brian Joseph Davis is an award-winning video artist; his punk recording of philosopher Theodor Adorno’s writings led the New Yorker’s Alex Ross to call him a genius. The UK’s Frieze magazine recently declared his work ‘serious hilarity … joyous and thoughtful.’

Book preview

Irving

Introduction

I am still alive.

I live in Simi Valley, in a house that could look quite like yours, but the ornate Moorish fence is electrified. Patrolling the grounds are Anatolian and Karabash Shepherd dogs. The door is steel with several vertical deadbolt locks set in a mesh and cement frame. The bay windows are double-paned Secureglass, designed to withstand everything from 9mm to military grade shells. If the residents‘ association hadn’t voted down the moat of blood, there would be one here. It’s not that I don’t feel safe; it’s for your protection.

From me. You see, this is a prison for one.

I am Tania, acting General Field Commander of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Remember my old communiqués from my first assignment, years ago, posing as a kidnap victim? My troops are dead and for the last few years you have known me — from the books, the AM talk shows of the blighted, bland and mortgaged — by my cover name, my pig name.

I’m let out for a daily routine and special events — nights for casing ballrooms at gala fundraisers, valet escape routes and weapons caches in potted palms.

I have to be careful. After all, I have no idea if my yoga instructor is equally adept at assassination as he is the wind-release posture. And will my half-caf soy almond latte one day come with radioactive isotope shavings on top? That goth barista has Homeland Security written all over her pale face.

Days are spent in fascist pumps and pig lipstick. Smile at golf humour. Hold the highball just so, with an air of ennui. Like this. To an outsider, I could be your mother with perfect, if slurred, elocution, who robbed and who was set free.

Yes, yes, my wild college days. Don’t make me tell that story again, dears.

But this is deep cover. A long novel of embossed, die-cut, beach reading. An assignment I chose of my free revolutionary will. I was not brainwashed to wear Dior grays and Tiffany leg irons. I was not. After the events of May 17th, 1974, we changed our tactics. We were rich (all of us, why do you think they recruited me?) and the cities we had wanted to see on fire were abstractions to us. It was a murderous mistake. We disbanded and returned to where we came from, to burn our own second homes, inherited New York co-ops, and cottages. Well, we‘re planning to, someday.

You see, Mao was wrong. A revolution is a dinner party, or doing embroidery. It can be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. That May 17th anniversary is coming up. My daybook suggests presents of pearl.

I will send a card but I cannot, for security reasons, tell you everything even as I now write the words to my story (I’m donating my book advance to an organization that helps first time novelists injured by landmines). After all the other stories, this is Tania’s story, told through code and ellipses. It begins in a country that I have been the exiled leader of for some time — Symbia. Never heard of it? Let me explain —

From Lonely Planet: Symbia

History

Symbia is an imaginary country founded by five academics, one ex–homecoming queen and one escaped convict in Berkeley, California.

People and Culture

The flag features a cobra with seven heads. Each head stands for a Symbionese principle: creativity, self-governance, cooperative production, collective work and responsibility, purpose, faith, and unity. (Which is eight, if you‘re counting.) They found the symbol in a book.

Many visitors to Symbia are confused by the language of pig English, a tongue that adds pig as a noun or adjective to almost every sentence. What makes a newspaper a pig newspaper? Find out, because context and metaphor are everything in Symbia. Ask, Where can I find a pig hotel? and you just might be thrown into the Symbionese People’s Prison, a 3 x 6 closet in an apartment above a florist shop — it’s a popular tourist attraction.

Many hit songs from the west are re-recorded for the Symbionese market, such as Cry Me a River (For Revolutionary Volunteers to Triumphantly Cross):

You told me you believed in historical struggle

Why did you leave me, all alienated

Now you tell me you need traditional property relations

When you call me, on the phone

Capitalist I refuse, you must have me confused

With some other guy

Your banks were burned, and now it’s your turn

To cry, cry me a river…

Or the number one hit (for forty-three weeks) by Destiny’s Child, The Petit Bourgeois Laments to the Worker on Her Condition:

The shoes on my feet

You‘ve made them

The clothes I’m wearing

You‘ve sewed them

The rock I’m rockin‘

You‘ve mined it

‘Cause the superstructure depends on me

If I want the watch