Soapbox: Essays, Diatribes, Homilies and Screeds.

I am typing this review of Glenn O'Brien's collected essays with my left hand. With my right hand, I am scratching the left ear of Ralph the Beagle, America's neediest canine, lest he resume his plaintive, stentorian breathing from his hideout under my desk. Novelists and theoreticians of my acquaintance would find this a distraction. I find it appropriate, since the importuning Ralph is the very emblem of O'Brien's "great subject": the polyvalent weirdness that just keeps coming at us, every day, demanding our attention, yapping at us, like a pack of much-beloved and extremely annoying beagles.

There is soft science on the front page, hard news in the society columns and bad news on the sports page; there are alien rhapsodies zooming up the charts and terrifying fashion plagues sweeping across the republic; there are revised dietary laws, new fiscal theologies and fresh icons of celebrity excess - and this stuff needs to be dealt with. It needs spin. Specifically, it needs to be spun back out there, looking weirder than it did before, so what you have written becomes a part of what you're writing about, and you become one with the weirdness. This is O'Brien's job - subversive complicity on deadline - and he does it very well.

In Soapbox, we get seventeen years of the old slap and tickle - one skirmish after another in O'Brien's healthy, neurotic romance with the slapdash and Tickle Me Elmo of American culture, selected from the pages of Interview, Paper, and other venues. By his own admission, O'Brien is a "standup essayist," so we always get the hook. We get "Howl" for advertising dudes; e.e. cummings at the coffee bar; Andy's Diaries from "Beyond the Sunset"; improved platitudes ("Know thyselves"); testaments of belief ("I believe: The world has a lot to learn from Hoagy Carmichael"); and declarations of desire ("We're looking for a few good women with the mettle to be enablers.").

We don't always get conclusions, of course, because in this kind of writing, the conclusion invariably presents itself in the writer's consciousness exactly twelve hours after the deadline has passed. But this is probably as it should be. O'Brien is not in the conclusion business. Instead we get a lovely kaleidoscope of attitudes with which we might confront the protean strangeness as it rushes past. O'Brien's aspirations for these essays is that they occupy a space somewhere "between Robert Benchley and Ezra Pound, between Lenny Bruce and Wyndham Lewis, between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Where's Waldo, and often they do.

They share that space with Donald Barthelme, America's Lewis Carroll, and, at their best, the essays in Soapbox are worthy of that fancy company. It was Barthelme, after all, who freed us all by proving that in the war between voice and words, voice wins, every time - that if you get the voice right, the words are a matter of taste. More often than not, O'Brien gets the voice right. This, from an essay entitled "Culture": "I remember when we first arrived here on the Starship Brigitte how we beamed down on a 4/4 beat, how we used to stay up all night, high on rhubarb, playing our music and watching the eyes in the dark, encircling our campfire.

It was a different world then, rude and brutal. But it was soon transformed as we planted our crops and released virus after virus including the microorganism of which beauty is a symptom."

The voice is right here, and the hook upon which the essay is based is funny: "When I hear the word culture I reach not for a revolver but for TCBY, the country's best yoghurt." O'Brien riffs this trope like Charlie Parker, into the stratosphere, and here, as in a couple of other essays, when the hook is right, and the voice is perfect and the associations are cooking, the writing totally transcends its genre and elevates itself into a kind of antic terror.

My favorite is an essay called "Reading Your Dinner Its Rights" that begins with a meditation on "harvesting" game, segues into a soliloquy on our new penchant for pampering the animals we eat ("free-range" chicken and beef) and concludes with the Swiftean proposal that if we ate the homeless ("free-range humans") we might find it in our hearts to care for them in a more humane fashion, on the principle that no one wants to sit down to Flank of Wino knowing that the creature upon whom we are about to feast has, all too recently, been sleeping on a grate. Makes sense to me, Glenn.

Dave Hickey is a critic who lives in Las Vegas.