Any reader who has finished the outstanding set of novels, essays, and journalism left to us by the late and truly great Joan Didion who have need to Any reader who has finished the outstanding set of novels, essays, and journalism left to us by the late and truly great Joan Didion who have need to read another smart woman writer blessed with quick wit, a fast and telling eye for detail, and who can use what they put across as the frailties of their personality as a brilliant means to get a handle on the cultural chaos that surrounds them in the SoCal sunlight, I would recommend...the late and truly great Eve Babitz.
Active as a writer in the 70s and 80s, Babitz was a feature writer for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Vogue and Esquire, with a good portion of her journalism and essay writing covering Los Angeles in its most chaotic , boundary pushing years. Slow Days, Fast Company is a collection of magazine pieces, reissued a few years ago by NYRB Books , the terrain being California, the place where it seemed everyone had come from everyone else to make a last stand to be something bigger than normal before resigning themselves to their fate.
These are wonderful pieces , with Batitz maintaining a beautifully modulated tone in her first person narration of non fiction events: she is skeptical while being sympathetic, bracingly honest but hardly heartless, full of wit but seldom cruel. What comes across through the scattered subjects here is how well she presents her lack of experience or her presumptions about locations and relationships she's about to enter and credibly reveal how much she'd learn. Her piece on the city Bakersfield is a revelation of serene sympathy for a people and the community they live in, and a stand-out article is a recollection of the heroine death epidemic that seemed to be everywhere in the bad old days; Babitz recollects on her relationship with Janis Joplin , who, Babitz writes, seemed to have everything after much struggle as a woman and an artist, but resorting to heroin to fill a void her material success couldn't heal. More moving is the memory of an actress friend named Terry , a delicate creature who flitted about the edges of acting success in Hollywood, who couldn't refrain from a drug that was killing her by the noticeable inch. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for more brilliant writing about the middle part of the 20th century. With Didion, Wolf, Mailer, Babitz, I think, is essential reading for the curious....more
Dylan is a word slinger to be, maybe a genuine poet during some parts of his oeuvre. Still, he is not a writer, not as we know the word, a craftsman, Dylan is a word slinger to be, maybe a genuine poet during some parts of his oeuvre. Still, he is not a writer, not as we know the word, a craftsman, an artist, a professional who makes sentences that start somewhere and set the tone for the sentence that follows. That is, writers, write things that make sense in some respect, as in you understand clearly the thing being described, or that you understand it more abstractly and realize that the writer is undertaking a task that tries to deal with several things--philosophical notions, contradictory arguments, overlapping historical data --and bringing a coherent framework to understand complex matters, or at least come away with a sense of what the writer is getting at.
Even Dylan's wildest lyrics, from Desolation Row to his more recent brilliance noteworthy Rough and Rowdy Ways: surreal or nonsensical as the stanzas may be, the line limits and the need to rhyme imposed restrictions on Dylan's musings. Hey needed to wrap up his investigations into his more obscure imaginings. He gave you something to talk about. Tarantula was written on the road, in hotel rooms, on tour, rattled off in high doses of speed, and maybe other drugs too inane to bother talking about, and it indeed reads like it, snub-nosed Burroughs, Kerouac without the jivey swing. Some parts make you laugh, some good lines abound. Yet, it suffers in that readers wanted their hero, the poet of their generation, to write a genuinely good of poetry or some such thing, with true believers tying themselves in self-revealing knots to defend the book that is interesting as an artifact to the historical fact of Dylan's fame and influence and not much else. There is a part I like, effective as poetry, a bit of self-awareness that shows that Dylan realizes that his persona is false, a conspiracy between himself and the major media, and that he might have to account for the construction somewhere in the future of the whole matter. Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up� technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. Although there are some striking and evocative tributes to Aretha Franklin, it remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf....more
Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, an ironic designation if only because Dylan wasn’t a man of books, but rather a songwriter. The gisBob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, an ironic designation if only because Dylan wasn’t a man of books, but rather a songwriter. The gist of the argument for the musician being awarded the prize was that his lyrics, in a brief span of time, evolved from clever imitations of the folk and blues artists he admired and imitated to become a rich libretto for his age. Surrealist nightmares, black humor, rhapsodic tone poems, acute observations of ingrained varieties of bad faith revealed in personal lives and in the political sphere, songs like “Like a Rolling Stone,� “I Want You,� and “Positively 4th Street� brought a new, serious poetry to the jukebox, leading the way for a generation of other songwriters. It was a common sight in nearly any graduate student’s apartment that Dylan discs like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde cozily nestled next to the typically dog-eared paperbacks of Pound’s Cantos, One Dimensional Man or a coffee table book about Max Ernst or Diane Arbus.
As the songwriter’s lyrics became darker, more mystical, expressively abstract, the deeper the appreciation of the baffling brilliance of his work became—and soon enough the serious vanguard of modern American poetry—Ginsberg, McClure et al., counted the man from Hibbing as one of their own, a sage who could see beyond the flat appearance of the material world and provide glimpses of what’s behind the veil. Dylan née Zimmerman had a run of genius, the length of which depended on how dedicated one is to the continuity of the songwriter’s brilliance. My interest is more about his earlier career, 1962 (Bob Dylan) through 1969 (Nashville Skyline). In my quizzical estimation, his work has been inconsistent since that time, occasionally animated with outbreaks of energy and verbal intensity (Blood on the Tracks). But Dylan zealots are a bright and well-read part of the listening population, and those who found worth, insight, and inspiration from albums from Street Legal or Empire Burlesque (two random selections from the years I call “the Great In-Between�) defend the later work with energy, solid thinking, and proficient writing. That’s the Dylan whose work and reputation provokes an alarming amount of cogitation.
An endless variety of books have been published about Dylan and his songwriting in the six decades since the release of his first album, some purely for pop music fans, others gossipy, and many that are a kind of interpretative analysis that approach the inscrutability of the maestro’s best stanzas. But Dylan, again, is a songwriter, not a writer of books in the main. His catalog of songs abounds with much of the most original, penetrating, and innovative lyrics of the 20th century, and many achieve the status of High Art, genuine and compelling poetry. “Visions of Johanna,� “Desolation Row,� “Highway 61 Revisited,� “Memphis Blues Again.� “Spanish Harlem Incident,� and the full version of “Mr. Tambourine Man� reveal a man in love with the varieties of idioms available to him; he loved language enough to ignore the formalities in front of him and merge the styles he loved in the simple melodies he often borrowed from others. He could rhyme and his couplets were adroit and left you saying “oh, wow� as he finished each verse. This virtuosity didn’t carry over to books, as the pair he’s written up to now wind-up head scratchers at best.
Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up� technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. It remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock, although there are some striking and evocative tributes to a woman named Aretha, most likely Aretha Franklin. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic inventions and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.
Dylan’s next book Chronicles Volume One, published in 2004, is said to have started as the author’s attempts to write liner notes for his then-forthcoming reissues of Bob Dylan, New Morning, and Oh Mercy. The project grew larger and became what is described as part one of a three-part memoir. While fascinating to read the usually opaque lyricist convene in readable prose, his recollections are limited to some worthy remarks about the making of his first album and then protracted memories of the relatively obscure New Morning and Oh Mercy. Chronicles spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was well reviewed, though there was disappointment in the matters he chose to talk about and not discuss. Worse, there were rumblings that Dylan had fabricated much of what he did bother to disclose. Clinton Heylin, a thorough Dylan biographer, who has published eight books on the singer in the last 30 years, has been quoted as saying that while he enjoyed reading Dylan’s book as a work of imaginative literature but that “� almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction…�
So, we arrive at Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. It’s a handsome, oversized tome that has Dylan bringing us a stream of brief essays that discuss an odd, seemingly random set of 66 songs that were popular through American history. As expected, the songs are a confounding selection of tunes, as he opts not to opine or analyze the landmark music of the last century or so but instead goes for a good many tunes that are painfully obscure and not necessarily worth dwelling on at length. From 2006 to 2009, the singer had Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly, one hour satellite podcast where each program’s playlist centered around a theme instead of a specific genre. The song choices were unusual in large part—the odd, the quirky, the gorgeous, and the amazingly bucolic varieties of American music played to whatever the mood of the week the week was, the music on each program peppered with Dylan’s off hand remarks, jokes, anecdotes, historical trivia, and brief biographies of the musicians. The Philosophy of Modern Music appears to take the same strategy and avoids a traceable thesis through the essays where Dylan chats about the songs he’s chosen for elucidation. A fascinating assortment, including three songs by the Eagles (“Life in the Fast Lane,� ”New Kid in Town,� “Pretty Maids All in a Row�), Rosemary Clooney (“Come on a My House�), Johnny Taylor (“Cheaper to Keep Her�), Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti�), Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves�), and other songs of far-reaching style, attitude, and subject matter that are, truthfully, perfectly fine, and often brilliant classics but that have little obvious connection other than the Nobel Prize winner selected for a book.
The book is hailed in promotion materials as a masterclass in songwriting and refers to the essays, while being nominally about music, as being “meditations and reflections on the human condition.� “Essays� is too generous a term to describe what Dylan has written for these songs, as their lengths and depth of thought don’t particularly rise above an average blog post. What’s revealed is that Dylan is not really the philosophical sort to take apart concepts and deal with them critically in archly specialized language, and that he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature based on his prose. Anyone desiring weighty and eloquent clarity on the purpose of existence will find the book wanting, but those who consider Dylan to be a gifted artist with interesting things to say about some musical landmarks that got and kept his attention, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an intriguing, frequently surprising set of remarks and musings from one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic figures. The individual pieces are remarkably poetic and literate on their own terms. What connects this wide swath of tunes is Dylan’s skill at putting himself in the narrative at hand rather than analyze the melody and lyrics for subtler inclinations and nuance or hypothesize how a hymn offers a critique of a social relations; Dylan imagines cinematic scenarios, sees archetypes of modern myth negotiating their respective terrains, and finds the souls of errant knight of endless variation questing for a greater glory with what gifts or curses that mark their lives.
The lyricist hasn’t the prose polish of John Updike or James Baldwin, but his language is vivid, colorful, and skillfully emphatic as he delineates the dilemmas and joys each song undertakes to describe in a short expression. A theme does emerge as he runs through a host of the music, the notion of perseverance and persistence even in the face of hardship, heartbreak, and the cold inescapability of a certain fate. A random selection of essays brings this. Marty Robbins� “El Paso� has a strong feeling of a classic movie western as Dylan writes of the narrator—a lone cowboy at a border town to meet up a challenge he cannot forestall, puts emphasis on the weight loneliness of the gunslinger, an existence where every joy is fleeting, and the shadow of death lurks in every unlit corner. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves� was a 1971 hit for Cher, a torrid bit of fanciful exploitation that was a cardboard pathos at best, but Dylan thought deeper on the matter and found resonance. It stretches credulity, but his insistence on this song makes for reading you can’t draw away from. He uses the pronoun “you� in writing about the title’s tawdry trio, the intended effect being to imagine yourself as a member of this wandering community, the only home being the wagon that carries you at the outskirts of every town. He lays it own a little too thick by essay’s end, with his penchant for stringing three or more adjectives together when one would have been just as effective, but he does what he sets out to do to give you a strong impression of what life at the edge of society would be like. To that end, it reminded me of my time as a carnival worker, going from town to town up the coast, selling chances to win dusty stuffed animals to townies who obviously held the orange shirted show folk in contempt. It was a rush of memories, a chill in the bones, and an adventure I consider myself lucky to eventually walk away from.
These are songs of perseverance and persistence are again short testimonials that crop up on the radio, in movie soundtracks and music videos of individuals of many origins, backgrounds, and varying degrees of stress, who are determined to stand their ground lest the final remains of what is truly theirs vanishes in self-loathing rituals of compromise and surrender. That seems what has found in 66 songs, wildly disparate in era, style, and sentiment; it’s the one tangible thread I’ve found. He is at his best when he gives vent to the full range of ironies contained in the Who’s 1965 proto punk rock anthem “My Generation,� with its famous line “I hope I die before I get old…�
The fact that the singer and songwriter who brought us the line, Roger Daltry and Peter Townsend are neither dead and are, in fact, old reflects on the arrogance of youth. The stuttering youth of the song is barely articulate and has no idea of what he wants to do, has no idea about why he’s angry and impatient, and is happy to simply be that way. It’s a grand and immature f**k you of self assertion, a declaration that shocked and inspired a generation of kids to think that things will get better when they take over after the last wicked adult dies. But Dylan writes that you’re in a wheelchair being pushed around to the places you need to get to—doctor’s offices, the bathroom, the community meal hall; your mind is alert, but the body fails in subtle and significant ways every day. You’re eerily close to whatever dying day will award you, and you hear noise and brash men having their own good clamorous time in the thrall of their youth. You’re annoyed, you’re sleepy, you fall asleep. Dylan’s writing is particularly effective in this essay that should have aged well. At 81, I suppose Bob Dylan hear what the lyrics declaim and vividly recalls being the speedy, in-your-face Dada King, who rarely missed a chance to confound and confront the Old Squares who didn’t get it, a character in full sympathy with the romantic tragedy of a genius poet’s early demise. But his musing takes him to the next thought, which is that he’s far older than he might have expected, his memories are fuller, richer, more far reaching than he thinks he has any right to, and the songs he’s paid attention to aren’t merely audio postcards of long-ago places but rather a means to remain connected; he intends to live fully and well and on his own terms, in his own words. Meandering and bizarre and syntactically awkward as it is at times, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wonderful glimpse into how this perennial mystery man thinks....more
Amanda Gormanda is a medicore poet,and the reason has nothing to do with her race or gender. Her book of poems has been published and it reveals all tAmanda Gormanda is a medicore poet,and the reason has nothing to do with her race or gender. Her book of poems has been published and it reveals all the defiencies of the inaugural poem, being full of superficial gestures that appear in the work of established poets—free verse, eccentric line breaks, a mixing of formal and idiomatic voices, typographical oddness, gender ambiguity, a fractured narrative line that has stanzas of individual poems not actually relating to the previous set of ideas but rather jumpstarting a new tangent. The appearances of a seasoned bard are there, but these seem used more to hide the rather ordinary set of exhortations for the readership and the nation to collectively move forward as one nation. Very little of this rings true as anything actually felt: the set of techniques she’s attempting to use read like nothing so much as attempts to write with depth and feeling in the cadences of greater, more seasoned poets. The problem with Amanda Gorman is her age in large part. Nothing about her work reads as genuine, natural. Her lines are stiff, without rhythm. ...more
The Ayn Rand Sampler is a promotional give away that has been sitting my house for years. Never a fan of the writer, I ignored it, confident that I knThe Ayn Rand Sampler is a promotional give away that has been sitting my house for years. Never a fan of the writer, I ignored it, confident that I knew from reading of The Fountainhead and selections from her political philosophy, just what a rank, turgid crypto-fascist Ayn Rand was. I hadn't, though, read what seems her central effort, Atlas Shrugged, which her followers consider being the highest synthesis of her work as both artist and a philosopher; what the hell, I thought, I needed something to read on the bus, so I decided to take the book along and read the sixty page excerpt from the novel. I was prepared to be surprised--one would think that a writer as famous as Rand, no matter how awful a writer or pretentious a thinker, had to have written at least one book that transcends everything she has going against her.
I thought I would power my way through the pages, but I couldn't even read ten of the sixty pages Rand's publisher selected for us to read. As has been said by critics more willing to speak at length about her inadequacies as a stylist, Rand's style of writing is wooden for great lengths, less rhythmic or musical as, say, the typical photo caption; making matters worse is when the late writer/pundit would try to lift her writing up a bit and applying similes that read more like afterthoughts rather than spontaneous insights, and metaphors that performed the rather mechanical function of boosting her storyline--which is, of course, one dualistic straw-man argument--to a philosophical level. Mechanical is the operative word here, as the attempt on Rand's part to frame her ideas about unrestrained power for brilliant capitalists in fictional disguise leaves us with a choppy, big footed shaggy dog of a novel that is in the tradition of unreadable novels-as-polemic. I closed the book and finished my ride to work looking at the neighborhoods I have passed through a thousand times before. This was more exciting, yes, more illuminating than a thousand pages of Ayn Rand's crabby, delusional exhortations to live free. ...more
In celebration of the 40th Anniversary edition of Hunter Thompson's gonzo masterpiece of political writing "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail", In celebration of the 40th Anniversary edition of Hunter Thompson's gonzo masterpiece of political writing "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail", Slate writer Matt Taibbi writes an extensive essay on why HST still matters in our current climate of dread and drudgery.It is a nice commemoration, but I'm not persuaded that we could have learned anything more than we already have from the late writer; what newer readers would learn is what we did, after time, that HST could be wildly entertaining and then dependably repetitive in his subjects, his insults, his tone. Truthfully, Thompson's reputation as a writer is based on a very small body of quality work. I am willing to cede that Hunter Thompson succeeded , momentarily, at being a Great Writer for a couple of books, but the bitter truth was that while he was long on rage , he was short on other elements that keep a writer interesting over a career. Those qualities are insight, nuance, a curiosity about people and their circumstances beyond what mere appearances.
Mere appearence, though, sufficed too often for Thompson, as his conceit, dove-tailing tellingly with his appetite for high powered stimulants, was that he could walk into the room full of characters and size the situation quickly. His concern was pacing over all, the attempt to simulate the down hill careen of a waiter carrying too many hot dishes from the kitchen. For all the energy and paranoid genius Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and his Campaign Trail book contained, it amounted to the best expression of the limited set of riffs Thompson.
He was not especially engrossing as a political thinker--we read him for his vitriol. His attraction for invective , I imagine, was because it was easy and that it was a convenient means to get to the bottom of one typewritten page after another; the rhythm of the constructed persona of being the most wasted man alive bravely inveighing against the stupidities and inequities and the utter mendacity of the world in which he finds himself would go into hyperdrive.
For some this suggested automatic writing, the idea that HST was channeling some Truth hidden behind the barriers of bullshit and pretense, a voice greater than his own. Perhaps, but for me it was the writing of someone who was working what became a tired set of rhetorical ploys. Thompson plainly never had the chance to transcend his moment of transcendent genius, as had, say, Norman Mailer, himself an egotist with a certainity that only he could get to the disguised truth of things. Mailer settled in for the long haul, abandoned much of his writerly eccentricity and produced a series of brilliant books of fiction and nonfiction in his late career; there are other things to discuss about Mailer than his antics.
There are many who would like to consider Thompson our generations H.L.Mencken, but I would say the departed Hunter comes up short: even a writer as caustic as Mencken would , often enough, vary his tone and write about matters that didn't need to be vilified, crucified or witlessly mocked. Thompson never had the chance to try anything truly different. ...more
Amanda Gormanda is a medicore poet,and the reason has nothing to do with her race or gender. Her book of poems has been published and it reveals all tAmanda Gormanda is a medicore poet,and the reason has nothing to do with her race or gender. Her book of poems has been published and it reveals all the defiencies of the inaugural poem, being full of superficial gestures that appear in the work of established poets—free verse, eccentric line breaks, a mixing of formal and idiomatic voices, typographical oddness, gender ambiguity, a fractured narrative line that has stanzas of individual poems not actually relating to the previous set of ideas but rather jumpstarting a new tangent. The appearances of a seasoned bard are there, but these seem used more to hide the rather ordinary set of exhortations for the readership and the nation to collectively move forward as one nation. Very little of this rings true as anything actually felt: the set of techniques she’s attempting to use read like nothing so much as attempts to write with depth and feeling in the cadences of greater, more seasoned poets. The problem with Amanda Gorman is her age in large part. Nothing about her work reads as genuine, natural. Her lines are stiff, without rhythm....more
Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967�75, a relatively new book by acclaimed Richard Thompson—guitar hero, songwriter, singer, and co-fouBeeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967�75, a relatively new book by acclaimed Richard Thompson—guitar hero, songwriter, singer, and co-founder of the influential British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. Thompson is appealing and moderate but overly cautious when revealing the facts of his life. Not without sin, sizzle, disaster, or tragedies that need to be overcome as eventual success comes to the music and the music maker. His style is reflective and meditative to a degree, choosing his words and descriptions carefully. There’s also a tangible air of hesitancy while he recounts his story, a seeming concern to avoid the dramatic and the sensational. Too much caution, however, as there are moments where eloquent rumination on incidents would have given Beeswing greater philosophical heft. To this day, it’s one of my low expectations that old guard rock stars have something resembling a pearl of elegant and lengthy wisdom that’s been formed over their years of music-making on an international scale. Thompson is the soft-spoken sort, it seems, and the soft-written as well. Elegant in his brief and occasionally minimalist prose, he trades not in a scandal, gossip, or revenge snark but instead goes forth like Joe Friday in Dragnet: just the facts as best he remembers them, told as well as he can manage. The album sold meagerly, but it was a fruitful starting point for the legendary band as they progressed. A woman blessed with an ethereal and silver-toned voice, Sandy Denny replaced original co-lead singer Judy Dyble, Thompson’s girlfriend. The addition of Denny to share lead vocals with singer, guitarist, and songwriter Ian Matthews coincided with Fairport’s burgeoning desire to grow conspicuous American influence but instead explored and made use of their own rich of British and Celtic music folk styles. The following three records—What We Did on Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, Liege, and Lief—marked a band that had invented a new kind of folk-rock, based on a fascinating combination of blues, jazz, and rock filtered through the gossamer textures of British and Celtic melodic construction and overtone. Fired by the unique sensibilities of Thompson’s guitar work, the songwriting collective in this band gave the world that singular thing in pop music history: a distinct body of work.
Thompson doesn’t belabor song meanings or origins, nor does he deep dive into the tricks and techniques of his laudable guitar skills, preferring to limn lightly through the scuffling days of the years 1967 through 1975. Again, there isn’t much in the way of sordid detail, strong opinion, or linguistic scene-chewing, but the book does provide a breezy, montage-like feel of Fairport Convention and the bands they knew that gig in the same towns at the same clubs, pubs, and meeting halls. The elements of low-paying gigs, the band’s eventual adapting an abandoned, unheated pub as band living quarters and rehearsal space, creative tensions in the band, and having a singer in Sandy Denny who was as strong-willed and undisciplined as she was brilliant and alluring are the ingredients of a rich tale that here seems told only by a third. Beeswing has concise and breezy pacing; the book gives off the feeling of being a treatment for a motion picture music biopic. The chronology of events has the air of a “greatest hits� list with the details scantily fleshed out to satisfy the requirements of a screen screenwriter who can squeeze everything into an entertaining and pat 120 feature. After reading, you’re left wanting to know more and can’t but feel a bit cheated.
What might deeper feelings there have been within Thompson when he had to fire Denny from the band? He makes a note of the difficulty in weighing Denny’s great talent against her insecurity and hard-drinking. At this point in a much-detailed story, we witness a conflicted choice to make sure that the band he co-founded remains a stable entity for the sake of his free expression and reason to exist. It’s apparent that as much as he loved Denny and cherished her talent, he felt it better that he and the rest of Fairport move ahead without her. Thompson writes of this deftly but is sketchy on the emotional details. Beeswing is full of matters that cry for a fuller accounting, episodes such as Thompson’s eventual conversion to Sufism, meeting his eventual wife and songwriting-performing partner, encounters, and music with John Lee Hooker, Van Dyke Parks, and Linda Ronstadt. Incidents get mentioned, briefly described, sometimes with significant poetic effect, but too often are a glance at meaningful encounters and musical landmarks. In the end, the style and amount of details are suitable for a making-of-the-band movie or an outline for a limited series for a streaming service. As a book, though, it’s a slight effort often poetically expressed. Thompson has a reputation as a potent lyricist who condenses emotional states and situations to brief, evocative epiphanies. It may be the case that his habit of compositional mind influenced his decision to avoid revealing too much of his inner life. The subtitle of Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967�75, tells us that the book covers only eight years of the author’s career, hinting that there’s another part of the story to be related, another volume forthcoming. With one book done, it would be a sweet deal if Thompson warms up to the idea that he’s now a writer and composes the next volume fearlessly, with verve, detail, and nuance. Thompson is a magnificent talent, and the world needs him to tell his tale of a critical and endlessly enthralling time in popular music history with the vividness it deserves....more
It's been said that John Updike is able to write extremely well about nothing what so ever, less to do with the sort of hyper-realism of Robbe-GrilletIt's been said that John Updike is able to write extremely well about nothing what so ever, less to do with the sort of hyper-realism of Robbe-Grillet or the purposeful taxonomies of David Foster Wallace than the plain old conceit of being in love your own voice. There is no theoretical edge to Updike's unceasing albeit elegant wordiness. It's a habit formed from deadlines, I guess, having to write a long and coherently in short spurts. He has published a minimum of one book a year since his first book The Poorhouse Fair was published in 1958, and like any artists who is as prolific over a long period--Wood Allen and JC Oates fans take note--there will be the inevitable productions that are ambitious but under constructed, dull, repetitive of past success, what have you.
Toward the End of Time was one of his occasional flings with science fiction and it was dull beyond repair. Licks of Love was rather a quaint and grandiloquent selection of lately composed stories that don't add much to his reputation. The Rabbit quartet, though, is masterful, a genuine American Saga of a man who is the quintessential rudderless citizen who goes through an entire lifetime in which none of his experiences gives any clue to purposes beyond his own disappointments and satisfactions. Updike is brilliant in this sequence, and for this alone I'd guess his reputation as a major writer is safe for generations to come. He's had his share of duds, but an unusually high proportion of his work is masterful, even brilliant. The Rabbit quartet, The Coup, Witches of Eastwick, Brazil, Beck: A Book, The Centaur, Roger's Version. I could go on. It's interesting as well to note the high incidence of experimentation with narrative form and subject matter. Rabbit placed him with this image of being someone comically dwelling on the lapsed virtues of middle aged East Coasters, ala John Cheever, (another writer I prize), but he has been all over the map so far as what he's written about and how he wrote about it. Even though I've cooled on Updike lately--I've been reading him for thirty years--I can't dismiss him nor diminish his accomplishment. He is one of the untouchables. Besides, neurosis is character, and it's hardly a monochromatic shade. It's a trait that comes across in infinitely varied expressions, and we need someone who can artfully exploit their potential....more
Joyce Carol Oates is not my favorite writer, but for all the repetition of her themes of fragile women being imperiled by evil masculine forces they mJoyce Carol Oates is not my favorite writer, but for all the repetition of her themes of fragile women being imperiled by evil masculine forces they masochistically desire, she does occasionally publish something both compelling and well written. I detested "Beasts" and "The Falls" since she exercises her familiar dreads in contrasting lengths, the first book a slender novella, the latter a literal brick, both books sounding rushed, fevered, and breathless, as first drafts of novels usually do.
Or a finished Oates novel, for that matter. She does get it right sometimes, as she did with "Black Water" and "Tattoo Girl"; with the right configuration, her usual wit's end prose style and fascination with fragile psyches and marginally psychotic psychologies get as intense as fiction is ever likely to get. Zombie is a rather potent little psychodrama, and it's the kind of writing Oates excels at. She gets to the heart of the fringe personality better than anyone I can think of. The Tattooed Girl, from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and The Falls. My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving.
She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil, as in the case with Jonathan Franzen....more
I made it halfway through Robert Christgau's memoir Going Into the City: Portrait Of a Critic as a Young Man before I had to put it down. Memoirs are I made it halfway through Robert Christgau's memoir Going Into the City: Portrait Of a Critic as a Young Man before I had to put it down. Memoirs are a literary excuse for interesting people to talk about themselves due to an inherent belief that merely being themselves, sans abstraction or objectively intriguing art--novels, movies, poems, paintings--is enough to fill a book. it's likely that my lapse was due to the format Christgau chose; too much him, not enough of the world that formed him as a thinker about Pop Music and related concerns.I'm tempted to pick it up again, but I hesitate, I stall, I make excuses to do something else, considering that Christgau's obsessiveness, perfect for a critic, can be hard to take for long in a book that is supremely autobiographical in nature. I have been wishing that someone would take his best essays from his website and collect them into a volume or two; on rock and pop and some other matters of culture is always an intriguing point of view and it would be great to have those views between covers.
I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. "Any Old Way You Choose It", his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of my all-time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At The Movies", for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA! “Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock, disco, reggae, folk, jazz, and pop was like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art. His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self-indulgent as it may have seen, it was fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music is an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice-weekly campus newspaper and was required, in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theater, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was a lot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau, an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style.
The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop a writing style, ideas, and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed an argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do. Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal shorthand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old-fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that. Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before the deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories.
His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain. Christgau certainly tried to be confessional, tell all essayist, a horrible habit from the sixties that still infests popular nonfiction these days, as when he reprinted a long piece in "Any Old Way" about a trip across country with his girlfriend Ellen Willis and, in what was ostensibly an essay dealing with ideas, chronicled the events precipitating their break up. It was a rather aimless accounting, neither interesting as personality gossip nor compelling as an intellectual argument. It was just...awkward, not unlike someone who feels they have to talk about something that is a change in their life but cannot find the words that make you empathize. I rather enjoyed his prejudices, snobbery and the like, and I liked the fact the reserved the right to change his mind about an artist, even if only for one album. He as a critic, a dilettante, someone's who's a propensity toward prolix was intriguing, attractive, worth the bother to pour over when he was engaging the popular culture he thrived on. ...more
Wallace Stevens was the quintessential American Modernist, a man whose muse allowed him to consider the perfection of forms and the imperfections theyWallace Stevens was the quintessential American Modernist, a man whose muse allowed him to consider the perfection of forms and the imperfections they garner as the human mind considers them and attempts to transform them. This is metaphysics with a memory , deconstruction with euphoric recall. There is a subdued music under the lithe lyricism of Steven's tuneful imagery, with varying degrees of joy, melancholy, desire, loss. The world he writes of is here because he was in the world. Heidegger likely would have admired Steven's reconsideration of Ideal and Idyll formations....more
I am inclined to agree that the HBO production was one of the best TV series in recent memory, but the novel by Tom Perrotta is no less brilliant, perI am inclined to agree that the HBO production was one of the best TV series in recent memory, but the novel by Tom Perrotta is no less brilliant, perplexing, comic and able to undermine a reader's sense of metaphysical sure-footedness. Perrotta is a cross between Don DeLillo and John Cheever, someone who brings weirdness into the suburbs and small towns and has us observe how oddly things come unglued. The plot here centers around a small, Cheeveresque suburb, but the difference is that these townsfolk, like the rest of the world, is trying to deal with the unthinkable fact that a quarter of the world's population has vanished, gone, literally into thin air, rapture-like. This is about how the folks try to reconstruct their daily routines both in personal lives in social structures and how different groups come to interpret that event which is, by its nature, sealed off from interpretation....more
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