Best records of 1979

(Unearthed from an online newspaper morgue,  here are my 10 best albums from 1979.-tb)

After a modicum of meditation, soul-searching, and late-night phone calls, I've decided that this annual autopsy we call a "year-in-review" won't be as grisly as I imagined. In fact, the most outlandish generalization one could make about the state of pop music in 1979 is that it was merely "okay." As in any year, there were plenty of decent albums that passed through my hands on to mine and my writer's turntable, but there was a sizable proportion of discs from new and established artists that fall well-below what one wants to hear. In any case, rock and roll doesn't seem to be dying at the present moment, though I, like anyone else who's been involved with the stuff too much for their own good, would have to have heard more records that reached the highwater mark. What follows are my annual hit-and-run comments on the previous year's more or less notable releases.

Best Records of '79

1) Armed Forces — Elvis Costello (Columbia): Although Nick Lowe's production is at times heavy-handed and strains too often for effect (too much piano, echo chambers, an overkill of vocal overdubs), Costello remains a formidable talent that no amount of cheap garnish can obscure. At best, (more times than not) Costello is dead on target. At worst, he's utterly incoherent and artlessly paranoid.

2) Nice Guys — The Art Ensemble of Chicago (ECM): By definition, avant-garde or "free" jazz is supposed to be difficult for the uninitiated to warm up to, but the Ensemble's latest seems (to me at least) to be the one '79 release in the genre that even Mangione fans can find enjoyable. Nice Guys is a brilliant crazy quilt of styles and strategies, with the shifting textures and colorations of saxophones, trumpets, drums, bass, and a plethora of more obscure instruments proceeding through a fascinating session of unconventional improvisation.

3) Trevor Rabin — Trevor Rabin (Chrysalis) Rabin is a singer-songwriter-guitarist from South Africa who's same-named debut album supplies the kind of mega-rock that Todd Rundgren's been promising for years. Rabin proceeds through a far-fetched array of styles, from Mountainesque heavy-metal, syrupy ballads, McLaughlin-inspired jazz-rock, Zappa-like ensemble virtuosity, through disco and reggae, often blending these incongruous strands into the same song. And, incredibly, it works.

4) Van Halen II — Van Halen (Warner Brothers): Edward Van Halen plays flashy hard rock guitar with admirable vengeance and ingenuity, that is enough for me. That is to say that it's enough for those times in the middle of the night when your brain is wracked by an alphabet soup of your mom's diet pills and the rapid notes from Van Halen's many solos here are the closest you're willing to come to have a large dog rip out your throat.

5) One of a Kind — Bill Bruford (Polydor): The former Yes, King Crimson and Genesis drummer deftly leads a band of superb musicians through a session that combines the best of progressive rock (compositional organization with a rich sense of harmony and counterpoint) and the best of fusion rock (inventive soloing meshing hard-rock dynamics with fleet-fingered technique). Guitarist Allan Holdsworth performs as though in a fluid and fluent state of grace, and bassist Jeff Berlin is someone to watch out for. The best moments, though, remain with Holdsworth, who extreme legato rivals that of any post-bop saxophonist in or out of this life, Coltrane, Shorter, Rollins, Michael Brecker, Josh Redman, you name it, and his technique, smoothly deployed as he tests the out rings of a chord progression and seems to begin solos in the center of an idea and then exploring the logical note sequences in both directions simultaneously, is stunning in the ways his spotlight moments build tension and then releases it. 

6) Shiny Beast (Bat Pull Chain) — Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (Warner Brothers): Beefheart, rock's most idiosyncratic avant-garde individualist, is refreshingly in place for once, seeming to have hammered his worrisome kinks and quirks into a form that benefits his talent for constructing fractured, asymmetrical, dada-derived music. Splendid use of free jazz tonalities, urban blues, Caribbean rhythms, and rhythm and blues. The music is as crankishly idiosyncratic as it's ever been (jump-cut time signatures, a free mixing of "free-jazz" randomness and pop song structures, blues and neoclassical shades blending into thick atonal texture) and Beefheart's vocals, one of the raspiest voices anywhere, deliver his dadaesque, free-associative lyrics with the same kind of off-kilter verve.(One would be remiss in thinking that Beefheart's lyrics are without substance or lack meaning: no less than Wallace Stevens, who explored his dreams of a world of perfect arrangements and their contradictions, Beefheart, nee Don Van Vliet chooses to inspect a terrain of imperfect things, material and organic, and forge connections and conversation between them with nothing but the force of applied and intense whimsy. )

The effect sounds like an Unlikely super session between Howlin' Wolf and Alfred Jarry (costumes designed by Max Ernst) . His new Magic Band, featuring ex-Zappa sidemen as Bruce Fowler (trombone) and Art Tripp (drums) , handle the demands of the music with disciplined ease, executing Beefheart 's quixotic time signatures and self-deconstructing arrangements with a professionalism that tends toward both perfection and liveliness, usually an unlikely symbiosis in art-rock groups. However cerebral Beefheart's music sounds, though, it should be POinted out that Shiny Beast is a fun album, full of good humor and strong material. This time out, The Captain is out to entertain and beguile, a work of art that does what any object of scrutiny must do, which is to offer a genius's bluster, blarney and brilliance the only way it can be presented, in your face, without apologies or a phone number for a second date.

7) New Values — Iggy Pop: Iggy, who is the godfather of punk if anyone is, has finally transcended the problems that too often stopped him from delivering that all-purpose knockout punch. The music is crunchy, cantankerous rock and roll, Iggy's vocals have the appeal of the off-hand remark, and the lyrics succeed in being anti-intellectual without the obnoxious posturing that is the calling card of many whom Iggy has influenced. Iggy proves here that he is the main-man.  That said, and do so sincerely, I fancy myself more an MC5  kind of guy;  I prefer music that gives us the effect of a demolition derby on the other side of the River Styx, relentless metal twisting and screaming tires until the torches lighting Plato's Cave are dosed.

8) Fear of Music — Talking Heads (Sire): Talking Heads, I fear, is more of an alliance with art-rockers like Eno, Roxy Music and John Cale than with the New Wave, but that hasn't stopped me from liking them. Their music has a cleverly controlled graininess that puts them half-way between garage band amateurism and the post-twelve tone rigors of the "new music" conceptualists. David Byrne's lyrics, sung in a voice that sounds as though it might evaporate at any moment, expresses the tortured politics of the paranoid mind while allowing as little self-pity as possible. This is the work of a refreshingly straightforward sociopath.

9) Rust Never Sleeps — Neil Young (Warner Brothers): Young, who, like Norman Mailer, has been producing advertisements for himself for years to little advantage (self-revelation must attain the universal, not the therapeutic, it's to sit well as something I'd like to investigate), has released a masterpiece of a kind, a rock and roll testament that deals with American icons, institutionalized violence, and the sand-trap of self-love (among other themes). And Crazy Horse helps Young play some of the dirtiest rock and roll of the sear.

10) Squeezing Out Sparks — Graham Parker: Parker bites the head off of everyone who's ever done him dirt with music and lyrics that have the mainstream kick of the old Rolling Stones. Blunt, uncompromising stuff.  To get to the issue that never left Parker's orbit while he was still someone who was interviewed and received a fair amount of airplay, Parker does indeed resemble Elvis Costello vocally. Somewhat, that is, as Parker prefers to talk-sing along with his snarling, while Costello can snarl and croon at the time. And while Costello strains credulity when he strains too often for high notes that refuse to come to him easily, Parker after three songs or so becomes something of that insomniac dog next door who won't stop barking. 

THE FADED WORD : Tom Wolfe, RIP

Tom Wolfe was alternately responsible for some of the best and worst American writing that found its public during the Sixties. On the one hand, he invented a new lexicon for journalists, full of sound effects, exaggerated emphasis, sly allusions to relevant bits of obscure literature, acute character sketches, a discerning eye and ear for the revealing detail and phrase, and snappy prose as well. His nonfiction articles were Heckle and Jeckle cartoons made prose, and with it, he left us a few masterpieces, not the least of which being "The Right Stuff" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Of course, for San Diegans, there is the "Pump House Gang," his essay about the La Jolla folks contained in the same-named book of collected magazine pieces. He fancied himself a social critic. There were some things even a snappy prose style could not disguise., although his ability to rewrite and paraphrase complaints about contemporary experimental art and modern architecture were entertainments galore. He revealed himself as a conservative in culture, but he had lost relevance to the current conversation by the time that element was revealed. His essays became diffuse, stumbling, grouchy, suffused with barbs that missed their targets with an increasing frequency. 

Worse, I think, were his novels, where the snappy prose style vanished all told as he attempted to refashion himself as a master of the 19th Century social novel, best revealed in his first effort "Bonfire of the Vanities," a long, very long slog about how NYC corrupts the soul on all levels of society, from politicians, bankers, gangsters, civil rights activists...It was a festival of straw-men, as wearisome to read as the volume of "Atlas Shrugged" you found yourself slogging through for a book club. Wolfe was a mixed bag of results, but what he did well will remain in our canon. The best of his work, his nonfiction, in my view, will need to be read by generations to come for readers who are looking for some salient clues on what America was thinking at a critical period.

As a novelist, Wolfe aligned himself with 19th-century social novelists Balzac and  Dickens, with a strong dose of the 20th-century American novelist Dreiser. His aim was to become engaged with society at all its levels and with the citizens of all its sectors, high and low. Nice ambition, I think, but his novels for me seemed more like exercises of sheer will rather than genuinely felt inspiration. When he ceased being a journalist, Wolfe became a polemicist, in essence, albeit with a Ph.D. He seems to be the case of a man of obvious gifts, occasionally used to brilliant effect, who wrote fiction so that he would have a shiny example of the very thing any thesis he developed would have us think is the preferred kind of fiction America deserved. 

As an artist/critic (or critic/artist), I never got much farther than thinking that Wolfe needed to write novels so he could construct an all-encompassing proposal to cure the aesthetic missteps that were preventing artists from producing narratives that actually matter. That polemic he wrote was called "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," again chastising the current crop of writers, circa 1989, and proposing they follow the example he provides them with "Bonfire." Wolfe could certainly toot his own horn, and he could certainly switch arguments when it suited him; in 1973, he co-edited a non-fiction anthology called The New Journalism, which featured articles by Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and others, journalists and novelists who created a new kind of journalism that employed fiction-techniques.In his introduction, Wolfe declared, more or less, that the conventional novel, the novel made up entirely from the imagination, had run its course historically, and the vivid nonfiction of New Journalism would replace it altogether. 

To be fair, this is not a case of Wolfe jumping onto bandwagons as much as it is him building the bandwagon itself. Never without an interesting thought, never sans a flash of real insight and snappy verbs and matchless similes, Wolfe was, in my view, a failed novelist, artistically, something that can be measured by the fact that over the last couple of decades, the discussion of the late writer's four novels has been virtually non-existent. His novels seemed like the results of arduous labor, strained, repetitive, increasingly lazy in their verbal aberrations; his inventiveness turned into indulgence and dithering.

 Barry Alfonso, a writer, based in Pittsburgh, sent me a note that added a crucial context for Wolfe in American intellectual tradition.  He writes:

It strikes me that Wolfe is comparable in some ways to T.S. Eliot. Both of them appropriated the razzle-dazzle split-screen jazziness of their modernist moments to ridicule and attack modernism itself. They won huge audiences that were uneasy about the changing societies they lived in and uncomfortable with their roles in it. They played with the lingering guilt sophisticated people feel about rejecting cultural traditions even as they chopped, channeled and mutated those traditions themselves. Wolfe and Eliot had their avant garde cakes and ate them too while they stuffed them up the dilated hyper-stimulated noses of the public.

A sound comparison to Eliot, Mr.Alfonso. I thought of John Dos Passos myself, a left-leaning novelist who was revolutionary in subject and experimental in the structure in his early fiction, especially in this USA Trilogy, but who later turned more conservative in his politics writing a blander fiction for most of his remaining career. Dos Passos even came to become a regular contributor to the National Review. However, I think Wolfe as a writer was undone not by politics--a smart and perceptive conservative thinker is worth a read--but by his style. It goes without saying, usually, that writers with careers that span over several decades sees a decline in their work; some escape this curse by changing styles or expanding their worldview. Mailer, Updike, DeLillo, and Didion have done this. Wolfe began, I believe, with a flashy, impressive, dazzling virtuosity and never strayed from it, and seemed caught up in the challenge about how he was going to keep up the pace, top what he'd already published, how to go further than he had before. He gave up on finessing his sentences and became lazy and diffuse. I dare say his last book, The Kingdom of Speech, was a challenge to linguistics in general, and Noam Chomsky, in particular, was incoherent through and through and factually incorrect on the history and practice of the subject matter.

Barry Alfonso adds this in a subsequent message:

I think the Dos Passos comparison is apt -- the USA Trilogy used motion picture techniques to describe the fractured realities of its era just as Wolfe adopted the lurid colors and cartoonish gestures of '60s pop culture to capture the passing scene. Something you said about style prompts the following...your co-favorite chew toy (with Bob Dylan) Jack Kerouac was once asked which was more important: style or content. Kerouac said style because it CONTAINS content. This is similar to the McLuhan slogan that the medium is the message. I think this applies to Wolfe's journalism in the '60s -- the way he wrote embodied the essence of what he wrote about. And, as a critic, he was COMPLICIT in the cultural scams and absurdities he wrote about -- in fact, he had a hand in CREATING them. I suspect Kesey and company realized this. Ultimately, Wolfe was a cultural liberal facilitator/fellow traveler -- no, he was a cultural liberal PERIOD, even if he wouldn't admit to it. You can't make fun of executions by cutting off somebody's head, as a wiseguy once opined.

Wolfe was at his best at his craft when he was a journalist, more the observer than the commentator. We realize his brilliance was how he used his verbal razzle-dazzle to characterize the accumulation of details and incidents. The scenery and he had a knack for getting the revealing quote and those statements that gave his subjects the gift of personality. And for all his novelistic exuberance, he was anchored to the facts; the story arc, whether he liked it or not, was being drawn for him, and his inventions had to be restrained and made to cohere to what actually occurred. This isn't to diminish his achievement as a craftsman--he does indeed elevate journalism to art, as he does with Electric Kool-aid and The Right Stuff, two masterpieces that survive the hard judgment of time. As a critic, though, he began as a fun read, an amusing grouser on things that confounded him, ingeniously entering into a conspiratorial alliance with his readers who likewise were suspect of the claims and posturings of modern artists, architects, and the communities of critics and taste-makers who made those careers. Possible. He too quickly, though, became a habitual and distressingly imprecise curmudgeon whose complaints had less impact on contemporary thinking about cultural matters; imprecise because one wasn't always sure what he was trying to find fault with and because his writing became alarmingly diffuse, more rhetorical bombast, sound, and fury, lots of grandiloquent throat clearing. He was making less sense as a critic, but it was obvious he was bitter. His last essay sparked any significant conversation was his piece "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," his manifesto extolling novelists to become engaged with the world around them rather than write fictions that take readers out of the world and into an author's metaphorical neurosis. Beyond that, Wolfe's fabled gifts were all but useless in gauging how insane the world was behaving.

Everyday Negoiations

I walk through this arch and its half shadows and I am gone, on the other side of wall in a world that might not be there. That's what I think , crossing the street, the late afternoon sun creating large swaths of slanting shade that caused the downtown high rise and over windowed condominiums that loomed over the cross purposed train tracks to seem emptier than they normally be so close to  five in the afternoon. Large, empty, thick with history of conceptions, bad business deals, lies told on phones with rotary dials. Even the newer structures, staggered edifices with mix materials of steel, glass, concrete and wood notable for the profusion of balconies , seemed to have been constructed in a designer's mind to recollect and establish a connection when matters of public welfare and taste were hand in hand. 

It was a simple contradiction to resolve, the resolution being to either rid the city of the people altogether and so not have a center of constructed perfection where down with the presence of human weight and woe, or , less violently, resign yourself to a convenient solipsism, imagine that only you exist and that since because everything is merely an aberration of the senses, you have it in your means to filter out the faces, the torsos, the expressions of others who crowd your personal space, a space you require to be everything you can see. This space halts behind the skylines and the ridge of far trees and power lines.

 The place that others inhabit is beyond your concern or care. Let this failing light and what it reveals for mere minutes in the day, the deep resonance and secret shapes of what is molded to functional requirements which are now matters for history books, add peace to your mind, which is fevered and quirky and fast on the draw when disturbing elements intrude over the invisible lines of death you've drawn on every black of concrete you tread over. But now, it’s time to be gone, to consider the void, what is   beyond this passage, the shadows that malinger and grow until only the basic outline of the walkway is visible under the least luminescent  light above. Time to board a train to where? Anywhere? Does it make a difference? When was the last time going in a direction you've decided upon prior to a journey result in a quality difference? 

Sleep faster, we need the sheets, your father said, eat slower, your mother mentioned, and then continued, we have miles to go before we run out of gas, this said in a Ford station    wagon going between Detroit to Cleveland by way of the turnpike, listening to radio stations fade and criss cross their news , weather sports, there was country music playing , a gospel choir, someone screaming Jesus almighty God , rain and no rain, the sky dark with clouds , thick groves of trees along the road behind which seemed to be one large factory after another, smoke stacks poking the clouds, flashes of rows of broken industrial windows obscured by perversely green flora and fauna, there was never a good time to play fifty states, Cleveland was rain and shadows and deep hills where tall houses were build, hills where the rain went and filled the basements, every house in the neighborhood had a third floor that had walls growing moss...

Harlot's Ghost, a novel by Norman Mailer

This is a generational saga more than anything else, the story of Harry Hubbard and his relationship with his CIA mentor, the titular Harlot. It is, I think, a brilliant mess of a novel, not unlike the projects the Central Intelligence Agency has taken on covertly, unheard of and unspoken, in order to preserve the good graces and virtue of the United States. The main message, I think, is that one cannot fight evil unless they understand exactly what evil is and are willing to be evil , unprincipled, lacking in romanticized notions of goodness and fairness in order to combat any and all threats that approach our shores.  It is messy work, in other words, and there is a liturgy here, something approaching a theological world view that places the agency and its agents in a context that represents an over specialized class of professional attempting to rationalize the vileness of their work by allusively equating their violence, lies and disruptions as serving the greater good.What especially intrigues about this novel is the foul premise that one cannot effectively fight evil unless they are able to become evil themselves, which is to say that the agents in play, visiting various bits of expensive and furtive skulduggery against enemies present and invisible, have to pay grave  lip service to the virtues of American freedoms and the governing institutions that direct them, but who must be able to betray every moral principle they've sworn to uphold as a means of defending against the godless, the unbathed, the fearfully "other". Rather than have agents who are compartmentalized to the extent that they lie, cheat, steal and dispatch bad guys by day and watch TV and crosswords at night, we have instead characters who are at war with the lies they tell themselves.Within this is a paranoia that is made into a layered, convoluted, brooding world. Not a perfect novel, but a genuine work of literature none the less. I would venture that this is Mailer's best novel. 

"THE AVENGERS: Infinity Wars" three hours of frantic, distracted agitation

The Avengers The Infinity War is a big, fat, slobbering mess of a movie, a gluttonous rampage of straggling superheroes, thinly connected storylines that are incomprehensible if one hasn't seen most of the Marvel movies that have come out in the last ten years. It is a great looking film, colorful (for a change, as Marvel films have tended to have a bleached out effect for most of what they have done so far), the special effects, especially the special effects, are cast cleverly, and the set pieces are spectacular are satisfyingly effective. But to what purpose, to what effect? One can say that everything that has happened in the films over the last decade have led up to this moment, which I think is the problem; Infinity War cannot stand on its own, it cannot excite without the fan boy's obsession with the smallest bits of detail and information from random Marvel efforts. And it switches from one part of the earth to a sector of the Universe, another planet, a dimension, from Villain headquarters to intergalactic weapons foundry, constantly, disconcertingly. 

That is to say that the editing is such that the movie finally does not add up to anything you find quotable, revealing of grim intentions under the professed declarations. Thanos, the villain, does announce his intentions and fulfills his purpose by Movie's end, and the effect is, admittedly shocking and effectively deployed, but it's little more than a sequence of competent magic tricks by a competent trickster who has one amazing effect for his finale. After you go wow, spend some time yammering about what comes next, you realize there was only one spectacular effect that made the grade, and that it wasn't enough to bring the wild twines that form this movie's unsporting narrative together in a way that made more it more than quips and clashes. Mind you, I did like the movie. Very entertaining as a distraction, but like Marvell's Black Panther, epic-ally overrated as masterpieces of cinema. But standards Marvel helped established, they are mere, merely okay. 

Finally, it its race to tie up a decades worth of plot lines and themes from fifteen or so amazingly profitable movies, watching this film was not unlike watching cable TV with a meth-addled tweaker who had the remote control, unable to make up its mind whether to sit, shit, stand, watch the news, jerk off, take apart a bicycle or simply die. Even after all this time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe cannot transcend its self-created cliches. So what comes next? At this point, does it matter? Doubtless, they'll continue to show their technical mastery, but for narratives, ideas, surprises? That rut only gets deeper.

MONKEYS ON A STICK

Once upon a time, by which I mean 2006 , when I was habitual lurker and part time scold on Slate's now defunct poetry forum Poems Fray there was an especially obtuse and truth-challenged participant  who persisted in saying naive and empty headed things about poets and their poems no matter how severely he's ridiculed, corrected, verbally stomped. I won't go into details as to what this person did that was dishonest, incorrect,disingenuous or otherwise offensive . We would be here all day. Not actually , mind you, but let us say that the memory of what this fellow said and presented himself as, under the flimsiest of online disguises, makes my capacity for a catchier metaphor presently nonexistent. But first I might want to own my own conceits and venture a guess to this fellow's motivation to remain in the company of other poetasters who couldn't stand his presence; we were a smug bunch, in fact, despite no lack of brains or wit. Being intelligent is not an automatic gateway to a winning,accepting personality. Perhaps that was this creature's motivation to keep burrowing in under the self satisfying veneer of our discussions.  You know the sort, the little man with the steroid ego who for reasons only God or Homeland Security understand has a habit of internalizing every truism, cliche and new age adage they come across, creating a moldy stew of babble they might think they can get loose women with. It's crazy making.  He added this at an especially exasperating point:

To be a Poet, you must be a Dreamer, for Poetry is the product of our hopes and aspirations.

To be a poet, it helps if one stops making Absolute Statements about what a poet must be or what one thinks is required for a poem to be valid. Above remarks like that make you sorry that anyone spoke highly of Universal Literacy.All a poet needs is a talent for the craft, an interesting way wit the language, and an openness to let the poem they're writing assume a form that is not strained, or made to conform to some specious and dubious requisites ; poetry made to do so is often turgid, vapid, bombastic, myopic and finally gutless when it comes to delivering the goods that the results of good poetic art should, that sound of surprise, the unexpected perception, that inexpressible feeling caught in terms of the unforgettable.It helps as well if one who desires to write good poet not address themselves as Poets, with a capital "P",lest they mistake themselves for priests, seers, mystics, oracles and all other manor of shaman whose existence is of use only to comic book writers or fakes and layabouts who find the personage a handy way to circulate their malarkey for yet another go around.

Finally, it 's useful for a poet to remember that what one has actually experienced in the world and how one brings order, sense, and irony to their stories is better grounds for poetic inspiration than "hopes and aspirations alone" which, truth be told, tend to be more or less the same, with minor variations . The real work of poets is to bring their skill as writers to work through the contradictions, u-turns, diversions and unexpected changes they experience while on their way to achieve their ideal circumstances. Life is what happens when you're making other plans. The poet who wishes to be good needs to slough off dubious advice from poetasters and instead improve their writing. Otherwise, there poetry is more message than message, more arch than artful, a string of cliches executed with the precision only the dull witted and easily trained can manage.

The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers | Literary Hub

The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers | Literary Hub

Book reader website Literary Hub has a recent article that is a generous sampling of the awful things master novelist Vladimir Nabokov has written about other renowned writers.  Interesting and intriguing, as the man, an entitled misanthrope who's lack of empathy for any of  characters turned his wicked tongue into a writerly geiger counter that could capture the damning detail as his myriad of obsessed sycophants , witless housewives and firmly addled head Wasps and create a damning, hilarious, unexpectedly acute tragedies and comedies ; he was a witness to characters of no particular charm engineering the means of their eventual dissolution. But this article is weak in its examples, whcih is to say they suggest Nabokov to be more vain that on target.            One of the best stylist in the English language with regard to his novels is merely chatty and a hazelnut shade prolix in his under-seasoned dismissals of other writers held in critical high regard. The remarks are mean, of course, but lacking is the conspicuous example that exposes the supposed fraudulence. His thrusts do not stab, his parries do not cut , his volleys neither detonate nor decimate. He does not leave the wounds he intended to. This reduces Nabokov's stature, in my judgement. Still, VN remains a splendid , brilliant novelist.

THE OLD WEIRD AMERICA by Greil Marcus

An admirable facet of Greil Marcus's digressive form of criticism is that he's always attempting--essaying forth, essentially--to demonstrate the unities between the high, low, and middle portions of culture, insisting, with an impressive range of references and reading that the separations between are more argumentative than substantial. Linking mountain and southern music with Dadaism and neo-Marxist student rebellions with Religious bliss with rock and roll and performance art--an exciting project to stake one's career on, which is precisely what Marcus has done. Famously, though, Marcus, one of the first rock critics for the Rolling Stone publication, the author is given digression and historical anecdote, musing and abusing the privilege of making metaphor when proofs of his theory are required. Assuming that he had a theory, to begin with. Marcuse is clearly moving in the dialectical mode, maintaining that opposing forces arise in history that then clash inevitably in the violent synthesis and create a new period of existence with new rules and cultural distinctions, all of which create its opposite and will again clash in violent synthesis. 

But instead of a theory that one can read and argue with, I suppose, a script one can comprehend and modify as new evidence comes to light, Marcus is a more impulsive notion than theoretical rigor. It is the joy of reading him, as he seems to relish the chance to recreate some blessed moment in music history--the Sex Pistols rehearsing "Johnny B. Goode" (in his book Lipstick Traces)  or the tension on the stage at the Newport Fok Festival when Dylan, assuming the stage with an electric band, was booed and called names by a crowd of stalwart folkies. Just when you think he's ready to provide the skeleton key to his musings, the punchline, the point he's taking a good while to get to, Marcus recedes into the mystified murk of his own grandiloquence. That is the joy and the aggravation of reading this writer.   I read Greil Marcus because I love the way he writes and admits that his prose has influenced the way I take fingertips to the keyboard. This is a problematic love of the man's love for five decades. Lately, though, it's been more prolix than persuasion, as his ongoing effort to make Bob Dylan the central factor of the 20th century hasn't struck a believable insightful note in decades. 

The Old Weird America is an extended reflection on the songs on Dylan's famous 'Basement Tapes", which strives to provide the secret history behind the songs. In matters of the cross-pollination of cultures, racial justice, the mashing together of folk authenticity, rock and roll, and Symbolist poetry, Marcus essentially argues that all roads lead to Dylan and lead through him as well. As criticism, it is more an act of imagination than a weighing of elements; Well read and as well listened to as he is across a great spectrum of literature and music types, what is lacking here are the dual duties of establishing how the songs and artists within the folk tradition influenced Dylan and how Dylan assimilated the music who's expressive brilliance he could never equal and yet was motivated by to create his own means and create new criteria by which to discuss the success or failure of the work. Dylan is less the artist to Marcus than a saint or something greater, and, even though there is a pleasure to ride the waves, cadences and well-crafted metaphors and similes of the writer's prose, The Old Weird America is a shaggy dog story at heart. Marcus began this habit of epic digression with Lipstick Traces, a tome not without its pleasures--his connection thereof the efforts of Cabaret Voltaire, the Dadaists, Punk Rock and the Situationist provocations of Guy Debord was especially tightly argued-- but now it seems little else than a practiced spiel that's trotted out and exclaimed, regardless of the topic, not unlike an old timer's AA share that is memorized not just by them but by the entire meeting that has heard them deliver for decades. I am saying that Marcus is writing the same book with diminishing degrees of enthusiasm. His fascination with the idea that there is a Secret History of American culture, where ideas High, Middle, and Low meet and create odd examples of genius and odd, clarifying perceptions to the exact set of ironies that both inspire and hobble us as a collective society striving for imperfectly stated Ideals has gone from an intriguing and seductive conceit where equally obsessed readers, hoping there is more to rock and roll and blues and country music than guitar chords and drunken hard times, can share the idea that there is a metaphysical aspect to the lovingly embraced sounds that defined the childhood of millions of citizens. 

This makes for the diffusion of argument on Marcus's case and leaves us more with the bold assertion that is no longer the poetic effusions of a critic inspired toward a degree of inspiring interpretation; this is the point where the eloquence no longer rings, soars, or makes you want to turn up the volume and study a lyric sheet while scrutinizing the tunes of Dylan, the Stones or the century's end disruptions of Hip Artists and those after them. Rock has its own Harold Bloom, likewise an esteemed critic of literary works who, of late, is an admitted Bardolator who has written some books concerning the essential genius of Shakespeare as being something much more vast and profound and, shall we say, "world creating" than even the wildest essayists have claimed in the centuries previously. Shakespeare, says Bloom, asserts Bloom, proclaims Bloom, created the Modern World, every inch of it, every concept, every psychological profile and alienated nuance we can think of. You can argue with his sweeping conclusions, but the book I'm thinking of, "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human," is a critical delight. It may be that Bloom is luxuriating in the laziness of a higher caliber. The difference between them is that Bloom has a thesis that he's worked with for decades, a set of subtle arguments crystallized in his landmark book "The Anxiety of Influence," a brief but trenchant discussion where the Professor posits that Shakespeare is the premier genius who casts a long and permanent shadow over the rest of world literature that came before him and that his influence is so pervasive that no poet or other literary artists cannot help but be influenced by him. Those great geniuses who've emerged after Bard's time have either engaged their influence from him and written great works extending, modifying, and altering the system of metaphor Shakespeare changed our collective consciousness with, or there is another genius who've emerged over the centuries who, being painfully aware of the Bard's embedded influence on how sentences about human experience have come to be written, write furiously in the other direction, against his style, assumptions, and rhetoric, experimenting, taking political risks, deconstructing, inverting, abstracting and de-familiarizing the artful language in ways only a new kind of genius would conceive and execute. 

But here's the rub: even for those great writers who've made great art with language that artfully contains the human impulse to go beyond mere descriptions of the world and peer at what is behind the veil of enumerated appearances, Shakespeare is present, his aesthetic, his metaphors, his language influencing new writers in one direction or the other. That is a rather crude summary of Bloom's basic premise, and there are dozens of other notions woven through his life's work. Still, the point is that his a set of ideas that make the ideas tangible and convincing once the initial "aha!"  of flashing insight wears off. It's not science, of course, but it is a craft, a profession, this kind of thinking, and what we have in Bloom who has taken his working theory and tested it against new ideas, new writers who write literature in cultures other than what is routinely aligned in the Western Canon. Bloom, who defended the existence of the canon and wrote a book on the issue, believes that there are permanent genius and masterpieces of Western Literature,  as he is a man who has made a career judging books with imposing standards. The standards are not fixed, though, and Bloom further asserts Test the Canon is a living thing, like the   American Constitution, a category of books and authors that must be continually revised as matters with human existence come to mean something different. 

 Marcus and impressionistic hot takes on matters of music, and culture, in general, have been brilliant at times. Still, the later work is regressive without a central premise or premises. Marcus hasn't put forth a thesis from which his notions can find a more compelling form of argument, a form that would aid others to avoid the frequent bush and thorny bramble that spreads in Marcus's many books and subject his scheme of rock music's claim to art to some respectful but rigorous interrogation. I frankly think he's lost in his thoughts but without a map. The point here isn't to go over Bloom's declarations in, say, Shakespeare and the Invention of Human or Hamlet: Endless Poem, but rather to mention that as in the case of Greil Marcus, we have a critic who has stared too long at the page, listened too long to the same old songs, two critics fixed on their respective catalog of ideas and conceits which are now not speaking to a readership, or at least no readership other than themselves. A pity, of course, since criticism, as practice, is to assert, offer proof of argument from the text scrutiny, and provoke discussion or at least some element of invigorated intellectualizing. 

I don't want to think about anything larger than what's for dinner after reading Bloom murmur through layers of verbal phlegm about the Absolute Appetites of Falstaff, nor do I desire to play air guitar or consider the sweet surrealist mannerisms of Tom Waits after Marcus intones multitudes of repetitively presented riffs, paragraph after paragraph. Instead, possibilities are exhausted in the critic's terms, not those of the book or the disc; I find that this kills enthusiasm for the art itself. Those familiar with how the author thinks on the page will note, also, the lack of real verve in the writing, skilled and flowing as it may be.

Terry Hertzler RIP

HOT TAKE!!Xiaolu Guo: ‘Dickens is sentimental, clumsy and lacks poetry’ | Books | The Guardian

Xiaolu Guo: ‘Dickens is sentimental, clumsy and lacks poetry’ | Books | The Guardian:

The Guardian posed as series of fast questions to writer Xiaolu Guo, and her answers result in harsh hot take on the writings of Charles Dickens. You can read the answers in full here .Her views on Dickens are so uninformed that I cannot take her seriously as a literary thinker. There is nothing in the article that makes me think that she is subtle and thorough writer, let alone possessing anything like the grace and poetry she maintains Dickens lack. This has nothing to do with gender preference: Dickens is simply a superb writer , a keen observer, a wonderful social critic, an amazing, astounding creator of complex characters from all the tiers of society. Dickens is the kind of social novelist that prolix neocon and former writerly whiz-kid Tom Wolfe extols as the kind of practitioner of the art that younger writers ought to be emulating. Wolfe, of course, goes on to , in his own fiction, imitate Dickens blatantly in several of his baggy monster novels, to paraphrase Henry James, and demonstrates the difficulty in doing what Dickens did with apparent ease; keen eye, sharp, character revealing dialogue, the skill and tact to characterize the privileged and the powerless humanely and fully without a (conspicuous) set of moral/political concerns undercutting the natural seeming flow of the author's many narrative strands.

 Dickens was an observer, which means he took in context, situations, conditions, and he listened as well, closely and intently no doubt, which seems a good way to make your characters complex, , believable and, to use a dread word, relevant. Of course Dickens wrote well and was capable of some the most immaculate and stirring lyric sentences written in English--does anyone doubt a 20th century maestro like William Gaddis didn't pay close attention to the Dickensian cadences as he aligned the many details we gather in Great Expectations, David Coppefield, Bleak House? As a matter of course, not uncommon for a professional, serializing writer like Dickens who wrote many novels and stories over many years, not everything he did was a home-run--neither is everything by Updike or Joyce Carol Oates for that matter. But let us end this rant by completing the metaphor and conclude that his lifetime batting average would make the other would be geniuses of the writerly sort seem farm league , forever up and coming, never arriving .

Smart's Cat, My Mantis

I love cats as much as the next premature curmudgeon, and I can't help but think that Christopher Smart is half pulling our collective leg with his poem, which is rock-slapping waves of adulation for his cat. Years ago I wrote a poem called "The Praying Mantis" that was a list of self-contained sentences, each beginning with the title phrase and then completing itself with some qualitative non sequitur; the point was, of course, was to lampoon the baroquely-phrased claims you come across in self-penned biographies, press releases or eulogies that overshoot the commemorative mark. The challenge was to see how many fresh takes I could get starting from the same premise and at what point would I sense that I was done, winding up the sequence on a diminished, perhaps exasperated note.

The praying mantis returns no phone calls,
The praying mantis will not shake your hand,
The praying mantis does not pay sales tax,
The praying mantis had been to the moon and found it drab and without a bar,
The praying mantis ignores streetlights and no smoking signs,
The praying mantis does not hear what you have to say,
The praying mantis is the other side of the story,
The praying mantis loves a hammer with sturdy, curved claw,
The praying mantis will have lunch when he's done with you,
The praying mantis is a close, personal friend of Sammy Davis Jr.,
The praying mantis directs traffic until it's an atonal film score,
The praying mantis says nothing but means volumes,
The praying mantis cured cooties and shared it with no one...

The litany went on another sixty lines until the absurdity grew tiresome, or my imagination failed, or both, but the point is that it was interesting to witness the momentum one could get attributing huge potential to things of seeming small consequence. I was interested in how the praying mantis could, by his lack of interaction with the larger human world, could seem, given the colliding box car cadence, seem a larger, more powerful force, one mere mortal should respect lest his restraint fall and said insect really show us what for. I had been thinking of every cliche portrayal of hip and badass cool I had come across, from junkie jazz geniuses, the Beats, white Negros and tortured renditions of existential cool; the sort of man who is so in tune with himself-in-the-world that he is privy to great amounts of power, but that power is withheld because there is no need for an ostentatious display. In other words, a state so slippery that attempts to describe it accurately result in growing amounts of absurdity, some of it baffling. Smart, it seems, wants the habits of his cuddly kitty to embody something purposeful with the divine, to reveal a connection with a heavenly agenda that our intellect prevents us from sensing much of the time but which a cat, with senses tuned like delicate instruments, can pick up on and be affected by.

For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon
**his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

There is a belief that there are absolutely no coincidences in God's Universe, that nothing, nothing at all happens my mistake, that what people and creatures do is, to a greater or lesser degree, the result of a divine intervention against our baser natures. One can see why Smart was inspired by his cat, cats being a creature that, while domesticated, still seem independent, engaged with invisible forces, acting in accordance to stimulus humans have little or no capacity to discern.

Smart injects so much purposefulness and subtle intent in his cat's movements that assuming that he's using the creature to mirror his own self-image is unavoidable. Or at least something to consider as one pursues alternative readings. He seems to be writing about his own lazing about, it seems, his own time eating, musing, writing, taking walks, talking, just being rather than doing something more active, productive and profitable. His cat is connected to a spiritual path, or at least he sees hints of it with each lick, purr, furball and odd reclining angle, and mounts an indirect argument that his very being, those times when he is thinking of the connections between stationary objects, the contemplative mode, is precisely how his God intended him to be in this life. Arguing that God didn't want me to work is something I've never had the nerve to try.

Some had commented elsewhere that these might be called "attention poems", something I like the sound of.I like "attention poem", as in a particular thing--creature, object--getting an unusual and, I think, unexpected focus. I'm one of those who thinks that citizens come to know the world through addressing it formally, "knowing", in this sense, being more than a formal recognition of origins, functions, and utility; imbuing a mantis, a cat, a building with qualities alien to them is a way of developing an intimate relationship with those things that might otherwise be problematic. We give them extraordinary qualities through fanciful rhetoric, itself distorted and careening along the tracks, so that they may become ordinary to us. It may be a shamanistic ritual transposed to the written word, an exercise of the will to imagine a realm of metaphysical propositions in an effort to assimilate a bit of the virtue and power the tropes would imply. It would seem a way of making that which is ultimately unknowable--the thing in itself--less of a concern and more an asset in our way through the day, the weeks, the months, the years.

Thinking again, the use of the word "ordinary" doesn't do justice to Smart's evocation. Nothing in the way Smart describes his cat seems an attempt to reduce something in size. A better phrase would have served the point better, which is my feeling that Smart, on some level, was trying to associate himself with the subtle and sublime qualities he attributes to his dear cat and, perhaps, have those same graces become a part of himself. You could also assert that the very act of sensing these things in his pet and having the language mastery to sufficiently align the motion with the spiritual nuance and attending effect comes from an innate quality, that these conditions already exist within Smart. He would be, then, be in the act of recognizing what he already knows, that part of the shared condition within his God's universe that is within himself and the living things around him. Not that the poem is meant to be the beginning of a campaign toward universal spiritual suffrage for all creatures great and small, but his close reading of Jeoffry's manner offers an enticing clue to his greater cosmological sense.