So what else was he going to call it, asked one reviewer of the big new Bruce Springsteen autobiography, Born to Run. “Born to Run,” as you may know, was the title song of the 1975 album that put Springsteen on the-covers of Time and Newsweek, whence he became the free-wheeling, hard-touring American hero we know today. But as often happens with this man of the people, the song is trickier than it appears — the lyric more about feeling trapped than breaking free, the music an exhilarating up that’s all about escape. You could say it’s too grand — Springsteen cites rebel-rousing guitar twanger Duane Eddy, operatic rockabilly Roy Orbison, and convicted megalomaniac Phil Spector as inspirations. But its grandeur is subsumed by the layered momentum of 85mph drums, blood-rousing piano, and tinkling glockenspiel. Is it true, as Springsteen feverishly declares, that he and Wendy plan to die together in their “suicide machines”? Only metaphorically, the music insists. They were born to run again — and then again.

Of course, Springsteen could have chosen a parallel title more in keeping with his grandiose side: Born in the U.S.A., after the title song of the 1984 album he went deca-platinum on, which framed a dark antiwar lyric inside a solemn, deceptively martial groove. Although soon misprised by Ronald Reagan and lesser liars, it became the Ur-source all the Springsteen books whose titles sport phrases like “American poet,” “American song,” “American soul,” and the inevitable “American dream.” Yet Springsteen still called his autobio Born to Run, and properly so — he’s not really a pretentious guy, and anyway, the title serves to emphasize a running metaphor. More times than I had the wit to count, he feels compelled to get on his motorcycle or in his car and race around this U.S.A. he was born in, often for days or even weeks at a time. Then he comes home, generally in a better mood. After 30-plus years of psychotherapy, he’s still running.

That’s right, psychotherapy. By now even his most ardent fans have figured out that their hero isn’t just a fun-loving bundle of energy fronting three-hour concerts that exhilarate you for your money, and in 2012, David Remnick honored his complexity with a massive New Yorker profile in which therapy played a crucial role. But Born to Run doubles down on the gambit. It reads like it was written by an analysand — he thanks his shrink by name, in the text rather than the acknowledgments — and that’s good. This is someone who’s thought a lot about his upbringing, and not just the brooding father sitting in the dark kitchen with his six-pack and smokes who was a fixture of his stage patter from the beginning.

Far more incisive than any biographer’s version, Springsteen’s account of his early years — say pre-Beatlemania, which hit when he was 14 — lasts over 50 pages. Although his parents both worked, his mother steadily as a legal secretary and his father usually as whatever he could get, to call the Springsteens lower-middle-class would be pushing it: when he was young, a single kerosene stove provided all the heat in the house. Yet his mother came from money even if it was damaged money — her thrice-married father was a lawyer who did three years in Sing Sing for embezzlement and held court thereafter in a proverbial house on the hill. But it’s even more striking that his paternal grandmother was young Bruce’s primary caregiver, indulging him so unstintingly that he refused to live with his parents even when he reached school age, sleeping down the block in his grandmother’s bed with his grandfather exiled to a cot across the room. “It was a place where I felt an ultimate security, full license and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love. It ruined me and it made me.”

There are no typical childhoods anyway, but this part of the book, which I wish was even longer, cracks through the working-class/South Jersey typology that has long encrusted Springsteen’s myth. It’s weird. And it’s written. Put aside your literary preconceptions and taste the two sentences I just quoted. They’re a mite awkward, the three commaless adjectives barely in control. But they make a big point loud and clear. Autobiographer Springsteen doesn’t command the brash fuck-you eloquence of rock memoirists Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell, each quite distinct yet all of a piece in their aesthetic verve and acuity. He’s cornier. But there’s a life to his prose that such high-IQ rock autobiographers as Pete Townshend and Bob Mould don’t come near, a life redolent of the colloquial concentration and thematic sweep of his songwriting. Sure he bloviates sometimes. But the book moves and carries you along.

In Remnick’s profile, Springsteen’s manager-for-life, intellectual mentor, and dear friend Jon Landau (who as the world’s wealthiest former rock critic could have supported more pages, though he gets his share) calls Springsteen “the smartest person I’ve ever known.” Intimates could probably say the same of Dylan, Smith, Hell, for that matter Townshend and Mould. But never think Springsteen has less brain power than these art heroes. Insofar as his book is corny, that’s a conscious aesthetic choice he’s made for the entirety of his career. It’s just that as he’s matured he’s gotten more conscious about it — and even smarter. Sure he’s all about Jersey, as he should be. But his first Jersey was the late-’60s one, where a hospital in Neptune refused to treat the head injury of a long-haired teen named Bruce who came in after a serious motorcycle accident — there are outsiders everywhere, and the longhair gravitated to them and knows he owes them. Moreover, he tenders many thanks to Greenwich Village — as a human being, because it bristled with life-changing alternatives to Jersey’s manifold limitations, and as an artist, because its poesy-spouting singer-songwriters and bohemian esprit lured him far enough away from his home turf to reflect on it with perspective.

Born to Run is a true autobiography, a thorough factual account of the author’s life until now. But since it’s an artist’s autobiography, it can’t do that job of work without telling us stuff about his art. For some this might mean the 12 out of 79 chapters whose italicized titles match those of albums he deems worthy of individual attention, which I found merely useful except as regards his overrated post-9/11 The Rising, which indicates that much of it was written pre-attack and then retrofitted to the catastrophe New Jersey’s poet laureate felt compelled to address, where the much sharper 2012 Wrecking Ball was protest music from its conception. Others will savor the celebrity gossip that’s always a selling point of these books — Sinatra knowing a paisan when he sees one, or “the GREATEST GARAGE BAND IN THE WORLD” prepping his “Tumbling Dice” cameo at their 2012 Newark show with a single five-minute rehearsal space run-through that blows his fanboy mind. But for me both were dwarfed by his reflections on persona and performance.

Never in Born to Run does Springsteen claim the mantle of “authenticity” he’s forever saddled with. “In the second half of the twentieth century, `authenticity’ would be what you made of it, a hall of mirrors,” he says, but also, mirror fans: “Of course I thought I was a phony — that is the way of the artist — but I also thought I was the realest thing you’d ever seen.” And if you’d prefer your analysis straighter, there’s: “I, who’d never done a week’s worth of manual labor in my life (hail, hail rock ‘n’ roll!), put on a factory worker’s clothes, my father’s clothes, and went to work.” No matter how you slice it, it’s an act, or to use a word he loves, a show: “You don’t TELL people anything, you SHOW them, and let them decide.” To convince them, he works hard, Jack, exerting himself as unrelentingly as any manual laborer, because only the audience’s boundary-less love can satisfy that deep, ruinous emotional hunger. Yet what you think you see is not necessarily what you’re getting. The book’s most dazzling single passage is a phantasmagoric two-page recollection of the frighteningly self-conscious “multiple personalities” who battled within him during his very first European performance, at London’s Hammmersmith Odeon in 1975. Ordeal over, he returns to his hotel room “underneath a cloud of black crows” and feeling like a failure. Only he was wrong — the performance became legendary, and when he worked up the guts to watch film of it 30 years later all he saw was “a tough but excellent set.”

Impinging even on these aesthetic reflections, however, you’ll notice the familial history that provides not only this full autobiography’s substratum but its true subject. You may want more about, say, Pete Townshend, who is quoted fruitfully on how the rock band makes de facto family members out of people you happen to meet as a kid, and his old pal Steve Van Zandt gets plenty of ink, as do departed saxophone colossus Clarence Clemons and departed organ grinder Danny Federici. But Springsteen leaves no doubt that although the show is his lifeline and he may die running, his love life in the broadest sense is what got 509 pages out of him. Offstage he’s been loved and loving from an early age, but between his unconditional grandmother and his silent father, learning to stick at it has been quite the sentimental education. Clearly Dr. Myers was his best teacher until he finally settled on homegirl turned backup singer Patty Scialfa in 1988 and married her in 1991. But although he’s not bragging, much of the credit redounds to him.

Full autobiographies generally portray elders more acutely than youngers for the obvious reason that the elders are dead — they can’t stop you and their feelings won’t get hurt. But in Born to Run, Bruce’s father Doug ends up packing more mojo than Van Zandt or Landau or Clemons or even Scialfa, and that’s unusual. The story returns to Doug when it doesn’t have to — no one would have missed that fishing trip. The account of his senescence, when he was finally diagnosed with not one but two major psychological disorders, is topped off with a bravura description of his body — “elephant stumps for calves and clubs for feet” — in the final hours of his life. Which in turn is topped by a briefer tribute to Bruce’s miraculous mother, still radiating “a warmth and exuberance the world as it is may not merit” as she navigates Alzheimer’s at 91.

Scialfa doesn’t resonate as vividly as his parents — discretion no doubt intervened, and is presumably why the redolently homely divorce case naming Bruce as a respondent goes unmentioned. Nonetheless, she’s the silent hero of this book. Springsteen was never a dog, but from his teens he was a serial monogamist with lapses who acknowledges with less vanity than chagrin that he went through a lot of women, including his first wife, the model Julianne Phillips. Scialfa benefited from Dr. Myers’s spadework as well as the failed Phillips experiment. She’s no beacon of calm because that wouldn’t work at all — she’d better the hell stand up to him. But she gives her husband the superstar version of a normal life he’s clearly craved since a childhood that taught him he couldn’t have one — a life both his maturing art and his everyman politics impelled him toward. Even the three kids are richly described, with discretion deftly served by focusing on their very different early years — in a passage few autobiographers would adjudge worth their literary while, Scialfa jawbones him first into getting up with the kids and learning to make pancakes and then into giving young Sam his late-night bottle-and-story. As he puts it: “She inspired me to be a better man, turning the dial way down on my running while still leaving me room to move.”

Born to run, yet happy with room to move. The artist’s story is worth telling. But so is the man’s.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2eldqUp

Hollywood loves the mythology of gambling, tough guys sweating it out over poker, reckless losers with a dream losing it all at craps. It comes with a built-in arc of suspense, a contest made obvious. Literature has always had a tougher time with it — many a work of fiction includes a card-playing wastrel, but the career of a gambler has never yet been the core of a great novel. Perhaps that explains why Jonathan Lethem tries it out in A Gambler’s Anatomy. Perhaps he saw a way to crack the nut, and made a big bet.

Alexander Bruno, the itinerant adult son of a Northern California cult escapee, comes to us in this book already adept at his chosen game: backgammon. He is “approaching fifty” and “aware that his appeal was that of a ruined glamour.” His game skills are still very sharp, so sharp that he is mostly looking for marks, not true opponents. In the words of his gambling manager (Lethem seems to have invented the concept), most of the people Bruno plays with are “whales,” rich men who like the thrill of playing with a professional and don’t mind losing a few grand in the process.

We know that Bruno is running low on cash in the early pages of the novel. Something has happened “in Singapore.” We also know that he suddenly has a blot in his vision. He collapses, and a visit to the hospital reveals that the blot is evidence of a cancerous tumor wedged behind his eyes. Most surgeons could never remove it, Bruno is told, but there is one who could, one who just so happens to be located in San Francisco. That’s also where a frenemy — who brought Bruno low in Singapore — happens to live. “Northern California, where Bruno least wished to return,” the narrator intones.

The Saturday-matinee sound of that sentence is plainly intentional, of a piece with the mood Lethem maintains throughout A Gambler’s Anatomy. The men in this book are seedy archetypes, masterminds or bumblers. Everyone is a pawn for someone else. The world is two-dimensional, but it is self-consciously so, stylish but also stylized. For example, one of the book’s two women characters is literally named Mädchen, the German word for “maiden.” Just in case you’re wondering who will play the damsel in distress.

All of that is, of course, deliberate. Lethem is one of those writers who people often say “transcends” the genre elements of his work. That phrase doesn’t quite capture it, though, because Lethem is too fond of genre tropes to want to vault above them. His previous novels spanned the straightforward detective-novel-with-a-Tourette’s-twist Motherless Brooklyn and the bildungsroman-turned-superhero fable The Fortress of Solitude. In each of those books, Lethem wasn’t so much elevating the genre elements to literary status as proving that genre elements had literary value in and of themselves. He evidently loved comic books. He evidently loved detective novels. His books were love letters to those genres, not attempts to leave them behind.

A Gambler’s Anatomy, though, complicates the scheme, in part because one senses that Lethem has nowhere near the affection for gambling stories that he has for these other literary genres. There are some neat metafictional elements here, most significantly the fact that Bruno believes he can read the minds of others, a power that gamblers would surely kill for. But it is not clear to the reader that this is actually so, given how often he seems totally unaware of the ways in which others are manipulating him.

Those formal flashes make the book very entertaining to read. There are also surpassingly beautiful passages of prose, especially in the section about Bruno’s surgery. Lethem makes such evocative use of the medical terms for various parts of the face — the philtrum, the arachnoid tissue, the nasopharynx — that the reader hardly ends up caring that she doesn’t know what the words mean. The process, too, is so elegantly described that the necessary vagueness about the technical details never feels lost. “The face now began its slow journey to reassembly,” Lethem writes. “The displaced parts clamored for it, in their voiceless fashion.”

But what, in the end, is all of this about? After reading A Gambler’s Anatomy twice it’s hard to say what Lethem is hoping the reader will take away. There are no characters to love. There are no real philosophical questions posed. At the risk of using a cliché that Lethem himself is far above using, this book lacks any obvious heart. It is a tale of a man caught up in a scheme that is not his own making, a man who believes he has the power to know everything but doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. And while it’s fun to follow Bruno along, it’s fun to think about him and the small strange world he inhabits, it vanishes soon after reading, leaving only the tiniest trace of smoke. We are left looking to know a face, but find ourselves merely in awe of the surgeon who put it together.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2dkEy8p

They were reprobates and ruffians; audacious freethinkers and eccentrics. Some were short a full deck, and others were plug-uglies, dark and cruel, who “blurred the distinction between rough justice and cold-blooded killing.” To Britain’s military traditionalists during the Second World War, the Special Air Service — SAS for short — were “the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons”: impertinent saboteurs, assassins, and damned unsporting.

Damned right, says Ben Macintyre in his new book, Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit that Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War. The author of A Spy Among Friends and Agent Zigzag sketches a rumbustious, polychromatic group portrait of a young corps of unconventional fighters, more interested in the war than in the army. For what they did — infiltrate themselves behind enemy lines, there to wreak as much havoc on the Axis forces as their imaginations could muster — required self-reliance and instantaneous decision making. (For their own part, the SAS referred to the regular army that snubbed them as “freemasons of mediocrity.”)

One of the remarkable aspects of Macintyre’s authorized-if-not-official history is that he keeps a cool hand on the theatrics (the availability of daring encounters simply begs for pyrotechnics) while maintaining an edge-of-the-seat narrative. The exploits have an authentic feel — he was able to work from primary source material, which certainly helped — and it is no easy thing to capture the spell of dire circumstance and distill it in such a way to be experiential to those who’ve never spent a moment wondering where in the darkness that sniper is. The writing gives us a taste of today’s Deltas and SEALs, where this type of activity is carried out numerous times, every night, somewhere in the world. Clandestine fighting is nothing new, but its modern manifestation was the brainstorm of an irresponsible, gadabout Scottish aristocrat.

David Stirling dreamed up the SAS while recuperating from a parachuting accident. Unschooled but fascinated by parachuting’s military prospects, Stirling simply improvised a test run. Three men threw themselves out of a totally inappropriate aircraft: first a Mr. Lewes, then a Mr. D’Arcy, then Mr. Stirling. “D’Arcy later wrote: ‘I was surprised to see Lieutenant Stirling pass me in the air.’ ” (Another of Rogue Heroes’ pleasures are the quotes Macintyre pulls from the diaries and letters of the SAS men.) Stirling, whose chute had fouled, must have been surprised, too, and unhappily. Yet, bed rest following that mishap gave Stirling opportunity to hatch a plan: drop small, highly mobile groups of raiders behind enemy lines to conduct improvisational sabotage and ambushes, sow confusion, sap morale. They would have to be fearless, crazy, or both, but they could be instrumental in disrupting Axis plans. They would also provide what might have been an even greater purpose: “War was not just a matter of bombs and bullets, but of capturing imaginations.” Stirling’s combination of daring and romance made him the perfect Scarlet Pimpernel. He was the personification of T. E. Lawrence’s words: “Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool.” That, and Stirling’s successful wooing of Winston Churchill to form his unit.

Macintyre goes through each SAS operation, long on details while improbably light on his feet: “The SAS had fought desert war, guerrilla war, and conventional war [to their dismay], a war in forests, mountains, and fields, on freezing snow, clinging mud, and baking sand.” They were the sharp end of the stick. One day it would be Thermopylae, with a handful of irregulars fighting off an entire Panzer division; the next day, they would be Hannibal in reverse, hightailing it over freezing mountain passes in northern Italy. There are also the particulars, which Macintyre attends to assiduously, such as the Libyan Taxi Service (the Long Range Desert Group, who ferried the SAS around the German flanks) or the two rowboats that passed in the Mediterranean night, one full of SAS men, the other manned by Patrick Leigh Fermor, “on a mission to link up with the Cretan partisans.” They “‘exchanged shadow greetings’ in the twilight, and paddled on.” These little intimacies lighten tales burdened by scenes of death and carnage.

The men of the SAS, and the men and women they work with and against, take the limelight in what heretofore was a shadow play. If Macintyre cannot look into their minds, with the exception of a few who survive today, he can read their actions, pick up on their frictions, rivalries, and friendships. They become close enough in view for their deaths to sting and their successes to occasion a hoot of gratification. They are filthy, happy, and dangerous, one an ice cream maker, others including a potato farmer from the Channel Islands, a bagpiper, an international rugby star, and more Scottish aristos than there are crags in the Highlands. As well, Macintyre watches as the war grinds on and even those with a predilection for risk wear thin. Internal demons were gaining ground: “Something was crumbling within.” Peace would not come too soon for the SAS.

In the end, Macintyre doesn’t have to sing their praises. He lets others do it. Consider the most starched and prickly of all: General Bernard Montgomery, the crustiest of the old-schoolers, who looked on the SAS with a jaundiced eye, but still . . . “The boy Stirling is mad. Quite, quite mad. However, in war there is often a place for mad people.”

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2eeChIA

Ed. Note: With the announcement this morning that Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, we are re-running this 2010 conversation between critic Greil Marcus, historian Sean Wilentz — both of whom have devoted significant portions of their careers to Dylan’s work — and the BNR’s James Mustich about Dylan as artist, historian and cultural icon.

“The pieces collected here,”writes Greil Marcus in the introduction to his just-published new book, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings1968-2010, “begin with a rumor and end with a presidential election. There are reactions in the moment and long looks back for undiscovered stories. But more than anything there is an attempt to remain part of the conversation that Bob Dylan’s work has always created around itself: You have to hear this. Is he kidding? I can’t believe this. You won’t believe this—”

For more than four decades, Marcus has proven himself to be one our most astute critics of music and literature. In seminal  works ranging from Mystery Train (1975) to The Shape of Things toCome (2006), he has opened our ears and eyes to the intuitions and  implications of the culture taking shape around us. His friend and colleague Sean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, has illuminated with uncommon acumen the early and later years of our republic in works such as The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, awarded the Bancroft Prize in 2005, and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (2008).

In his newest book, Bob Dylan in America,published last month, Wilentz applies his alertness to the themes of American culture, his historical scholarship, and his personal perspective on Dylan’s career to create a remarkable dual portrait of the singer and his country. Opening—as have many of his subject’s performances in the past few years—with an invocation of Aaron Copland, Bob Dylan in America then traces Dylan’s career forward from his first arrival in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s through his artistic resurgence in the1990s, and, even more tellingly, backward through a pageant of musical influences that seem, over the past half-century, to have inhabited the singer’s voice,where they still abide.

Wilentz’s book stems, in his own words, from its author’s curiosity “about when, how, and why Dylan picked up on certain forerunners, as well as certain of his own contemporaries; about the milieu in which those influences lived and labored and how they had evolved; and about how Dylan, ever evolving himself, finally combined and transformed their work.What do those tangled influences tell us about America? What do they tell us about Bob Dylan? What does America tellus about Bob Dylan—and what does Dylan’s work tell us about America?”Marcus’s book, an unparalleled retrospective of one listener’s immediate encounters with Dylan’s music through the years that coheres into a powerful,satisfying, and frequently revelatory narrative, might well be said to ask—and,in its own way, answer—the very same question.

Early in October, it was my great pleasure to talkabout Dylan and his work with both Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz. For thisjoint interview, Greil and I were in a studio in New York, while Sean was onthe telephone in California, lending the affair an accidentally appropriate nation-spanning breadth. What follows is an edited transcript of ourc onversation. —James Mustich

James Mustich: Let’s start with a simple question: you each have a major new book on Bob Dylan, and the two of them have been published nearly simultaneously. How long ago were you aware that this was going to happen, and what were your feelings about it?

Sean Wilentz: About appearing simultaneously, or about two major books appearing about Bob Dylan? I’m delighted about the latter. It’s great. Greil and I are old buddies and collaborators. And to have two different books about Bob Dylan’s work is, I think, terrific. Greil, what do you think?

Greil Marcus: Well, it was a big shock to me when you called and brought this up quite a number of months ago. I said, “No-no-no, my book is coming out in the spring of 2011,” and you said, “that’s not what it says online.”So I looked and you were right. I called my publisher and they said, “Oh,we moved it up; didn’t we tell you?” I said, “No.” And I said, “When do I have to have the manuscript in?” They said, “Oh, in about a month.” I said, “I haven’t started work on it yet—that’s impossible.”They put the thing on a rush schedule. I remember talking to you about it andsaying, “We should do this like one of these old Ace paperbacks—like William Burroughs’ Junkie, where you have that on one side and on the other side, reversed, Narcotics Agent—and sell them as one big book.”

SW: Right.

GM: But it wasn’t too practical.

SW: Unfortunately, Ace has gone the way of all flesh. But it is kind of weird. Greil and I are,you might say, brothers beneath the skin, but reviewers do all kinds of strange things in comparing people’s work, and that can lead to craziness. But other than that, I think it’s a great day for Bob Dylan myself.

GM: Ideally, there will be a conversation sparked by both of these books in the ether between them. People who follow Bob Dylan, people who listen to him, people who are just now finding out about him—they love to talk about both the person and the work.

SW: Right.

GM: If these books contribute to that conversation, that’s their real life.

SW: That’s why I’m saying it’s great. And it is sort of odd. Dylan himself has been hard at work the last few years, doing all kinds of stuff, and giving people plenty to talk about. I do get the feeling that there’s a great resurgence of interest in his work, not only by the Dylanophiles, but by others as well. Do you feel this, Greil, too?

GM: Well, I can tell you two stories. One is that in San Francisco recently Dylan did a concert that was only announced the day before: no advance ticket sales, low price, you had to show up and get in line. This was so unusual that the local TV stations covered it, and, in all the footage I saw, the people waiting inline were in their teens, twenties. It was just remarkable. In the course I’m teaching right now at the New School, which is on old American music (but Dylan is all through it), there are people who come to the class with some or even a lot of knowledge of Dylan, but many who come with none, and who are asking, “Where has this guy been all my life?” or “Where has my life been all thist ime?”

SW: Right.

GM: At the very beginning of the class I show a clip from the last episode of The Sopranos, in which worthless,no-good son A. J. is sitting in an SUV with his new girlfriend. They’re parked out in the woods, and she sticks in a tape of “It’s Alright, Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding).” A. J. has never heard Bob Dylan before, and he says, “God, this guy is very good.” And she says, “It’s hard to believe this song was written so long ago,” as if it was the nineteenth century or something. I love that. It just sucks them in.

JM: I don’t know what critics will say, but, as a reader, it was wonderful to be reading the two books in tandem. They conversed with one another, amplified one another, informed the listening that one naturally does when reading so much about Dylan. It was a delight to have both of them in front of me at the same time. In different ways you explore similar themes and then take them indifferent directions. I agree that having them both appear at the same time is wonderful for Bob Dylan and for people interested in him. But it’s also wonderful for people interested in history, not just musical history but the kind of idea of history which courses through both your books.

Let me ask you both about your first encounters with Dylan and his work. Greil, your initial critical appraisal of Bob Dylan, as you write in the introduction to your book, was face to face with him in 1963. I’ll quote from the book: “‘You were terrific,’ I said, never at a loss for something original to say.” But he apparently did not feel the same way about his performance that day. [LAUGHING]

GM: That’s right. I had gone to see Joan Baez at a show in a field in New Jersey.  She was someone I often saw in the Bay Area in my hometown of Menlo Park, California. I had gone with a girlfriend. And Baez brings out this guy, a very scruffy, dusty looking character—and he sang a couple of songs, and I didn’t even notice the rest of the show. The song that stuck in my mind was “With God On Our Side.” It was one of those musical events—and they happen every once in a while—when you hear a song for the first time, maybe on the radio, maybe not, and you instantly remember all the words. The melody is seared into your mind. You sing the song in your head without even wishing to. And that was what was happening for the rest of the concert.

Afterwards, I saw him squatting in the dirt, trying to light a cigarette, and I went up to him and I said, as you mentioned, “You were terrific.” He didn’t even look up.He said, “No, man. I was shit. I was just shit.” I learned something right at that moment about the difference between someone in the audience and somebody performing; they have very different standards. The work reaches the performer and reaches the listener in radically different ways. I was thrilled by that notion. I hadn’t even caught the guy’s name. I had to ask somebody, “That guy over there, do you know who he is?” “Yeah, Bob Die-lan.” I said, “Oh, ok.”

JM: Sean,you first saw him perform in 1964, at Philharmonic Hall, right?

SW: Yes,a year after Greil’s encounter. Although by that time, I certainly knew very much who he was, and everybody in the audience did. It was in Philharmonic Hall in the then new Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, which was the premier showcase for high art music. I mean, it was the home of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and here were all of these kids, coming out of the subway, crawling into this temple of high culture (with such bad acoustics,unfortunately), and listening to this scruffy downtown folk-singer.

My Dad and his brother owned a bookshop in Greenwich Village, at the corner of 8^th Street and MacDougal, which was a kind of literary crossroads of the 1950s and 1960sfor the downtown literary scene, and just down the block, down MacDougal Street, were the Folklore Center and the Gaslight and all the places where Bob Dylan was first coming up. So as a kid (I’m somewhat younger than Greil, and I’m ten years younger than Bob Dylan), I was aware of all of that, and the only thing that was strange about it is that I thought it was all very normal. I thought that this was what growing up in America was like, hanging around with these people.

GM: It’s interesting you say that, Sean. Because Milosz [Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet and the 1980 Nobel Laureate] once said something only a foreigner with unbridled contempt for the United States could say. He said, “The only two places one can really be free in America are Greenwich Village and Berkeley.” So we touch each other from distant points. [LAUGHS]

SW:  I think Liam Clancy once said that you came to Greenwich Village to be able to take your clothes off—he was coming from Ireland, of course. So I grew up in some of this, and my Dad scored a couple of free tickets to that concert. But I was very aware of what was happening.

The concert itself surprised everybody, because he not only sang his more familiar songs—I can’t remember offhand if he sang “With God On Our Side,” but he sang songs of that era, his very early political ones. But he also sang for the first time in New York, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Right, Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding),” and “Gates of Eden,” which just blew people away. So I knew some of what was coming, but boy, did I not know what was coming as well.

GM: That was true at all the Dylan shows that I went to in ’64 or ’65. He would come to Berkeley two or three times a year, and at every single show he would perform songs that hadn’t been recorded, that hadn’t been released, and they often had a drama and a tension—some of it coming from him, some of it coming from the audience—this frisson of uncertainty that so often produced the same effect that I had when I first heard him sing “With God On Your Side.” You walked away knowing the song.

SW: And there was the feeling that he was at least six months to a year ahead of everybody in the audience, and no one quite knew what was going to happen. This is well before his decision to perform with a band and to go electric, as it were; people make a lot of that, and it was an important moment to be sure. But that tension that Greil talks about was there well before that happened. The flux that he was in, the rapidity with which he was expanding his own musical and literary vocabulary—all of that long antedated “Like a Rolling Stone.”

GM: There’s something that always mystified me as somebody from the West Coast, and I write about it in my book, in a piece on Todd Haynes’s movie from 2007, I’m Not There. I never could understand—it was impossible for me to get my head around—what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan’s beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio. Everybody I knew, and myself too, was thinking, “What took you so long? What were you waiting for?” It was only when I saw Todd Haynes’s restaging of that moment at Newport, a fictional restaging, that I understood. Because in that moment, the way the scene is presented in that film, it’s so loud, it’s so harsh, it’s so overwhelming—suddenly you’re in a new world. You were sitting on a seat but the seat isn’t there any more, and you have no idea where you are. And I realized for the first time that if I’d been in that crowd, I’m not sure how I would have responded. I wouldn’t have responded with any kind of ideological yes or no. It just would have been “What’s happened?” Whereas, when I first saw Dylan play with the Hawks, who would later be known as the Band, in December of 1965, it was the most glorious thing imaginable.

SW: Thisis one of the differences between Greenwich Village and Berkeley. In the Village there was this ideological element that was very strong. It was therein 1964, when he released Another Side of Bob Dylan. I talk about this in Bob Dylan in America. The reaction from some of the older commissars on the folk Left, like Irwin Silber, was in response to Dylan’s music moving fromthe more political, Woody Guthrie-esque kind of songs to “inner-directed songs,” as Silber put it. There was a feeling that Bob Dylan was becoming something different from the Bob Dylan that they wanted; what they wanted wast he new Woody Guthrie.

And it wasn’t just the commissars. There were lots of people then, lots of young people who truly identified politically, spiritually, and emotionally with that Bob Dylan as a continuation of the tradition, as the troubadour of the revolution. When he started moving away from that, the seismographs started going off, as early as1964. And when he went electric—I was at the Forest Hills concert in ’65, just after the Newport business…

GM: And it was close to a riot.

SW: And it was organized, or semi-organized. I think Al Kooper [Dylan’s keyboardist at the time] said something like, “It’s the revolt of the Beatniks; we’ve got to get out of here.” He was knocked from his stool and all the rest of it. But that was a purposeful attack because Dylan had betrayed the Left, yes, but more than the Left—they felt he had betrayed a whole sensibility. People had become so identified with Bob Dylan, a certain Bob Dylan, that his move away from that image they had of him forced them to do the one thing that they didn’t want to do, which is to question themselves. And when they questioned themselves, they went crazy. They went bonkers. It was as if the world that they had come to understand as true, as wonderful, as pure,was suddenly being snatched away from them by the very figure that they had identified with. That’s why it was all felt so powerfully.

GM: That’s something I finally came to understand, but only after learning that when Dylan reached England—on this same tour that caused such a furor in parts of the United States—the controversy and the conflict, and the smell of violence and fear in the concert halls, was unlike anything here. When I found out that the Communist Party in England, which ran a whole network of folk music clubs up and down Britain, had organized and recruited people to go to Dylan concerts,to try to disrupt them, to stage mass walkouts—then I knew there was something going on here that I didn’t have a clue about.

JM: In your book, Greil, you write: “Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people’s responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it—I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it,through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.”

Having read you on Dylan’s music over the years, in many of the pieces now collected in the new book, it seems to me that you really have gotten inside the music in an extraordinary way, and you’ve discovered a whole country there, the invisible republic which you’ve written so eloquently about. Was there something about Dylan’s work in particular that made this kind of approach to writing about music something you could reach for?

GM: What always attracted me to Dylan, and what has sustained me as a Dylan listener, or has always continued to surprise me, is his voice, the way he sings, the way he wraps his voice around certain words, the way he backs off from melodic moments, the way he moves forward to grab something in a song that, were anybody else performing it, they would have no idea it was even there. There is in that voice, at its best moments, 50 states and 400 years. That voice opens up many, many doors, and most of those doors open up onto the past, onto many very different pasts.

Sean is a professional historian. I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice. But that voice calls up many shadows, many ghosts, many forebears, and sometimes those people are very shadowy and sometimes they are absolutely distinct. It’s in the way that he rewrites,reframes, re-sings old songs, with a knowledge of American music that may be beyond that of any archivist. I just mean factual knowledge: who sang what,when; and who they played with; and what label they were on; and what were the conditions of the recording; and why did that person choose this song as opposed to that one—I mean, that kind of knowledge. All of that manages to transmit itself when he sings and when he plays, in a way that takes away any burden of having to know something or having to track any fact down, and allows you totravel to other places and to other times as you listen, and never lose your sense that you’re lucky to be alive right now and listening to this at that moment.

JM: Sean,you and Greil collaborated on the editing of a collection of essays about ballads, The Rose and the Briar. Throughout that book, there’s an assumption that there’s a weight of history carried in the melodies and the lyrics of the ballads that the various writers celebrate and discuss. In Bob Dylan in America, you find that same kind of weight in the work of a contemporary artist. As I was reading your book, I wondered how your appreciation of Dylan’s work, and your placing it in that kind of context, has been informed by your historical training and scholarship. Has the one enriched the other, and vice versa?

SW: Sure. I wanted very much to ask historical questions about Dylan’s work, and to find circuits and webs of connection which might not be so apparent—may not even be fully apparent to Dylan himself, as much as he knows (and Greil is right—his understanding of the music is encyclopedic). But there are circuits and circuits, and I wanted to try and reconstruct those as best I could. Those are historical questions—they are the kinds of things that we as historians of culture, politics, what-have-you, do all the time. It’s just that Dylan turned out to be a far richer source for all of that than most of the people I study.

The question of the ballads, though, and why Dylan was drawn to them so early on, is interesting. In Bob Dylan in America I recount a scene where he’s at the White Horse Tavern with Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, and they’re singing these lusty songs of Irish rebellion. Dylan is knocked out by them, and he wants to try and write that kind of song, but write it in a way that’s relevant to an American experience. He describes this nicely in his memoir, Chronicles. He decides to go up to the New York Public Library and actually read microfilm, which in those days is what historians did; now we do it all on computers. But he actually did historical research,reading old newspapers from the 1840s and 1850s. There, he said, he found the template for everything he would write. It came out of the history of the United States as it was entering into an apocalyptic war that would eventually rewrite the Constitution and redeem America’s original sin—or at least start the redemption of America’s original sin. That is a historical moment that, ashe said, became the template for everything that he would write after that.

Of course, he’s writing about a great deal more than that. But he writes at the same time (remember this is in the early ’60s) about how the distinctions between the past and the present seem to collapse. He would be walking down the street, and other kinds of ghosts, real ghosts, the ghosts of Greenwich Village, would be there: Edgar Allan Poe would be there, Walt Whitman. Then he would be hearing a song about the death of James Garfield, and it would seem as if it were a contemporary event. In other words, he lived in a zone in which he realized that this was not so far back—no, he realized, this is very much alive; it’s very much here.

One of the marks of Dylan’s genius is the ability to shuffle time and space like a deck of cards. He can make the past sound like the present and the present sound like the past. In doing this, he is a great, great historian, like Greil says. But Dylan also does something that historians can’t do, which is to actually commingle the past and the present in ways that are astonishing.

JM: There’sa wonderful sentence in your book, towards the end—I think you’re writing about“Love and Theft”—where you say that what Dylan was doing “was trying to create a magic zone where itwas 1933 and 1863 and 2006 all at once, and where the full complexity of humannature might be glimpsed.”

SW: Exactly.

JM: That’s beautiful.

GM: And yet, he can also shuffle those cards that Sean is talking about in a single song, and erase the boundaries between forms of music, ideas of music, musical traditions that other people cling to, and cling to sometimes very desperately,whether they do so in a scholarly way, in a community way, or in a way that islike tradition. I’m thinking of “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” which is a song from 1964. It’s about a farmer from South Dakota who kills his whole family because he can’t feed them. He shoots his wife and his five children and himself. The song, as form, is blues, first line repeated twice, then a third line, over and over and over again. The melody and the structure of the song isfrom the old English-American ballad, “Pretty Polly,” one of the most distinctive cadences in American music. But the voice, the point of view, the sense of bitterness is Dylan’s own; the story as he tells it builds momentum.He puts you inside the farmer’s mind. He keeps referring to the man’s brain and what’s happening in his brain until it’s boiling. It builds this tension, and you, the listener, realize there has to be a release. It can’t go on like this,and there is no solution. It’s a story that reaches a pitch of complete nihilism, but also empathy. The singer has managed to put himself into the body of the character he’s created, and sing as if he’s telling that story as that person would want his story to be told. That’s the kind of thing, to me, that has sustained Dylan’s career and made it possible for somebody like me or somebody like Sean to devote many pages to it.

You know, Dylan said something to me the only time I met him—other than that 1963 encounter, where we were not exactly formally introduced. This was in 1997, and I had published a book about his Basement Tapes called InvisibleRepublic [reissued in paperback as The Old, Weird America], and he had read it and liked it. As another person once said about that book, it pretended to be about the Basement Tapes,but it was really about Dock Boggs, a great country blues banjo player fromVirginia in the 1920s. The book was full of history, and it was about the kinds of doors that the Basement Tapes songs opened up, and where they could take you.

Dylan and I were introduced. What do you ask a writer? “What are you working on next?”he said. I said, “I don’t really have a project.” He said, “Why don’t you do part two of Invisible Republic? You know, you only scratched the surface.” He could not have been more right.

So it’s that sense that there are so many worlds behind and within the songs to discover and live in,but also this sense of empathy for the people who appear in his songs. Dylan once said, maybe sarcastically, that all of his songs really ended with “Good luck.” But that may be what he says to the people in his songs.

SW: I think that’s right. Greil, what you say about so much happening in the space ofa single song is really important, because it’s not just that he sings different kinds of things, say, on an album, and assembles them all together.Take a more recent song, like “High Water (For Charley Patton).” It begins with the Mississippi-Louisiana floods of 1927, the floods that Charley Patton wrote about in the original “High Water.” That’s established at the beginning. But as you move through the song, you’re moving back to talk about 19^th-century Victorian figures, and Dylan’s asking philosophical questions about materialism and spirituality. Then the next thingy ou know, you’re at the Flood flood; you’re back in Biblical times.

The album in which the song appeared was released on September 11, 2001. He couldn’t have predicted that. But nevertheless, there it was, and when he’s saying, “It’s bad out there, high water everywhere, things are breaking up out there,” it’s about right now, too. So he has the ability in the space of—well, that’s a fairly long song—but in the space of a single song, he has the ability to bring you through epochs of time. It has to do with his, in part, not respecting boundaries. Not just boundaries of style, not just boundaries of genre, which he can mix up in any one song, too (you think you’re listening to rockabilly,and then all of a sudden, you’re back in an old English ballad), but also in terms of understanding the ways in which time actually works and space actually works. He has very, very complicated ideas about that, and they show up in the songs, and they illuminate each of the specifics in extraordinary ways.

He has a wonderful song, “Talkin’ World War 3 Blues,”in which everyone has the same dream: the nuclear holocaust has occurred, and they’re the only one left. They don’t see anybody else around. Everybody realizes finally, “I’m the only one left.” Well, everyone thinks of himself in history that way up to a point. There’s a certain narcissism; we all think we’re special. Dylan breaks through that with extraordinary power, and opens peopleup to think about their place in the world and in the cosmos and in history,much more powerfully than any other writer I know of in recent times.

JM: When he first arrived on the scene, he had a lot of fun trying to create a myth thathe had come out of nowhere like some kind of hobo. But one of the interesting things in reading both of you about him is the recognition of how considered his education was, not only in the music that he came to master, but also—in your book particularly, Sean—in American history. You spoke before about him going to the New York Public Library to read microfilms of Civil War-era newspapers.

And one of the most delightful pieces in Greil’s book is about his tour of Hibbing High School and what he found there. Would you talk about that for a little bit?

GM: I was giving a reading in a bookstore in Berkeley, and somebody asked the oldquestion, “How does Bob Dylan come out of a nowhere town like Hibbing?” This woman stood up, and she was absolutely outraged. She said, “Has anyone here ever been to Hibbing?” Nobody had. She said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This isa town steeped in radical traditions, as every town in the Iron Range has been for a hundred years. This is a town with poetry on the walls, and arguments going on in the streets that people have been having between Wobblies and Communists and Socialists and Social Democrats for a hundred years, and this is the world Bob Dylan came out of.”

So we were there fast. [LAUGHS] We had to see for ourselves. The shock for me, the first shock, was seeing Hibbing High School. I went to a high school that was built in 1951. It was a modern, suburban California high school, a pretty good-looking place—and it was a shack, compared to Hibbing High, which opened in 1924. Hibbing High School is absolutely enormous. It’s the most impressive public building I’ve ever seen outside of Washington, D.C. When Harry Truman met the head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who was from Hibbing, he said, “Oh, I know Hibbing; that’s the place where the high school has gold doorknobs.” And it damn near does. It has a legendary auditorium, which is not like a high school auditorium—it’s like a great opera house. That’s one of the stages where Bob Dylan first performed, and you can imagine him up on that stage and seeing notj ust his high school classmates in the audience, but the whole world before him.

But the most unusual and the most striking thing about our trip to Hibbing High was that during a tour the next day, an organized tour, B. J. Ralston, who had been Bob Dylan’s high school English teacher, was there. He was then in his eighties and he was feeble, but with a completely clear mind. He sat in his old English classroom where he had taught Bob Dylan. Forty or so people crowded into the room, and the notion was we were going to hear him reminisce about Robert—Robert Zimmerman. He mentioned a couple of things.He mentioned that Robert always sat in the seat directly in front of the podium from which he lectured, and he quoted a Bob Dylan song about “You gotta sit up near the teacher if you want to learn anything,” and he was full of pride about that. That was five minutes. But then for the next 20 minutes, he taught a class in poetry to the 40 visitors there. There were many poems he discussed. But he kept returning to the “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. He approached that poem from so many different angles,from so many different points of view, putting an emphasis on one word (there are very, very few words in this poem), putting all the weight on another word (it might be “chicken,”it might be “red,” it might be “rain”), and then opening up the poem as if it were a flower in high speed film.

Forget about the grandeur of the high school. Forget about the magnificence of the auditorium. Think about how rare it is for anyone to encounter a teacher who can do those kinds of things, who can open you up to the notion that there is an infinite amount of meaning and possibility and inspiration in the smallest thing before you.  That’s what this teacher could do. That was the poetry on the walls.  Yes, there is literally poetry chiseled on the walls of Hibbing High School, from Wordsworth and any number of other people, and it’s pretty great stuff. But this was a different kind of poetry.

SW: Also,people forget, as you were saying at the beginning, Greil, about the politicaltraditions that were all around Hibbing. I have a little story in my firstchapter about Aaron Copland, of all people, who stumbles into a Communist Partymeeting in 1934 while staying at Lake Bemidji, which is just west of the MesabiIron Range, not all that far from Hibbing. At that time, that whole part ofMinnesota was full of Finnish Communists and other leftists, whose ideas were verymuch in the air when Bob Dylan was growing up there. Hibbing was a mining townwith very activist workers.

But lots of other thingswere in the air, too. There’s all of the polka music. When people listen toDylan’s Christmas album and are amazed by “Must Be Santa”—well,that comes right out of a soundscape that was very much a part of Hibbing inthe 1940s and 1950s. We often hear about his listening to the Shreveport,Louisiana radio station, but there was a lot more going on in and around Hibbing than people can imagine. There was the circus that was always coming totown. Dylan’s talked about how the circus gave him all kinds of imagery and ideas. He made up myths about the circus when he first came to New York, butthe fact is that it was there and it really did turn him on to certain kinds of entertainment. He was very shrewd about what was going on. He always talked about the freaks in the circus, the bearded ladies and all the rest of it, and how there was an illusion being portrayed, but it was an illusion that was trying to get you to be both feeling superior to these people at the same timeas you were feeling sorry for them. He was very, very alert to performance as ayoung man.

So all of this stuff isgoing on in “nowhere.” And nowhere is not nowhere at all.

JM: You both write in different ways about his memory of all these things and,especially, all these sounds. There’s a line, in your book, Greil, which I love. You call Time Out of Mind “the big night around the campfire Bob Dylan spent with the ghosts of old American music.” And you write wonderfully about Harry Smith and the importance to Dylan of his Anthology of American Folk Music, while Sean goes into many other kinds of othermusic—Aaron Copland, Crosby, Sinatra…

SW: Right.

JM:…and you talk about Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, in which he presented a kind of living history that seems available to him in ways that it’s not available to anyone else.First, because no one else has absorbed it all the way he has, and second because it remains present to Dylan at all times in a singular way. It’s related to his borrowing of phrases and imagery from other sources, which you write about quite well…

SW: Well,it’s available to everybody. It’s just that he does something very special with it.

JM: Is it because all these sources are somehow more alive to him than to anybody else?

SW: That’s right. He captured them, and he understands them in a way others don’t. First of all, he’s not interested in being authentic and reproducing something; he’s interested in what’s alive and what’s around him. In 1963, he composed for the Newport Folk Festival a sort of prose poem for the program. It’s called “To Dave Glover.” Glover was a buddy of his from Minneapolis, who was in fact known as Tony “Little Sun”Glover, the harmonica wizard. In that piece Dylan talks about how all of these songs that he’s picked up on are very important to him, but that he now had to write about his day, and that he couldn’t write songs about his day without the others, but he had to talk about his own experience to transform the others into something different—again, to collapse the past and the present.

But he was also somewhat lucky, because he arrived on the scene and he made his way into folk music at a time when a lot of other people were collecting and making available things that hadn’t been available before. Harry Smith is one of them; he was early on,in the early ’50s. But Sam Charters, who is a person who doesn’t often get enough credit for what he did, was putting out his albums of country blues and rural blues. There was a whole blues mafia that was getting together in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, that was finding all of these old records and putting them back onto 33-1/3 records that you could actually listen to—making it all available in new ways. That was all happening right at the time when Bob Dylan was in Dinkytown in Minneapolis and then coming into the Village. So there’s this cornucopia of American music that suddenly opened up. It’s why, in fact, places like Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in New York were so important. Something that seemed to have been suppressed, something that seemed to have been unavailable to anybody in the 1940s and 1950s suddenly was there—it was like a feast, and Bob Dylan was there to pick up on all that. He happened to bein the right place at the right time.

GM: There is a moment in his book, Chronicles,that to me is like an explosion of light in the way that it throws his whole career and his whole sensibility into relief. My book is a collection of pieces—starting in 1968, going up to September of this year—of one listener’s continuing encounter with one singer. It is an imaginary conversation, in someways, with pieces written along the way over a long period, with the writer often being wrong, often misunderstanding, and maybe with a perspective broadening in time.

But the moment where you can see Bob Dylan’s sensibility, his way of being in the world, his sense of obligation and of vocation, all coming together, is when John Hammond, his producer, gives him an acetate, a pre-release copy of a collection of songs by a then-unknown and forgotten blues singer named Robert Johnson of Mississippi from the mid ’30s that he’s going to be putting out. He gives it to Dylan and says, “Listen to this; you might find it interesting.”

Dylan does listen to it. He’s never heard of Robert Johnson. Dave Van Ronk, who he plays the record for,who knows Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr and everyone else, he’s never heard of Robert Johnson. Dylan is thunderstruck listening to Johnson. He says, “I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.”He writes down the words of the songs. He tries to understand how they’re put together. They seem more elegant, more complete—and yet skeletal—than anything he’s ever encountered before. He says, “It’s hard to imagine field hands at hop-joints really responding to, really understanding songs like these. Maybe Robert Johnson was looking at an audience that only he could see, an audience far in the future. In other words, me, Bob Dylan. He was singing for me. He was waiting for a listener like me to get him, in a way that nobody could at the time.”

Well, you can take that statement apart, and you could flay it and throw in the garbage for a whole lot of reasons. And yet that is a visionary statement, and it says an enormous amount about the relationship between the listener and the performer that is a lifetime commitment on both sides, that has sustained Dylan’s career from both sides. That’s what I have wrestled with all these years with so much pleasure,but of course, never found the moment to crystallize it as well as Dylan does with that story.

JM: Clearly, he is a man who lives with a sense of history, but the sense of history is conveyed by the voices in these songs. Sean, you say something very interesting in your book: Dylan’s story, you write, “is decidedly not the story of a baby boomer. Although he is stamped as a 1960s troubadour, Dylan, who was born in 1941, is at pains to point out that he is really a product of the 1940s and the early 1950s, which he remembers as a long-past era of political giants,like Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin.”

SW: Right.

JM: And you quote and paraphrase from Chronicles,”‘The world was being blown apart….’ Chaos and fear and smaller leaders came in their wake…. ‘you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning… like putting the clock back to when B.C.  became A.D.’”

SW: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.

JM: Int he ’90s, when he went back and made the two records before Time Out of Mind, Good As I’ve Been To You and World Gone Wrong, on which he truly was summoning to the campfire—to use Greil’s phrase—the ghosts of old American music, he seems to get back in touch with something that’s before his boyhood, deep back, in that B.C. world. And then come Time Out of Mind and “Love And Theft,”which, as Greil describes it at one point, follow this character wandering through a landscape that’s very old, suffused with a sense of time but devoid of any actual, or rather, any documentable history—it’s like he’s following human nature into a different kind of history entirely, not normally what wecall history but very much a vivid composite of past and present.

GM: Well, take the story I just told, where Dylan says, “Maybe Robert Johnson was aiming at an audience that only he could see, one far in the future.” On those two albums, Good As I’ve Been To You and World Gone Wrong, in ’92and ’93, for me he’s clearing his throat of twenty years of wasted time. Here he is, singing these old blues and folk songs, stuff that in his own repertoire preceded his first album, the kind of stuff he was singing in ’59, ’60, ’61, in people’s living rooms, in maybe radio stations, in clubs. He’s singing these old songs. He’s investing them with extraordinary life and humor, and regret,compassion, and glee, with an inventiveness on the guitar that’s utterly new in his own musical life. Yet, who is he singing to? He is not looking at an audience far in the future; he is looking at an audience far in the past. The people he’s singing to are the people who first sang these songs.

There’s another wonderful moment in Chronicles where he does this Mickey Spillane imitation, where he says, “The dead can’t speak for themselves, so I’m speakin’ for ’em.” Well, on those records, he was speaking for the dead and he was speaking to the dead. And raising the dead.

JM: Sean,your book so richly evokes Dylan’s relationship to America. I’m interested in any thoughts you have on how newspaper history, if you will, intersects with these songs, and how the maturation of Dylan’s art from the ’90s through the last few albums seems to be coming to grips with the fact that the big history that he grew up with in the ’40s and ’50s really doesn’t have as much resonance for people now as it did then. We live in a different world in terms of our own sense of history as a vital force.

SW: In the liner notes to World Gone Wrong,he talks about how virtual reality has taken over, or is taking over—he calls it “hegemony”—and people are just not able to write songs like the ones that he is singing for the dead and out of the dead; they can’t write those kinds of songs any more. He makes it pretty clear that, in some ways, all he can do to battle this hegemony, as he calls it, is to sing those songs, and to continue to write his own songs out of that tradition, out of those traditions, the many traditions, not just one. It’s not exactly the attitude of a big rock star who thinks he’s all powerful; this is a guy who feels like he and the world are up against forces that are so complex and so overpowering that singing these songs is all that he can do.

But this goes back with him—it’s not just a matter of the mass media today. In a song like “Blind Willie McTell,” he can talk about the world being full of greed and corruptible seed, and that seems to be all that there is, and yet, in the end,it’s Willie McTell singing. It’s the man who can sing the blues like nobody else, that comes back like a grace note, as something that can put a hedge against all of the world’s cruelties and stupidities and corruption, and give you a breather from the hegemony. Well, I think that’s what Dylan’s trying to do: to create a space artistically where something else can take shape, can take life—where there’s hope. It goes back to what Greil was saying earlier about “Good luck” being at the end of every song. You’re up against a lot in this world, and you may be up against more now than you were in 1961.But as he says, he finds his lexicon in the songs, and in the songs he can find a measure of hope to battle against it. But that means more than just protesting; it’s not about protesting. Well, maybe it is always about protesting—all of his songs are protest songs. But it’s really about exploring realms of human imagination that he finds being flattened out in this virtual reality in which we live.

Something like the same thing is true with history, too. I do think that he is aware of how historical consciousness is being flattened out. It’s not just that we’re all catching onto the latest wave, and that there’s a kind of historical attention deficit disorder—cultural attention deficit disorder—settling in, so we don’t remember what happened last week, let alone what happened in 1861. But I think he understands that his connection to the past and to the present is something that is in danger of being eviscerated, and one of the reasons that he is singing the songs in the way that he’s doing it, the way that is mediating between past and present, is precisely to keep that connection alive as best he can, if not for the masses out there, at least for himself. And to keep sane. One of the reasons that any person writes anything is to try and keep his own sanity together, and I think he’s doing that as well.

JM: Greil?

GM: If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. It’s not just a wicked, sardonic sense of humor (although it can be that, too). But it can be an uproarious, laugh-out-loud, “you’ve got to be kidding me,” “have you heard this?” sense of humor. There’s always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him. It was very evident early on in his career when he used to talk alot on stage, something he doesn’t do now. These days the humor is mostly in the songs and in the way they’re played. But if Dylan is an historian, he is doing this because, yes, there is a mission; yes, there is a need; yes, there is a goal—but it’s also interesting in and of itself, and it’s pleasurable in and of itself. That comes through to whoever is listening.

JM: Let me close with this question: if you were trying to explain all that we’ve been talking about to someone who knows nothing about Dylan—to say, “To get a sense of what we’ve been trying to articulate here, just listen to this”—what would you pick?

GM: I think I would pick Another Side of Bob Dylan. This was an album that was recorded in one day. It’s full of flubs and mistakes. It’s utterly human. It’s incredibly funny. It’s got some songs that are tremendously painful and difficult to listen to. It’s got some overblown, pretentious songs. I think it’s an album that nobody’s ever really gotten a handle on. When it was released, it kind of slipped in and out of the public eye, as if it had never been. People didn’t know what to make of it, and they kind of didn’t want to know what this other side was.

I would never try to convince anybody to like anything. So I’d just say, “See what you think of this.” Then if that person came back to me and said, “I don’t know what to make of this at all,” then maybe we would talk about it. But more likely, the person would say, “I hated this and I hated that, but that thing about ‘I’m gonna grow my hair down to my feet so strange so I look like a walking mountain range,’ that was really funny”—and we’d take it from there.

SW: It’s funny that you picked that album, Greil. It’s a title that he didn’t like particularly, Another Side of Bob Dylan.But I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, as I’ve been going around the country discussing my book. The song I keep coming back to is off that album: “Chimes of Freedom.” The reason I’d choose that one, especially for a young person, is that I think that’s a song where you can see his imagination opening up in ways that it hadn’t before, where he takes basically a thunderstorm, a summer city thunderstorm, and out of that manages to write not only beautifully about that thunderstorm, but about all the other aspects of his work that are important as he hears the thunder peeling out for “the rake,” and “the mateless mother,” and ending with “for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe”—with all of those intonations that are offbeat, that are strange. I think that a lot of what Dylan was aiming for crystallized in that song, and it’s accessible in ways that some of the other ones aren’t. I wouldn’t say you have to like this or not. But I would give it to someone to try and understand what Bob Dylan is about; it would probably be right at the top of my list.

–October7, 2010

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2dVfRhk

 

 

As she tells it, the inspiration for Brit Bennett’s captivating debut novel, The Mothers, was her own uncertainty about where she fit in. “I grew up in the church but I always felt a little outside of it, particularly as a young person. I would see all of these kids my age who seemed so devout and solid in their belief. I’ve always wondered, “How are people so sure about anything?” I had a lot of doubts, but I thought that doubting was the opposite of believing, so I kept it to myself.   I’m sure most of the kids I grew up with had their own doubts, but at the time I just thought, everyone else has it together except me. That’s where my interest in these young characters growing up in a conservative, gossipy, church community originated.”

The Mothers traces the friendship between two young women, Nadia and Aubrey, who have lost their mothers in different ways, Nadia to suicide and Aubrey when her mother chooses her abusive husband over her children. But the novel moves far beyond the relationship of the girls, and the stifling religious community they grow up in, to question the very nature of grief. “Loss can feel shameful, which makes it so impossible to talk about, but, it also pervades every aspect of your life,” Bennett explains. “I think all of the characters are bound by deep loss—whether the loss of a mother, or the loss of a child, or the loss of a certain type of future they hoped they’d live. As I’ve grown up alongside these characters, my interests expanded from simply, teenagers and their problems, to thinking about how their choices as adults, in response to loss, can affect their entire community. Originally, I thought that loss would ease over time but now that book is finished, I think, you can be walking around 50 years later and see or smell something that can bring you right back. Loss keeps circling and we can never completely escape it.”

Bennett always wanted to be a writer, but until her undergraduate years, she felt alone in her passion. “I’d never met professional writers, so it seemed like an impossible career. And then suddenly I went to undergrad and I had independent studies with Stegner fellows. I was really fortunate to have mentors who took me seriously and worked with me on The Mothers for three years before I even got to grad school.

“One of my mentors was Amy Keller and I showed a lot of the early drafts to her. She helped me with the psychological aspects of writing a book: how to get rid of my perfectionism and allow myself to make mistakes. The draft that I worked on with her I wrote out of order and I was anxious because I thought I was doing it wrong. She said, ‘Who says you have to write a book in chronological order?’

“Another mentor encouraged me to write multiple chapters from Luke’s mother’s perspective that never made it into the book, but allowed her character to, hopefully, become much more complex. It felt feeling freeing to do that and not worry, is this going towards my word count? Is this furthering the plot?”

The Mothers underwent many significant changes during the seven years Bennett worked on it. “I’m a pretty drastic reviser. I enter the revision process with the belief that anything is changeable, which I think is both a strength and a weakness. Because when you solve certain problems, you often create new ones, so I spent a lot of years putting out fires and sparking new ones that I had to respond to. Recently, I found an old flash drive from 2009 at my parents’ house and the thing that surprised me was, despite all the characters and plots I cut, the first line of the book was exactly the same.”

Bennett drew inspiration from a variety of literary works, both classic and contemporary for inspiration, “A few of the standouts for me were Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison and Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, which thematically has some similarities of impending motherhood in the wake of grieving a lost mother. Americanah was also very technically instructive as far as illustrating how to move through time – one of the hardest things for me to figure out in my own writing – in a coming-of-age narrative. I remember being impressed with how efficiently Adiche moved from childhood to adulthood for all of those characters.”

But, says Bennett “I always return to Toni Morrison—she’s one of the first authors who made me want to write a novel, and I’m in awe of what she can do with language. Her imagery is unforgettable and she writes such strange, often unlikable characters who still have fully realized lives. I read The Bluest Eye in the beginning of high school and a lot of it went over my head. I don’t think that’s the right gateway novel to Toni Morrison when you’re fourteen, but, the fact that the book was so beguiling to me actually made me want to read her work more. I read Song of Solomon when I was studying abroad and that was a big influence, too. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t in America and I felt I had the space to really consider what it means to be an American and that book really centers on the idea of finding our ancestors.”

Though fiction has been her main passion, in 2014, in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, Bennett felt called to write essays. “I was texting back and forth with a friend about how frustrated I was seeing the self congratulatory social media posts of some of my white friends, while the the rest of my black friends were all grieving. There was such a gap in their responses. My friend said “Just write about it.” I thought, I don’t write non-fiction, I’m writing a novel. But, Jia Tolentino, who I was in grad school with, had been asking me for essays for Jezebel. I wrote the essay from an emotional space where I was wondering, ‘What’s the value of good intentions?’

“It was very jarring at first to take a break from a novel I’d been writing mostly on my own for years to work on essays where I would receive immediate feedback from readers within moments of publication. But I try to approach non-fiction writing the same way I approach fiction—with empathy, always asking big questions, always looking for interesting connections between ideas. And I was fortunate that Jia gave me the initial platform to do it, because, through that, my agent found me, which set the process of publishing The Mothers in motion.”

Now that The Mothers is finished, Bennett, has made peace with her past doubts. “I’ve come to realize that doubt is part of belief. Believing something wholesale with no room for doubt is like being a computer. There’s nothing real about it and it’s not how I want to move through the world. I make space for ambiguity. I’m not afraid of it anymore.”

 

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2diImoU

The Professional Golfers Association of America turns 100 this year, its first tournament held October 10−14, 1916, at Siwanoy Country Club in Bronxville, New York. Winner Jim Barnes received $500 and a gold medal — a long way from the $1.8 million prize at this year’s PGA Championship but enough for Barnes to get a new spoon (3-wood) or mashie niblick (7-iron) and pursue his dubious craft.

Until the 1920s professional golfers were so déclassé that they were forced to enter most country clubs through the back door and barred from the members’ locker room. Walter Hagen, one of the first pro athletes to make a million dollars, helped to change this, in brash Yankee style. At one snobby 1920 British tournament he used his chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow, parked in the country club driveway, as his locker room and social headquarters; at another, he declined his first-place money because it was to be handed over inside the clubhouse that had banned him.

Described by many historians as “the father of modern professional golf,” Hagen is often linked to Arnold Palmer, the two credited with having popularized an elitist sport. The two golfers became close over Hagen’s last years, and when he died in 1969 Palmer was a pallbearer. In A Golfer’s Life, Palmer describes his summers at the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, nine-hole course where his father was club pro and head groundskeeper. Instructed by Dad to “Hit it hard, boy,” Palmer practiced doing so with an old Walter Hagen driver. And as Hagen became “The Haig,” so Palmer became “The King” — though as explained in his just-released A Life Well Played, Palmer did not care for his moniker:

I know it was meant to be flattering, but there is no king of golf. There never has been, and there never will be . . . what I really am, inescapably — and how I prefer to be thought of in terms of my legacy — is a caretaker of the game, just the way my father was before me. Someone who tried to preserve it, nurture it and improve it if he could, and who tried, also, to be a caretaker of the dignity of the game.

Palmer piloted his own plane to Hagen’s funeral, but his early years on the golf tour were spent behind the wheel, hauling a trailer from tournament to tournament, his wife, Winnie, at his side. In Michael Bamberger’s Men in Green, Palmer tells a “back in the day” road story that involves fellow golfer Al Besselink:

“I’ll never forget this,” Arnold said. “Winnie and I are driving from Baton Rouge to Pensacola. We’re watching the car in front of us. All of a sudden sparks are coming out of the back of that car. I’m watching. And I thought, I’m seeing something that I don’t understand.

“I pulled up closer to them and there’s Besselink hanging out of the back door of the car, grinding a wedge on the highway. That’s what the sparks were.”

You could see it like it was in a movie.

“It really happened,” Arnold said.

“Al Besselink’s a crazy man . . . ”

“Oh, shit,” Arnold said in casual agreement.

Men in Green is itself a road trip, Bamberger in pursuit of some of the game’s most legendary and colorful players, and of an answer to one of the game’s most venerated beliefs: “One of my goals here is to see for myself whether Arnold and Jack [Nicklaus] and the rest really put the game ahead of themselves, or if that was a myth handed down to me by sportswriters happy to god-up the ballplayers.”

Should anyone like to document some of the game’s most colorful fans, they could excerpt heavily from The Tao of Bill Murray, in which Gavin Edwards demonstrates that Murray, a mainstay at the PGA’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, is both crazy and a corrective for a sport that seems out-of-control commercialized. In the 2011 tournament, Murray played a round behind John Daly, whose golf bag featured a video screen that rotated commercials for a car dealership and Daly’s own line of golf gloves. “It would be nice to play some black-and-white movies, maybe some Kurosawa films, get some culture out here,” said Murray. Then, in his giant red Elmer Fudd hat, he played Robin Hood with a spectator’s beer cooler, tossing drinks to the gallery — and played well enough to win the event with pro D. A. Points.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2e3N3G2

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century and, according to quite a few contemporaries, the most disagreeable man they ever met. Waugh has already been the subject of three important full-scale biographies and countless critical studies, and has played a signal role in a number of histories and memoirs. Now another biography appears in the shape of Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. Aside from having been suggested by Evelyn Waugh’s grandson, Alexander, as an anniversary commemoration, the ostensible reason for the book’s existence is that its author has been able to draw on material not previously seen by earlier biographers, chiefly Waugh’s letters to Teresa “Baby” Jungman — for whom he entertained an unrequited passion — and a brief, unpublished memoir written by his first wife, Evelyn, or “She-Evelyn,” as people liked to say.

Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh was the second son of a publisher, a man who preferred his firstborn son, Alec, over the younger Evelyn to a grotesque extent; and in time Waugh returned the favor by despising his father as a sentimental clown. His schooldays were more unhappy than otherwise, but he found joy at Oxford, where he came into one of his personas — that of the homosexual wit, high liver, wine bibber, friend to the great, and entertaining guest at grand country estates. Eade spends more time than previous biographers poring over questions of whom Waugh slept with, what he did in that regard with whom, when, and for how long. To this end, he includes a photograph of the nude person and nice bottom of Alastair Graham, Waugh’s “friend of [his] heart” and one of the models for Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited.

Waugh left Oxford with a discreditable Third and a devotion to drink (“There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk . . . That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach”). With no real plans for making a living, Waugh took a stab at becoming an artist but was finally forced by penury to take a position teaching at a ghastly boys’ school in Wales (the model for Llanabba of Decline and Fall). After a year at the place, his future seemed so bleak that — he claimed — he swam out to sea intending to drown himself, but, encountering jellyfish, promptly swam back to shore. He then took up two further teaching posts, a stint of learning cabinetmaking and writing for a newspaper, Waugh published a well-received biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, married Evelyn Gardner, and emerged as England’s most celebrated young novelist with the publication of Decline and Fall — one of the funniest novels ever written. His marriage lasted only a little over a year before his wife went off with another man. It was a shaming, scarring experience Waugh never got over, and it clearly contributed to his vision of the world as a place of the damned. Indeed, the betrayal occurred as he was writing Vile Bodies, and Eade notes, as others have, that the darker hue of the novel’s second half reflects this. Its effect is even more directly evident in to A Handful of Dust, which some consider his greatest work.

As a young person, Waugh had shown a religious streak that faded in and out of sight through the years, but, after the breakup of his marriage, it concentrated itself in his decision to become a Roman Catholic in 1930. With regard to more earthly matters, he traveled as a newspaper correspondent to Abyssinia for the coronation of Haile Selassie (and later to cover Mussolini’s invasion), to South America, to the Mediterranean, and to Norway for some unsuccessful glacier climbing, all of which eventually produced travel writing and elements of novels (Black Mischief, Scoop). Meanwhile he was pursuing Baby Jungman and besieging her with billets-doux. Though these letters have not been used by previous biographers, it must be said that they do not really add anything and, judging by the snippets included here, they are pretty dull, especially by Waugh’s standards.

After securing an annulment of his first marriage, he married Laura Herbert, thirteen years his junior, with whom he eventually had seven — six surviving — children. Although he had, in his obnoxious way, supported Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, he gave up his Fascist sympathies with the declaration of war in 1939 and after much trouble and string-pulling managed to join a commando unit, taken on, it transpires, because he was entertainingly funny, and, according to his commanding officer, “could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war.” The unit was part of the famous “Layforce,” which, among other things, was forced to evacuate from Crete in 1941. This event has given rise to hot controversy over whether Waugh and his commanding officer, Robert Laycock, jumped the queue in escaping the island, reprehensibly leaving a good number of troops behind to be captured or killed by the Germans. Eade shines in his examination of the affair and convincingly exonerates Waugh and Laycock of dishonorable conduct. It is clear from this biography and from the others that while Waugh possessed many vices and failings — snobbery, spite, cruelty, ire, sloth, arrogance, gluttony, boozery, and pigheadedness, to mention only a few — he was no coward. Still, as Eade also notes, Waugh clearly felt a “sense of moral unease” over the whole thing, which unreconciled feelings found expression in his depiction of Ivor Claire’s ignoble flight in Officers and Gentlemen.

Waugh managed to take some time off from military service to devote himself to writing Brideshead Revisited, the novel he considered his masterpiece at the time, a view he later discarded, though it made him a pile of money, dollars especially. After the war, Waugh’s physical and mental condition began to decline badly, propelled by alcohol, bromides, and barbiturates, one result of which was the wildly funny novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Somehow, during these years of despair and disintegration, he also managed to come up with what many, myself included, consider his masterpiece, The Sword of Honor trilogy. Evelyn Waugh died at home after Mass on Easter Sunday, 1966.

How does this biography stack up against the previous ones? It is far less tactful than Waugh’s friend Christopher Sykes’s and necessarily less detailed than Martin Stannard‘s rather plodding 1,000-plus-page, two-volume behemoth. It is not written with the pitch-perfect tone, alertness to irony, and all-around panache of Selina Hastings’s 1994 Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, but that book, like Sykes’s, is out of print. So, this one will have to do. There’s nothing really wrong with it except that, with the exception of Eade’s straightening-out of the Crete affair, there is nothing new. The best parts are, as in every biography of Waugh, the quotations from the letters of the great man himself.

Thus I shall conclude with a famous passage from one of them, quoted by Eade, that perfectly conveys Waugh’s sense of the black comedy of life in this vale of tears. Waugh, now with the Royal Horse Guards in 1942, was stationed in Scotland under the command of Col. Dornford-Slater (“Col. D.S. D.S.O.”) with his unit near the estate of Lord Glasgow, whose favor the colonel wished to curry by having his men blow up an old tree stump. Lord Glasgow said he’d be grateful but begged that they not “spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye.” They reassured him.

Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. D.S. D.S.O. said you will see the tree fall flat at just that angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet in the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.

And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7 ½ lbs not 75.

Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn in the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every piece of glass in the building was broken.

So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosed by the explosion, fell on his head.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2dRGFjs

 

When I’m creating a character, I ask myself, “What is she afraid of?” And I make sure to throw plenty of that in her path. When I’m starting a book, at some point I realize that it has similarities to other novels. Then I start comparing myself to those other writers…and panicking. As I wrote Today Will Be Different, these books loomed scarily.

 

 

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
By Ben Fountain

Another novel that takes place in one day. The story follows Billy Lynn, a private enlisted in the Iraq war who’s on his last day of leave. It’s urgent, fiendishly well written, and packed with heart. The greatest challenge with a single-day narrative is finding urgency in the story. Unless you’re Jack Bauer trying to save Los Angeles from nuclear disaster, how gripping can the stakes be over twenty-four hours? Fountain succeeds spectacularly in making the ordinary feel extraordinary.

 

Mrs. Dalloway
By Virginia Woolf

I read this in college and have always included in it my top ten list. When I realized I was writing a book that followed a complicated woman through the course of an ordinary day, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity to revisit Woolf’s classic. I opened the book with zeal, read the breathtaking first page . . . then slammed it shut and stuffed it out of sight. Sometimes, in the face of fear, denial is the only option.

 

Bridget Jones’s Diary
By Helen Fielding

A brilliantly funny and gutsy book. I deeply admire Fielding’s nerve in making her comic heroine a genuine mess. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Martin Amis all have a grand old time pushing their male comic heroes to depraved depths. But it’s not something I often see in novels by women about women. While I was writing Today Will Be Different, anytime I felt the instinct to water down Eleanor Flood, I remembered Bridget Jones. Helen Fielding didn’t wimp out; why should I?

 

Ghost World
By Dan Clowes

Early on, I decided to make Eleanor Flood an illustrator and include a graphic novel in Today Will Be Different. The trouble was, I didn’t particularly like graphic novels. (Just sayin’!) One exception was Dan Clowes’s Ghost World. Hilarious and joyful, haunting and poignant, mean-spirited and heartfelt: it’s a perfect work of art. As soon as I came up with the idea to have Dan Clowes “himself” write an “introduction” to Eleanor’s graphic novel, I knew it would mean tracking down Dan Clowes to ask permission. The specter of Dan Clowes himself one day reading my novel had me writing scared.

A Dictionary of Modern American Usage
By Bryan A. Garner

I could spent my entire day binge-reading this cranky and entertaining prescriptive grammar guide. Garner is so precise and passionate about language that a page (or two, or three, or ten) of this hefty book before a day of writing is the novelist’s equivalent of Gene Hackman’s speech in Hoosiers. It fires me up to run to my keyboard and win one for the team!

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2dCaaUe

Since the lamentable passing of J. G. Ballard in 2009, there remains only a handful of British writers with personal ties to the paradigm-shattering New Worlds/New Wave era, a revolutionary period which saw science fiction imbued with fresh quantities of literary sophistication; more engagement with Realpolitik and pop culture; a redirected focus on “inner space” psychological probings; and a close kinship with the weird, surreal, absurdist, and magic-realist strains of fiction. The UK contingent includes Michael Moorcock, who helmed many of the changes as editor of New Worlds, while simultaneously producing a cornucopia of exemplary fiction; his onetime assistant Charles Platt; Brian Aldiss, a mainstay of the New Wave, who just turned ninety-one; and M. John Harrison, whose most recent novel appeared only four years ago. Jumping continents, we retain, among the Americans connected with the movement, the inspiring presences of Samuel Delany, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Harlan Ellison.

But Aldiss, Platt, Delany, Silverberg, and Ellison produce hardly any fiction these days, and Moorcock is currently occupied with semiautobiographical novels, starting with The Whispering Swarm, which, while they display fantastical elements, are more roman à clef than otherwise. Harrison’s output, although still provoking major excitement upon release, is relatively infrequent. Some good news is that after serious medical issues and a small publications drought, Norman Spinrad has a new book forthcoming: The People’s Police. All laudable accomplishments, but still: while the lessons and models and ambitions of the New Wave continue to percolate through later generations of SF writers right down to the present young crop — folks as disparate as Christopher Barzak, Lavie Tidhar, and Will McIntosh — it seems as if that first generation has mostly fallen silent, except at rare intervals.

Until we come to the case of Christopher Priest.

Born in 1943, Priest sold his first story as a very young man in 1966. Priest has always been intimately connected with the 1960s movement to remake the genre. While he was not the first to employ the term “New Wave” for this kind of SF (an honor that goes to a fan named Jim Linwood), Priest was one of its first promulgators. He and his books typified the ambiguous, eerie, multivalent stance on science and the substance of reality that the New Wave endorsed. In Priest’s novels, human nature and cosmic reality both exhibited spooky quantum behaviors, with subtle slippages between dimensions and avatars alike. Since his first novel in 1970, Priest has produced about twenty books — roughly one every two and a half years. Not the output of a Stephen King or James Patterson, but nonetheless a steady creative flow that shows him always growing and responding to changing conditions in the world and in the field. His work continues and extends the esthetic “final programme” of the New Wave with panache and insight.

Priest’s major introduction to the world at large was certainly his book The Prestige, which became a critically acclaimed film with a stellar cast. While an excellent example of his skills and tactics and interests, the book’s steampunk ambiance and quasi-detective mode were not totally representative of his work.

Perhaps the most archetypical sequence in Priest’s oeuvre is The Dream Archipelago. The short story collection that bears that title is accompanied by novels The Affirmation and The Islanders. In these volumes, Priest charts a strange land somehow laterally displaced from ours, a polity comprised of many linked islands where spatial and temporal anomalies reign. These books belong, at least in one sense, with such Ruritanian masterpieces as Jan Morris’s Hav, Brian Aldiss’s The Malacia Tapestry, and Ursula Le Guin’s The Complete Orsinia.

Priest’s newest book, The Gradual, is the latest installment in his Baedeker of Oneiric Atolls and extends the effects and remit of the sequence admirably, while standing utterly and satisfyingly self-contained.

Our tale begins, however, not in those esoteric, idyllic isles (ostensibly “hundreds of thousands” in number, some larger than continental countries) but on the mainland, in the drab, dreary nation of Glaund. Note the perfection of this nomenclature: gluey, glandular, gloomy, glaucous, glaucoma, and “grim land” are the echoes. And the city in Glaund where we start is Errest: “to err the most?” Priest will deploy scores of equally perfect cognomens, proving himself a rival to Jack Vance, the master of resonant place and character names.

Into Glaund, an autocratic country perpetually at war for no clear reason with its neighbor, Faiandland, is born our narrator, Alesandro “Sandro” Sussken. His parents are talented professional musicians. His older brother, Jacj, exhibits instrumental skills as well. But Sandro will come to outshine them all during his unpredictable and, eventually, radically remade career.

The first forty pages of the novel bring Sandro from childhood up to, coincidentally, age forty. This section forms a compact, poignant, completely palpable Bildungsroman. We witness Sandro’s blossoming realization of his talents; his less-than-perfect relations with his parents; and his adoration of his older brother, who, shatteringly, in a pivotal moment, is drafted and sent to fight in the endless war, now displaced from Glaund and Faiandland to a polar neutral zone. We watch as Sandro meets and falls in love with Alynna, another musician, who becomes his wife. We also observe the seed of Sandro’s obsession with the Dream Archipelago: a rare glimpse of several islands not far offshore from Glaund, on a day when the polluted atmosphere opens up briefly.

To my mind, Priest in this opener solidifies our impression of Sandro as a real and believable musician of talent. His take on life, his application to his work, his artistic goals and inspiration and methodology all ring true.

Throughout this portion of the book, we are also steeped in the history, culture, and politics of this alternate continuum, which so much resembles our familiar plane and yet is so foreign. This world possess a kind of echt Mitteleuropa feel, in part due to the antiquated technology — though it evolves as Sandro ages, going from LPs to CDs, for instance. The old-fashioned gravitas and emphases of Sandro’s voice and perceptions evoke the feeling that we are reading some lost volume by Thomas Mann or Bruno Schulz, Alberto Moravia or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. A bit further into the novel, however, we are going to have reason to conjure up Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino as well.

Priest’s masterful prose is very sensual and concrete. The reader receives vivid and nigh-tangible impressions of the houses and streets, exteriors and interiors:

The place was looking shabby and cluttered: cardboard boxes were stacked in the hallway and up the staircase. The main room at the front of the house was crammed with furniture and more boxes. My parents appeared to spend their days in the cosy music room at the back — the piano was still there, but also mounds of sheet music, as well as hundreds of old newspapers stacked in and around the fireplace. Unwashed food plates and odd pieces of cutlery lay on the floor. The curtains were closed but hanging irregularly from the runners, one of which was coming away from the wall. Sunlight glanced in at an angle. There was an unpleasant background smell.

This same vibrant specificity will apply when Sandro gets to his longed-for islands as well. In contrast, they will be all lush jungles, glaringly white buildings and oceanside promenades.

The innocuous yet potent monkey wrench in Sandro’s life arrives in the form of a seemingly wonderful invitation to undertake, along with a company of other musicians, a nine-week concert tour of many of the islands in the Dream Archipelago! He jumps at it, even though it means leaving Alynna behind.

The tour is an eye-opener, invigorating Sandro both artistically and romantically (he has a one-night stand with a female pianist). He considers expatriating himself forever but resolves to return home first.

Priest plants a couple of little nuggets of information here that will prove central. This is part and parcel of his devilish slyness and craft. I fear I must highlight these clues, as well as reveal a major plot twist, in order to talk sensibly about the rest of the book, whose further surprises I promise not to disclose. But my reveal concerns an event occurring less than a third of the way into the narrative, and much wonder remains undisclosed on the far side.

First, Sandro is given a “stave” by the Dream Archipelago authorities and told never to lose it. This small, curious wooden baton seems featureless, but it is demanded like a passport at every point of entry. Also at all these customs facilities he notes an oddball crowd of louche hangers-on who seem purposeless. Bizarrely enough, faces in this ragtag bunch repeat from island to island, sometimes betokening inter-island passages faster than the ships that Sandro rides himself.

In any case, the mysteries of stave and customs house idlers are forgotten when Sandro returns to Glaund and discovers that an enormous and catastrophic change has taken place, one that connects The Gradual to the fairy realms of fable, and makes Sandro into a figure with a suitably Wagnerian cast.

The rest of the book provides a magnificent step-by-step unriddling, while at the same time continuing the deeply affecting story of our hero and his artistic and spiritual transcendence — all of which turns on the explanation for the disaster on Glaund, its causes and its consequences. Along the way Sandro must flee Glaund and return to the Dream Archipelago, on the run from the dictator of Glaund (the operatically absurd and perhaps Thatcheresque Madam Generalissima Flauuran), his life becoming inextricably bound up the archipelago’s mysterious class of “adepts,” an offbeat bunch employing Carrollian logic and discourse that accompanies their unique powers. While seeking his heart’s desire — including knowledge about the fate of his decades-lost brother, Jacj — Sandro will come to deep intuitions about their work and how it illuminates what once seemed to be a straightforward journey from cradle to grave.

I should lastly note that while the Dream Archipelago stands as the polar opposite of Glaund, both in reality and symbolically, it is not portrayed as a utopia, being full of human quirks and disappointments and vices.

Organically suspenseful in the manner of real life and not a contrived thriller, with feet planted in the gutter of daily living and head soaring into the empyrean, this book stands comparison to anything by David Mitchell or Mark Helprin or George Saunders. It begs to be filmed by Terry Gilliam or David Lynch or Michel Gondry. And it justifies and ennobles all the high ambitions of the New Wave of science fiction, whose banner Christopher Priest had unfailingly flown, through all of his imagination’s manipulation of space and time.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2cTzVgm

fgfgfg

We are here to celebrate the completion of the greatest dam in the world, rising 726 feet above the bedrock of the river and altering the geography of a whole region; we are here to see the creation of the largest artificial lake in the world . . . and we are here to see nearing completion a power house which will contain the largest generators yet installed in this country . . . The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea. Today we translate them into a great national possession.

—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech at the dedication ceremony for the Hoover Dam

The Hoover Dam turns eighty this week, its first kilowatts delivered to the citizens of Arizona, Nevada, and California on October 9, 1936. The dam was an immediate and enduring factor in the economic and environmental transformation of the Southwest, but it generated more than a regional makeover. “The story of America in the last half of the twentieth century,” says Michael Hiltzik in Colossus, “is the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era”:

The United States became in that post-dam era a country very different from the United States that built it. It was transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support. To be sure, that change was not all the making of the dam itself; Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and other New Deal programs forged in the crucible of the Depression played their essential role, as did the years of the war. But the dam was the physical embodiment of the initial transformation, a remote regional construction project reconfigured into a symbol of national pride.

In the hands of the Norwegian-American sculptor Oskar J. W. Hansen, that symbolism was given Art Deco style and Wagnerian scale. He saw his monumental “Winged Figures of the Republic,” flanking the dedicatory flagpole on the Nevada side of the dam, as representations of “the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment.” Even the 200 workers who died during construction were orchestrated into Hansen’s heroic national vision: “They died to make the desert bloom,” reads their commemorative plaque.

But the dam has a legacy of division and disruption also, starting with the political squabble over its name — the partisan Roosevelt administration insisting on “Boulder Dam” until President Truman, in a gesture of reconciliation with Republicans, made Hoover Dam official in 1947 (by which time some exasperated citizens were lobbying for “Hoogivza Dam”). Herbert Hoover, as FDR’s predecessor, not only deserves recognition for the dam, argues Glen Jeansonne in his new biography, Herbert Hoover: A Life, but deserves better treatment from history. Contrary to the usual view, Jeansonne says that Hoover’s legislative record shows that he was “neither a do-nothing nor a laissez-faire president” and provided an essential bridge to the New Deal era: “American politics could hardly have leaped from Coolidge to Franklin Delano Roosevelt without Hoover in between.”

In The Profiteers, Sally Denton describes how the Hoover Dam became a different sort of stepping stone, not only ushering in the era of New Deal public works projects but propelling the major builder of the dam, Bechtel Corporation, “into a condition approaching that of a corporate nation-state,” today the largest construction-engineering company in America. The dam was Bechtel’s first megaproject, and it opened the floodgates on profit and influence:

Bechtel has closer ties to the US government than any other private corporation in modern memory. No other corporation has been so manifestly linked to the presidency, with close relationships to every chief of state from Dwight Eisenhower forward. For nearly a hundred years, Bechtel has operated behind a wall of secrecy with its continually evolving military-industrial prototype.

For Marc Reisner, author of the 1986 classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, the Hoover Dam symbolized the watershed moment when a blind or blithe nation “began to founder on the Era of Limits.” In The Water Knife, a near-future novel by the prizewinning author Paolo Bacigalupi, those limits have gone so unheeded that the Southwest is in the grip of “Big Daddy Drought” and the water baron thugs who manipulate it.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2dpUMye