Listen to what the man said

Couldn’t have put it better myself. And now I don’t even have to try.

Friday finds

In search of the origins of Bob Dylan’s accent. That clip above, by the way, is “Sugar Baby” as done by His Bobness earlier this month in Portland. Normally, Dylan in concert lifts his harmonica for the same reason a stripper lifts her skirt — it always gets a cheer from the audience. In this version, the harmonica gets some real quality time. And this post celebrates the top ten wonderfully weird Dylan performances, including a duet with Jack White. I particularly like the rendition of “Dancing in the Dark” from the legendary Toad’s Place show.

A celebrated film critic blogs about his life with books.

Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson.

Why Photoshop is a mixed blessing.

“I tried writing novels as a young man and I didn’t like my novels very much. And by the way, neither did anyone else. So I went to California eventually to seek my fortune and try and get into the movie business. And I was lucky. I started to make some progress. And then just as I was starting to have stuff produced, the Writers Guild did go on strike. This was back in 1972 or ‘73, I think. And I was sharing digs with a young woman who said, “Well now, since you’re not allowed to write screenplays, you can write that book you are always talking about.” And that book was my fanciful notion of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, in which Holmes met and joined forces intellectually as well as narratively with Sigmund Freud. And there really wasn’t any good reason at that point not to try doing it.”

How the use of antique words in fiction can be the equivalent of the Easter Eggs embedded in many DVDs.

“Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the faculty and football for the alumni. But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students’ bedrooms?”

The Wednesday Westie

The moving finger writes

This Umberto Eco piece lamenting the decline of penmanship (which generated responses cited and critiqued in this excellent Ducks and Drakes blog post) strikes me as a higher-toned version of the ludicrous old-fart thinking that has George F. Will denouncing denim, or numberless cranks complaining that people no longer get dressed up for air travel.

For me, functionality trumps all over considerations. Unless you’re flying first class, dressing up like Cary Grant for the airborne cattle car that is the modern airliner just means you’re likely to ruin a good suit. As for Will’s Savanarola rants about denim — winger, please. If it weren’t for the bow-tie and the bigger vocabulary, you’d be indistinguishable from Glenn Beck.

Whatever gets me to the writer’s thoughts most quickly is what counts, and my opinion of the quality of those thoughts depends on graceful construction and cogent phrasing rather than the loops and whorls of Palmer penmanship. Yes, a handwritten note should be legible and easy to understand, but it’s ridiculous to think that lovely handwriting tells us anything useful about the author or his work. Eco’s complaint also leads, inevitably, to the canard that PCs and mechanical aids to writing lead to rushed, sloppy work. Plenty of egregious nonsense has been written with goose quills, typewriters, and PCs. The writer himself is the most important piece of equipment.

I love writing on computers for the same reason I love taking pictures with a digital camera. My Canon A590 removes most of the technological barriers that once stood between the image I wanted and the photograph I got. No doubt there are photography geeks who believe the only true image is one obtained by turning one’s room into a toxic-waste dump of chemicals, with chance elements of stray light and faulty gear added to the mix.

There are also snots who insist that the real writers use typewriters instead of PCs. The real hardcore ones narrow it down to manual typewriters instead of electrics, as though one’s character and creativity were enhanced by jamming an Underwood platen with a Dagwood sandwich of white paper, carbons, and onionskin backup pages.

Yessir, it was a great spur to creativity when the sheets would slip across the carbons and your pages ended up looking like a chimney sweep’s hankie, or you’d commit a typo and have to make corrections, a chore about as enjoyable as backing a tractor-trailer onto a Dixie cup. If writing is rewriting, then the removal of the tedium involved in setting up a typewritten page can only improve a writer’s work by making him more willing to go back and rework his thoughts.

As for the aesthetic experience of reading finely wrought script, all I can say is that  people in need of a Palmer Penmanship fix can enroll in a calligraphy class. Eco is a semiotician, and  from my layman’s perspective I have to say that mistaking the box for its container is an occupational hazard of the semiotics trade.

Gee, Steve, cranky much?

Blue Monday (The Fats File)

Fats Domino sings the song that gave this feature its name. In his biography Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock’n'Roll, Rick Coleman claims “The Fat Man” predates any claim Elvis Presley may have to performing the first rock’n'roll song. Because so many blues and R&B performers can also lay claim to the title of Original Rock and Roller, I doubt the question will ever be settled. Shucks, my own choice would be Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry.”

Here’s another well-worn number from the Fats files.

Betcha by golly Wao

Jeff Sypeck spends some quality time with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and finds it stirring up Central Jersey memories and stories. I’m always astonished to hear how many other people have taken that scary trek along the railroad bridge spanning the Raritan River.

Caro country

At the end of his Tuesday night speech at the City University of New York, Robert Caro pointed to his wristwatch and joked that he’d run over his allotted time, a trait that showed why “I always write thousand-page books.” Judging from the applause, I doubt many people noticed he’d gone into overtime — or even cared if they had.

The theme of Caro’s speech, delivered before a capacity crowd at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, was the importance of conveying a sense of place in writing biography. As the author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, and the ongoing Brobdingnagian chronicle The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro certainly has the credentials to show how biography should be done.

Interestingly, when Caro illustrated the need for a sense of place he cited examples from fiction: Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace; Herman Melville’s account of a dead whale being systematically taken apart by whalers in Moby-Dick; and Dickens’ depiction of Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations, a mansion turned into a mausoleum for the hopes that died when she was jilted by her suitor. It served as a reminder that Caro is a contemporary of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and other New Journalism figures who brought literary techniques to their reportage, though I could hardly think of great books with less in common than The Power Broker and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, or Means of Ascent and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

What Caro went on to demonstrate was the power of storytelling grounded in deep, painstaking research. Anyone hoping for a taste of the fourth and (Caro says) final Johnson volume went away disappointed: Caro concentrated on his time spent in the Texas hill country, where he got a feel for the loneliness, isolation, and poverty that wracked Johnson’s youth. Caro noted that when he started his Johnson research, there were already seventeen books about the controversial president, and he had read “Johnson grew up poor” so many times he thought he already knew most of what he needed. Only by going to the hill country and imagining what it would be like to live in a place where the essentials of life had to be dug, chopped, and hauled across miles of rugged landscape.

Particularly spooky was Caro’s description of how one of Johnson’s relatives made him get on his knees and thrust his fingers into the soil, by way of demonstrating the mistake that ruined the Johnson family’s fortunes. No matter where he dug, Caro said, he never found soil that was even deep enough to cover the length of his fingers. The land was beautiful, but the beauty was a veneer of easily exhausted soil over rock. Johnson’s father overpaid for his land, thinking he would grow crops, and so dragged the family into ruin. His son’s ruthlessness and drive, Caro explained, was rooted in that disaster.

Not all of this was new, and some of it has been offered by Caro at many other speaking engagements. But Caro’s storytelling skill rendered that irrelevant. To illustrate his theme of the need to convey a sense of place, Robert Caro spoke of New York City,Washington D.C., and the Texas countryside. But by the end of the evening, it was all Caro country, and I am eager to pay it another visit.

Friday finds

Classic rock album covers reimagined by Eric White. In addition to Rumours, pictured above, White’s show (on view at Sloane Fine Art in New York) includes new takes on Houses of the Holy, Wish You Were Here, Who’s Next, Songs in the Key of Life and Hot Rats.

Be careful about those acronyms. It’s a concern both here and abroad. And it goes well beyond Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, too.

“My eyesight, as eyesight, is perfectly good. But how the brain deals with what my eyes can see can be pretty ropy. For instance, I might glance down and not see that cup on the floor. If you told me the cup was there, I would see it. However, the brain is filling up the space with something else. But because I come out with words properly used, like apprehension, you think there can’t be anything wrong with this guy.”

Do you remember where you were when the Death Star exploded?

Bats dropping in for a late-night drink. Remarkable photography.

Talk about having too much sex on the brain.

Why can’t American conservatives be as smart (or as relatively sane) as their European brethren?

“The big blowhard Michael Moore is a hugely successful left-wing carnival barker in a culture of right-wing carnival barkers, and for that he deserves our admiration. He has, it is true, been caught playing fast and loose with timelines — not a negligible crime. But he rarely stoops to the level on which his rivals permanently reside: He’s obnoxious but not corrupt. He doesn’t spew talking points. He’s out there, on the streets, corralling evidence to support his theses (or thesis — there’s really only one). And he is, point for point, difficult to refute. His new cinematic circus, Capitalism: A Love Story, is the film to which he has been building for the last two decades. It’s sprawling, scattershot, sniggery, and, in one instance, exploitative. It’s brazenly one-sided. But Moore calls questions that no one else in the mainstream corporate media goes near. His other films focused on symptoms. This one tackles what he sees as the disease.”