A Melting Pot Full of Words

[Mister Moobs]

When the music critic Greil Marcus set out to make sense of rock and roll in the early 1970s, he tried something that seems more intuitive now than it did then: He looked to American literature as a backdrop for what he was hearing from the likes of the Band and Sly Stone. Putting literature and popular culture together, Mr. Marcus said at the time, came naturally to him. As he put it in the introduction to "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music": "I am no more capable of mulling over Elvis without thinking about Herman Melville than I am of reading Jonathan Edwards . . . without putting on Robert Johnson's records as background music."

For Mr. Marcus the echo of the Puritan preacher's vision of hell in the blues guitarist's bargain with the devil offered proof that rock music wasn't simply an American subculture; it was American culture itself. The music, he argued, was connected to the very past that its rebellious spirit sought to break from. Indeed, rock's countercultural ethos would shape the future that some rockers hoped they wouldn't get old enough to see. What a rock song had to say and the way it said it, according to Mr. Marcus, was both literature and history. He made the point so forcefully in "Mystery Train" and the books that followed?on Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley, among others?that he helped change American attitudes toward popular culture even as he transformed himself from rock critic to cultural critic.

I don't imagine that anyone will read each of the essays with equal pleasure or that any two readers would agree on their favorites. The biggest risk in this kind of writing is the temptation to herd more history into the everything's-connected corral than is feasible in the scope of a few pages. Journalist and memoirist Ann Marlow's essay links the porn movie "Deep Throat" and the memoirs of its star, Linda Lovelace, to the Watergate hearings (their tone, not just the codename of the affair's key informant), the blandness of politicians, the smugness of op-ed writers, "Catch-22," Mad magazine, the early reality show "An American Family," the persistent idea that the moon landings were a hoax, and the ascendancy of the "memoir of abuse." Each connection may seem plausible, but the effect of coming across them one after another in a brief essay is like looking in on a series of parties you wish you had time to crash.

Some readers may register a similar complaint about the book as a whole, but at a vast scale the superabundance of ideas and voices fits more comfortably. "A New Literary History of America" gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn't the past so much as the present.

Flashing back to the essay that opens the book makes the point. In retrospect, Toby Lester's dramatic account of the discovery of "America" reads like a synopsis of what Messrs. Marcus and Sollors have achieved in their new literary history. In Mr. Lester's view, it was impossible to understand the achievement of the explorers who discovered the unknown territory across the Atlantic until a pair of cartographers put two and two together while preparing a new edition of Ptolemy's "Geography."

The huge map they created as a result became, in a sense, the first American text: "On the map's left side, rising out of the formerly uncharted waters of the Atlantic and stretching almost from the map's top to its bottom, . . . was a strange new continent, long and thin and mostly blank. And there, in the general vicinity of what is known today as Brazil, a strange new name appeared: America."

The point is that it's less the landscape of fact that matters than the way we understand and talk about what's really there. The story Messrs. Marcus and Sollors have to tell in "A New Literary History of America" isn't itself new. The line of cultural tinkerers the book describes have been inventing this same America for centuries. But the editors have drawn a new map for us and inscribed it boldly with the strange name America.

Seems like it will be an interesting book.

[eagle]

Well thats a lot of mental wheel spinning but thats all it is. Rock is from historical roots he says wow breakthru stuff. I guess if I spent 10 years in college I would write dribble like that also. I found if you get thru the first paragraph and its boring its probably all dribble and I read the rest and found it was.

Can you cut and paste something more concise and meaningful.

[Mister Moobs]

Somebody piss in your Cheerios?

it's a simple review of a book on American Popular Culture. It's really nothing to get angry about...but hey, have at it. Pick up a bat and go beat some homeless ex-Wall Street execs or something.

There is no requirement for agreement or disagreement and there is certainly no requirement to respond like an ass.

WTF???

Post something your damn self instead of criticising everything that everyone else posts. You're on a roll. Ya hit P'Marc, me, one more and you've got bases loaded.

[eagle]

I'm not angry but am frustrated. The healthcare debate is so full of BS and politicized and then seems the guys is writing a political essay on rock culture. I apologize as your trying to come up with a decent topic.