To Hell Without the Dignity of a Handbasket, Even

One just strikes a peaux That everyone kneaux

They played some Broms, And sang soms.

The whole band was racist, Even the bacist.

Today a professional reviewer opined that the The Velvet Underground “still holds up, after 45 years.” Easy money, reviewin'. Of course it holds up. But does The Velvet Underground (recorded 1968, released 1969) hold up to the extent of a 6 CD reissue? Actually, it does. I’m going to concentrate on the last three discs, because those represent not one but two dreams come true for VU fans. But first, in brief, the three LP mixes. Aficionados know that Lou Reed supervised the dank and idiosyncratic “Closet mix,” released in some countries on LP; and that veteran producer Val Valentin created the “Val Valentin” mix, released in the other territories on LP; and they may know there is a mono mix, released on a radio promotional record. The power of imprinting is very great; the LP from which I got to know this record was a mispress that had the Closet mix on side A and the Val Valentin mix on side B. Those still sound right to me. So on the first three discs, the present set giv...

This post was commissioned last year during Banned Books Week. United States v. Mark Twain No such case as my title implies was ever brought, of course. The United States has no banning—that is, no centralized prohibition of books. Here, a ban has come to mean any decision to eliminate a book from a library or a school reading list. It’s true that, until fairly recently, the Postal Service exercised a censoring function by enforcing laws against sending obscene matter through the mail. But Supreme Court decisions of the ’60s and ’70s have rendered obscenity pretty ungainly to work with as a criminal charge. Huckleberry Finn was “banned” several times in Mark Twain’s lifetime—always by librarians. In 1885, when the book was new, the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, withdrew it, citing the characters’ “low grade of morality” and “irreverence.” Huck lies, talks dialect, is friends with a black man, steals and fails to return stolen property (the black man). Mark Twain’s respon...

Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious". Then why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus apparently depriving it of its mystery? -- Leonard Bernstein, 1976 In the mid-twentieth century, the word of Einstein -- a genius who explained our universe, was against bad things, and played the violin -- was something you could take to the bank. But Leonard Bernstein didn't need any special authority for this insight, which is not his alone -- I myself had the same reflection back when I was the King of Ur, and again, some centuries later, when I was Czar of All the Russias. (It's an odd title, know, but "Czar of All the Mexicos" didn't sound right either.) About "genius." I have meant, for long and long, to write something about Schumann. Among Schumann's most remarkable qualities was the ability to discern genius at long range and without a scope. And he never bothered himself with beat...

Of the year it is the autumn Of the ninth it is the bautumn You want hot dogs & we gautumn

I love the rhythm But it's forbythm

The death of the Nawab of Pataudi comes hard upon that of Rowdy Raudi.* *Piper. Except he isn't dead. I was thinking of Macho Man Randy Savage.

You'll wissue Brought a tissue.

For D. H. Lawrence I confess my abhawrence.

It was an honor to guest the other night at the radio show of my friend, gentleman-polymath Shawn Roberts. We turned over the great, heavy rock that is Captain Beefheart and you'll want to see what crawled out from under. Podcast of Shawn's Beefheart Show

In the words of a famous colonel: "War is infolonel."

I often think that Dijon Is France's most beautiful rijon. And it's nice to tour the Midi With your swidi. But head for Beaune If you want to be aleaune, Because in Bourgogne They won't quit annogne.

A mere fragment of a sentence, yet I could criticize it for days. It's from a review of some contemporary poetry that, for all I know, may be very good. But this twelve-word clause is corrigible out of all proportion to its length! What is uncanny about the extruded fragment is that it contrives to be patronizing toward Pliny while, at the same time, overrating him. You couldn't have done this if you knew what you were doing -- to quote a great poet. 1. Patronizing. Why "wonderfully"? Is it matter for surprise that Pliny should be inquisitive and incisive? Is the implication that inquiry and incision are recent inventions? Or is it (rather) implied that they are traits seldom met with in classic literature? -- or seldom met with among the Romans specifically? I fear I'm being reassured that Pliny, Rome, and the ancient world aren't as boring as it is presumed I expect them to be. And hereby a man may learn that it's not only Pliny the Elder who is bein...

Narrative Drift in Oral Culture and Scripted Theatre * Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Volume 37, Issue 4 (2006): 725–38. 1. Jack Students of British popular culture have often collected valuable evidence in North America. Broadly speaking, there are two attitudes that may be taken toward such a provenance. On the one hand, the American environment may be seen as a preservative: the Appalachian mountains, for example, are isolated enough that a transplanted folk-tale gathered there may be seen as more authentic than if it had been gathered in Britain: insulated from agents of change in its place of origin, the tale is as if sealed in a time capsule; it has not had to adapt to the altering circumstances of industrial society, mass culture, and so forth. Another line of thinking, however, would say that the American environment, be it never so “isolated,” is distant — in space and in culture — from the British Is...

Deafness in High School: When he explained the binomial theorem I couldn't heorem. Murder on Everest: The perpetrator Was a sherpetrator. Initiation: When they admitted me to the inner sanctum I politely thanctum. An Emergency Bris: We couldn't find a mohel So we had to use Father Dohel. You seldom meet a Mormon But in Utah they're simply Swormon. Why not come over for gnocchi Followed by karaocchi?

[This was brought forth by, but isn't really a response to, the very perceptive article "The Death of the Editor" by J. Stephen Murphy.] My own feeling is that the New Criticism, reader-response theory, and deconstruction were each responding to something that is just true: that is, the fact that, whatever it is that creates a text's meaning, the author's intention just isn't it. In our experience of reading, authorial intention is a complete non-event except in unusual moments -- as when we become positively stymied ("What can the author mean?"). (Now the reasons why deconstruction arrived at this conclusion seem to me quite unnecessary -- we don't need structuralism's semiotics OR deconstruction's counter-revolution to see that authorial intention is always imputed, never actual, even when it is the author who imputes it to the author.) The author's intention is, in all cases, properly phrased as "the intention someone impute...

Certainly, my heresy is not that I deny Mahler. I love Mahler, but I am not sold on his entire output. Possibly these notes will encourage those who have been dismayed by some unfortunate encounter with the less rewarding parts of his output. For declining to go absolutely ape over the entire corpus, I make no apologies; still, it can't hurt for me to adduce the testimony of Otto Klemperer, who knew Mahler, worked with him, and is one of the greatest conductors of his music. Interviewed toward the end of his life, Klemperer said of his mentor: Today I like his Kindertotenlieder and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and some of the symphonies. But not all of them. I mean, I am not a stupid, enthusiastic boy: I don't like everything he wrote. Another opinion from which I have drawn some support is my father's. He said long ago, when I was starting to get interested in classical music, that a good deal of it is what he called "sawing around." He meant the many p...