Secure A Copy A New Literary History Of America Outlined By Greil Marcus Ready In Digital Version

a little while to get through two years!, A deeply satisfying anthology of bitesized literary history and criticism, The wideangle lens on the stories that made America has been a vital balm during the endtimes of the Trump presidency.
Anyone interested in the project of America would love the hell out of this, Magnificent, exasperating, eccentric, vast, humming with a thousand voices, ten thousand whispery pages, and also, also a rack ofs ands this history takes the word LITERATURE and explodes it into a lot moren ever it used to be so its not just the serene tramp tramp tramp of the great names going by duly saluted and festooned with praise, its also speeches, songs, paintings, and all that radio needs is a fuse and you can pound that dent out in the hood and everythings a dollar in this box.


No, I did not read alllarge sized pages, there was a lot of theth century that I couldnt get particularly riled up about but as soon as Januarycame up it got pretty good, that was the Haitian revolution, then Audobon painting eagles and Stephen Foster and the Book of Mormon.
Theres a whole ton of stuff about slavery “what to the slave is the fourth of July”, Jim Crow, narratives of escape, Ida Wells pamphlet called A Red Record describes three years of lynchingsdead black men, the Klan rescue the South in The Birth of a Nation, and later, Malcolm X.


Many pages go by without a single essay celebrating a dead white male but Edgar Allen Poe does get to invent the detective story and Thoreau does refuse to pay his taxes and whatever it is thats going on between Ishmael and Queequeg goes on all over again and Harriet Beecher Stowe starts the Civil War and death kindly stops for Emily Dickinson and Buffalo Bill proclaims that the Winchester is the boss for Indian fighting and Edisons Kinetoscope invents a whole other kind of literature only a couple of years before Dorothy is whirled off to Oz.


Theres not a moment to relax, Gertrude Stein bamboozles, Little Nemo sets off for Slumberland, Tarzan makes that weird noise, theres Gatsby, Babbitt, Scopes, theres guys who never make passes at girls who wear glasses, Mickey Mouse, Alcoholics Anonymous is that literature It is now and inthere was this can you guess what it is

Magnificent, beautiful, stupendous golden, purple, violet, gray and blue.


Whatever it was, it lit up the mountains

with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.
It was that beauty that poets dream about

Have you got it yet Well, its the atom bomb, as witnessed in New Mexico by General Farrell.


And theres music : the wild thrilling harmonies of the Sacred Harp, that mournful scraping of a knife against guitar strings overheard by W C Handy

I hate to see that evening sun go down
Makes me think Im on my last goround

And the big hit Alexanders Ragtime Band it wasnt ragtime but no one was counting, and Mamie Smith is the first black woman on recordth August, Jelly Roll Morton mythologises himself for Alan Lomax, Billie Holiday records Strange Fruit, theres Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie inand Miles Davis, then Chuck Berry never an easy guy to eulogise.


Now some of these articlewriters lapse into High Mandarin, that supercilious tone used to cut out most mortals who dont have a masters degree, and this is annoying.
I could quote a couple of zingers but I wont, I dont wanna put you off, There are so many five to ten page articles here that you can just pass those fools right on by.
Therell be something intriguing just around the next corner, They even make room for Linda Lovelace,

So if like me you have a passion for big intimidating books that will make your friends think youre really smart, this is one that will look most handsome on your shelf.






I left my home in Norfolk Virginia, California on my mind.

I straddled that Greyhound, and rode him into Raleigh,
And on across Caroline,
We stopped in Charlotte and bypassed Rock Hill,
And we never was a minute late,
We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown,
Rollin' out of Georgia state,

We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle,
Half way 'cross Alabam,
And that 'hound broke down and left us all stranded
In downtown Birmingham.


Right away I bought me a through train ticket,
Ridin cross Mississippi clean
And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham
Smoking into New Orleans.

Somebody help me get out of Louisiana
Just help me get to Houston town,
There are people there who care a little 'bout me
And they won't let the poor boy down.


Sure as you're born, they bought me a silk suit,
Put luggage in my hands,
And I woke up high over Albuquerque
On a jet to the promised land.


Workin' on a Tbone steak a la carte
Flying over to the Golden State
When the pilot told

us in thirteen minutes
He would set us at the terminal gate.


Swing low sweet chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone
Cut your engines and cool your wings,
And let me make it to the telephone.


Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia,
Tidewater four ten O nine
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin'
And the poor boy's on the line.
Fucking finished! The greatest value of this book is that it reveals a lot of the bsides of American literature.
Will make an accompanying reading list soon,

Norman Mailer shows up a bit too much for my liking but oh well, Many of the other reviews note that this book isn't worth reading from beginning to end, I agree but perhaps for a different reason, Taken individually, any of these essays could be insightful and interesting, Read together, however, and they seem to totally elide white supremacy and imperialism, colonial violence, early capitalism, and euroamerican ideology.
It feels wildly out of touch with our contemporary era, in other words, and while I could imagine using an essay or two to supplement a class, I grew incredibly frustrated with just trying to read it.

Dave Hickey and Ishmael Reed's essays, on Hank Williams and Huck Finn respectively, are brilliant, There's a tremendous amount of amazing material here a few mediocrities, to be sure, and some clunkers, maybe, but the overall effect is stimulating, accessible, creative, and often counterintuitive, which is precisely how I like 'em.
. . and a book about American literary more like cultural history deserves no less, . . This comprehensive literary history and commentary on American literature presented in fairly brief essays on our history startled and intrigued me.
I still refer to it from time to time because as yet I have not exhausted its insight and charm.
I am a great fan of Greil Marcus and now Werner Sollors,

I found fresh articles that introduced me to literature I had not know and means to further explore those entries.
This is a really good collection of essay, but it does take some time getting used to, There is a lot in quite a small space and font and you should not expect the essays to explain what the stories/movies/speeches/etc.
are about: they give really interesting arguments and views, but if you don't know the basics of the thing the essay is about you might get lost.
That aside, this is a perfect way to get a glimpse into the cultural/literary history of the United States through a lot of different stories, views and ideas.
It's is not a whole, not one big story from the beginning to the end, but it is a collection of different moments, of different events throughout US history.

I read this for a semesterlong course, and clearly I have not read the whole thing, but the parts that I read were overall great! A fantastic collection of short essays in a marvelously broad range of topics in American history by a great many writers, this book is so huge in scope that it needs to be owned and kept handy for a year or two to be properly appreciated.
I've only scratched the surface with a few at the beginning how "America" first came to appear on a map and a few at the end.
Some of these essays are fascinating and others are useless for instance, an essay that purports to be about modern poetry but amounts to nothing more than namedropping names of poets and poetry journals unknown but there's a great deal to be learned in here and the overwhelming effect is positive.
This would make a great Christmas or birthday gift, Some numbers:pages.essays. Five pages for every essay,essayists. Three essayists the editors, Marcus and Sollors, plus David Thomson with three or more essays, Twelve editorial board members, recruiting, a number of whom write twice, Fourteen contributors without University affiliation, only one of these on the Editorial Board, Five of the socalled "Seven Arts" Painting, Literature, Theater, Sculpture, Architecture, Dance, Music represented among thewith an essay.
One essay on Architecture one more than on Dance or Sculpture, Eighteen essays on poetry. Fifteen essays on movies. Five essays on painting. Ten essays on Twentieth Century poetry, Twelve poets with book publication entrusted to write essays, Two essays on rock 'n' roll music, Six other essays on vernacular music, Eight essays on jazz and popular music, Three essays on theater.essays on the novel. Etc.
Some description: The essays focus on a year, sometimes a date, sometimes an hour on a date in a year, and move chronologically,.
An event, say, Allen Ginsberg's October,reading at the Six Gallery, in San Francisco, of his new work, "Howl," will be isolated, not for its capacity to demystify some canonical text as in The New Historicism, but for its being a harbinger of a mode of responsibility among the youth culture which would, in the case of "Howl," valorize the poem over the next decade.

Some inferences. "Literary," as in the A New Literary History of America's title, is that which is provided by the preponderance of literary scholars who make up the rolls ofcontributors.
One of the editors, Marcus, talking to the New York Times, claims that the title A New Cultural History was avoided for being too trendy, but this is disingenuous, since if it was a cultural history the numbers tabulated above would need to at least seem representative, and the editors have not bothered.
No, for the editors, it is a literary history, so we're left with the question, how does the volume construe "the literary" And for the moment, at least, I'm left with the obvious reply, that the literary is supplied by those writing about these cultural and historical moments emendated for some reason or another.

Now, surely this distorts the traditional service philological scholars are thought to provide in establishing texts, More pointedly, the editors have merely sloughed off the blurring of cultural/literary text "history" can partake of but criticism better damn well have in focus.
I graded the volume at three an absorbing if parochial survey until late I reached Joshua Clover's essay on Dylan, the first in the volume to encounter "the literary" of its title in relation to the cultural formation its claim enacts.
Coedited by one of this country's most dazzlingly wideranging, prolific, and intellectually charismatic writers, Greil Marcus, among the most celebrated nonfiction volumes in the past year, this vast, wickedly vibrantAnn Marlowe on Linda Lovelaceeducation between covers must come with a small note of warning: an extended trance state induced by the treasurelike essays here can produce incidents such as dropping "the Harvard book" on one's stillasleepfoot, causing it turn bruiseblack and viciously painful, to say nothing of the volume's own spine! Thisstate endeavor was, astonishingly, followed by a compendium of Marcuss work on Bob Dylan, which has already attained canonical status sitelink nybooks. com/articles/archi , and WHEN THAT ROUGH GOD GOES RIDING: LISTENING TO VAN MORRISON sitelink nytimes. comboo , is likely to attain a similar one, Marcus rightly points to Peter Gerstenzangs New York Times review of the Morrison work as the best interpretation Gerstenzang writes that it is “more a series of nonfiction short stories than a straightforward analysis.
” Marcus also writes that the chapter devoted to “Take Me Back” was happymaking in the process of its composition.
When "Real Life Rock Top Ten" ran on SALON, which inexplicably dropped it, to to speak, Marcus made me very happy by, among other things, praising the film version of ABOUT A BOY, though I don't share his reservations about Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance of the Morrison song in GEORGIA sitelink salon. com.

s of “the Harvard book” have been stellar, of course, and like the Dylan volume, its one to be savored, an essay at a time also a good means of preventing household accidents such as that described above.
Marcus partner in this enormous undertaking was Harvards Cabot Professor of English Literature and AfricanAmerican Studies, Werner Sollors, but the pair worked with a board of editorial writers, who, Marcus said drolly in a NEW YORK TIMES interview, sometimes nominated themselves as well as others.
The final list must have been daunting to behold, Then Marcus and Sollors were faced with an equally Herculean task: choosing writers for the pieces, which didnt always go according to plan.
Surely the most amusing anecdote about the construction of the book was the editors attempt to wrest a knowledgeable piece combining discussion of twoclassics, William Faulkners ABSALOM, ABSALOM! and Margaret Mitchells GONE WITH THE WIND.
In case anyone cares, I place the former novel with ULYSSES as the past centurys greatest achievement in the Anglophone variety of the genre, and I agree with Marcus assessment of Faulkners gorgeously intertwined and overlapping storieswhich are far easier to figure out than Joyces, at least if youve read The Odysseyas “scary.
Much more so than THE SOUND AND THE FURY, which is more nihilistic, ” Yet when Marcus contacted Virginias Lee Smith and Kentuckys Bobbie Ann Mason, neither had ever read Mitchells book.
Next stop: Carolyn Porter, a native of Texas and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, “Read it” she replied. “Ive memorized it. ” At this point in American history, literary and otherwise, more people have seen the movie than plowed through Mitchells long road of red clay, causing me to wondered if Robert Politos superb latest book of poems, HOLLYWOOD AND GOD University of Chicago Press shouldnt have been titled Hollywood IS God.
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