The White Album and other hot messes

Over at Hey Dullblog, the Beatles blog for today's modern listener, Mike asks readers for their favorite unreleased Beatles song. This turned into a skewering of the White Album:

That's my biggest issue with White, how it's totally fashionable and false, just like most Beatle's solo output, and not like what came before. Both it and Let It Be seem like the triumph of each band member's persona over their authentic selves; they are their final refusal to change, when change was what The Beatles did best. Lennon's "honest" and politically aware (in a rockstar way) and intentionally grimy. McCartney's that much more eager to please (which is why his music hall thing gets out of control). Harrison's either wafting away on a cloud or acidly angry. Starr is a good ol' boy who just happened to be born in the North of England...I don't like the White Album anymore than I like The Beatles' cartoon, for the same reasons.

There follows a spirited back and forth with the almighty Dev, who decrees:

It's all a matter of what you hear. If you hear something and love it, you'll find ways to give personal context to the importance it has to you. If you don't like it, you'll find those reasons. What you hear as "the Beatles' final refusal to change" I hear as drama--four individuals joined under the skin, that skin withering and wearing, their unity telepathic even as their verbal communication breaks down, fighting within the skin to work together and push the group to new lands: and all of that without, I believe, any conscious intent. White, in the best Beatle tradition, doesn't intend, it IS. Whereas "Abbey Road" for all its magnificent passages is an acquiescence, an abrogation of conflict for bliss, consequently lacking (overall) in drama and even a little inhuman.

White Album is the first principle and the last. It is Moby-Dick. And you thought you were fed up with the praise before!

("Everyone Knew Her As") Nancy steps in, to smooth some feathers:

There's something spooky about the White Album's tendency to engender intense, often negative feelings, both at the time and now. Much as I love parts of it, I can rarely listen to more than a couple of songs from it at a time.

Devin, I agree with you about the way John's comments ("backing band") color the way we hear this album. Certainly there was plenty of tension and bad feeling, but listen to a song like "Dear Prudence" -- what amazing collaboration, especially between Lennon's melody and McCartney's sublime bassline. The evidence of collaboration and enjoyment in many songs makes the overall effect of the album all the sadder.

A lot of food for thought. Great stuff!

And—sorry, Mike—I fall into the pro-White Album camp...I was utterly thrilled when I listened to it for the first time (long before I read any rock crit); if memory serves, a local radio station played an old "classic" album in its entirety every Friday night, beginning at 11. I taped The Beatles off the radio in its entirety, marveling at whole continents of stuff I'd not heard before. Still thrills me. Still have the tape, for that matter!

Food on the shirt

On his most recent trip to New York, the always dapper Levi Stahl bought a copy of Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living. Here's a bit from Levi's recent post:

It's a lovely little edition, whose translator, Napoleon Jeffries, acknowledges right off the bat one's immediate objection: that Balzac, as evidenced by the photo below, was no dandy. I think there is food on his shirt!--and that's far from the worst of his sins against fashion in this photo!



As Jeffries explains in his brief but solid introduction:

Even those familiar with Balzac's novels may be initially taken off guard by the notion of that giant presenting himself as an expert on elegance--let alone a self-proclaimed originator of, to use his own coinage, the new science of "elegantology." Even more surprising may be the fact that Balzac considered himself something of a practitioner of the science. He was an odd manifestation of early French dandyism: taking his cues in dress from friends such as Eugene Sue and Lautour-Mezeray (both of whom make appearances in this treatise), Balzac proved to be more of a part-time dandy. The dandy memorialist Captain Gronow provided a particularly amusing assessment of the man's elegance in practice: "The great enchanter was one of the oiliest and commonest looking mortals I ever beheld; being short and corpulent, with a broad florid face, a cascade of double chins, and straight greasy hair . . . [he] dressed in the worst possible taste, wore sparkling jewels on a dirty shirt front, and diamond rings on unwashed fingers."

UPDATE: More Balzac (in Nicholson Baker's letter to John Updike, ca. 1985):

Your complete literary man writes all the time. It wakes him in the morning to write, it exercises him to write, it rests him to write. Writing is to him a visit from a friend, a cup of tea, a game of cards, a walk in the country, a warm bath, an after-dinner nap, a hot Scotch before bed, and the sleep that follows it. Your complete literary chap is a writing animal; and when he dies he leaves a cocoon as large as a haystack, in which every breath he has drawn is recorded in writing.

(“Balzac,” quoted in Richard B. Hovey, John Jay Chapman)

* * *

(OK, this is Ed again.) Speaking of things that should be in block quotes: The passage from Devin McKinney's Magic Circles that ends my LAT review of Matt Kindt's Revolver should be set off from my own words. It's still messed up on the website. Which is to say, this passage is pure McKinney:

"Revolver" is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings… By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming.

READ HARD — Believer Music Issue — Beatles post-Beatles — AUGUST 5 PARK-LIT EVENT

I. Read Hard is out! It's a collection of some great pieces from the last five years of The Believer. We could have easily filled several more volumes of equal thickness—and hopefully we will someday...As an appetizer, McSweeney's excerpts my essay on the work of Charles Portis, a piece that appeared in the very first issue of The Believer, back in 2003. I've always like this list of food in Portis's first novel, Norwood:

With reportorial precision, and without condescension, Norwood captures all manner of reflex babble, the extravagant grammar of commercial appeal − stray words bathed in the exhaust of a Trailways bus. This omnivorous little book has a high metabolism, digesting everything from homemade store signs (i do not loan tools) and military-base graffiti to actuarial come-ons and mail-order ads for discount diamonds. Appropriately enough, the characters are constantly chowing down. On one leg of the journey, Edmund B. Ratner (formerly the "world's smallest perfect man," before he porked out) and Norwood's new sweetheart, Rita Lee Chipman, are described as having eaten their way through the Great Smoky Mountains. Norwood's decidedly humble (call it American) menu nails the country's midcentury gastronomy with a precision that today takes on near-archaeological value: canned peaches, marshmallows, Vienna sausages, cottage cheese with salt and pepper, a barbecue sandwich washed down with NuGrape, a potted-meat sandwich with mustard, butter on ham sandwiches, biscuit and Brer Rabbit syrup sandwiches, an Automat hot dog on a dish of baked beans, Cokes and corn chips and Nabs crackers, a Clark bar, peanuts fizzing in Pepsi, a frozen Milky Way.

II. The Believer Music Issue is also out! Q: What's in it? A: A lot.

Arthur Phillips (The Song Is You) on writing about music (or, as they say, dancing about architecture); Brandon Stosuy interviews Phil Elverum (here's a taste); Joe Hagan—author of the classic Bill Fox piece that rounds out Read Hard—on another underappreciated songwriter, Benji Hughes (the online version features two streaming songs that will make your day); Blvr editor Ross Simonini does double duty, writing about Jamaican dancehall and violence, and interviewing Radiohead's Thom Yorke; Greil Marcus; Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black...a long piece by Michelle Tea...Justin Taylor with an excellent appreciation of David Berman's Actual Air, upon its 10th anniversary...a piece on Lawrence Welk...Ben Greenman...Hilton Als "performing" a sentence (à la Barthelme) about PJ Harvey...the inimitable Paul Collins, and more! Double issue! Get it before the newsstands run out! Because they always do with this one...

And I haven't even mentioned the Daniel Handler-curated CD, a real ear-opener, featuring names you know—Lloyd Cole (?!!!), Dave Wakeling, the Waterboys' Mike Scott, Sam Phillips, Stephen Duffy (!!?), David Sylvian (!!?!), Lisa Germano, and more—all great, but you cannot miss the Mike Scott song. It is an EPIC, like the best Waterboys songs (though also different).

(Blvr music issue trivia question: Who wrote an article for an earlier Blvr music issue entitled "The Song Is You"?)

III. One last thing I'll mention—David L. Ulin imagines the ideal Beatles '70s albums, using material from their disparate solo albums. In a nice bit of cross-magazine fertilization (eh??), the Utne Reader blog did an "imeem" playlist of the Ulin-imagined post-Fab Four album, Too Many People. It's fun to listen to...and it kicks off with "Imagine"...

IV. I won't be in New York for this, alas, and neither will Heidi, but the Believer and McSweeney's will be taking the stage for a Park-Lit event next Wednesday, August 5, at Bryant Park, 12:30 p.m.—lunchtime edification! (Here's more info at New York mag.)

Aforementioned music issue contribs Messrs. Phillips, Hagan, and Stosuy will be there, as will two new McSwy's novelists: Jessica Anthony (The Convalescent) and my old-PTSNBN colleague James Hannaham (God Says No). Amanda Stern hosts. (Copies of Read Hard and the music issue and the novels should be available.)

Tloothy in the Sky

I. Levi has been reading that George Plimpton book, and has some quotes from/thoughts on the Plimpton-connected figure I'm most interested in—Harry Mathews! Here's HM on GP*'s

George created the first Paris Review Editions—another moneymaker, he hoped. And the first book they published was James Salter's wonderful A Sport and a Pastime, which was cover-to-cover sex and did well. The second was my second novel, Tlooth (1966), which was a totally weird book, but I worked on every sentence. The story that George always used to love to tell is that on pub day, they would hire a plane to inscribe the letters TLOOTH in the sky above New York to create wonder and bewilderment in the populace; but the winds weren't right, and it was too expensive anyway. Of course, the book—well, it didn't go nowhere, but it didn't do very well.

II. Dzyd Molls has some thoughts and more thoughts on the whole Pope-forgiving-the-Beatles news. Great—irresistible—headline for her dotCommonweal piece: "Mother Superior, jump the gun"!

She also poses this trivia bonus: "Do you know which Beatle was Catholic (by birth)? Hint: it wasn’t Lennon."

Dzyds??


*= George Plimpton, not HM's other great friend Georges Perec!

"Visible Hitchcock" b/w "Paperback Writer"

Robyn Hitchcock and Elvis Costello join Nick Lowe onstage in New York to sing "If I Fell" (and "Mystery Train"):




Read the writeup over at Driftwood Singers.

(Bonus: here he sings "Surgery" for Bryant Park Presents.)

* * *

In other Beatles news: The U.K. Times on the possible origins of "Paperback Writer."

(Via Jenny D.)

* * *

And speaking of "paperback writer"—the new Cosmopolitan's "Paperback Page-Turners: What every chick should have in her beach bag" features Personal Days!

"If you think Pam and Jim have it bad, try spending a day with Lizzie, Jonah, and Pru at their 'Office'-like company. You'll laugh, cringe, and thank God you don't work there."

* * *

And finally:

Among the books published under [Philip M. Parker's] name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

—Noam Cohen, "He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Some of the Work)," NYT

Table-talk for April 11, 2008

I. Nabokov and Trilling in Canada (via...I can't remember!)





II. What was going on with those luminous, anonymous photos on Spinster Aunt? Read the enchanting debriefing!

III. Dzyd Joshua has a review of S.Y. Agnon's To this Day in the Forward. Hmm, any Ourobori? Why yes!

It's public knowledge or should be that only true love can sunder what science fiction calls "the time-loop": Only the fervid pounding of our hearts can break the chokehold of Ouroboros, the Greek snake that swallows its own tail and serves as our oldest symbol for infinity.

IV. Not me!

Ed Park, who was one of the children in the Players' version of "It's a Wonderful Life," is now at Yale Opera School. He recently was named one of the top five young opera singers in the country.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 22-23, 2008

I. Hey Dullblog's Devin appears on the Upper West Side on Tuesday, March 25, to talk about the Beatles in 1968; in the meantime, read his take on the great (?) Beatles movie project that never was.
II. On Style; for Moderns meditates on Elton John's sartorial choices:

The background looks like a stock background on offer at your local overmodernized, ruined-a-good-thing photo booth. It's like Hi Mom! Here's me and my fake visit to Yellowstone! Except it's not me in 1997. It's Elton Freaking John in 1974, hairy chested in some pre-JNCO jeans, with less (head) hair than his contemporary self, and holding his hands as awkwardly as hands have ever been held.

III. A friend has unearthed a blog post (I am not quite clear what the blog is called!) devoted to the iconography of Idiocracy. Here's one for tax season:

Weekend Table-Talk

I. It's not every day you pass by a palindrome, let alone two: Yesterday I walked by a new condo, Avonova...and then, later, an Argentinian restaurant, La Rural.

II. Weekend Ouroboros, from Dizzies Team Member Hua:



III. Beatles trivia was never this difficult! (Black Sabbath experts, please apply inside.)

IV. Levi uncovers more about the Family Waugh than is seemly.

V. Weekend vintage video: "Shout to the Top"!



VI. Sebald genealogy? (Via Bibliodyssey.)

Hey Dullblog!

News flash: A motley group of Beatles enthusiasts (including yours truly) have set up shop at Hey Dullblog, dedicated to extended musings, assorted links, and news about the greatest band of all time!

Dizzies Music Supplement

I.
Dizzies Team Member Hua—whose cell-block tag is 'The Professor'—has two rare versions of a Fab Four ditty about eternal fruit patches up at his blog...

II.
Toward a partial list of groups who've written songs with the same title as their name (as a songwriter, do you feel pressure to make this your best song, your defining statement?):
Bad Company, "Bad Company"
They Might Be Giants, "They Might Be Giants"
Hallelujah the Hills, "Hallelujah the Hills" (This band is great!)
UPDATE: Friend Edward Crouse's band Logjam's "Logjam"

III.
Slight variation: Doktor X, "The Sickening Sound of Doktor X"
The Beatles, "The Ballad of John and Yoko"

IV.
Any other ones you can think of?
UPDATE: "Fergielicious"!

V.
The intricate lyrics of Sarah Johns—check out "The One in the Middle," at first you think, this is corny, but then the lyric keeps going...I also get a kick out of "He Hates Me," this sentiment should appear more frequently in songs, no? (This is inside baseball, but for some reason these songs remind me of old tracks recorded by the man currently known as Team Knucklehead, a/k/a composer of "The Theme to 'The New-York Ghost.' ")

Classic McKinney

In the L.A. City Beat (via MG): "Is it presumptuous to anoint a book only five years old this October a 'contemporary classic'?"

Not when it's Dizzyhead Devin's Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History!

Instant Desert Island Books

What books are on your desk right now? These are your desert island books!

To my left I have:

The Case of the Persevering Maltese, Harry Mathews
The Beatles. The Beatles. The Beatles. 100 Hits for All Keyboards (sheet music; this is a book I bought in Korea about 14 years ago; the phoneticized Korean title is "Beatles Memory 100.")
Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick, foreword by Edmund Wilson
Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, transl. Seamus Heaney

A strange batch! (Send your list right now to thedizziesATgmailDOTcom.)

* * *

Dizzyhead Susan sends in this short list:

Likes: ferns, geese, telepathy

Dislikes: the news, telephony

Freudian slip

From Dizzyhead Brent (whose two-part Rivette epic concludes in the latest Cinema Scope):

I LIKE
Coffee, cigarettes, pasta, pizza, De Quincey, Bresson, Astaire, Kinks, cats, the first and middle fingers

I DON'T LIKE
Most other food, Kieslowski, Updike, The Doors, insects, Freud, the ring finger

I LIKE DON'T LIKE
Nabokov, Beatles, dogs, people, thumb

* * *

Bonus post—etymology of the day: "A 'rival,' for instance, is someone you are bickering with over river water rights." (A.E. Stallings at Harriet)

And: Over at the PEN America blog, David Haglund digs up a great George Plimpton memory, a name-dropper's delight in which a bit of advice from Steinbeck compels GP to address Jean Seberg while writing about going to a baseball game with Marianne Moore.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday, October 1

Time to pick up the October Believer, which features an interview with the great Adrian Tomine (whose graphic novel Shortcomings is just out; he'll be signing at that store in Brooklyn on Wednesday I think?), a conversation between Dizzyhead/Psychic E. singer/Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape author Sarah Manguso and short-short story wizard Amy Hempel, and Dizzyhead Rachel's fascinating piece on dream researcher Allan Hobson...oh and also a short review by me! (on Selah Saterstrom's The Meat and Spirit Plan)...and much, much more™...Levi on The Eustace Diamonds...No Image Available: my novel, Personal Days, has popped up on Amazon (it's not out till May)...For Beatles fans: Let it Be...Dissected! (via Mike Gerber)...Paul Hornschemeier has a blog...DizzyhEd Halter went to the Housing Works sale and unearthed a "gem from 1955: Keen Teens: 101 Ways to Make Money by Stookie Allen (including an early glimpse of SF writer Joanna Russ)...Keep those likes/dislikes coming...

Dizzies Newsfeeds for Tuesday, September 18

The Dizzies: Bringing kittens and owners together since 2004...Best name for a movie theater: The Co-Ed. Also at Dizzyhead L.'s blog, the long-awaited wrap-up to "David Lynch Weekend" and a look at Across the Universe: "The film’s crimes are almost too diverse to list."...Jenny D muses on the soul of a copy editor—while Crude Futures finds a typo in Copy Editor newsletter....Musicwise: Dizzyhead Hua is blogging again! And check out the Gene Clark downloads at Driftwood Singers Present: "Some sort of Jimmy Webb mini peyote blowout"...I guess I won't be seeing Dragon Wars!...Update: Vocabulary builder (Adam Bresnick in the TLS): “[Clive] James’s volume is an exercise in what the psychoanalysts call ‘anamnesia’, or unforgetting, his attempt to present and preserve what he has found most vital in the culture and history that he and the rest of us have, to a greater or lesser extent, lived through over the past decades”...

Dizzies Press Release — Brooklyn Book Festival

Though I don't live in Brooklyn, I'll be on a panel at next Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival, with Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield! It's at 5 p.m., on the main stage at Borough Hall Plaza. (OK, I have no idea where that is...) Lots of good stuff going on—more info here....

* * *

In other news...Restricted View on For Better or For Worse..............Does one italicize comic strip names?................Speaking of copy-editing mysteries: Molls on Pilates—or is that pilates?.............................New Psychic Envelopes single is out..........(more info here).................................Slate says no to exclamation points (via Dizzyhead Jen)...but Jenny D is on a quest to reclaim them! So am I!.............Jonathan Franzen: "It sat in a drawer for twenty years".............Jonathan Lethem: "the hapless and poignant Julian Lennon"..........Thought: My favorite humor site might actually be Cracked, when they do their musical lists........Thought: This lyric (from Cream) has always bugged me:

I told you not to wander 'round in the dark
I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park
Then I told you 'bout our kid, now he's married to Mabel

...........................Mabel?...This also doesn't sound so great, alas (via Dizzyhead Brent):

Across the Universe takes place in a ‘60s England and America in which there are no Beatles, only Beatles songs. Jude, a Liverpool dockworker, jumps off a steamer in America to find his father; at Princeton, he meets up with happy-go-lucky soon-to-be-dropout Max and his ethereally beautiful sister Lucy.

Domino dancing

1. Memories of Pop With a Shotgun: Fab Four, Howard Stern, David Thomson, and more.

2. Great Onion piece: "Earthquake Sets Japan Back to 2147." Sample line: "The prime minister said that the greatest effort would be exerted on rebuilding the Procross Buster Quasigravitic Lensing Frame, the motive force behind Japan's automated network of roads, aerobuildings, and levitation canals."

3. Nice pic of a jar of rubber cement!

4. Levi weighs in on the ouroboros and more (NSFW!)...

5. Rachel in the Times on a two-person abstinence society at Harvard. The piece contains the classic line: "He redirects his attention toward his fajitas."

(Accidentally double-clicking that last word got me: "A dish consisting of strips of marinated meat, poultry, or vegetables that are grilled over an open fire and served in a tortilla, usually with spicy condiments. Often used in the plural.")

6. This NYT headline today led me to my first iTunes purchase in a while—does anyone remember this?

"April Wine" now appears right before "Arcade Fire" on my iTunes. There's a line in French toward the end of the song; what if all Canadian groups had to include a line in French in every song (or a song entirely in French, à la the Arcade Fire's "Une Année Sans Lumiére," on every album)?

Norwegian good

Via Complete Review, a look at a 1984 Norwegian novel (as yet unenglished) by Lars Saabye Christensen entitled Beatles:

Beatles is narrated by Kim Karlsen, and it's the story of him and his three buddies, Gunnar, Ola, and Seb—and, yes, they occasionally like to think of themselves as the Fab Four. They were born in 1951, and the story starts with the first wave of Beatlemania in Norway, in the spring of 1965. Each chapter takes a different Beatle song (or, near the end, post-Beatles solo song) as its title and theme—all the way through the winter of 1972—, but Christensen doesn't go completely overboard with this. It sounds—and, at first, looks—a bit too simple and obvious, but it's only a loose structure: this is a story of teenage years in Norway in the late 1960s, with music playing a big but not overwhelming role. (The Beatles are idolised, but don't always hit the right note: surprisingly often the lads are disappointed by the newest song— though practically each new single and album is a major event for them.)

I like the idea of chapters named after song titles (à la Special Topics in Calamity Physics' organizing scheme).

(Here's what Dizzyhead Darren had to say about a previous LSB novel, in the PTSNBN...oops, looks like I used the exact same headline that I did for this post! Curiously, I didn't know then that LSB had written a book called Beatles.)

Dizzyhead challenge: Name ten books (fiction or non-) which use Beatles titles!

More Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Wednesday, July 25

Via Levi: The New York Sun has excerpted Luc Sante's "Commerce," which will appear in toto in the forthcoming book New York Calling (U. Chicago).

Once after leaving the World, a club on 2nd Street, I was riding in a taxi with J and R. Rounding a corner, we saw a mutual acquaintance, using a car hanger, breaking into a parked car. We knew he did things like that, but none of us had ever seen him in action. It was like watching a nature documentary—or better: It was exactly like looking out the window and seeing an egret building its nest.

(Here's what Jenny D had to say about it.)

* * *

Beatles covers galore at Moistworks.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday

Jonathan Coe's new novel will focus on mothers and daughters....The parts of Adolfo Bioy Casares's diaries focusing on his friend Borges have been published, and the TLS has an in-depth look (with several significant reservations)....(I like that the TLS will review things that aren't even in English)....We agree with Nick Owchar at Jacket Copy re the final chapter of the Potteriad: "It is exciting that a book can still stir the kind of frantic energy typical in Dumas’ day"....Over at Slate, Dizzyhead Hua on the rap "beef" in the YouTube era....Not sure we agree with this take on The Sopranos vs. The Novel....The Sopranos is surely not as good as Lost???....What say you, Dizzyheads?....Devin has a new "Pop" post up—including this controversial gem:

Fab Revelation #537
That virtually the whole of Oasis's worthy career sprang from a single tight and polished tap of pop musicality: "And Your Bird Can Sing." And that as well as Oasis have done what they've done over their 15-year career, the Beatles not only did it better but did it in two minutes.

And via Pinky's Paperhaus, this photo of Faulkner's legendary wall outline for A Fable: