Read More Words: Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Books to read (or re-read) in 2012

In pursuit of my 2012 resolution to "read more in general," I'm plowing through Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music and it is giving me a pretty bad lady-crush.  Also some hand-cramps from excessive underlining. A few samples . . .


On pop culture:

Conservative and utopian idealogues agree that man must understand and control his environment; the questions are how, and for whose benefit.  But pop culture defines man as a receiver of stimuli, his environment as sensory patterns to be enjoyed, not interpreted (literature and philosophy are irrelevant) or acted upon (politics is irrelevant). . . . The bureaucrat defends standardization because it makes a complex society manageable.  Yet he thinks of himself as an individualist and finds the idea of mass-produced, mechanized art incomprehensible, threatening--or a put-on.  The pop artist looks at mass culture naively and sees beauty in its regular patterns; like an anthropologist exhibiting Indian basket-weaving, Warhol shows us our folk art--soup cans.  His message--the Emperor has no clothes, but that's all right, in fact it's beautiful--takes acceptance of image for essence to its logical extreme.


On Dylan (next to which I just wrote "YES"):

Dylan has a lavish verbal imagination and a brilliant sense of irony, and many of his images--especially on the two Blonde on Blonde records--are memorable.  But poetry also requires economy, coherence, and discrimination, and Dylan has perpetrated prolix verses, horrendous grammar, tangles phrases, silly metaphors, embarrassing cliches, muddled though; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others, and he relies too much on rhyme.  His chief literary virtue--sensitivity to psychological nuance--belongs to fiction more than poetry.


Even the footnotes she wrote later are memorable.  Poetic crimes aside, she clearly loves Dylan (as do I) but notes in reference to her 1967 discussion of "Another Side of Bob Dylan":

Here as elsewhere in this prefeminist essay I refer with aplomb if not outright endorsement to Dylan's characteristic bohemian contempt for women (which he combined with an equally obnoxious idealization of female goddess figures).  At the time I did not question the idea that women were guardians of oppressive conventional values; I only thought of myself as an exception.  I was not possessive; I understood men's need to go on the road because I was, spiritually speaking, on the road myself.  That, at least, was my fantasy; the realities of my life were somewhat more ambiguous.


Rock on.