Griel Marcus Interview

Powell's Books has an interesting interview with long-time chronicler of rock music and pop culture, Griel Marcus. I used to write a music column for an alternative newspaper, and Marcus was the icon I looked up to. The interview begins:

Describe your latest project.
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice: Through the moral and political rhetoric of John Winthrop, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, America explained itself to itself as a field of promises so vast they could only be betrayed. The attempt to keep the promises — of community, liberty, justice, and equality, for all, because once let loose the genie could never be put back in the bottle — in the face of their betrayal became the engine of American history and the template for our national story.

Once this was the stuff of political speech; today, the real story is pursued in art: as I tell my part of the story, in the work of Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, David Lynch, in the faces and gestures of the actors Bill Pullman and Sheryl Lee, in the music of Corin Tucker's band Heavens to Betsy and of David Thomas, for more than thirty years the face of the band Pere Ubu. It's not a story where anyone ends up where he or she started out.

Read more!

The 100 Most Infuential Books Ever Written

Interesting chronological list of the books that had the greatest influence on the world. The oldest? I Ching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Most_Influential_Books_Ever_Written

Read more!

Waiting

Yesterday, I finally heard from my literary agent. I left a message for her last Friday wanting to know how the pimping of my book was progressing.
“We’ve had a couple nibbles,” she said, “but nothing definite yet. Don’t worry Mike, it’s only been a month, and we really haven’t gotten into the big push.”
Nibbles? Does that mean a publisher bit a noun but spit it out when he tasted the adjective attached to it? I’m worried; do I need to change bait?
“It is going to be fine,” she said, “You’ve got to have patience. The wheels of this business grind slow. I’ll talk to you next month, or sooner if I have any news.”
I am, of course, convinced my book, Pathetic Bob’s Self-Help Guide (Practical Advice From a Very Strange Dog), is probably the worst book ever written. I’m sure slush-pile readers are gathered at some New York bar shaking their heads at the audacity I had to pose as a writer.
The other manuscript—The Lunatic (My death and Life in a Bi-Polar World--is now in the hands of my editor. I anxiously await her phone call asking me if I have ever thought about as a mime.
Four submissions sent out to three magazines yesterday, weird magazines, my kind of magazines. Three notices of receipt by those magazines today. Electronic sniggering?
Writing is not as hard as waiting.

Read more!