Peter, Paul & Mary (1962)

Folk music is a paradox unplugged, accompanied by a riddle playing stand-up bass and an enigma singing high harmonies; the whole kit and caboodle (which just might be the name of the group) sits in the corner of the Coffee Shop of Self-Doubt, gnawing at bagels and sipping at fair-trade coffee, wondering where it's all bound. Once in a while they get up and sing.

*

For an intense two or three years in my late teens I was a folkie. It was the late '80s: how did this come to be? How did a child of a Republican household in the Later Age of St. Ronnie come to spend his afternoons and late nights lost in the sounds of the Kennedy years? In a sense, the question answers itself: I knew I wasn't a Reaganaut, and I was looking for something else. And I kept finding these interesting-looking old records in the local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores - we had a lot of thrift stores in suburban Anne Arundel County, and they seemed to have been stocked by Boomers who'd grown up and out of the same youthful obsessions that were now, and at a bargain price, mine. I picked up most of Peter, Paul & Mary's oeuvre this way, on old vinyl (so much heavier than the vinyl of new records), scratches and pops and clicks and faded labels with "Susan K." written in blue magic marker on them; I found Joan Baez's first two albums that way. And of course that's how I got my first Dylan...

At the time it was a lifeline to a better, vanished age. Within a few years I was learning about the people these folk-revivalists had based themselves on, the sources of their repertoire, and I was getting lost in the knotty question of authenticity; I left them behind (and followed Dylan's muse, truth be told, re-enacting in my own belated fanhood his gestural rejection of the Newport crowd). But for a couple of years there, PP&M and Joan Baez, Glenn Yarbrough and the Limeliters, were the beacons showing me the way out.

*

Most of what passes for folk isn't really folk. Right? "Folk" has to be somehow connected with the folk, right, the people, the tradition: a folk song by definition has to be a song that has been handed down by generation after generation of singers who taught it to each other manually, orally, preferably in an isolation enforced either by poverty or geography or both. A folk song isn't the product of any one person's genius or craft, but rather the collective genius and craft of many people, mostly anonymous: the People.

That's a naive and even essentialist view of it, to be sure. Study the liner notes to the Harry Smith anthology and you'll realize that for every traditional song that really is as old as the hills there's another that can be traced, if not to a creation out of whole cloth, than at least to a very specific innovation made by a particular, named, individual at a particular time in a particular place. Put another way, Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie can be seen as auteurs at least as easily as they can be seen as autochthonous products of the People.

Still, there's a lot of miles that separate someone like Johnson, who may have been exercising his individual genius but was doing it within a context that was rich with the tradition that gave birth to him, that created the idiom in which he was expressing his genius, from someone like my former neighbor in Cambridge, who sang pretty much only songs he had written himself, based in equal parts on his own musings and whatever he had learned about music from exactly three formats of radio: classic-rock, college, and talk.

My neighbor sang solo, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, and sang sensitive, earnest, melodically shaggy songs that went well with coffee and bagels. I'd call that, if I had to give it a label, singer-songwriter: he had more in common with James Taylor or Jack Johnson than with Bascom Lamar Lunsford or Mississippi John Hurt.

If it ain't old, if it ain't rooted in what's old, it ain't folk music, is what I feel.

And yet, of course: if Robt. Johnson was singing what he knew, and what he felt, and drawing inspiration from his immediate musical context, not considering it particularly old in relation to himself, most likely, and drawing, let's remember, from whatever he'd heard of Tin Pan Alley as well as the Delta, how is that different from my neighbor? Was not my neighbor being authentic in drawing from the music that surrounded him, no less than Mr. Johnson was?

This brings us to two points that might fairly be considered the rub here. First, authenticity, that dreadnought of a word. Second: the radio. Mass Culture.

*

I'm aware that I'm not saying anything many others haven't said better before me, by the way.

*

Authenticity. I'm prepared to grant my neighbor (and I'm sure he's quite relieved) an authenticity somewhat on a par with Mr. Johnson's, if we stipulate that authenticity to mean being true to one's musical context. RJ's was the Delta Blues, with snippets of mainstream pop here and there; my neighbor's was radio. Both take these materials - accept them, meaning maybe challenge but not reject them - and filter them through whatever they may have of personal genius and craft. If I like one better than the other, it's either a matter of responding to the genius of one over that of the other, or a question of liking the raw materials of one over the other.

Which I do, and do; no problem, end of debate. It's a question of taste (and I do believe taste can and should be accounted for: given account of), but not of authenticity or embeddedness in the folk process.

Unless. Unless you see a crucial and definitive difference between person-to-person transmission from one singer to another and mechanical transmission from one singer to thousands of listeners who have never met the singer and have no clue as to how the singer's culture may or may not be reflected in the music. Unless, in other words, you see folk music as being fundamentally impossible in the (wait for it) age of mechanical reproduction.

What could that difference be? What would you get from having Robert Johnson himself teach you "Terraplane Blues" that you couldn't get through learning it from a record? Musical fundamentals such as chords, tunings, rhythms, ways to produce and modulate the human voice? Background knowledge about the lyrics, what they mean, and why they mean what they mean? Why he's singing about a Terraplane? A greater familiarity with all the musical techniques, cultural knowledge, and experiences that lie behind "Terraplane Blues"? Something less definable - some kind of subverbal sharing that might arise naturally and gnostically from the type of intimate relationship that alone would have made it possible to get Mr. Johnson himself to teach you "Terraplane Blues"?

Shared culture, is that what we're talking about? Participation in the creation, maintenance, and transmission from which "Terraplane Blues" emerged organically? Are we saying that such participation is definitively different than cultural transmission into the midst of which mechanical capitalism - radio, records - have intervened?

Well, it is different, isn't it?

*

If you're a middle-class white guy in Cambridge, Mass., in the early '00s, and you play acoustic guitar and read books and are honest with yourself, you know that you can't get away with singing Robert Johnson songs, not really, because you didn't learn them from him (not strictly necessary), or from anybody who learned them from anybody who learned them from him. Not personally. You're not part of the folk tradition that Robert Johnson inhabited: you don't have the same right to the songs as he did.

If you're interested in authenticity, this poses a problem for you. You have two options. You can either sing them anyway, in which case your peers will think you're a poser and clueless and maybe a thief and not listen to you. Or you can sing what you know, trying to be as authentic to yourself as possible. In which case you end up sounding like James Taylor or Norah Jones and you're boring and lame and I don't listen to you. No big loss there, which is why folk music sounds the way it does now.

Is there still a folk tradition anywhere? A lot of us seem to think there is - I think that thought is what's behind a lot of the F on the NPR DORF lists. The periodic appearances of people like Caetano Veloso, Buena Vista Social Club, or things like the O Brother soundtrack on bestseller lists seem to speak for a yearning to believe that there is authentic music out there, somewhere, and people who can perform it authentically. I also think it's what's behind the surge of interest in a local music scene that you sometimes see - the assumption that a music's incubation in dark clubs and basements before the bright lights of the music biz are turned on it is analogous to, if not a manifestation of, the folk process. CBGB was just like a juke joint, in this line of thinking. Sugar Hill is the Delta. In this way of thinking the folk process can be boiled down to the idea of the proletariat, or kids (same thing, to rockists), reacting honestly to the world around them, as a community.

I don't think that's folk music, even if it is a good thing in other respects. An appreciation of the other respects in which it's a good thing is what led, to use a now-obscure example, Nora Guthrie to deliver Woodie's cache of lyrics to some indie-rockers and an agitprop songwriter, people who could speak to youth of their day, rather than to somebody who had some kind of appreciation for the musical context in which Guthrie worked. I would have loved to hear what Dylan or Cash did with them. That might have been close to folk music. Mermaid Avenue wasn't. It was shaggy singer-songwriter music with a pleasant indie murk and unusually pithy lyrics. (And, to be fair, a couple of tracks that make me smile to this day.)

Again, I don't think that's folk music. Shouldn't folk music, no matter how impeccably engagé it is, have something to do with old music?

*

I listened to Peter, Paul & Mary's first album today. After many, many years in which my love of folk music was indulged solely by exploring old music, I've recently decided to give the Folk Revival another look. And I started by picking up PP&M's first six albums, their all-acoustic ones. Their "folk" ones, before they embraced folk-rock in Dylan's wake.

I hear many things in it now, mostly problems. The kind of problems that turn you off, not on. Like:

They're upper-middle-class urban white people, sons and daughter of privilege, singing songs plucked mostly from poor, rural, often non-white contexts. Appalachian ballads, African- American spirituals, calypsos, blues. What right do they have to these songs? Aren't PP&M just part of a long line of whites appropriating black music, putting a presentable face on it, and making money from it?

Does it make it better or worse that PP&M are performing in a style that, mostly, sounds like themselves, not their sources? Unlike, say, early Dylan, they're not trying to sound black, or Southern, or rural (except on "Bamboo," where they seem to be trying to sound Caribbean): they're singing pure notes, not bent, in carefully-tiered harmonies. Peppy rhythmic arrangements, very tight - very poppy. Of course PP&M were decidedly on the pop side of the folk revival... Is this them being true to themselves - authentic?

Does it make it better or worse that they seem to have had the best of intentions? That they marched on Washington, stood up for civil rights, really exerted themselves in causes - and that their repertoire also included good contemporary examples of the other strain of thinking about folk music, the new-but-political strain?

*

It seems to me that when it began, the Folk Revival was about repertoire, and then it became about stance, and then it ended.

That is, in the '50s there were some people who realized what the age of mechanical reproduction was doing, or had done, to the folk process: destroyed it, or all but. And in the face of this loss, it seemed to fall to those few people who lamented the loss to document what was being lost. So you had people like Alan Lomax going around and recording the last of the traditional singers; you had people discovering some of the traditional singers and trying to bring them to new audiences before they breathed their last.

Other people heard this music and felt something in it, something that touched them despite, or more likely because, it had nothing do to with their world, their own context. It's the authenticity question, but in a period in which it seems this stuff is all but snuffed out, don't the benefits of trying to keep the tradition alive outweigh the potential violence you do to it by performing it out of context? Hedy West came by "500 Miles" authentically, but it touches you deeply, as well, and so why not sing it? Keep it alive, pass it on?

If you're really into the traditional music itself, for its own sake, then I think the answer's yes. But if you're coming to this scene a little later, attracted by the thoughtfulness of the performers, for example, or the simple beauty of the human voice/acoustic guitar combination no matter what it's singing, or by the politics, or just by the fact that everybody around you was into it (the Folk Revival was the original college radio music), then I think maybe after a while the authenticity question gnaws at you enough that maybe you step back and start looking for ways to incorporate a little more of yourself into your music. Your first album maybe is filled with Rev. Gary Davis and stripped-down Bill Monroe songs, but your third maybe has things by Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, and by your fifth you're trying to find your own songwriting voice.

Which is a healthy thing, I think.

But what about the old songs? Who's singing "500 Miles" now? Nobody. The tradition is not just dead now, but twice dead. Dead and abandoned. Dead and forgotten.

Maybe it could never have been any other way. Since, as we've seen, things are never the same again after radio and records step in.

*

Let's go back to that moment when "500 Miles" has touched you deeply. Check the Wikipedia entry out: Hedy West was from rural Georgia, daughter of a union organizer, and she learned "500 Miles" from her grandmother, who'd learned it from her forebears. That's the folk tradition, in case you were wondering. I don't know if PP&M learned it from West when she hit the folk-revival circuit, or if they learned it from her record, but either way, they're not from rural Georgia. Peter was born in NYC, Paul was born in Baltimore and went to Michigan State, and Mary was born in Kentucky but moved to Greenwich Village when she was 2. This wasn't their music. Hello, elephant. If you're middle-class in America in the middle 20th century or later - probably it started earlier - you have no tradition. You were raised on TV and radio, and chances were you lived somewhere very different from where your ancestors had lived, very far from whatever community may have once nurtured them. It's the great dislocation of modernity, right? Wherever you are, whoever you are, you probably don't feel connected to a community: you feel atomized, isolated, and alienated.

And that brings us back to the dreaded authenticity question. The Folk Revivalists, many of them, had a genuine love for that music, but for most of them that would have been inextricably bound up with a hunger for an authenticity, membership in an organic community, that they felt the circumstances of their birth and upbringing had denied them. Maybe it's an illusion, maybe it's essentialist, maybe it's yet another unwitting manifestation of unexamined privilege, but you hear "500 Miles" or "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and you hear that, and it's something you want, something you want to honor, and in the honoring become (or is it the other way around?).

Is it so wrong to sing those songs, to make them part of your repertoire? And if you can sing them well, so that other people want to pay to hear you sing them, is it so wrong to charge admission, so that you can buy the time and means to learn more songs like them, and perform them to more people?

Maybe it is. Because they can never be your songs, no matter how well you sing them.

Dylan solved the problem by plugging in: by radically remaking the songs so that it was obvious to all that he was adding something new. That was '65 and '66. But if you listen to what he's done ever since, you realize he's never stopped trying to find his way inside those songs, find a way to inhabit them. To make them his. He's an antiquarian, in some ways, and it means that he's always been bedeviled by the authenticity question - it fuels much of his brilliance.

*

Listening to Peter, Paul & Mary's first album, I can't help but think of A Mighty Wind: that movie nailed the folk revival, and specifically PP&M. Hilarious, and all in good fun, right? But while Spinal Tap didn't destroy heavy metal for me, A Mighty Wind might have destroyed folk music for me. The scholarly pretension, the naivete, the jejune rhythms and antiseptic harmonies, the utter cluelessness about where one falls in relation to the authenticity question - that's what the movie grasps. Certainly I can hear that in the music, clearly now where I couldn't when I was younger.

Has it ruined it for me? Or can I still enjoy PP&M for what they were, rather than scorning them for what they might have been trying to be? That's what I'm here to decide. I'm not sure if I can. Certainly every time I've played this disc in the last few weeks since I got it, I've been sent off on reveries like the one above.

This in spite of the fact that the record offers quite a few surface pleasures. I really like their harmonies - a rich blend where you can still pick out each individual voice for its qualities of personality. I like their arrangements: tight rhythms, well-honed accompaniments. They bring in the best aspects of pop: the professionalism, the attention to detail. And I love their repertoire: as something of a musical antiquarian myself I have to thank them for turning me on to such a wide variety of sturdy songs.

But I can't surrender myself to it like I once did.

True Grit (2010)

The line on the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit seems to be that it's their first serious foray into genre filmmaking. I don't know about that; what was Miller's Crossing? But it is their first serious, full-blown Western: after, of course, a modern comic Western (Raising Arizona), a Western-inflected modern comic noir (The Big Lebowski), and a modern revisionist sorta Western (No Country For Old Men). Clearly it's something they've been leading up to for a long time, and I'm glad they finally took the plunge.

Because True Grit, it turns out, sorely needed a remaking. The original (which I confess I only just saw in preparation for the remake) is an iconic Western, but for all the wrong reasons. It's a perfect example of the late classic Western - i.e., before Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah started shooting the place up. It has John Wayne in it, in all his unearned male-privilege swagger; it has unrepentant worship of out-of-control state violence to thumb the nose at dirty hippies (the original was made in 1969, don't forget); and it has the aspen glories of Colorado standing in for Arkanfuckingsas.

Worst of all, through becutesying and belittling Mattie, it has the gall to suggest that it's Rooster Cogburn who actually has the true grit. As if.

The Coens are too loyal to, or fascinated with, the myths of the Western to utterly jettison Cogburn's macho mystique, or utility; but they undercut it enough to put him in his place. That is, he's useful in a tight spot, not entirely useless otherwise, a gnarly mess of endearing and repellent traits; and, most importantly, he recognizes that it's Mattie who has the biggest and most cast-iron balls in the film.

That's only part of what I liked about it.

Another part is what the Coens did with the scenery. They keep the story in Arkansas, and Indian territory, and they don't glamorize it one bit. This is not the romantic Wild West, but a hard-bitten, scrubby Lower Midwest; it has its occasional prettiness, and a certain haunted spareness, but no aspens. The land their cameras give us is a perfect setting for the hard, matter-of-fact story they tell, in which there may be heroism, but not glory. And only occasionally what most of us would recognize as beauty. The major exception is, touchingly, during Cogburn's desperate ride to get Mattie to medical help: then, suddenly, the camera gives us lyrical views of a burning sunset, luminous frosty fields, endless starry skies. The West of legend.

Another thought. This is the second film in a row in which the Coens seem to be very interested in the idea of religion - in exploring a worldview (or even a world) entirely shaped by a particular religious outlook. In A Serious Man, of course, it was American Judaism of the late 1960s in the suburban upper Midwest. Here it's American Protestantism of the 1880s in the lower rural Midwest. Think about the opening of the film (their openings lately have been doozies): a dark screen, then a faint warm light in the middle that gradually comes to look like a cross seen through snow, but which, as it comes into full resolution, is revealed to be a saloon door in front of which a murder happens - a betrayal, as a man kills his master, a man to whom he is beholden.

And the language of Mattie's narration, and her whole way of dealing with the world, is all about debt, payment, tallies, contracts. The only thing free in this life, she says, is grace - and is there any of that in the film? Not until reality gives way to myth. Not until we come up, through the snow, to another doorway shining through the night, but this time with the possibility of salvation. And is this the same trading post where we've earlier seen Cogburn kick little Indian kids? Are we to imagine him begging for grace where he's previously shown none?

You know, I get the feeling that the Coen Brothers might only now be hitting their prime.

Federico Fellini: La Dolce Vita (1960)

Midway (or a little more) through my life's journey, I saw La Dolce Vita. A good time to see it: in one's prime (if you can call this prime).

Wow.

This film is too deep, too different from any I know much about, and too well known, for me to have anything useful to add about it. But, wow.

I'll just mention a couple of things that stopped me in my tracks.

One is that deathless opening. We see a helicopter carrying, suspended, a big statue of Jesus: flying past aqueducts, old Rome, then construction sites, new Rome, the statue's arms outstretched in benediction. Then the helicopter flies over some bathing beauties, and stops. Marcello, our protagonist, is on board, and his eye has been caught. Hovering there, dangling the Jesus over the girls, he tries to get a phone number. No dice. He smiles and flies on.

What a wonderful summation of the whole movie: immense, grand spiritual yearnings that nonetheless refuse to separate themselves from the pleasures of the flesh, with the result that neither category of desire is ever fully consummated. But no matter: on we fly, majestically.

The other scene is what Professor Wikipedia calls the "intermezzo." If the girl in this scene is an angel, then this must be heaven - it functions that way, as a brief moment away from the moil of mortality, all tomorrow's parties*, a breathing-space where our protagonist can work on his art. And Fellini's camera makes it look like heaven - this beachside cafe, reed blinds for walls and ceiling, light and shadow in a luminous dappling. But what about our protagonist? Could it be any clearer that he doesn't belong here? He, and his coat on the chair, are the only spots of darkness in the scene.

*Rock nerd me was happy to notice Nico in a bit part. Appropriate casting, to be sure.

Children, go where I send thee

No high school kid in the '80s listened to as much Peter, Paul & Mary as I did. I listened to them all the time in high school, and basically never since. But I've been rediscovering them recently. I may be working up to a serious post on them, but in the meantime, here they are singing "Jane, Jane" (a.k.a. "Children, Go Where I Send Thee") in 1966.

Imagine a time when this was the height of cool.

Big Country

Big Country's problem was the problem a lot of bands have. When they burst on the scene it was with a sound, a musical idea, that was fully formed and dramatically different from anything that anybody had heard before. But when the novelty wore off, it became apparent (to a lot of listeners, anyway) that they didn't have much else to offer.

So, that sound. Obviously, it's the bagpipe thing. Using the e-bow, among other things, to make their guitars sound like bagpipes, and then writing twin-guitar melodies that sounded like they could have been stolen from old Highland hymns. These they laid atop rhythms that conjured up images of bekilted regiments alternately marching and pogoing. The whole announced the band as unabashedly, not to say self-consciously, Scottish in an era when British pop was opening itself up to contributions from border nations. In other words, since Ireland had coughed up U2, it fell to Big Country to represent Scotland, and the Alarm to hold up the Welsh end.

I know the band remained big in Europe more or less through the '90s, but really, it was all over for them after their first couple of years, as far as I can tell. The tricks started to sound old, but when they moved away from them, it became apparent that they didn't have any other musical ideas: everything I've heard from their second album and beyond is either a retread of ideas from their first, or else sub-U2 heartland-rock empty bombast.

But for an album and maybe a half - from 1983 into 1984 - Big Country managed to wring an amazing amount of awesome from their one idea. Everybody knows their two big singles, "In A Big Country" and "Fields Of Fire." But their whole first album, The Crossing, is brilliant - consistently satisfying, despite consisting mainly of different twists on the rock'n'roll fife-and-drum-corps sound. And they managed to survive on the artistic momentum from that album for a little while: a splendidly re-recorded version of "Chance" from the album, a decent non-album single, "Wonderland," and a handful of nice b-sides (including "The Crossing," a belated title track for the first album, and a good farewell to their golden youth) all complement that remarkable debut. Add in a few highlights from the second album, and you have a perfect Big Country disc, all you'd ever need.

Things I love about Big Country, then. When Stuart yells "shock" or "shot" or whatever the hell it is he yells over the intro to the album version of "In A Big Country" (the drum section in our high school marching band used to warm up with this, and of course they all yelled "shock." Us dopey clarinet players lived for that). That pugnacious, anthemic bass couplet at the beginning of "Fields Of Fire," way up on the neck. The crazy buoyancy of "Harvest Home," somehow sounding both old as the hills and new as the sunrise. The brooding, inscrutable "The Storm," which is basically a couple of Walter Scott novels set to Fairport Convention music. Their surprisingly affecting take on "Tracks Of My Tears."

I respect punk. But I think the most interesting music to emerge from the movement came when the punks started to outgrow punk and (re)discover other kinds of music.

Walter Mosley: A Little Yellow Dog (1996) and Gone Fishin' (1997)

Of course I had Walter Mosley in mind when I was writing my private little riposte to Doc-X last night. I mean, here's a perfect example of books that take the conventions of a genre, in this case the private eye mystery thriller, and use them as a means of getting at something else entirely. We get at something really important and true about the black experience in America in the 20th century through Easy Rawlins not in spite of the fact that he's a character in a thriller, but precisely because he is. Our understanding of the way private eyes are supposed to act, their relationships with the law and the criminal element, their moral codes, their stance vis-a-vis society, all of this generalized, genre-specific knowledge helps us to further understand Easy Rawlins because we see how he both adheres to and departs from what his genre leads us to expect. And the more we read Easy Rawlins the more we realize that both his adherences to and departures from the model are conditioned by America's racial history.

That's what we see in A Little Yellow Dog (1996), the fifth in the series. By this point (it's 1963), Rawlins has lost all connection with the knight-errant template. He's not even casually a private eye anymore - in fact, he's not self-employed anymore. He's taken a job as a school janitor, and he's trying to make it work, to leave the street behind him. Would Sam Spade do that? Would Sam Spade have to do that? No. And so now we've learned something about the difference between Sam Spade and Easy Rawlins. We know something, too, about the kinds of opportunities that were available to black men in the '60s in L.A., even black men who read Ian Fleming and Emile Zola and Marcus Aurelius. We know something about the kinds of relationships it was possible for such men to have with the police, and how very different those relationships were from those enjoyed by, say, Jake Gittes.

Maybe Mosley could have gotten this far with Easy without making him into a private-eye figure in a thriller-patterned series. Maybe. But then read the sixth book in the series, Gone Fishin' (1997). It's not a thriller. It's a story of Easy Rawlins's youth, of his time with Mouse in Houston. Their back story - their origin story, to put it in superhero terms. There's mystery here with a capital M, as the story involves witches, voodoo, fever dreams, and bayou Brigadoons, but no sleuthing.

And it's not, I'd venture to say, entirely a success. It's an essential entry in the series - for five books Mosley has had Easy alluding to dark secrets in his past, and more than that to the wild and scary ways of Houston and the bayou country from which so many of his L.A. acquaintances hail. East Texas and West Louisiana sort of take on the same resonance in these books that Chinatown does in that movie. Well, here we go back and experience it first-hand.

So as a way of opening up this character and his life experiences, it's effective. And it does a great job of sketching an almost mythic, slightly romanticized vision of life in the black deep South before the War - Mosley doesn't disguise the poverty or violence, but he does allow his descriptions of the milieu to echo Faulkner's lyricism, and his rendering of the journey to remind us of Huckleberry Finn.

But our view of all of this is, in a way, passive. Easy is so young, so naive, and so helpless for so much of the book that, through his eyes, we don't really understand a lot of what's happening to him - even the central murder is left a little ambiguous. And this means that we don't come to quite as deep an understanding of this society as we do of the L.A. of the other installments in the series. There's one exception - through the character of Miss Dixon, Mosley shows us the heartbreaking precariousness of black life in the south, as the death of this one indifferent white landlord manages to destroy the whole town of Pariah, located on her land. We understand how impossible it is to build a life when you don't have access to the money you'd need to buy the land to build it on.

Anyway, as I say, the novel has its strengths. But as a whole it didn't feel as richly detailed, as thoroughly known, as the other books in the series. And who knows why that is - I don't know much about Mosley's life, only what's on Wikipedia, but it may be that he knows L.A. in the '60s a lot better, more personally, than he knows East Texas in the '30s. But I think it's also because the formula of the detective story forces the hero to be out and active, meeting people, putting clues together. That formula is absent in Gone Fishin' - and that's a valid decision, and maybe Easy's passivity here is really what Mosley wanted to explore (his epiphany, after all, is to learn to read).

But you see what I'm driving at, in my characteristically roundabout way: I think it's genre that allowed Mosley to explore black L.A. so well. Absent genre, we don't know black East Texas nearly as well.

Edward Docx, genre fiction, literary fiction

I just got back from Powell's and Kinokuniya in Portland with a sackful of books that include both James Church and Terry Eagleton, the Tale of the Heike and a new manga, and I find that I'm late to the party, as usual, I see. (Or is it that I'm crashing? I can never tell.) Edward Docx (who seems to be a British novelist, rather than a file I can't open with my old version of Office) fired a broadside against genre fiction last week in the Guardian.

He seems to have two main gripes about it. First is that it's badly written. I tend to agree with him about Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown, his two main whipping-boys. At the same time, I heartily agree with Laura Miller at Salon, who notes that cliché-ridden writing is not necessarily a drawback for some readers in some situations. Drawing on C.S. Lewis, Miller is defending accessible prose and those who read it- kind of echoing B.R. Myers' famous assault on the Cult of the Sentence from a decade ago. The gist is that not every reader is always, or even ever, up for prose that, sentence by sentence, tortures itself in an effort to avoid cliché. It's work to read, and some of us just like to read for pleasure.

I agree with Miller, but in fact I don't think she goes quite far enough: she's still buying into the same dichotomy that Docx is setting up, that "serviceable" prose, prose that "flows," that's easily readable, is artistically inferior - she just seems to be saying, lay off those who think that. They know what they like.

I'd go farther: I hold that sentence-smithing is only part of what goes into novel-writing. What goes into a novel? Sentences - syntax and grammar and style - of course, but also story - pacing and plot construction and character. And, beneath all that, there's the possibility, at least, of subtext, theme, ideas.

And none of these things presupposes skill at the others. Anybody who's read an academic book knows that you can have deep ideas but still be unable to express them in beautiful sentences. And anybody who's read Larsson or Brown knows that you can have a story that works for the reader without beautiful sentences. Likewise, one could point to any number of high-lit novels that prove you can have ideas and style without having to pay any attention to the mechanics of storytelling, or even the need to have a story to tell.

Why can't we recognize that since novels involve a lot of different skills, it's possible for novels to have different kinds of excellence? To say that Larsson and Brown are lousy sentence-writers but still manage to write interesting novels is to put the emphasis in the wrong place. They're not good sentence-writers, but they are excellent storytellers. There's real skill there. And the appreciation of skill is a large part of the apprehension of art, no?

In short, to say these novels are badly written, and to have that charge mean what Docx means, is to oversimplify what's involved in writing a novel. They are extremely well-written, I'd say - and the purely workmanlike nature of their sentences is part of that, allowing the reader to follow the plot (and whatever ideas the authors may have embedded in the plot) without getting hung up on individual word choices.

Docx's second point - and I'll admit that this is a pretty ballsy claim to make in 2010 - is that genre fiction is inherently inferior to non-genre, self-consciously literary fiction:

...even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. ...If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

I happen to think he's wrong, but I'm going to argue this point not by example but by analogy. Recently I was teaching an 18th-century Japanese comic book that was parodying popular sermonizing, using the metaphor of the kite. Ah, yes, the kite metaphor: I had this explained to me in Sunday School. You've seen kites high in the sky, straining against their tethers. They look for all the world like they're trying to get free and fly away into the ether, but are restrained by the string. The string looks like bondage. But in fact it's only the string that allows them to fly - cut the string, and the kite falls to the earth pretty quickly. Rules (the sermon goes) are like this - they may appear to be restrictions on freedom, but in fact they're the only things that allow us any freedom at all.

In the comic book in question, the parody came in when the author took this basically common-sensical metaphor and elaborated it beyond all believability, driving the point home with mock-pedantry for thirty pages. Very funny stuff. But at the same time it does make you think about the central metaphor, and how it is pretty common-sensical. (A mixture of parodic and sincere didacticism was this author's hallmark.)

And that's how I look at genre fiction. To Docx, the conventions of genre fiction look like rules that curtail the novelist's freedom and limit his/her potential. Certainly it may work that way for some writers - conventions can certainly be a crutch - but not all of them. For some writers conventions are the kite strings that allow them to soar - rules that spur creativity, or focus it, rather than kill it. To say that genre constraints interfere with the novelist's ability to write a good novel is like saying that Shakespeare might have been a great poet if he hadn't been constricted by the rules of the sonnet form.