I’m not particularly drawn to biographies, and certainly not music biographies, but I make exceptions for Elvis. I was also swayed because I have heard Peter Guralnick’s books praised many times. Most satisfying about Last Train to Memphis, volume one of Guralnick’s two volume biography of Elvis Presley, was Guralnick’s ability to humanize his subject. The persona of Elvis, years after his death, is such a caricature, even a joke, that it can be hard to remember that there was a real, living, breathing person named Elvis Presley. The book contained what were, for me, some fantastic revelations. For one, Elvis was nearly done in when he was a youngster, not by the difficulties of his quest for fame, but by the swiftness with which it arrived. In a year’s time, he went from being a nobody to being one of the most recognizable faces in the country, a man whose presence literally caused riots whenever he appeared in public. For Elvis, it was a major struggle simply to adjust to this new life. Television documentaries and magazine articles often mention in passing that Elvis’ music and persona caused quite a stir, moral outrage even, when he appeared on the scene in the 1950s. Such stories sound quaint and exaggerated in this day and age, but with the context provided by Guralnick, I was able to see how groundbreaking Elvis really was, both musically and socially. Finally, I was enthralled by Guralnick’s portraits of Elvis’ supporting cast, quirky characters like Elvis’ mother Gladys, his manager Colonel Tom Parker, and the guy who gave him his first big break, Sam Phillips. The book rekindled my love, as it surely will rekindle yours, for the early days of rock and roll, and it left me with a serious hankering to read volume two of the biography, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley sometime real soon.
A Review of Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick
A Brief History of the Future: On James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History
The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey
First the good: there’s lots of neat info in this book about antique map collecting and about the history of maps in general. Anyone with a passing interest in maps will find that the The Island of Lost Maps contains a number of absorbing digressions about adventurous mapmakers from centuries ago. Miles Harvey’s book also, however, bills itself as an account of the crimes and ultimate downfall of map thief Gilbert Bland. As Harvey writes early on in the book, Bland never agreed to talk to him, and the crimes themselves, while interesting, are not compelling enough to carry the 400-some pages that it takes Harvey to tell the story. The book is a 15 page magazine article enveloped in hundreds of pages of discursions and asides about various cartographic topics as well as a great deal of melodramatic meta-narration about Harvey’s efforts to tell Bland’s story:I was trying to map the life of a man – an anonymous and elusive man, a man I did not know, and a man who demonstrated no desire to meet me. And even all that might not have been so bad if I had somehow been able to find a way inside his head, to put myself in his shoes. But Bland and I were very different people. Other than a few shared superficialities – both of us white males, both right-handers, both map lovers – our common frames of reference were few.It’s as though Harvey, realizing that he is devoting a tremendous amount of writerly energy to what is, in the end, a rather straightforward crime committed by an uninteresting man, feels the need to overexplain himself. Over and over he tells the reader how fascinating this crime is and obsessed he has become with telling Bland’s story, and after a while it seems that Harvey has forgotten about his readers and is simply trying to convince himself. The best creative nonfiction seems effortless (John McPhee’s books, for example), but Maps reads like it was a tremendous effort to write.
Black and Proud: James McBride on James Brown
Three years after his National Book Award, I am pleased to report that James McBride has outdone himself. His new book, a delicious stew of styles called Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, is part memoir, part biography, part history, part journalistic investigation, and part musical exegesis. But mostly it’s a scorchingly honest examination of the racial divide that explains why America continues to be a bloody and schizophrenic place.
As its subtitle suggests, this book is a quest both for a man and for how he helped shape our national soul through his music and politics and personal style. McBride goes to some lengths to state the case for Brown’s importance. “For African Americans,” McBride writes, “the song of our life, the song of our entire history, is embodied in the life and times of James Brown.” He adds, “James Brown was our soul” and “one of the greatest American forces in modern musical history.” But importance does not always lead to understanding, and McBride acknowledges this as a further reason for writing this book: “[James Brown] is also arguably the most misunderstood and misrepresented African American figure of the last three hundred years, and I would speculate that he is nearly as important and influential in American social history as, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass.”
One reason Brown was misunderstood, as McBride reveals, is because of the nature of the world that made him. He grew up poor and parentless in an impoverished swath of the Jim Crow South, raised mostly by relatives, largely unloved, frequently despised, and clearly headed nowhere good. He was busted for stealing car parts and served three years in juvenile prison before he was out of his teens. He was no stranger to loneliness. As Brown said of his early years in the first of his two memoirs, The Godfather of Soul:
I was left by myself a lot. Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, not having anybody to talk to, worked a change in me that stayed with me from then on: It gave me my own mind. No matter what came my way after that — prison, personal problems, government harassment — I had the ability to fall back on myself.
Shortly after his release from juvenile prison, Brown formed a group called The Famous Flames, and in 1955 they cut their first record, Please, Please, Please. There were to be major bumps in the road, but the fledgling singer was on his way to becoming The Star of the Show, Mr. Dynamite, America’s Soul Brother Number One, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business — Jaaaaaaaames Brown!
McBride plays saxophone and leads the gospel/jazz/blues Good Lord Bird Band, and his understanding of how music gets made is a key to this book’s power. He offers a deft dissection of the differences between jazz and funk, likening jazz to basketball and funk to baseball. “Jazz requires a blend of split-second timing, skill and training,” he writes, while funk requires “specific learned skills that have to be exercised flawlessly [and] can only be learned through years of practice.” He adds, “That’s why funk is as challenging as jazz. You must know when to enter the groove, and what to play [as well as] when not to play.” I would venture to take McBride’s sports analogy a step further into the realm of visual art and say that jazz, with its soloists’ squabbling improvisations, is akin to abstract expressionism, while funk, with its pared-down precision and stress on what to leave out, is more akin to minimalism. Compare Jackson Pollock’s volcanic eruptions to Donald Judd’s simple plywood boxes. Compare John Coltrane’s lushly rambling “Traneing In” to James Brown’s precisely chiseled “The Payback.”
Though it’s a celebration of a remarkable life and career, Kill ’Em and Leave is also a sad book. Brown’s lonely and largely loveless childhood produced a grown man who was deeply suspicious and withdrawn. He routinely hid money and carried thick wads of cash because he didn’t trust banks. He drove his musicians mercilessly. A long-time friend said of Brown: “I’ve never met anyone in my life that worked harder to hide his true heart.” And Brown himself admitted to his trusted manager, Charles Bobbit: “Mr. Bobbit, you’re the only one I let know me. You’re the only man that knows I don’t know how to love.”
But mainly Brown was driven by fear. McBride describes it with this marvelous mash of metaphors:
That fear – the knowledge that a single false step while wandering inside the maze of the white man’s reality could blast you back home with the speed of a circus artist being shot out of a cannon — is the kryptonite that has lain under the bed of every great black artist from 1920s radio star Bert Williams to Miles Davis to Jay Z. If you can’t find a little lead-lined room where you can flee that panic and avoid its poisonous rays, it will control your life….Keeping the pain out was a full-time job, and Brown worked harder at it than any black star before or after.
Here’s Henrietta Shackleford, the narrator of The Good Lord Bird, speaking in his/her wised-up vernacular about the source of this fear and pain:
Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don’t know your wants. He don’t know your needs or feelings or what’s inside you, for you ain’t equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse.
Like many who bring themselves up out of poverty by force of will, talent, and hard work, Brown was disdainful of handouts, any hint of shiftlessness. He became an icon of the civil rights and black pride movements, and “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” became an anthem during the incendiary summer of 1968. I saw James Brown perform in Detroit that summer, and the crowd’s delirious shouting of the title lyric nearly popped the roof off of Cobo Hall. For Brown, the civil rights movement was all about getting equal opportunity, not special treatment. He summed this up nicely in the lyric: “I don’t want nobody to give me nothing. Open up the door, I’ll get it myself.”
Brown was demanding, prickly, impossible, and eventually just about everyone abandoned him — wives, lovers, musicians, family — and he wound up isolated, in physical pain, hounded by the IRS, with a mean streak and an angel dust habit to boot. The lonely boy in the cabin in the piney woods wound up walled away inside his mansion, alone with his genius and his irascibility. As a crowning insult, greed and legal wrangling have seen to it that, a decade after his death, not one dime of his $100 million estate has yet reached its intended beneficiaries, the impoverished schoolchildren of South Carolina and Georgia. This may be the true tragedy of James Brown’s life.
I already knew that McBride was a gifted writer and musician, but this book proves that he’s also a tireless shoe-leather reporter. He does the legwork, finds the right people, gets them to open up to him. These writing and reporting skills dovetail to produce some startling insights, including an epiphany about race that McBride has while eating in a soul food joint called Brooker’s in Barnwell, S.C., not far from where James Brown was born and where he died. This epiphany is worth quoting at length because it captures the essence of McBride’s unorthodox method:
They laugh and smile and make you feel good. But behind the laughter, the pie, the howdies, and the second helpings, behind the huge chicken dinners and the easy chuckles, there’s a silent buzz. If you put your ear to a table, you can almost hear it; it’s a churning kind of grind, a rumble, a growl, and when you close your eyes and listen, the noise is not pleasant. It’s nothing said, or even seen, for black folks in South Carolina are experts at showing a mask to the white man. They’ve had generations of practice. The smile goes out before their faces like a radiator grille. When a white customer enters Brooker’s, they act happy…and howdy ’em and yes ’em to death. And you stand there dumbfounded, because you’re hearing something different, you’re hearing that buzz, and you don’t know if it’s coming from the table or the bottom of your feet, or if it’s the speed of so much history passing between the two of them, the black and the white, in that moment when the white man pays for his collard greens with a smile that ties you up, because you can hear the roar of the war still being fought — the big one, the one the northerners call the Civil War and southerners call the War of Northern Aggression, and the more recent war, the war of propaganda, where the black guy in the White House pissed some people off no matter what he did. It’s all about race. Everybody knows it. And there’s no room to breathe…
If you wait till the white man leaves and ask about that space, the space between white and black folks in South Carolina, the black folks say, “Oh, it ain’t nothing. Such-and-so is my friend. I’ve known him forty years. We all get along here.” Only at night, when they get home, when the lights are down and all the churchin’ is done and the singing is over and the TV is off and the wine is flowing and tongues are working freely, only within the safety of home and family does the talk change, and then the buzz is no longer a buzz. It’s a roaring cyclone of fury laced with distaste and four hundred years of pent-up bitterness.
Kill ’Em and Leave is full of such tough truths. Every person living in America today needs to hear them, fruit of the hard work of one of our most gifted and important writers.
Where Randomness and Madness Reign
Detective fiction and theory have a surprising history, one that I sometimes use to rationalize my childhood love of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. And I’m not alone: T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and G.K. Chesterton were obsessed with popular mysteries. We like whodunits, Bertolt Brecht thought, because our lives are filled with structural problems and social contradictions that aren’t caused by single agents. Crime-solving sleuths, people like Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew, help us put back into place a system that no longer functions: it’s only in detective fiction that we start with a bunch of evidence, follow it rationally to a conclusion, and, in the end, apprehend a villain. Reading detectives, the thinking goes, helps us do what we can’t normally: piece together fragments, forming something coherent out of the madness.
Or at least, traditionally. Enter, then, Laurent Binet’s newest novel, The 7th Function of Language, a madcap sharply irreverent French theory mash-up that’s part mystery and part satire, by the Prix Goncourt winning author of HHhH. The new book turns Roland Barthes’s accidental death in 1980 into a murder investigation set against French intellectual life. With a cast of characters that includes Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva with guest appearances by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Umberto Eco, and John Searle, it’s no surprise Binet’s book is way more dizzying than most detective stories. What is shocking, though, is how it manages to respect the theories and mock the theorists all at once.
The question that prompts the book is simple: who killed Roland Barthes and why? On the case is Bayard, a grumpy inspector who’s more than a bit impatient with the posturing of French intellectuals (who can blame him?). Simon Herzog, his sidekick, shares more than initials with Sherlock Holmes; he’s a young semiology instructor brought on to help decode and interpret the case’s signs. Together, they navigate a blindingly bizarre and often raucous set of worlds: picture a chase scene through a gay sauna with Foucault, Bulgarian secret agents with possible ties to Kristeva, drug-riddled parties after the infamous Derrida-Searle debate, and even a Logos Club competition, which is the kind of intellectual fight club that Plato wishes he would have invented.
What the troublesome twosome learn along the way is that Barthes, just before he died, was working on the so-called (fictional) seventh function of language: the ability—first introduced by linguist Roman Jakobson—of language to persuade, convince, and seduce. In the novel, French intellectuals and politicians like socialist president François Mitterrand and his one-time opponent Valéry Giscard d’Estaing are all after the function for themselves.
But all of this —deciphering the mysteries of the seventh function and figuring out who killed Barthes—isn’t why you keep reading. Sure, mystery propels the book forward, though we’re certainly not going to get the clean resolutions Brecht thinks we want: The Seventh Function revels in a world where randomness and madness reign.
What really drives the book is Binet’s irreverence—Philippe Sollers is a loudmouth dandy, Foucault masturbates to a Mick Jagger poster, Umberto Eco gets urinated on by a stranger in a Bologna bar. All of this might lead you to think of Binet as a writer of long-form libel. But Binet’s cheek is grounded in a serious familiarity with and respect for the theories, if not the personalities, he uses to populate his book (a lot of the anecdotes are non-fictional, and he provides in-depth treatment of the philosophies at hand.) I bookmarked a page with titles of talks from a Cornell conference; Searle’s giving one called “Fake or feint: performing the F words in fictional works,” while Spivak lectures on “Should the subaltern sometimes shut up?”
For all its lightness and raucous humor, The 7th Function can sometimes feel a little heavy handed, especially when it comes to the blurring of fiction and nonfiction.“ Life is not a novel,” the book begins, and a few hundred pages later after I’d started to ignore the self-aware interruptions of the narrator, the semiologist-sidekick Simon Herzog himself starts suspecting he’s in a novel, one by “an author unafraid of tackling cliches.” Maybe Herzog’s paranoia and distrust are the result of reading too much philosophy. I couldn’t help but feel, though, that the narrator was wearing brass knuckles spelling out “postmodern” and trying, repeatedly, to punch me in the face.
In spite of this, what’s most shocking is that Binet’s novel works, although perhaps more to draw attention to our mad, mad world than to help reconcile us to it as Brecht hoped—for that, we might need more than the fictional seventh function of language.
Style and the Man: On Adam Begley’s Updike
A Hundred and One Days: a review
In January 2003, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad arrived in Baghdad on a 10-day visa. With arrangements in place with various Scandinavian print and television media, the freelancer joined the growing ranks of international press who wanted to witness the changes that were in the air. Well, ten days grew to twenty and eventually to a-hundred-and-one. When she finally left, in April 2003, one type of hell had been replaced by another.Out of all this comes A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal – a powerful bit of reportage that chronicles not only the thuggish brutality of Saddam’s regime and the heart-wrenching civilian “casualties of war” caused by the chaotic “Shock and Awe” invasion, but also a gripping behind-the-scenes account of war-journalism which at times plays out like a thriller.When she first arrives, its still Saddam’s show. We see Seierstad working her way through the red tape of the Iraqi Ministry of Information. It seems so much like Soviet-style media control that at times I feel like I’m reading an account of a Western journalist in Cold-War era Moscow. When Seierstad eventually gets the chance to meet people in Baghdad it’s always with an official “minder” and the answers she gets are almost always stock answers. These people are afraid. Saddam had instituted a form of domestic terrorism, putting fear into the lives of Iraqis. Even the odd time that Seierstad escaped the watchful eye of her “minder,” responses from some citizens showed just how Saddam’s cult of personality had indoctrinated them. Saddam was everywhere. Posters, statues, all art glorified this megalomaniac. Seierstad also chronicles the poverty under his regime. The wars with Iran and Kuwait, the first Gulf War, and the ensuing Western sanctions had crippled the country.But it was early 2003 and something was in the air. Whatever line the Ministry of Information was giving, everyone knew the US invasion was imminent. The closer they got, the more Saddam’s regime lost its grip. The reins of government slackened and when Seierstad sneaks out to interview people, they begin to speak a bit more freely, more candidly. Feelings were mixed. The US invasion, just days away, was alternately feared and anticipated, often in the same breath. The common thread through most of the civilian responses was “Well the US is coming, let them sweep Saddam and his regime away and then leave, immediately”. Given the hell they’d been living through, no one could be surprised by this kind of resigned-optimism. And given the nature of war, no one can really be surprised that this optimism was shattered.Seierstad’s eye for detail is remarkable. At one point, on the eve of the invasion, she goes to an open-air book market. At that point, it had been a dozen years since the last scientific periodical was available in Iraq, but the Iraqis’ thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. There was a boy looking for a book about cloning, and a man seeking any book he could find about structuralism. Another was searching for Sartre. The insatiable quest for scientific knowledge and artistic enlightenment, especially through periods of brutality and oppression, has always been, to me, humanity’s saving grace.Seierstad also shows how the “human shield,” that collection of activists who flocked to Baghdad to physically oppose the US invasion, wound up becoming a tool of the Iraqi regime. While the Shield-ers wanted to protect hospitals and orphanages, the Iraqi government instead used them, co-opted them, by placing them in front of Iraqi infrastructure. They became pawns.Free of the lures and pressures of being an embedded journalist, and providing a clear-headed Scandinavian reasonableness to a chaotic situation, Seierstad’s account is unique. And as a Western woman trying to maneuver independently in a Middle Eastern country, even one which is admittedly more tyrannical than fundamentalist, Seierstad’s compelling tale becomes a worthy addition to modern reportage.