Ask Greil: January 4, 2023

Hi Greil: Just read your 1979 Rolling Stone interview with John Irving. Best piece about an author I ever read. Any plans on reviewing The Last Chairlift? —DAVID HAMBURG, Montreal

I picked up a very battered copy of The Cider House Rules in a Little Library on my street last year and took it home and read it straight through. (Then it fell apart.)  It had always been one of my favorite Irving novels (also the movie) but I was shocked at how powerful it was now, how effectively interwoven the themes, how moving, how stark. (Though I couldn’t picture anyone but Toby Maguire as Homer.) I’m unsure about The Last Chairlift.  First, I distrust any book that says it’s about the last anything. Second, it’s so long I’m afraid I won’t finish it, or worse, look at it on my nightstand for a year before I realize I’m never going to start it. But your kind words about the Rolling Stone piece make me think I have to read it, if only to see where he is now. We were in touch for a while after that interview; I sent him an LP of Elvis’s Sun Sessions that turned up in The Hotel New Hampshire.

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What is your view on Phillip Norman's biography of John Lennon, and for that matter his other writings on the Beatles? —BEN MERLISS

I haven’t read the Lennon book. The Beatles book is far better than Hunter Davies’s authorized biography, but as I recall marred by a homophobia that makes no sense within the contours of the story—I mean, it’s not there to make an argument, say, about Brian Epstein’s homosexuality somehow affecting the efficacy of his management of the group. His Buddy Holly biography is far better, focusing on Holly’s financial thralldom to his producer Norman Petty, which he connects to Petty and his wife’s sexual and financial thralldom to one of their studio employees. How true it is, how related it may be to any sexual paranoia on Norman’s part, I don’t know, but it’s convincing and surpassingly weird: a picture of Holly being under the thumb of a Clovis sex cult of which he had no inkling at all.

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Reading the chapter “Ain’t Talking” in your recent book, Folk Music, digs up uncomfortable feelings about Mr. Dylan as a songwriter. The line “Walkin’ with a toothache in my heel” was beyond descriptive, making the reader or listener feel what that felt like. Agree it’s one of the strongest lines in the song; that is until you realize Dylan didn’t write it. When something is original, it allows people to reflect on and appreciate the creative process. Modern Times is riddled with borrowing but apparently Mr. Dylan believes if you’re not stealing you’re not trying hard enough. Once again your book reminds the reader of “The Lifter’s Escape.” —PETER TOBIA

Dylan didn’t write it any more than he wrote “…among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But he heard them. Both are among the most original coinages to enter the American lexicon and the American mind, they belong to anyone who chooses to take them up and keep the conversation about what they mean going, and anyone who hears what comes of it.

To me, Dylan’s ‘Walking with a toothache in my heel’ is far more evocative, mysterious, and funny than the “Died with a toothache in his heel” in anyone’s version of “Old Dan Tucker.” I devoted pages in Folk Music to Dylan’s line because as it’s sung it’s so evocative, because it made me want to live in the life-story of the phrase, and because now I wish Jack Scott had used it too. I’d bet he knew it.

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I don’t have a question, but wanted to say I’m so happy to see you here! Both Real Life Top Ten books and Folk Music helped get me through the long lockdown (which, since I am old, immunocompromised, and paranoid, is mostly still in effect.). I hope you are recovering fully. I’m looking forward to this! —GLENN LEA

I’m glad to hear that something I did helped.  Stay safe.

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Longtime reader here, and I wish you all the best on your new web forum. I'm surprised to have waited so long to chime in with a question, but here goes... I mean this question sincerely, but do you think of yourself primarily as a "critic" or as an "artist"? Reason I ask is, more and more in your writing it reads to me like you are not merely "analyzing" a work in question, you are taking it on as a project of your own, extending what it does, showing what else it can do, where else it can go. So that, when you take on a song by Bob Dylan, you aren't merely conveying your personal feelings about said work, and describing/evaluating it in formal terms, you're doing what Dylan himself has made a career out of doing with other people's work in that you're picking it up and running with it to the next station. That may be one way to describe a critic but isn't it also what artists do? Do you honor these distinctions in the first place?

Thank you again for decades of great writing. I'm still looking forward to diving into Folk Music. —ABBEY COLEMAN

I think of myself as a critic. While that’s by nature a parasitical practice—what I do depends on what others have done—it’s perfectly possible for a critical piece to be better, deeper, more provocative, and more fun than the occasion—a song, movie, book, speech (Senator Warnock in his victory address last night on voter suppression), or car crash—that gave rise to it. But if that results in art it’s a by-product. It’s not a goal. It’s not an impelling cause. Pauline Kael once said that criticism is an art. She didn’t say her pieces were art. Lester Bangs said that some of his were “better art” than their sources.

I’m speaking only for myself. In all the years I’ve been doing whatever it is I do, talking about it with other writers, discussing what we’ve written or what others have, I don’t recall the question ever coming up.

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You were asked in your previous forum your thoughts about Baz Luhrman's Elvis which you then hadn't seen. Have you had an opportunity yet to see it? I couldn't take more than a few minutes of Tom Hanks as Col. Tom but thought Austin Butler got better and better as the film wore on. Some of the musical recreations or remixes were fun, and there was a lot of feeling in the Vegas sequence near the end, but something felt a little empty about the movie overall for me. —JIM ROBBINS

We tried to see it when I was briefly out of the hospital in June, but I was in a wheelchair then and the places it was playing didn’t have wheelchair access. I did see it on TV in the fall and was increasingly with it until the After-the-Army sections. I watched it again last month and liked it far more, from start to finish (yes, even Tom Hanks). I’ll be writing about it in my Real Life Rock Top 10 column in February or March, and have a (very) short piece on it and Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in an upcoming issue of Variety that I will post here too.

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Greil: I'm wondering if you've read Christopher Hill's book The World Turned Upside Down. I'm making my way through it now, and it strikes me as an ancestor of Lipstick Traces in some ways. It has the same quality I remember from my first read of your book; I'll finish a chapter, but instead of going right on to the next, I find myself wanting to wander back through what I've just read, looking for something that didn't strike me the first time but might open up a portal this time around. —JUSTYN DILLINGHAM

It was very specifically and consciously part of the bedrock Lipstick Traces was built on. I read it as an undergraduate around the same time I read The Pursuit of the Millennium. Both graceful, subtle, termite books. I mean they steadily chew away the floorboards of what we take as western civilization.

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Lipstick Traces is one of the best books on culture, modernism, and post-modernism, and it should be more widely read. There is a quote in the book from Walter Dean Burnham: "The great American substitute for social revolution is murder." I've looked everywhere for it and can't find the source. Do you remember where you go it? Thanks. —GD DESS

This comes from my tear-gas days as a student at Cal. I recall reading it, not overhearing someone supposedly quoting it at a coffee place, but I have no idea where it came from. I asked Sean Wilentz, who would know if anyone does. He said WDB argued that regular elections and shifts in party alignment were the American substitute for social revolution, which is several dimensions from murder. I didn’t make it up.

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A student from Iran said to me (in the beer garden) a few years ago: There are two kinds of Germans. One has never been to the USA, the other has. As I belong to the second category, I have been suffering severely since Donald Trump's presidency. Will the USA still get its act together in the 21st century?

All the best, health, happiness, and good books in 2023! —KOLT GERRAG

Nothing like a nice, simple, specific question. I or anyone could go on for days. So I'll try to keep it down.

Electoral turnout in 2020 and 2022 was big. It was big because people on both sides understood that they were playing for big stakes: what kind of country do we want to live in, and who do we want to allow to live in it? And while Joe Biden got seven million more votes than Donald Trump—which is a lot—in too many, and one was too many, key states the choice split right down the middle, and in some states the Trump margins were enormous and in some counties they were all but 100%. What that means is that close to half of the country, and in some parts of it far more, chose and would choose again autocracy, or worse, over anything that could be called democracy. 

The United States is a big, dynamic, inspiring, churning, dangerous, and hateful place. As the the Swede's brother says in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, "This country is frightening." There are plenty of people in the United States, in communities that haven't changed much, in terms of values, since the Civil War, and in communities that, again in terms of values, have only taken shape in the last forty or fifty years, who want a country without blacks or Jews. That's what they voted for. And they are not going to change. They may die out; death could be a winnowing. But there are people who are going to be running for president in 2024, and plenty in the government now, who are perfectly happy, even eager, to bring those people to their side. 

So, no. This is a long struggle. I certainly won't see the end of it. My children won't.  When my granddaughters are in their fifties the picture may be clearer.

As far as two kinds of Germans go... I've spent a fair amount of time in Germany.  I was in Berlin when the wall was built. I've been to Dachau before it was cleaned up and made fit for visitors and after, and it was a horror movie both times. To me I suppose the two-kinds-of-Germans who make sense to me are a few long-time friends and those I haven't met.

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The great Thom Bell just passed away [Dec. 22], the producer and architect of so many of my favorite soul records, particularly those by the Spinners. Were you a fan of his work and do you have any thoughts on why he isn’t more of a household name?
Thanks in advance for your consideration. —JC

He was subtle. He didn’t build a persona. His groups weren’t flashy; the Spinners were almost anonymous. He may not have even had a publicist. As for his records—he’ll be around.

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