I liked HELLFIRE, DINO, and (especially) COUNTRY, but I couldn't stand this book. Not because of the subject but because of Tosches's oracular and pious voice. It was like being stuck in a room with a sanctimonious recovering alcoholic. And I found out all I needed to know about Miller from the chapter in COUNTRY.
Greil—I've listened (not recently) to Emmett Miller for 30-plus years, have written about him, and have read a number of works by Nick Tosches. Tosches, his abundant talent notwithstanding, was a writer with, ultimately, a small, very limited tool kit, an individual of emotional imbalance, his "insights," finally, untrustworthy. I would call him a sort of poor man's Hunter Thompson. Re this last: read Dave Hickey's astute essay "Fear and Loathing Goes to Hell" in Hickey's "Pirates and Farmers" collection. As Hickey points out, in Thompson's Las Vegas book, for instance, one learns nothing about Las Vegas, the book's putative subject. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" could have taken place in Portland, Me. or sunny Tennessee. As with all of Thompson's books, the subject is the author's skillfully, minutely described inner life, which consisted primarily of fear and loathing. Thompson, writes Hickey, was a one-trick pony who "did lyric bile, fear, loathing, and rabid denunciation without much else in his quiver." All this by means of a critique of Nick Tosches. In his book "Country: Living Legends and Dying Metaphors in America's Biggest Music," Tosches takes a look at Jim Dickinson's one solo album, "Dixie Fried." I knew, and truly liked, Jim Dickinson, a good, kind man, for 20 years. I visited him and his family at their home in Mississippi. Dickinson was a fine musician, but what attracted Tosches to "Dixie Fried" was a smallish aspect of Dickinson's talent: a capacity for turning reality lurid, for seeing life's nasty underbelly. Jim was talented, but not a major talent, and when Tosches calls "Dixie Fried" "one of the most bizarrely powerful musics of this century," he is writing not criticism, but pure bullshit. One wants to trust, or energetically engage with, a critic, not recoil from his work in scorn, shaking one's head at how a talented writer could be so damned off the mark.
Emmett Miller was fascinating but ultimately lurid and grotesque, hence what you call Tosches's obsession with Miller. For me, as someone to whom achieving emotional balance is an important task, "obsession" does not describe a particularly desirable state of mind. Obsession is a (mild) form of mental disease; "obsessed" does not describe someone I'd like to spend an afternoon with.
Not that I want to make anyone like something that they don’t, but I don’t buy your arguments at at all (except for that hosanna over the Jim Dickinson solo album—in pre-internet times I went to an absurd amount of trouble to track that thing down, and then played it over and over in a vain attempt to find something there). I do believe that in certain hands—with Tosches in ‘Hellfire,’ Fitzgerald in ‘Gatsby’ (at one point he worried that the prose was so good it covered up the vapidity of the ideas he was trying to get across), in Hunter Thompson in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,’ especially at the end—generates its own meaning, and I think that happens in ‘Where Dead Voices Gather.’ It’s not that at certain, crucial times, the writing is so strong it hides bad ideas, but that it makes ideas that might seem ephemeral interesting, and can lead you to think.
And so what if ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ doesn’t tell you anything about Las Vegas? Sue his estate for false advertising. But that it. Plus have been set anywhere else is the point. ‘Gatsby’ may be set on Long Island but like ‘Las Vegas’ it’s about America. It maps the territory. It’s a deeply frightened, saddened, at the end tragic book about the end ofthe shared promise of the decade it closes, the losing of the door on one version of America. Like Pynchon’s ‘Inherent Vice,’ which I think it deeply influenced. It’s a just-post-Manson book that may try to hide pain in absurdity and fails.
Talk about where dead voices gather: Hunter Thompson, 1937-2005. Dave Hickey, 1940-2021. Nick Tosches, 1949-2019. Our luck were not among them yet.
I liked HELLFIRE, DINO, and (especially) COUNTRY, but I couldn't stand this book. Not because of the subject but because of Tosches's oracular and pious voice. It was like being stuck in a room with a sanctimonious recovering alcoholic. And I found out all I needed to know about Miller from the chapter in COUNTRY.
Greil—I've listened (not recently) to Emmett Miller for 30-plus years, have written about him, and have read a number of works by Nick Tosches. Tosches, his abundant talent notwithstanding, was a writer with, ultimately, a small, very limited tool kit, an individual of emotional imbalance, his "insights," finally, untrustworthy. I would call him a sort of poor man's Hunter Thompson. Re this last: read Dave Hickey's astute essay "Fear and Loathing Goes to Hell" in Hickey's "Pirates and Farmers" collection. As Hickey points out, in Thompson's Las Vegas book, for instance, one learns nothing about Las Vegas, the book's putative subject. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" could have taken place in Portland, Me. or sunny Tennessee. As with all of Thompson's books, the subject is the author's skillfully, minutely described inner life, which consisted primarily of fear and loathing. Thompson, writes Hickey, was a one-trick pony who "did lyric bile, fear, loathing, and rabid denunciation without much else in his quiver." All this by means of a critique of Nick Tosches. In his book "Country: Living Legends and Dying Metaphors in America's Biggest Music," Tosches takes a look at Jim Dickinson's one solo album, "Dixie Fried." I knew, and truly liked, Jim Dickinson, a good, kind man, for 20 years. I visited him and his family at their home in Mississippi. Dickinson was a fine musician, but what attracted Tosches to "Dixie Fried" was a smallish aspect of Dickinson's talent: a capacity for turning reality lurid, for seeing life's nasty underbelly. Jim was talented, but not a major talent, and when Tosches calls "Dixie Fried" "one of the most bizarrely powerful musics of this century," he is writing not criticism, but pure bullshit. One wants to trust, or energetically engage with, a critic, not recoil from his work in scorn, shaking one's head at how a talented writer could be so damned off the mark.
Emmett Miller was fascinating but ultimately lurid and grotesque, hence what you call Tosches's obsession with Miller. For me, as someone to whom achieving emotional balance is an important task, "obsession" does not describe a particularly desirable state of mind. Obsession is a (mild) form of mental disease; "obsessed" does not describe someone I'd like to spend an afternoon with.
Not that I want to make anyone like something that they don’t, but I don’t buy your arguments at at all (except for that hosanna over the Jim Dickinson solo album—in pre-internet times I went to an absurd amount of trouble to track that thing down, and then played it over and over in a vain attempt to find something there). I do believe that in certain hands—with Tosches in ‘Hellfire,’ Fitzgerald in ‘Gatsby’ (at one point he worried that the prose was so good it covered up the vapidity of the ideas he was trying to get across), in Hunter Thompson in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,’ especially at the end—generates its own meaning, and I think that happens in ‘Where Dead Voices Gather.’ It’s not that at certain, crucial times, the writing is so strong it hides bad ideas, but that it makes ideas that might seem ephemeral interesting, and can lead you to think.
And so what if ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ doesn’t tell you anything about Las Vegas? Sue his estate for false advertising. But that it. Plus have been set anywhere else is the point. ‘Gatsby’ may be set on Long Island but like ‘Las Vegas’ it’s about America. It maps the territory. It’s a deeply frightened, saddened, at the end tragic book about the end ofthe shared promise of the decade it closes, the losing of the door on one version of America. Like Pynchon’s ‘Inherent Vice,’ which I think it deeply influenced. It’s a just-post-Manson book that may try to hide pain in absurdity and fails.
Talk about where dead voices gather: Hunter Thompson, 1937-2005. Dave Hickey, 1940-2021. Nick Tosches, 1949-2019. Our luck were not among them yet.
Pondering yr remarks as per usual