Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

I kind of hate that Kent Jones quote. I'll give him Shelly Duvall, but for me Keenan Wynn, Carradine, and the ending--which couldn't be more perfect--are as integral to the film as anything else.

I get what you were saying now, but tbh it makes the idea of fandom all the more dubious, like blindly rooting for a sports team.

I feel like a fight.

Not at all--I tend to be hyper-critical when it comes to directors who've made some of my favourite films. I've been all over Scorsese and the two Andersons in numerous threads. But most, if not all, great artists have works that definitively sum them up, for better or worse. My guess is--and you can set me straight if you know otherwise--is that the critics you mention probably have issues with Altman in general, and that Nashville crystallizes those issues. Not that they're major Altman fans who don't care for Nashville.

I actually think the smartest appreciation of Nashville I've ever read after Kael's was Rick Perlstein in Nixonland (or it might have been The Invisible Bridge).

Anyway, for what it's worth, I'm not sure how true something you started with applies to Nashville, not if the TSPDT list has any value as a barometer: "Nashville and MASH have both taken a critical beating in recent years."

M*A*S*H, yes: its ranking has slipped quite a bit the past decade. Starting in 2010: 576 - 573 - 580 - 584 - 840 - 827 - 915 - 827 - 951 - 894 - 891 - 887 - 911.

Nashville has fallen a bit, but really not that much, especially for a film so tied to its moment. Starting in 2006, the year the list was launched: 58 - 61 - 68 - 67 - 74 - 76 - 76 - 83 - 81 - 82 - 80 - 84 - 87 - 85 - 87 - 88. So while I don't doubt that some writers, like the ones you cite, have gone after it, there seems to be solid core of support there that keeps it in the Top 100.

Relatively, they’ve both fallen almost identically then, especially if you take out the last MASH rank (911)

58 to 88 is ten times less than
576 to 887

Maybe his critical standing has fallen 50% across the board? I dunno

I was thinking about that--how would you measure that? I suppose you could say that 58 to 88 means that Nashville has experienced a 52% decline (30/58). But I don't know how useful that is: if Citizen Kane had dropped from #1 to #2 over the same time frame, like in the Sight & Sound poll--it hasn't, but for the sake of argument, say it had--that would be a 100% decline using the same logic.

More sensibly, to me, seeing as it's a Top 1000 list, is to say Nashville's gone from 58/1000 to 88/1000, which is a decline of 30/1000, or 3%; M*A*S*H, on the other hand, has fallen 335 spots, or 33.5%.

That 58 to 88 / 576 to 887 parallel, though, is pretty amazing--almost exactly a factor of 10 for both, if you round off.

I think the most likely Altman career narrative that a Nashville hater might spin is that it was the start of the era of his decadence and growth of self-importance. Robin Wood, who was highly ambivalent about him, echoes Jones in that he saw Nashville as a combination of his best and the worst tendencies (the latter of which he sees as a combination of self-satisfied jokiness and easy cynicism).
Certainly, in the book I read about Altman, the period immediately following Nashville was characterized as one where independent-minded crew and collaborators were abandoned for those who would be less challenging to Altman's ideas and working processes.

There's a long Greil Marcus answer in "Ask Greil" concerning something Carl Wilson wrote about Norman Mailer (connected to a couple of recent ILX threads). Just loved it.

https://greilmarcus.net/current_2021/

(Second from the top.)

Couldn't be more OTM.

From my interpretation of the review, Wilson did not ask for the 'cancelation' -- a word I would never use on my own but Greil did -- of Mailer.

And Wilson does write in the last paragraph: "I guess at least enough evidence to say that hip-hop’s own Norman Mailer still has some of his old magic after all. And enough other jackglobglogabassery to make me wish he’d hurry the hell up and just lose it for good."

What do you guys find OTM about Marcus' response, which I found quite good as rhetoric?

For reasons I wouldn't post about here, I don't even want to get into that.

More generally, though, one of the best things about being young is tearing down people like Marcus and Mailer. One of the best things about being old is defending them.

yeah, i thought greil wrote an excellent response to a really dishonest, irritating argument. (wilson's pious reference to the opinion of joan didion, as if she was someone we all somehow agreed on, was so unbearable it almost made me wish i didn't like her writing.)

I think you guys are missing this point: Wilson wrote as anguished and ambivalent a review of Kanye as Marcus did of Norman Mailer. So long as he's got a gig, Wilson will keep writing 2000-word pieces about Kanye: about the songs, what goes on in them, the pathologies raging in them.

Marcus doesn't engage the Kanye part at all.

"Anguished"? Really? A record review?...Marcus is responding to a question about Mailer, not Kanye West.

From my reading of the piece Wilson tries to sort out -- as Marcus does in his own terrific reading of Mailer -- what makes the curdling of Kanye's music so irritating.

It's disappointing Marcus uses "cancel" in that cynical rightist way.

I mean, I just reviewed a Lindsey Buckingham album where he's LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU about accusations hurled at him, and his blissfully, obstinately hermetic approach has been good and worrisome about his music. I didn't once suggest 'canceling' him.

This is the truest part of Marcus' response: "I’m not going near another Woody Allen movie, haven’t for years, but I don’t think it’s my or anyone’s business, or intellectually interesting, to tell other people to do the same." And Wilson would agree. Marcus would know that because they've known each other many years.

The final line of Marcus's thing is excellent. Couldn't care less about the word "cancel." Translated into a Dylan lyric: "Cursing the dead that can't answer him back."

carl wilson recently complained on twitter about cornelius being cut from his olympics gig (without e.g. thinking about any compensation his victim could have received) so seeing him being cast as some kind grand canceller is funny

It's a good line. As Randy Newman said, good lines don't have to be true. When did Wilson say he wanted Mailer canceled?

I'll take Marcus' challenge seriously, clem and birdistheword. Is there a trend in criticism you want redressed? If so, what? If so, what examples?

Marcus doesn't engage the Kanye part at all.

Late to this, but I thought it was pretty clear he was only engaging the excerpt sent to him, which makes no mention of West, and that seemed reasonable given the way the question was framed - in response to just that, Marcus's answer seemed completely OTM.

This seems like a total misreading on the part of Marcus. I don't think there's anything in Wilson's article saying "the present is always more advanced". Wilson clearly says that the book critic in the 70s and the music critic in the 20s have the same dilemma: is this art going to be worthwhile enough to justify overcoming the distaste for the problematic artist? Wilson is saying the book critic, at that time in the 70s , could have had that negative prejudice against Mailer. He's not saying, "If I were a book critic then, I would have had the guts not to read Norman Mailer".
Marcus does this a lot on his "ask me a question" page: jumps to an unsupported conclusion and gives a nasty response. It's why I'd never submit a question there.

in response to just that, Marcus's answer seemed completely OTM.

― birdistheword

But what is otm about it?

Marcus does this a lot on his "ask me a question" page: jumps to an unsupported conclusion and gives a nasty response. It's why I'd never submit a question there.

You may feel he's being rude or unfair to Wilson, but he is rarely less than polite to questioners. I've followed the "Ask Greil" section pretty closely since it started four or five years ago, and you could probably count on two hands instances where his response was curt, impatient, or worse. (Which was a surprise based on interviews I've seen and the once I did myself 35 years ago.) People have written in with questions where I was positive he was going be all over them--"What's your favourite Spin Doctors song, Greil" (I made that up)--and he took a pass.

If you want to see a really capricious and sometimes volatile version of "Ask Greil," take a look at its blueprint, the "Hey Bill" section of baseball writer Bill James's site. You really needn't worry about submitting questions, though.

in retrospect the thing mailer could most be faulted for -- didion too -- is their participation in "new journalism" which (per wikipedia) emphasizes "truth" over "facts" ("clarification needed" -- you can say *that* again) and was the first step down the long rocky road to today.

If we could just collectively admit as grown adults that sometimes problematic people make great art, the discourse would 1000x more sufferable, but then Wilson et al wouldn't be able to hit those wordcounts.

I feel like Wilson just kind of wandered into Marcus's crosshairs by stating clearly and concisely an imperative of polite discourse in today's world, which is that the duty of any critic (whether of art, literature, music, etc) is to first assess how well the subject of the critic comports with contemporary mores of thought and behavior and to get the necessary caveats/trigger-warnings/moral judgments etc out of the way first before turning towards the "art", which it can never be assumed are separable from their recalcitrant political views.

But what is otm about it?

If we could just collectively admit as grown adults that sometimes problematic people make great art, the discourse would 1000x more sufferable, but then Wilson et al wouldn't be able to hit those wordcounts.

I feel like Wilson just kind of wandered into Marcus's crosshairs by stating clearly and concisely an imperative of polite discourse in today's world, which is that the "duty" [my quotation marks] of any critic (whether of art, literature, music, etc) is to first assess how well the subject of the critic comports with contemporary mores of thought and behavior and to get the necessary caveats/trigger-warnings/moral judgments etc out of the way first before turning towards the "art", which it can never be assumed are separable from their recalcitrant political views.

Another topic Marcus has talked about is art as fiction, and how so much of popular art today is interpreted and even marketed like it was autobiographical - it can be those things, but I get the feeling more and more people in the audience confuse personal with autobiographical. I bring this up because it feels related to what Marcus criticizes in his response to that excerpt, and what o. nate expresses above. Judgment of an individual isn't synonymous with art theory and criticism, and it's asinine to propose a scenario where a book critic in the '70s doesn't want to review a publication by an author of literary merit because of their personal failings. Others here have made the case that Wilson is only laying out the guidelines that defines today's discourse rather than arguing for it himself - I don't think that negates Marcus's response, only that it shouldn't be directed at Wilson personally.

And while critiquing an artist's work and scrutinized/analyzing their personal failings shouldn't be confused as the same thing, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't write about both, and Marcus gets to that as well:

There’s a passage on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy when Mailer at once says that when he heard about it he was with “a witch" which hit me as criminally sexist and self-absolving then, a real window into a sick soul—and that he would have cut off his arm to save Kennedy’s life, and made me believe it. To dive into why both those things could be true is criticism.

And Wilson does that.

I get the feeling that Marcus, as a writer himself, is very hesitant to discuss the personal issues of the people he writes about. It's notable that the Sly Stone chapter of Mystery Train focusses on the Stagger Lee archetype but never mentions drug abuse/addiction.

i can't speak for marcus but i found it odd that wilson proposed a thought experiment in which he was a book critic in the mid-1970s asked to write about norman mailer and automatically assumed that he, wilson, would have had the Correct Stance, which includes awareness that mailer "wrote massively screwed-up things about race and feminism." maybe he would have; on the other hand, it's entirely likely that any white guy alive and writing for a major magazine in the mid-1970s would have had his own blindspots on those subjects.

marcus has said many times that he's not interested in musicians' personal lives, doesn't care if -- for example -- van morrison is a jerk, but i suspect he cares more than he lets on: his review of albert goldman's elvis book is probably the single angriest thing he's ever written.

Marcus's response here it total garbage, frankly!

*is, not it. I typed three annoyed paragraphs and then thought better of it. The only allegation of problematic behaviour between either Wilson or Marcus in this one-way-dialogue is Marcus's non-subtle intimations that Wilson is anti-Semitic in his dislike of Mailer

Alfred OTM.

i did not care for that passage of the kanye piece for the reasons j.d. stated but i also though marcus' response zoomed way past anything that was advocated in the essay into a zone of his own annoyed speculation, where he could not possibly be otm to anyone. what do i win

The Complete Greil Marcus library!

reading mystery train several times in a row during my college years is enough for me thanks

His Doors book is quite good - he is less personally invested than in most of his writing, and the attitude is lighter than usual, more like "let's study this unusual phenomenon".

i can't speak for marcus but i found it odd that wilson proposed a thought experiment in which he was a book critic in the mid-1970s asked to write about norman mailer and automatically assumed that he, wilson, would have had the Correct Stance, which includes awareness that mailer "wrote massively screwed-up things about race and feminism." maybe he would have; on the other hand, it's entirely likely that any white guy alive and writing for a major magazine in the mid-1970s would have had his own blindspots on those subjects.

Absolutely. It would be historical arrogance, but given what others here have posted, it's probably just sloppiness since it's doubtful Wilson would truly presume this would be his perspective in another time.

And Wilson does that.

I don't think he does that very well, and he doesn't in the passage that was presented in the original question.

we keep circling back to this (and I'm done after this post), but the act of writing this expansively about that album -- more than most of us get at other gigs -- undercuts any claims about his wanting to 'cancel' Kanye or not taking his duty as critic seriously.

in an earlier time there were many fewer publications where one could assume the readership was entirely of the left, and where ridiculous tics -- like the cataloging of an artist's moral failings as throat-clearing exercise to drive home the writer's own bona fides -- could develop.

we keep circling back to this (and I'm done after this post), but the act of writing this expansively about that album -- more than most of us get at other gigs -- undercuts any claims about his wanting to 'cancel' Kanye or not taking his duty as critic seriously

I think we keep circling back to this because as already explained, Marcus was responding only to that one excerpt sent to him, which doesn't include anything written about West or his new album - it's distorting his response to say he's suggesting Wilson is calling for West's cancellation. As for Wilson taking his duty as a critic seriously, I don't think there was ever any question about that - it was how well he was performing those duties.

considering how much televised energy norman mailer put into getting himself called sexist and tiresome by contemporaries i'm unsure he's the right poster boy for the phenomenon of ideological rearprojection marcus describes

haha yeah my opinion should also have a footnote that says "i wasn't born until a few months before the film adaptation of tough guys don't dance came out"

gore vidal implied he was an intellectual charlie manson iirc?

(i am one of mailer's three remaining superfans, but)