Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

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)

When did Wilson say he wanted Mailer canceled?

Again, I don't much care about whether the word "cancel" is used or not. But seeing as we're splitting hairs, I reread Marcus's final line.

Asking if it’s cool to cancel a man who is not around to speak for himself--as he surely would--is something else.

Marcus doesn't actually say that Wilson says Mailer should be cancelled; he says Wilson asks if he ought to be. Surely that's accurate.

And maybe I find that even more irritating than if he'd flat-out said Mailer is a horrible person and I can't read him anymore. I read Marcus's response and I feel something, genuine anger maybe. All I get out of Wilson is all this carefully calibrated hedging--quite the opposite of anguish. "The constant calculations," as a friend put it.

carl and the (lack of) passion(s)

So Cancelled

Cher says that to one of her classmates in Clueless, no?

Already can’t remember whose blog was called some play on Classes Are Canceled.

(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.)

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Great from J.D. !

Ha, yes.

and how so much of popular art today is interpreted and even marketed like it was autobiographical

Total tangent here, but surely it's always been marketed that way? The teen idol is just the kind of nice young man that his song lyrics make him out to be, the Hollywood actress is as glamorous as her film roles, etc. Because marketing departments have always known ppl crave authenticity.

The change is that critical interpretation used to call bullshit on that more regularly imo.

I think the access we have to artists and their lives through instagram, tik tok, twitter, gossip sites, etc etc etc makes people even more wedded to the autobiographical concept then they were before (but yes it always existed)

Otm

I thought Michelle Goldberg's recent NYTimes column was astute on the "cancel culture" backlash from certain quarters:

"Many people I know over 40 - maybe 35 - resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm. It has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it. The shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young is a cause of real psychic pain."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/generation-cancel-culture.html

I think there's a bit of that at play here. Pre-internet, the national media was like a massive stone fortress with imposing metal gates controlled by stuffy bien pensant moderates. In those days it was fun for peasants on the outside to laugh at the overcautious reactions of the gatekeepers to anything controversial or edgy. Then the fortress was razed to the ground by bloodthirsty barbarians and the peasants had to run for their lives. Laughing at the gatekeepers isn't so funny any more. The traumatized peasants have become more vigilant at policing the boundaries of polite discourse than the old corporate busybodies ever were.

Anyone down on Marcus will like the second question here:

https://greilmarcus.net/current_2021/

Agree with this, though: "And appeals to experience ('witnessing atrocities firsthand') are worthless. It’s not where an artist has been, it’s what he or she can bring back."

Lord, he was born a ramblin' man.

Marcus's new Substack has been up and running for a couple of weeks now. (Ex-ILX'or Scott Woods edits the site--he wouldn't let me put up a Facebook post, but he'll never see this.) I took out a yearly subscription, even though you probably have a few months to read it for free.

The best thing is--a requirement of being on Substack, I think--there's new content. greilmarcus.net was great, but, except for "Ask Greil," it was close to 100% archival. Just in the first two weeks, he's had a piece on Peter Jackson's Beatles film, and today a review of Dylan's new book. ("The Beatles and Dylan" some of you are exclaiming in unison. "The excitement is palpable.") And in one of the intros he wrote for the new site, he identifies the two greatest sentences he thinks he ever wrote. I think they're from Mystery Train.

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/

Thanks for the news, esp. about Scott. Will read the review after finishing the book, which I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? I'm still enjoying most of it, although the "Witcheh Woman" comments are as dumb as the song and don't mention its use in the Seinfeld ep.

Long interview up on Letter in the Ether:

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-world-in-a-song

From his substack: Ask Greil

I wasn’t exactly sure in what way Swift’s Midnights was the musical equivalent of Dylan’s “autopen” scam. Could you please expand on that? —ANDREW MACDONALD

It sounds to me as if it were made by a machine, and I don’t mean Taylor Swift herself is a machine.

I think he meant the recent Billboard chart where Swift had the entire Top 10 on Billboard. Stuff like that always makes me wonder if it actually means anything.

Hey, I said (in the Midnights thread): this kind of sounds like if you asked an AI to make a Taylor Swift pop album. Move over, Marcus!!

Greil Marcus's daughter, Emily, passed away yesterday (1/31) more than two years after her diagnosis of appendiceal cancer. Per request, Greil has posted her obituary, and Robert Christgau posted a tribute to her. Her playlist for her funeral has also been posted.

If you want a free month of Marcus's Substack, let me know via ILX mail--I've got two to give away. It gives you access to a few things that are behind the paywall.

Also, his Real Life column this month leads off with a 100% vintage-Marcus entry on Biden's SOTU. If you're a fan, you'll probably love it, if you're not, you'll almost definitely cringe.