Voice, persona, tone

The trouble with reading Karl Marx these days is to finally see that he sees everything in terms of literature, though Marx was prescient in seeing that imperialism is the natural outcome of capitalism.

Marx would be as disappointed in V. Putin as Thomas Jefferson would be in D. Trump.

The piece in the most recent The New Yorker by Kelefa Sanneh, "The Prog Spring" (June 19, 2017), about the progressive rock movement, is most fun reading. When's the last time you gave a thought to bands like "King Crimson", or "Genesis", or "Emerson, Lake & Palmer", or "Yes"? Just when you think that Sanneh's starting to make a case that progressive rock is to music what bad painting is to art, he delivers what I call a counter-sentence--the counter-sentence belonging to writing as the rope-a-dope belongs to boxing--such as, "the genre's contradictory impulses: to explore musical history and to leave it behind." Or, "the best prog rock provides, instead, the shock of the old." No matter what, there's always at least one thing worth reading in The New Yorker.

Hank Burdine of Greenville, Mississippi, writer and hunter, a man who carries to dinner the ass pocket full of whiskey that the bluesman R.L. Burnside sings about--though in Hank's case it's a flask of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch--told me his mama made him sugar sandwiches when he was a kid, but only when he was having trouble going to sleep. The southern United States is full of these kinds of storyful contradictions, sugar not known for its sleep-inducing qualities. The night Hank told me this story, over dinner at Doe's Eat Place in Greenville, the only restaurant I've dined at where you enter through the kitchen, grab a beer from the fridge, and then seat yourself,  I had a dream about a swamp monster and a pond full of white human teeth that were grinning at me while I slept.