[contextly_auto_sidebar] LAST week I took a wild guess and approached singer/songwriter Aimee Mann for my musicians-on-writing column, All the Poets. As a longtime fan I had a vague sense that she was literary -- whatever that means -- but could not recall a specific reference to a novel or poem in any of her songs. Nor had we talked about books of any kind across the several interviews we'd … [Read more...]
Ayn Rand and Libertarianism
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR most of my life -- I was a kid during the Reagan Revolution -- I've been puzzled by otherwise smart people falling for Libertarianism and Ayn Rand's brand of freedom snake oil. Everybody likes the idea of freedom, but for the Fountainhead crowd, the notion acquires cartoonish dimensions, and their definition of the term seems to tilt toward rich businessmen and … [Read more...]
Martin Amis on Poetry and Posterity
[contextly_auto_sidebar] AS smart and funny as his novels are, Martin Amis is a devastatingly good essayist as well. I spoke to him recently about his latest collection, The Rub of Time, which assembles several decades of nonfiction pieces. The subject of the book is the toll taken by the ages -- the way it gradually erodes talent and inspiration as surely as it does the soil on a hillside. … [Read more...]
Patti Smith in All the Poets
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I've been doing a series on musicians and their interest in literature and writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books. So far, all of these have been strong interviews with artists I love about figures I share an ardor for. In some cases, the conversations have taken me down intellectual alleyways I did not expect to go, which is even better. … [Read more...]
The Literary Richard Thompson
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FEW living musicians fascinate me as much as Richard Thompson, the London-reared, Los Angeles-dwelling, Fairport Convention-founding guitarist and songwriter whose recording career just hit the 50 year mark. I've been listening to Richard's work for three decades now -- since I first heard "Valerie" and "A Bone Through Her Nose" on WHFS as a teenager -- and have been … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem and Rock Criticism
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SINCE I was a teenager, I've been fascinated by the lions of music journalism and rock criticism -- Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, and others, especially from the field's 1970s heyday. The novelist Jonathan Lethem and his Pomona College colleague (and resident Dylanologist) Kevin Dettmar have collected 50 years of the stuff -- "From Elvis to Jay Z" -- … [Read more...]
All the Poets: Rhiannon Giddens
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The second installment of my Los Angeles Review of Books -- All the Poets, in which musicians discuss their literary influences -- went up the other day: Rhiannon Giddens, who earned her reputation with the string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, talked to me about her childhood interest in science fiction, in the African roots of what we think of as Appalachian or … [Read more...]