Classics. It’s a category title we use to set apart certain works of art as great and, therefore, timeless. But the debates that surround any list of classic works– be they novels, plays, films or pop music albums– often prove as timeless as the title itself. Nevertheless, taking as a given that there will be glaring omissions to any such list, what is striking is the degree of consensus among readers, listeners and viewers as to which works truly are great.
Greil Marcus courtesy Corbis
A new list compiled by the pop culture critic Greil Marcus, in partnership with Harvard professor Werner Sollors, mines the American canon. A New Literary History of America includes many of the works one would expect (e.g. Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby), as well as some that should surprise those with an orthodox definition of canonicity. In a recent interview with To The Best of Our Knowledge, Marcus explains his definition of classic:
A book, a movie, a poem, a political speech that you can return to again and again…and not only will it stay alive, not only will it continue to provoke you, but the context in which it seems to be embedded– might be a historical context, might be a cultural or intellectual context– a truly classic work will continually create new contexts for itself, it will illicit from the reader, the listener, the viewer new thoughts, new responses.
You don’t go back to Moby Dick, you don’t go back to Preston Sturges’s films, Ernest Hemingway, Chuck Berry’s early recordings…just to re-experience what you felt when you first encountered them. You go back because you know you haven’t gotten to the bottom of The Sound and the Fury. You know that in Lincoln’s second inaugural address there are rhythms, there are cadences that supersede the turns of phrase, and will communicate to you like music. And the melodies will be different, the rhythms will be different, each time you go back.
All classics, at least in the way I’m trying to talk about them, are in some essential way unfinished. They’re open. They do not say, ‘this is the way the world is, this is how it works, that’s all there is to it.’ They are alive to their own fragility, and their own unlikeliness. When you look at something that we would call classic, you really can’t imagine that the writer of those works said, ‘OK, I know exactly what I’m doing here, and this is exactly the result it’s going to have and the shape it’s going to take.’ I think that sense of openness and discovery is passed on to the reader or the listener and one reacts in the same spirit in which a work is made.
Also on the January 31st edition of the show, film critic David Thomson explains why Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho is a classic American film and the definite horror flick. In the interview, Thomson, whose book The Moment of Psycho is just out, talks about the movie’s notorious shower scene, which Hitchcock, an infamous perfectionist, spent a week filming. Was Hitchcock apologetic about this decision? Thomson argues in the director’s defense: “He said…it may only play for a minute on screen, but it may be the most intense minute there’s ever been in American film, and we’re going to take our time over it.”
The music critic Michael Streissguth also drops in to talk about his new book Always Been There: Roseanne Cash, The List, and The Spirit of Southern Music. The book discusses Johnny Cash’s one hundred essential songs, a list the American music legend gave his daughter in 1973. The list of course includes classic country songs, but according to Streissguth, it also draws from gospel, blues and folk. “It wasn’t just Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers and Lefty Frizzell,” he says, “it was Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan as well.”
Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
-Leonard Cohen
“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
-Ishmael from Moby Dick, by Melville
HBO has good news for fans of The Wire, the acclaimed TV series about life in inner-city Baltimore that finished its stunning five season run in March of 2008. David Simon, creator of The Wire, has reunited with some of that show’s key contributors to bring us a new series about musicians living in post-Katrina New Orleans. Treme, which takes its name from a neighborhood inhabited by many of the city’s musicians, is set to air in April.
Wendell Pierce, who played homicide detective Bunk Moreland on The Wire, will star in the series, though Simon has said that Treme will feature local actors in a variety of roles, as did The Wire. Treme’s writing and production team will include Eric Overmeyer, a part-time New Orleans resident who worked on The Wire and also on Homicide, Simon’s award-winning series that aired on NBC from 1993-1999.
HBO has released a teaser for Treme on its site. Though it isn’t set to Tom Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon”, this scrolling montage of Crescent City scenery recalls the haunting intro of Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 film about three hapless chums snatched off the streets of New Orleans and forced to share a cell in a nearby prison.
MF Doom (courtesy Stones Throw Records)
Can it be I stayed away too long?
Did you miss these rhymes when I was gone?
When Doom dropped this couplet on last year’s Born Like This, the MC’s first LP in four years, he mustered a croon that would make Cee-Lo blush. Always a sucker for comical disguises, he wrapped his inquiry in the tested tropes of an itinerant soul man, asking us to play the part of his lonely damsel. But it wasn’t his love that made us instantly forgive his sins, it was his rhymes. True to his part, he teased us with the knowledge of our willful naivete. And we didn’t care. We were just glad to have him back. And for those who wanted more, Doom was generous enough to leave us with an EP. Gazillion Ear, featuring one of Born’s tastiest tracks along with three remixes, came out last month.
General Sash was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years and old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college….
She meant to stand on that platform in August with the General sitting in his wheel chair on the stage behind her and she meant to hold her head very high as if she were saying, “See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!” One night in her sleep she screamed, “See him! See him!” and turned her head and found him sitting in his wheel chair behind her with a terrible expression on his face and with all his clothes off except the general’s hat and she had waked up and had not dared to go back to sleep again that night.
For his part, the General would not have consented even to attend her graduation if she had not promised to see to it that he sit on the stage. He liked to sit on any stage. He considered that he was still a very handsome man. When he had been able to stand up, he had measured five feet four inches of pure game cock. He had white hair that reached to his shoulders behind and he would not wear teeth because he thought his profile was more striking without them. When he put on his full-dress general’s uniform, he knew well enough that there was nothing to match him anywhere.
-from A Late Encounter with the Enemy, by Flannery O’Connor
“He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
-The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, “Men Without Chests”
