One River of Prose, with Many Tributaries

“[G]eneric labeling is of little utility, and can be seriously misleading. For the fact of the matter is that America’s many vernacular musics are dialects—not separate, mutually exclusive languages. In practice, spirituals and gospel music are often musically identical to blues and rhythm and blues, for example; only the lyrics change, from sacred to secular. In today’s jazz, an increasing number of special collaborations that span historical styles and generations are making a mockery of the vastly oversimplified notion that this music developed in a straight line, as a series of revolutions by young Turks against the musical status quo.”

Robert Palmer, “The Names May Change, But the Beat Goes On” (NY Times, 19 June 1986); it’ll be reprinted later this year in the Palmer retrospective Blues & Chaos.

I’d suggest, freely admitting that it is no great original insight, that something much the same has been going on in American literature as well, rendering the distinctions made between “literary” and “popular” fiction—between, to take one notorious point of contention, “chick lit” and “not chick lit”—equally misleading. I don’t really have much more than that to go on right now, but I wanted to set the thought down while it was fresh, perhaps as something to return to later…

9 September 2009 | uncategorized |

A Brief Lesson in Tabloid Philosophy

I don’t usually go “off-message” and talk about anything other than books and writers on this blog, but I went to the little grocery store on the corner earlier today, and I happened to look at the newspapers by the door, which is how I noticed the contrasting approaches New York City’s two daily tabloids, the Post and the Daily News, had taken to the story of Charles Augusto, Jr., a Manhattan business owner who shot four men who tried to rob his store earlier this week, killing two of them.

I really don’t have much to say about the story; I don’t much feel it’s my place to comment. All I’m saying is that these front pages may just tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about the philosophies that guide editorial sensibilities at the two papers.

(Note: I cropped some sort of contest banner from the middle of the Daily News front page, to make the comparison more stark.)

15 August 2009 | uncategorized |