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"Public intellectual" isn't a job you can find in the classifieds, and if you could, it probably wouldn't have among its qualifications skills as a dumpster-diver, knowledge of punk and post-punk culture, or a thorough familiarity with the oeuvre of Charley Patton. Fortunately, since it's a make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of gig, the buttoned-up types have had to make room for Luc Sante over the past couple of decades, since the power and authority of his writing is undeniable despite the fact that he occasionally traffics in -- yuck! horror! -- rock criticism.
Kill All Your Darlings is an action-packed collection of 25 of his non-fiction and critical writings, published between 1990 and 2005 everywhere from High Times to The New York Review of Books, where, Geffen-like, albeit with far different ambitions, Sante once toiled in the mailroom. Their subjects range from cigarettes to photography to New York City to the painter René Magritte to the expanded CD version of Nuggets, and it makes for dense, exciting, thought-provoking reading.
The title, Sante's writing and curating two books on crime (Low Life and Evidence, the latter a collection of crime-scene photos) notwithstanding, has nothing to do with murder per se. Instead, it's a piece of writerly advice he attributes to William Faulkner which warns (usually young) writers to eliminate the tricks and fancies they most admire. They're rarely as clever as you think, the reasoning goes, and just point out how self-consciously cool you think you are -- and make the reader think you're showing off. In fact, making this sacrifice leaves your text much "cooler," in the sense that instead of throwing off heat, it draws attention to what it says, rather than how it says it. Which, after all, is the idea.
Which is not to say that Sante's writing isn't stylish; part of how he keeps you interested is by constantly tossing in the jarring note. A very minor example, from a piece on the Mekons: "They toured with a lineup that expanded and contracted like the bellows of Rico Bell's (occasional) accordion, and they toured relentlessly, like Nazareth or something." The last four words -- and the last two in particular -- are a nice touch, but for the most part the way he does this is at length, building and releasing the pressure, inserting the raspberry at the point where he's aware that the text is in danger of taking itself too seriously. Part of being a public intellectual, after all, is being read by the public. And that public is wider than those who, as he comments in a footnote in his fond consideration of Allen Ginsberg, hold the "view...that the best minds of [Ginsberg's] generation, far from being destroyed, were leading Chaucer seminars all across the country."
For readers of a music site, the best entry-point to Darlings will be the 70-odd pages of the third section here, comprising his review of Nuggets, the Mekons' piece, a long review of Dylan's Chronicles Vol. 1 from the NYRB, his essay on "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say" from a collection of essays on ballads, The Rose and the Briar, edited by Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz (full disclosure: I also have a piece in it), and another long NYRB piece, "The Invention of the Blues." Given the low standing of writing about popular music (not completely without reason, these days, given the equally low standards editors and readers seem to have), these five pieces are worthy of celebration. Fluid, cerebral, learned, funky, and contentious, they're some of the best cultural criticism (not "rock criticism" -- see previous parenthesis) I've read this decade. Controversial, too, in places: the blues piece was written before the recent flap occasioned by Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues, and yet it makes a fine case for the Mississippicentricity of the blues. (I'm agnostic on this until I read Hamilton's book, which I have yet to do, but Sante does seem to have some strong points here, including an argument for a single inventor of this form, who's been long lost). The Dylan piece foreshadows Todd Haynes's film I'm Not There, by taking its title from the same Rimbaud quote -- "Je suis un autre," or "I is someone else" -- that informs the film and taking note of the obscure (at the time) Dylan song which gives the film its title.
From there you might like to go to his sardonic piece on Woodstock '99 -- a rare piece of reportage in the book; another deals with the Thompson Square riot of 1988 -- or a magnificent examination of "hip" in the form of two book reviews, one of a biography of Terry Southern, the other of John Leland's Hip: the History. East Coasters will chuckle uncomfortably over his essay on New Jersey, and anyone who's had a crappy job will marvel at his memoir of working an injection-molding machine in a plastics factory.
But I suggest, gentle public, that you also stray into his fourth section here, which contains straightforward (well, pretty straightforward) pieces of visual-arts criticism. The essay on Victor Hugo's art output is a revelation: who knew the revered icon of 19th century French literature signed and dated pebbles he found on the beach, or did automatic drawings at séances? The Magritte piece is Belgium's best-known painter as seen by America's leading Belgian-American, and his coming to terms with Robert Mapplethorpe's life and photography, as well as the writing that's been done on each, shows a sharp, but fair, intellect at work on a very difficult topic.
Publishers these days don't tend to do collections of magazine pieces, which in Sante's case is a shame, needless to say. So he's gone outside the list of usual suspects and Kill All Your Darlings is a product of Yeti Press, the book wing of the excellent "little magazine" (does anyone still use that term?) Yeti, who were kind enough to send their latest issue along with my review copy. In it are some posts from Sante's Pinakothek blog, which, along with showing he's still as prickly and as much fun to read as ever, includes a short introduction which ends with the words "Now if only this activity could pay my rent..." I hear ya talkin', but it's another frontier for today's public intellectual, and one which can only help grow his public. As of this writing, he's slacked off in favor of having to pay that rent -- no posts since May of this year -- but I commend it -- and Kill All Your Darlings and Yeti, for that matter -- to the attention of anyone who cares about that muscle between the ears.
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