I'm old enough not to take things for granted, so I do wonder whether you've read Greil Marcus' "The Old, Weird America?" The original title, "Invisible Republic," was so much better, but I suppose it kept ending up in the Current Affairs sections of bookstores.
Yes, of course! A classic of American music writing. It's from something Kenneth Rexroth wrote in September 1969, reviewing a volume of Carl Sandburg's letters for the New York Times, that the phrase 'old weird America' is derived: "Today one of the principal foundation stones, perhaps the cornerstone, of the counter-culture is the American folksong. It is through songs that Sandburg first made popular that the old free America in which he grew up was to transmit, as through the narrow channels of hundreds of capillaries, its value system, its life blood, to a generation that ignores him or looks on him as a joke." We prefer Rexroth's phrasing to that of Marcus, ultimately.
Well said. I love all the quotes, and the Biblical aspect was unknown to me.
I'm old enough not to take things for granted, so I do wonder whether you've read Greil Marcus' "The Old, Weird America?" The original title, "Invisible Republic," was so much better, but I suppose it kept ending up in the Current Affairs sections of bookstores.
Yes, of course! A classic of American music writing. It's from something Kenneth Rexroth wrote in September 1969, reviewing a volume of Carl Sandburg's letters for the New York Times, that the phrase 'old weird America' is derived: "Today one of the principal foundation stones, perhaps the cornerstone, of the counter-culture is the American folksong. It is through songs that Sandburg first made popular that the old free America in which he grew up was to transmit, as through the narrow channels of hundreds of capillaries, its value system, its life blood, to a generation that ignores him or looks on him as a joke." We prefer Rexroth's phrasing to that of Marcus, ultimately.