FORTHCOMING


" 'Green They Shone' : The Poem As Environment"

D.H. Lawrence Review
50th Anniversary Issue



"J. Hillis Miller's All Souls' Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies"

Reading Nineteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of J. Hillis Miller
Eds. Julian Wolfreys and Monika Szuba

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (UK)
New York: Oxford University Press (USA)

2017

"The Feudal Unconscious:
Capitalism and the Family Romance"

October 159 (Winter 2017)
MIT Press




Now Available

Portuguese translation of THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE (Blackwell Manifestos, 2010) now available from Tinta Negra (Rio de Janeiro, 2015)



OS MITOS DA CULTURA POP: DE DANTE A DYLAN

O renomado crítico cultural americano Perry Meisel detona as noções convencionais sobre a divisão entre “alta” e “baixa” cultura.

O autor transita pela provocante teoria de que a cultura pop experimentou ritmos dialéticos. A hábil análise que o livro apresenta de três tradições culturais duradouras – o romance norte-americano, Hollywood, e o rock inglês e americano – nos leva a um ciclo histórico da cultura pop que tem Dante como ponto de partida e revisita ícones como Wahrol, Melville, Hemingway, Twain, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Scorsese e Sinatra.



THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN

The Myth of Popular Culture discusses the dialectic of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" in popular culture through an examination of literature, film, and popular music. With topics ranging from John Keats to John Ford, the book responds to Adorno's theory that popular culture is not dialectical by showing that it is.

Available as eBooks

COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure (Columbia University Press, 2011)

THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN
(
Blackwell Manifestos, 2010)

THE LITERARY FREUD (Routledge, 2007)

THE COWBOY AND THE DANDY: CROSSING OVER FROM ROMANTICISM TO ROCK AND ROLL (Oxford University Press, 1998)

FREUD: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS (Prentice-Hall, 1981)




3/30/10

Mark Almond 73

by Perry Meisel

The Mark Almond band has been at best a purveyor of moods. Even the addition of former Mingus drummer Dannie Richmond has hardly given the group the groove it so sorely lacks. In fact, the hiring of Richmond around the time Columbia signed Mark Almond for a reportedly large advance only confirms the feeling that corporate investment and hype have managed to sustain a band that lacks power musically. What else but money would prompt so fine a drummer as Richmond to take up with the limited likes of Jon Mark and Johnny Almond? Why would the new album's liner list company executives, managers and accountant unless they were as vital to the band as the music?
At least Mark Almond 73 features a live side. We're spared the tedious control-room drama that the group's unfortunate fondness for suites produced on their three previous albums (no real difference in recording technique, by the way, marked the switch from Blue Thumb to Columbia). Here at last is a chance to hear what they're like without a curtain of strenuous production.
Definitive moments in concert: Richmond rolls on his snare during Mark's acoustic introduction to "What Am I Living For," ready to land with the full ensemble on the downbeat of the next measure. Mark, though, is grazing in the soppy meadows of his lyrics, oblivious to the drummer's sense of drama; the roll dies out awkwardly because Richmond at least has a musician's obligation to follow the band's so-called leader.
The studio side contains the most pleasing tune on the album, "Lonely Girl"; an easy Latin thing, featuring a ripped-off horn line from BS&T's version of Nilsson's "Without Her." After two choruses, though, it provokes only yawns, like the cloying acoustic hues of the remaining songs.
Even hiring the best sidemen, like Richmond and LA studio bassist Wolfgang Melz, can't make up for the band's appalling lack of ideas. Nor can ornamenting the group with ex-Cat Stevens guitarist Alan Davies or a truckload of percussion hide the emptiness at the core of Mark Almond's painted shell.

Originally published in The Boston Phoenix, September 12, 1973

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