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)




4/15/10

Badger: White Lady

by Perry Meisel

Recording in New Orleans under Allen Toussaint's supervision, Jackie Lomax and his new band Badger are a portrait of rockers in the process of relaxing. Like Hawkins and Beckett at Muscle Shoals, Toussaint now runs a Gulf Coast clinic; another way of saying that the rhythm and blues revival in rock is finally seeking some advice. It's less the funky beat itself, the good doctors seem to say, than the relaxed head behind any groove at its best.
You might be inclined to compare Lomax's singing with Dean Martin's; though even if you did, you'd at least be admitting he's mellowed out. Lomax, though, has always relied on traditional, even slush, modes of singing, usually against a heavier band than he fronts here; but the combination has been, to me, an indication of honesty. It's easier to rip off the Otis Redding you heard at sixteen than to work out the foxtrot style that really defined your musical sense as a white child, condemn it though you must.
What's cooled out most remarkably here is the sound behind Lomax's singing. The band gets a trifle messy on explicitly funky tunes like "The Hole Thing," but it handles everything else - the light swingers as well as the album's many ballads - with admirable poise and restraint. Roy Dyke's still far from your main soul drummer, though he's finding his way down what used to seem the disreputable path toward simplicity. Toussaint's own organ and piano set examples for bassist Kim Gardner and guitarist Paul Pilnick, while his horns pop and slide mildly enough not to interfere with the textures slowly breeding in the band itself.

Originally published in The Boston Phoenix, June 11, 1974