alive and kicking (and reading)

[pantryslut]

Still deep into Where Dead Voices Gather, and glad I stuck with it. When you push past Tosches' bluster and some of the blinders of his ethnic-White perspective (Tosches is Italian) -- and his somewhat hilarious constant disparagement of academia whilst actually connecting early 20th century American popular music to Homer, down to quotes rendered in Greek -- he has a lot of interesting things to say. Plus the seriously digressionary structure of the book is oddly compelling. This week, we swung back to Dylan again and Tosches pointed out that Highway 61 isn't just any highway in Minnesota, it's the highway that runs south to New Orleans, i.e. down to the Mississippi Delta, jazz and blues and all that mythology. Tosches also disassembles that mythology quite neatly, by the way. All of this is highly esoteric, I know, and really tangential to my project, but so be it.