Beautifully integrated, feeling naturally from Booker Prize #WillSelf to Norton anthology high school hero, Flashing @Utahna Faith (her "All-Girl Band") gives her the status, "hella storytella" of her young daughter, she never interferes with her anti-superfluous storytelling (she still receives letters from those whose director had given her that day a varied, iterative but generally consistent lesson about the non-existent ghost world beyond which characters authors and readers do not dare to follow, the last word of the last chapter belongs to him and is as democratically satisfying as happy They send to Mrs. Faith: "What happens after the end ...?"
And, yes, she does not have bananas that are not already on this plant, or are they too hard to peel. Of the ADHD-Gen Z, she is the friend of the quick language that does not support, belabor, boredom or blame. And here is @AndrewGallix who keeps his flashists keeping track of future achievements, published previously, properly proportioned - from writer to reader - reducer, accelerating expertise. Pub Rock-friendly, tasty rockers, essay-juggling writers on tour continue well-hailed by Andrew's @3AMmagazine.
The longest #microdot edited with insight an inch of its no-denouement-allowed, shit that fits palimpsest scholars exercises passion for non-messy detritus unlike Pollock.
Adderall to Twombly, our greatest teachers who best work in asylums, blossoming perfect paper pen into hypergraphic ecstasy.
This is life that sets your plans before you can ruin them.
God's big joke: making plans, accounts for 90% economy and 10% trifled one-page nascent stories for grandchildren of Chekhov's grandchildren, canaries, his gold mine, bitumen BLACK, Kidman-white, AND read ALL OVER ...
So I removed the colors and went back to black on white. In spring, the fritillaries bloom, turning meadows purple and white.
Lovers all in white with costumed variety of nineteenth-century period.
An ephemeral video image of a woman dressed white and moving through trees, lit by mooncast spells of love.
Place the mussels and clams in large saucepan and pour over white wine.
She was standing in front of her master's throne with pure white armor edged with gold.
I looked at my father and was struck by the whiteness of his lips.
This honey-white concentrated, sweet and sour is perfect dish.
He looked - he was white like paper - even his lips, and he had dark shadows under his eyes.
She was wearing a cowboy outfit of bright green and white, contrast color of the horse.
The ten commissioners, five white, five black, voted along colored lines.
He was wearing a black jacket with white reflection marks, dark blue jeans and sneakers.
Made by a cellar that produces great wines, it is a sober, fruity white with citrus fruits.
On the terrace was a beautiful woman dressed in a bright white silk.
I sighed deeply and sat down on the grass, fastening myself to a large white oak tree.
Magnifiquement intégrée, se sentant naturellement de Booker Prized #WillSelf à l'héroïne du lycée à anthologies de Norton, Flashing @Utahna Faith (son "All-Girl Band" lui confère le statut de "hella storytella" de sa jeune fille, elle n'interfère jamais avec ses anti-superflous super amoureux la narration (elle reçoit toujours des lettres de ceux dont le directeur lui avait donné ce jour-là une leçon variée, itérative mais généralement cohérente, sur le monde fantôme non existant au-delà duquel personnages, auteurs et lecteurs n'osent pas suivre; le dernier mot du dernier chapitre lui appartient et est aussi satisfaisant démocratiquement que heureux Ils envoient à Mme Faith: "Que se passe-t-il après la fin ...?"
Et, oui, elle n'a pas de bananes qui ne sont pas déjà sur cette plante, ou sont-elles trop difficiles à éplucher.
Parmi les TDAH-Gén. Z, elle est l'amie au langage rapide qui ne supporte pas le belabor, l'ennui ou le blmer.
Et voici @AndrewGallix qui garde ses flashistes à l’écart, en assurant le suivi de son avenir et de ses survols de routes à partir de toutes ces réalisations accomplies, publiées antérieurement, correctement proportionnées - d’écrivain à lecteur - réducteur, accélérant l’expertise.
Des rockers sympathiques et savoureux de Pub Rockers sont devenus des essayistes qui jonglent journal pour écrire des auteurs en voyage et qui continuent d'être acclamés par le @ 3AMmagazine d'Andrew.
Le plus long court de son scintillation, # micro-pointes, microdots édités avec perspicacité dans un pouce de leur no-denouments permis - le golf de allumé, avec tout l'arc et la merde qui convient à ajustement, presque savants palimpsestu exercent leur passion pour le détritus en désordre de Pollock adderall les envoyant à Twombly, ou nos plus grands professeurs dont le meilleur travail est dans les asiles, épanouissant à merveille stylo à papier en extase hypergraphique. Il s’agit de la vie qui établit vos plans avant de pouvoir les ruiner d’abord; la grande blague de Dieu: faire des plans, représente 90% de l'économie et 10% de ce bagatelle borstal jamais complètement embrassé, ces histoires naissantes d'une page pour les petits-enfants des petits-enfants de Checkov qui ont une meilleure merde à examiner , sont des canaris dans sa cage de mine d’or, bitume noir, blanc Kidman et lis partout
Voir Tweet activity So j'ai enlevé les couleurs et suis revenu au noir sur blanc.
Au printemps, les fritillaires fleurissent, transformant le pré en une masse de pourpre et de blanc.
Les amoureux sont tous en blanc avec des costumes d'une variété de périodes du XIXe siècle.
Une image vidéo éphémère d'une femme vêtue de blanc et se déplaçant à travers des arbres éclairés par la lune jette un sort d'amour et de mystère.
Placez les moules et les palourdes nettoyées dans une grande casserole et versez sur le vin blanc.
Elle se tenait devant le trône de son maître avec une armure de blanc pur bordée d'or.
J'ai regardé mon père et j'ai été frappé par la blancheur de ses lèvres.
Ce blanc miellé, concentré, de style aigre-doux est parfait avec ce plat.
Il avait l'air affreux - il était blanc comme le papier, même ses lèvres et il avait des ombres sombres sous les yeux.
Elle était vêtue d'une tenue de cow-boy de vert et de blanc éclatants, contrastant parfaitement avec la couleur du cheval.
elle portait du blanc
Les dix commissaires, dont cinq sont blancs et cinq noirs, ont voté le long des lignes de couleur.
Il portait une veste noire avec des marques de réflexion blanches, un jean bleu foncé et des baskets.
Fabriqué par une cave qui produit de grands vins à tous les prix, c’est un blanc sobre et fruité aux agrumes.
Sur la terrasse se trouvait une femme magnifique, vêtue d'une robe de soie d'un blanc éclatant.
Je soupirai profondément et m'assis sur l'herbe, m'attachant près d'un grand chêne blanc.
Wonderfully integrated natural Booker Prized #WillSelf to Norton anthologized, High School heroine, flashing @Utahna Faith ('All-Girl Band' makes a 'hella storytella.'
Form never interferes with list-loving, super-fluid anti-superfluous storytelling (she still gets letters from those whose absence that day the headmaster gave a varied iterative but generally consistent lesson on the nonexistent ghost world beyond which characters, authors and readers dare not follow; the last chapter's final word is hers, and as democratically satisfying to happy-enders as their contrarian coequals).
The longest short of this scintillate #twitlit microdots, edited perspicaciously within an inch of their no-denouement-allowed golf-lit scorecard, encouraging all the arc to its hypergraphia;
palimpsest savants overwriting their passion as messy detritus of Pollock.
Adderall, Twombly, our greatest teachers' best work is in asylums, blissfully emblazoning pen to paper in hypergraphic ecstasy.
It's all about life making your plans before you can ruin them; the big God joke: Make Plans.
10% of this never-embraced bagatelle, borstal overwrought, nascent one-page stories for Chekhov's grandkids' grandkids who've got better shit to pore over, like canaries in his goldmine, bitumen black.
Kidman-whiteand read all over...
1,983
In spring the fritillaries flower, turning the meadow into a mass of purple and white .
The lovers are all in white with costumes of a variety of nineteenth century periods.
A fleeting video image of a woman dressed in white and moving through moonlit trees cast a spell of love and mystery.
Place the cleaned mussels and clams into a large pan and pour over the white wine.
She stood before the throne of her master in armor of purest white edged in gold.
I looked to my father and was stricken at how white his lips were.
This honeyed, concentrated, sweet and sour style white is perfect with this dish.
He looked awful - he was paper white , even his lips, and he had dark shadows under his eyes.
She was dressed in a cowboy outfit of bright green and white, contrasting perfectly with the colour of the horse.
she was wearing white
The ten commissioners, five of whom are white and five black, voted along colour lines.
He was wearing a black jacket with white reflection marks, dark blue jeans and trainers.
Made by a winery that makes great wines at every price point, this is a restrained, citrus fruity white .
Upon the terrace was a beautiful woman, garbed in a flowing silk gown of glowing white .
I sighed deeply and took a seat on the grass, bracing next to a tall white oak tree.
Morwenna Banks (born 20 September 1961) is a British comedy actress, writer and producer known for her roles as Mummy Pig, Madame Gazelle and Dr Hamster in the children's series Peppa Pig.
Search Results
Early life
Banks attended Truro High School for Girls and Robinson College, Cambridge and was a member of the Cambridge Footlights from 1981 to 1983. She also acted with the Marlowe Society, notably in a brief but dominant comic cameo as the Widow in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, alongside Tilda Swinton.
Career
One of Banks’ early major television roles was as part of the team on the comedy sketch show Absolutely, broadcast on Channel 4 between 1989 and 1993.
Her other television appearances include the BBC series The Thick of It, Red Dwarf, Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul and the Steve Coogan comedy Saxondale, in which she played receptionist Vicky.
She also appeared as Anthea Stonem in the E4 Teen drama Skins and was a cast member on NBC's Saturday Night Live, for four episodes of the show's twentieth season. She appeared as Carmen Kenaway in the first two episodes of the 9th series of Shameless.
Her voice roles include Claire Feeble in Stressed Eric; Mummy Pig in Peppa Pig; the ship's computer in the BBC TV series Hyperdrive; the witches in Meg and Mog, an animated children's series for CITV (2003);[citation needed] Ping Pong in Rupert Bear (Channel 5); Guinevere in King Arthur's Disasters (CITV).
Banks won Best Voice Performance at the 2014 British Animation Awards for providing the voice for Queen Marigold in Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom.
She wrote, produced, and appeared in the British ensemble film The Announcement in 2001.
She also appeared in season one, episode 13 of Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a 'rulebearer'.
In 2004, she played the central role of Tess in the series Catterick with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.
Since 2009
In 2009, Banks made a series of web videos for BBC Comedy called Celebrities STFU, each video featuring her in costume impersonating Lady Gaga, Noel Gallagher, Susan Boyle, Pixie Lott, Jools Holland, and Duffy. On 19 October 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Banks' play Goodbye about a woman diagnosed with breast cancer. The play is an account of the path from first diagnosis to death of Lizzie, played by Olivia Colman); it deals with her relationships with her family and with her best friend Jen, played by Natascha McElhone, and their reactions to Jen's illness and death. The cast included Darren Boyd, John Simm, Alison Steadman, Ezra Banks-Baddiel Seren Deeks and the voice of Dolly Banks-Baddiel; it was produced by Heather Larmour.
Banks received the 2015 Satinwood Award for the play. She subsequently wrote the play's 2015 film adaptation, titled Miss You Already. From 2012 to 2018 she played Venus Traduces (a parody of Violet Trefoils) and other roles in the BBC Radio 4 sitcom Glastonbury. Her later voice work includes the roles of Betty and Sonia in the 2008 film version of Tales of the Riverbank; a translator at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in The Eichmann Show; and The Queen in the 2015 version of Danger Mouse. In 2016, she co-wrote and starred in the comedy series Damned. She co-starred in and wrote (with Rebecca Front) "Shush!" a sitcom set in a library broadcast on BBC Radio Four in 2017.
Awards
2014 British Animation Award for Best Voice Performance in Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom: Nanny's Magic Test
2015 Satinwood Award for the radio play Goodbye
Mummy Pig, Peppa Pig et la maman de George Pig ne sont pas des porcelets nourris, Mummy Pig a travaillé elle-même dans le style californien avec M. Potato. Tout le monde est sur les îles au vent et sous le vent de Mustique et de Saint-Barthélemy, et elle a aussi changé, une chienne saoule vide, profonde, buvant des flacons de rêve de l'exotique tokyo, des tractions furtives sous les tables au fond de la nuit avec des coussins blancs, force de la viande de porc; elle est glissante et glissante, une coulée de boue écrasant sa claque heureuse, un cochon de lait rôti à la broche tournant des tours pour des dates dans la cuve pleine de queues trop visqueuses pour manquer, portant des bottes étranges, des orteils fendus, un souse qui pique le porc, trop tard pour se laisser aller, trop infernal pour s'arrêter. 'Giss giss! Sooie! Elle fantasme les mendacites boueuses lors des pauses dans les maisons en pente, laissant des tueurs mortels pour des amis freegan, des rêves de ferroutage comme vous! Cochon maman! Habille piggy, velouté, sans manches, haute couture; ils sont à votre aise, incompétents; les jeux de tête artistique enduisent leur chagrin d'amour comme des crêpes; quittez la table si cela vous déprime; saupoudrez votre nez de vos petites compresses; tes perles lancées sur des porcs en porcelaine immaculée; tes yeux de porc bruns montrent maintenant qui est qui dans sa chaude bouchée pâteuse; la merde qu'il mange est la merde où il vit. Vous êtes un cochon ensorcelé, un fiasco désordonné! Concurrence réduite pleine d'intention rationnée. Le cochon de la mère le donne gratuitement, sans se renverser sur les cuisses, elle écarte les hanches, drainée, surchargée de travail, elle est un peu ligotée. Tu es une femme, une fille la nuit; DEMI-JAMBON et sans œufs, le porcelet sans patte Peppa Pig, un souvenir que vous évitez de déshonorer. Battant une centaine avec trois cils noirs, moi, ouais, cochon, c'est toi dont tu effaces tes cendres. Vous êtes le porc smizing, blonde et mauvaise perruque; les énormes prosciuto suspendus tranchent des tranches transparentes du pays, des portions absurdes mangées pour le plaisir; libres, avec une prise, mais ne vous lamentez pas, ils se retrouveront dans des dégâts graisseux; folderol on furlow pour la gourmandise prête, pour le pays, vous arborez le drapeau déployé, déjà. Insatiable pour tous, surexploité, trop partagé, surchargeant votre freakshow derrière des cordes veloutées, trotters-up, pigged-out, vous êtes un lardon donnant des coups durs, des lèvres collantes apprêtées pour les enfoirés du camionneur, un soulagement pour les coqs fatigués, des kilomètres à allez-y avant de vous reposer, leur soif de viande déclarée comme propre dans la douche, vous êtes assis dans la cabine et attendez une heure!
Mummy Pig, Peppa Pig and George Pig's mom are not fed piglets, Mummy Pig worked herself in the Californian style with Mr. Potato.
Everyone is on the windward and leeward islands of Mustique and Saint-Barthélemy, and she has also changed, a drunk bitch, empty, deep drinking dreamy bottles of exotic Tokyo, furtive traction under tables at the end of the night, white cushions, pork; she is slippery and slippery mudflow of mud happy slap, spit-roasted suckling pig turning turns for dates in the tub full of tails too viscous to miss, wearing weird boots, slit toes, a sousey pig, too late to let go, too infernal to stop.
'Giss giss! Sooie!'
She fantasizes muddy mendacites during breaks in slophouses, leaving deadly killers for freegan friends, dreams of piggybacking like you!
Pig mom! Dresses piggy, velvety, sleeveless haute couture; they are at ease, incompetent; the games of artistic heads coat their grief of love like pancakes; leave the table if it depresses you; sprinkle your nose with your little compresses; your pearls thrown on immaculate porcelain; your brown pork eyes now show who's who in hot pasty mouthfuls; the shit he eats is the shit he lives.
You are a bewitched pig, a messy fiasco!
Reduced competition full of rationed intention.
The mother pig gives it for free, without falling on her thighs, she spreads her hips; drained, overworked, she is a little tied up.
You are a woman, a girl at night; HALF-HAM and without eggs, the Peppa Pig-free piglet, a souvenir that you avoid dishonor.
Beating a hundred with three black eyelashes, me, yeah, pig, it's you, you, your ashes.
You are the smizing pig, blonde and bad wigged; the enormous suspended prosciuto sliced transparent slices from the country, absurd portions eaten for pleasure; free, with a grip, but do not lament, they will end up greasy in messy folderol on furlow greed-ready, you sport the flag already.
Insatiable for all, overexploited, over-shared, overloading your freakshow behind velvety strings, trotters-up, pigged-out, you're a lardon giving hard-ons, sticky lips primed for trucker motherfuckers, a relief for crushed balls and the miles to go before you rest, thirst for meat as clean in the shower, you sit in the cabin and wait an hour!
Both Tosches and Robert Palmer, author of another current Jerry Lee Lewis bio, have taken a different route to the rockbook in the past: the pop text. Not surprisingly, neither elected to cover rock and roll per se — unless you count Sound Effects. Nik Cohn’s Rock from the Beginning, a history published more than half the music’s lifetime ago, remains the only honorable attempt at that Sisyphean undertaking ever essayed by an individual acting alone. Tosches’s 1977 Country: The Biggest Music in America is pure gonzo scholarship, so outrageous that I felt let down when jacket copy that began
“If you’re looking for a cogent, comprehensive history of America’s most popular music…” didn’t continue “…then steal Bill C. Malone from the library, sucker.”
Alternating garish anecdotes, many apocryphal and several completely made up, with the kind of catalogue-number fanaticism only record collectors can read without artificial stimulants, Country attempts to prove that America’s most conservative popular music is in fact its most radical. Where Marxist George Lipsitz makes a similar case by doggedly documenting the music’s class origins and consciousness, Tosches’s book is all fucking and fighting and getting high. As history, it’s partial and absurdly distorted. But as vision, it’s hilarious and instructive, a perfect rockbook combo; it’s not the key to country music, but it breaks down some doors.
Palmer’s Deep Blues, published in 1981 and just out in paper from Penguin, is something else entirely — the best book available on a subject that’s always inspired passionate erudition. Although I’m not enough of a blues scholar to attest unequivocally to its originality or accuracy, I guarantee its scope, coherence, and grace. Tracing the blues back to Will Dockery’s plantation in northwestern Mississippi, where in the 1890s guitarist Henry Sloane (teacher of Charley Patton, student of ??????) was heard to play something damn similar, Palmer follows the tradition to its international present with an admirable sense of proportion (except when he overplays his good source Robert Junior Lockwood).
Because Delta blues is his subject, he barely touches on the East Texas strain, but that’s regrettable only because he would have made such a good job of it. He completes his self-appointed task superbly, especially the stopover in Chicago with Muddy Waters and his numerous nephews. This is a pop text, yes, but it’s also where to start exploring the source of all rock and roll. A rockbook and then some.
Palmer’s critical virtues have always been on the ethnomusicological side — he appreciates madness, style, and sleaze, but he’s never shown any inclination to incorporate them into his writing. So for the same reason that the star lecturer isn’t always the life of the faculty party, it’s no surprise that Palmer brings off a history with more pizzazz than a quickie.
His Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks! began its life in 1980 as a memorable Rolling Stone profile, but stretched out for the rockstar bio people at Delilah, it’s little more than the usual excuse for photographs (many of which are wonderful). Sure the facts are here, as well as a lot of historical background and a few authorial reminiscences that Bangs always made a specialty — Palmer grew up in Little Rock and had his life changed, he says, by “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.” But he doesn’t seem to put a whole lot of thought, or heart, into his thesis that “maybe rock and roll can save souls as well as destroy them.” And while in Deep Blues he applies his musical expertise to one of the key enterprises of all rock criticism — establishing the technical brilliance of inspired primitives — he never does the same for Jerry Lee’s pumping piano, surely one of the great instrumental signatures.
Too bad — I would have liked him to parse those boogie rolls.
Hellfire feels like it was written fast, too — but not ground out like a quickie, really written, in what I envision as a month or two of icy lyric fury. Even at the end, when what begins as heroic narrative breaks down into a string of clipped little items that might just as well have been lifted whole from the trades, the police blotter, and the secret diary of Oral Roberts Jr., the book has the kind of trance-like coherence that has overtaken every writer at the dawn of a specially blessed all-nighter. Basically the tale of the archetypal Southern backslider, it’s been described as Biblical and Faulknerian, and it should be. But Tosches, who has lots of just-the-facts hack in him, sustains a page-turning pace that intensifies its of-a-pieceness. And his tone partakes of the grand, inexorable distance of a genuine epic as well.
Such things cannot be, of course — the epic is of the past. All the oral tradition south of the Mason-Dixon line can’t bring it back unspoiled, and anybody who thinks different is ignorant, pretentious, or both. So Hellfire can only succeed as some kind of mock epic, the chronicle of a would-be hero in an antiheroic age. And indeed, Tosches does cut King James’s English with journalese; he does mix straight reporting and bent faction with the stuff of legend; he does disfigure his story with the mean details of Lewis’s vanity, cruelty, and crazed sense of humor. But Hellfire isn’t mock anything. Without hewing foolishly to the usages of a dead form or trying to write like someone he isn’t, and without presenting Lewis’s excesses as merely cool, colorful, or semi-divine, Tosches limns the life of a doomed hero as if that hero deserved our respect, and his. As a dedicated classicist who is also a former snake hunter and a contributing editor to Penthouse, he rejects the notion that there’s something debased or devalued about the mongrel rhetoric he exploits. It’s just there, with all it’s peculiar virtues and drawbacks, and it’s Jerry Lee Lewis’s mother tongue.
Not that this avowed Pindar fan doesn’t respect the past — not even that he doesn’t believe there-were-giants-in-those-days. Like most rock critics with a specialty in roots music, he disdains most of today’s pop, and his Jerry Lee is driven by his heritage as “the final wild son” (Tosches’s phrase) of a family with “a big history” (Lewis’s). Nor is Hellfire at all solemn — in fact, it’s very funny indeed. Lewis’s excesses aren’t merely cool or colorful, but they’re at least that — this wild son has done a lot of exorbitant things in his life, and he’s some interview:
“‘I mean Elvis this, Elvis that. What the shit did Elvis do except take dope that I couldn’t git ahold of? That’s very discouraging, anybody that had that much power to git ahold of that much dope.’ ” Furthermore, Tosches does play his story for laughs, often finding punch lines in the grand rhythms of his rhetoric itself: “She caressed Jerry Lee and soon told him that she was pregnant. He told her that it was no seed of his that had rendered her so. They lifted their hands in anger anew.” Nevertheless, Tosches never makes fun. There is a humor not of derision of of delight.
I’m making big claims for Tosches’s complexity of tone, and I’m sure not everyone will read him that way. His elevated periods can be dismissed as rodomontade, his jokes a sarcasm, his compact narrative and penchant for interior monologue as proof that he didn’t do his homework. Then again, you can also dismiss Jerry Lee Lewis as one more unholy roller, or pigeonhole his achievement as a couple of classic rock and roll songs, a piano insignia, and a fling as a country star. But I would argue — having listened long and hard, I would swear — that there’s a lot more there. Lewis’s offhand arrogance, candid insincerity, and unshakable sense of destiny are not qualities commonly found in any artist. He’s very much a modern, set apart not so much by the elementary truth and transcendent power of his singing and playing as by his self-consciousness itself. His distance from his own show of fervor can seem positively eerie upon reflection, yet it in no way diminishes that fervor — if anything, the distance helps the fervor penetrate and endure.
Tosches has absorbed this sensibility if he didn’t share it all along. In Country, he avers (pace Bird and JB) that Jerry Lee Lewis’s mastery of 20th century rhythm is rivaled only by Faulkner’s, but what author has learned from subject hardly stops there, and where it ends is with that same synthesis of distance and fervor. This is why Albert Goldman’s half-truths about rock’s attitudinal roots in “the put-on and the take-off” are so irrelevant — it’s radically unlike “Mad or the routines of Sid Caesar” because its formal roots are in the ecstatic, vernacular music of the American South, just as Tosches, who is touched with the spirit, is radically unlike Goldman, who has all the largess of an unemployed gag-writer.
What Tosches believes is harder to know. I suspect, however, that the source of his own fervor isn’t second-hand — isn’t just his passion for Jerry Lee Lewis. Tosches’s account of Pentecostal fundamentalism maintains an objective if not skeptical tone. But like everything else in this terse, intense book, it never gets theoretical, never socializes, and though nothing else would be formally appropriate I’m left wondering.
Not only does it seem that Tosches envies Lewis the simplicity of his Manichaeism, which is bad enough, but it also seems that in a less literal way he counts himself in thrall to the same dichotomies. Tosches makes no bones about the wages of this belief, always linked so intimately with romantic agony in extremis — he leaves Lewis unloved and without male issue, his career and his IRS account in tatters. His judgement, however, is muted. If Lewis has traded an eternity in hellfire for some great music, you can’t help but feel that Tosches has gotten a fairly great book at similar cost.
As a skeptic in the matter of eternity, I don’t really believe that myself, of course, and Hellfire is fairly great indeed — the finest rockstar bio ever and up with Mystery Train among all rockbooks. But as such it raises philosophical questions, for it reminds us that even the much more reflective Mystery Train is rooted in — and perhaps limited by — the Puritan tradition and/or the Great Awakening, which between them sometimes seem to ground all American culture. Because Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, and Jerry Lee Lewis each takes this heritage seriously, each creates worth that isn’t mock anything, that connects us with an epic, heroic, deeply felt past. But in escaping modernism’s cul-de-sac they don’t escape modernity, which is why it’s worth remembering that in the end both Hellfire and Mystery Train aren’t epic at all. They’re tragedies of damnation. I’m not lodging a complaint — these aren’t just fine rockbooks, they’re fine books, a lot finer and more durable than most of what passes for literature and criticism these days. But one reason for that is that neither of them is content with such achievements. To the either-or — and beyond!
