Real Life Rock: America’s Greatest Pop Culture Critic Discusses His Latest Book in NYC for FREE
Few writers have written as eloquently or been as engaged with the roots and development of American popular culture than author, critic, and professor Greil Marcus. Readers may know Marcus most for his early seminal work Mystery Train from 1975, or from a series of books that, in their own right, craft poetry out of an exploration of Bob Dylan and other Rock icons’ work, such as That Old, Weird America (1997) and The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 10 Songs (2014).
New Yorkers should come in mass to Albertine bookstore at the Cultural Services of the Embassy on October 22nd as Greil Marcus will give a free discussion with equally-renowned writer Robert Polito.
Discuss between Greil Marcus and Robert Polito
Wednesday, October 22, 2015 at 7PM
Albertine Book Store
972 5th Avenue, New York City
FREE Discussion in English, Open to Public
RSVP not necessary.
More info
From the Albertine Website:
“Greil Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says it” wrote David Kerby in The Washinghton Post. For nearly thirty years, Greil Marcus has written a remarkable column called Real Life Rock Top Ten. It has been a laboratory where he has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements–collected now as Real Life Rock. Published at the same time is Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations, about songs that seem to have been written by no one, and as such give a peculiarly American strain of free speech to anyone who takes them up. Both books–direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud–are critical arguments about how culture moves through time, and time moves through culture.
Joining Greil Marcus will be poet and scholar Robert Polito. Our guests will discuss Greil Marcus’s latest publications, as well as the 2014 The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 10 Songs, recently issued in paperback, and this year’s sixth edition of Marcus’s first book, Mystery Train, first published in 1975.
About the Speakers:
Greil Marcus has written many books, including Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of The Twentieth Centuryand Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, currently staged at La Comédie-Françaisein Paris by Marie Rémond and Sébastien Pouderoux. He teaches at Berkeley and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Robert Polito’s most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God and Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Hollywood & God was chosen by Barnes and Noble as one of the top five poetry books of 2010. Polito received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Savage Art: A Biograpy of Jim Thompson. He is also the author of the poetry collection Doubles, as well as A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and a study of Byron’s poetry. His poems and reviews, criticism, and essays on literature, film, and popular music have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Harpers, The Believer, Bookforum, The Poetry Foundation website,Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, and Best American Film Writing. The founding director of theGraduate Writing Program and the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy at the New School, he served as President of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago (2013-15) before returning to New York and the New School. He is working on a new collection of poems, as well as on a pair of nonfiction books — on noir; and Bob Dylan.
