The Spy Who Loved Me

The best part about doing archival work on Cold War materials is that when you are allowed to use a digital camera to photograph documents, you feel like someone out of a John le Carre novel.

Fun fact: When the US Information Services Bureau, which ran the American Libraries across Europe in the post-WWII period (particularly in France and Austria), asked for donations of books representative of American culture, New Directions gave them a recently published translation of Baudelaire.

As James Laughlin's right-hand man Robert MacGregor put it, in a 1955 letter to Mr. L.L. Brady at the American Embassy in Paris, "Here is an excellent example of American scholarship. Bilingual editions are of inestimable value, and not only in schools. It therefore occurs to us that you might find FLOWERS OF EVIL a useful item for the New Year's presentations to people of importance, as well as for the end-of-the-year school prizes next June, the library loan collections and the lists of available titles circulated to the 21 French-speaking missions." (quoted from New Directions Publishing Corp. records, call # bMS Am 2077, Houghton Library, Harvard)

Talkin' 'bout the knockout shrub

An important recent event in my life has been the discovery (via Douglas Wolk) of a complete archive of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. As its title would suggest, each episode is devoted to a single lyrical theme (weather, drinking, baseball, sleep, shoes, birds, New York, etc.) The song choices, mostly from the 50s and 60s, are pretty eclectic and uniformly great. But the nicest surprise is that Dylan's a terrific DJ: warm, informative, charming and passionate, with the added advantage of being, you know, Bob Dylan. And even though I gather, from the credits at the end of each show, that he has a team of producers and researchers coming up with the perfect little factoids he strews about every which way, it's hard not to give in to the Greil Marcusian fantasy that it's all coming straight out of the great man's Old Weird American Subconscious. I especially like the way he intones phrases from a song he's just played, thus (a) making them sound like Bob Dylan lyrics and (b) instantaneously converting them into Dylanological cross-references for the remainder of recorded history.

Anyway, just to give you a little taste, here's the opening to the "Flowers" show: