Boldtype | April 2008


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April 2008:: issue 54

Books This Month
1.	The Telephone Gambit by Seth Shulman
2.	Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
3.	Coltrane by Ben Ratliff
4.	In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton
5.	Sound Art by Alan Licht
6.	Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown
	Interview: Jad Abumrad Feature: Rip It Up, and Start Again Book News Credits/About Us

Sounds
The rustle of turning pages is usually the only sound you'd hear from us, but in this issue we explore a range of aural excitements. We recommend biographies of icons Phil Spector and John Coltrane. Flavorpill's Music Editor helps you navigate the world of niche-music books with a handy, three-step guide. We also review books on a variety of fascinating but little-known noisemakers — elusive sound artists, the man who really invented the telephone, and the obsessive field recorders who constructed the authenticity of the blues. We conclude with an interview with Radiolab's Jad Abumrad about sound and storytelling.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

NONFICTION

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret by Seth Shulman


Published:	January 2008
Pages:	256
Publisher:	W.W. Norton
Links: Wall Street Journal review Boston Globe review Christian Science Monitor review Author website

“The Telephone Gambit illustrates the philosophical labyrinth of intellectual-property rights, as well as the inevitable price of innovation.”

Review
Seth Shulman's The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret draws the true creator of one of the 20th century's greatest inventions into question. Shulman probes one of the science community's more salacious scandals, delving into an intellectual rivalry on par with that of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison or Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato. The resulting tale illustrates the philosophical labyrinth of intellectual-property rights, as well as the inevitable price of innovation.

Shulman investigates Bell and electrical engineer Elisha Gray's concurrent research on transmission devices, examining both inventors' patent claims (filed on the same day, no less) and their suspicious similarities. He interweaves the narrative with excerpts from the rivals' lab notebooks and legal documents, blending inquiry with anecdotes from the telephone twins' lives. In the process, he also explores the ins and outs of a vulnerable American legal system and the dubious circumstances that led to Bell's later fame and fortune.

Despite the book's juicy premise, Shulman is no conspiracy theorist. While he was working as a guest researcher at MIT, the Harvard-educated science journalist stumbled across a document that cast doubt upon Bell's alleged invention. After considering the potential repercussions of challenging the inventor's widely mythologized discovery, Shulman created a scandal of his own by pursuing his controversial theory. As the book's subtitle suggests, the resulting argument is more of a journey than a dry thesis, and, in many ways, is as much about its author as its subjects.

The Telephone Gambit is not without obvious relevance to a world of wireless communication and accelerating technology. Shulman's exhaustive research and bold assertions are a testament to the enduring fragility of authorship and ownership in the realm of abstract ideas. Even without its philosophical undertones, however, The Telephone Gambit is an engaging story that examines a historical event with the suspenseful gush of a detective novel and the intellectual clarity of academic scholarship.
- Chelsea Bauch

FICTION

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser


Published:	February 2008
Pages:	256
Publisher:	Knopf
Links: NY Times review BOMB interview Transatlantica interview

“Millhauser continues to channel what is so often said to be missing from today's fiction: the natural storyteller.”

Review
Dangerous Laughter is as much a concept book as it is a traditional story collection. Each of these tales by Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser can be enjoyed alone — as they were in publications such as Harper's, the New Yorker, and McSweeney's. And yet, when read together, a cohesive conversation emerges. It's as if the stories are sitting at a table, in all their variously personified forms, discussing childhood, innovation, and their sense of the past with one another.

The stories range from adolescent adventures to alternate histories, and are divided into four sections: "Opening Cartoon," "Vanishing Acts," "Impossible Architectures," and "Heretical Histories." Despite their varying subjects, they all share a surrealist core — a cartoon cat chases his mouse nemesis as Tom did Jerry ("Cat 'n Mouse"), a community maintains a life-size replica of its town ("The Other Town"), and women's dresses evolve to the size of houses ("A Change in Fashion").

Millhauser is at his best when grounding these fantastical concepts in the emotional terrain of childhood. In "The Room in the Attic," a man recalls the high-school months he spent infatuated with his friend's sister, a girl who lived in total darkness. Looking back, the protagonist questions whether his boyish obsession stemmed more from his uncertainty about adulthood than from any desire to understand the girl's strange existence. This same tone permeates the title story, which is an elegy to a summer when laughter was in vogue and teenagers provoked one another into fits of hilarity.

Whether you read them all together or prefer to take small bites, the 13 voices in Dangerous Laughter are all gripping. Millhauser continues to channel what is so often said to be missing from today's fiction: the natural storyteller.
- Adam Lefton

NONFICTION

Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff


Published:	2007
Pages:	250
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Links: NY Times review Guardian review Bookforum review Slate interview

“The Story of a Sound is about how Coltrane's musical evolution reflected the maturation of jazz itself.”

Review
There's no shortage of John Coltrane biographies on the market, so Ben Ratliff makes clear that his book will focus not on the man, but on his sound. That wasn't just a marketing decision, however. The truth is that Coltrane didn't live all that interesting of a life — a nasty heroin habit aside, he spent far too much time in the woodshed to have done anything memorable that didn't also involve his horn.

The enthralling story of how Coltrane went from being an anonymous tenor to a revolutionary titan transcends mere biography. The man was relentless in his single-minded dedication and innovation. A tune like "Giant Steps," for example, has a harmonic complexity that became a foundation of jazz pedagogy almost as soon he recorded it. And yet, after his "sheets of sound" phase as a sideman to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in the late '50s, Coltrane moved away from his rigorous study of theory and harmony. To the dismay of many traditionalists, his new sound turned away from technique and toward a more raw, emotional, and expressive spirituality.

While the story of Coltrane's groundbreaking transition has been told before — though Ratliff probably tells it best — the retelling encompasses only the first half of the book. The rest of the account deals with the inevitable repercussions of this rebellion. Coltrane's body of work transformed the jazz world and music as a whole — both before his premature death in 1967 and long after. At its core, The Story of a Sound is about how Coltrane's musical evolution reflected the maturation of jazz itself. Just as there's a Coltrane album for everyone, from Blue Train to Ascension, there are many rooms in the house of jazz, which he did as much as anyone to build.
- Chris Parris-Lamb

NONFICTION

In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton


Published:	February 2008
Pages:	309
Publisher:	Perseus Books
Links: Guardian review NY Times review PopMatters review

“Aural 'explorers' such as Howard Odum and Dorothy Scarborough sought to capture a static and exoticized ideal of the noble savage.”

Review
Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues recasts the elevation of the raw, "primitive" blues sound as a form of American orientalism. Hamilton deconstructs the myth of the solitary Delta-blues drifter, but ultimately focuses on the collectors and musicologists who idealized that lonesome figure. In the process, she opens up critical questions that are too often taken for granted when discussing the music's origins.

The author begins by tracing the development of academic field studies in the early 20th century. Forays into the Deep South consisted of interviews, oral histories, and recordings of rural black musical culture. Aural "explorers" such as Howard Odum and Dorothy Scarborough sought to capture a static and exoticized ideal of the noble savage, a figure they believed was being tainted by commercial and urban sensibilities, the popularity of records, and a shift away from agricultural toil.

These studies by white outsiders prized unpolished voices for their supposed "purity" and reinvented the history of African-American music in the process. The selective affinities took even deeper hold with the rise of the genre's second wave of evangelists — namely, record collectors. Though the early chroniclers of the blues denounced collecting as a commercial exercise, the practice came to define the blues canon — and resulted in enduring fame for such characters as the oft-imprisoned and twice-convicted Leadbelly.

Though In Search of the Blues is both interesting and engaging, Hamilton is uneven when analyzing her research and doesn't fully elaborate on the implications of this revisionist history. She traces how Robert Johnson's devil at the crossroads meme diffused from a record-collecting "Blues Mafia" into the full-on blues revival of the '50s and '60s. But the reader is left yearning for a discussion of the same thorny issues of race and cultural ownership, which remain volatile today.
- Kai Hsing

ART

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories by Alan Licht


Published:	2007
Pages:	303
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Links: Paris Transatlantic interview

“Licht implies that delimiting sound art risks short-changing those who don't work within the confines of a single discipline.”

Review
In Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, Alan Licht attempts the near-impossible task of explicating his subject. Neither movement nor medium, and often indistinguishable from experimental music, sound art is a postwar phenomenon — an artistic sibling to the nebulous genres of installation, video, and performance art, which meld elements of music, theatre, film, and visual mediums into immersive experiences.

For the book's introduction, influential indie-rock producer Jim O'Rourke asked three artists — Annea Lockwood, Max Neuhaus, and Christian Marclay — to propose their own definitions. Lockwood, an experimental composer, acknowledges a pragmatic need for the term "sound art" to differentiate audio installations from musical compositions, while Neuhaus and Marclay dismiss the term outright. Coming to the rescue, O'Rourke echoes philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art, declaring that "sound art belongs in an exhibition situation rather than a performance situation." Though this is a serviceable explanation, it's notable that Licht is unable to tell the history of sound art without recounting a simultaneous history of music.

Licht covers an enormous array of artists in the book's two sections, "Environment and Soundscapes" and "Sound and the Art World." Figures range from wacky late modernists such as Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and John Cage (and Cage's many acolytes) to contemporary art-school rockers Black Dice and Fischerspooner, as well as mercurial artists-cum-musicians like Marclay and Rodney Graham. An enclosed CD features six exemplary works, including contributions from French painter Jean Dubuffet and emerging artist Steve Roden. Many museum-goers may recognize these as archetypal sound art — assorted ambient noises are strung together like music to create an auditory environment that is neither arbitrary nor expressly musical.

Alongside the wild diversity of projects presented in the book's many images and artist biographies, Licht — who, himself, is a conceptual artist and minimalist composer — subtly implies that delimiting sound art risks short-changing those who don't work within the confines of a single discipline. So, when his inability to fit postmodern art and music practices into a neat (modernist) box makes for, at times, a frustrating read, think of it as a happy consequence of our era, reflecting the variety of paths available to contemporary artists and musicians.
- H.G. Masters

NONFICTION

Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector by Mick Brown


Published:	2007
Pages:	452
Publisher:	Knopf
Links: Guardian review Random House interview Telegraph original interviews

“Spector imposed his will on everyone and everything: he insisted upon artistic control, co-wrote most of the songs he produced, and ran recording sessions with irreproachable authority.”

Review
Yes, Phil Spector revolutionized pop music through his "Wall of Sound" production technique. It would be impossible to discuss his work, however, without also discussing the eccentric and egomaniacal man who was later accused of murdering Lana Clarkson. For this reason, journalist Mick Brown's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector is not written from the safe, objective distance of biography. Brown is well aware of the inherent allure of his subject and knows better than to cast himself as an omniscient authority. Instead, he narrates as a rapt interlocutor with a profound interest in both Spector's life and work.

Brown's interest in Spector began with a 2002 interview, in which he discovered the notorious recluse to be a strange, but engaging man. While Spector admitted to suffering from bipolar disorder and craving incredible amounts of recognition, he also made silly jokes and seemed to be perpetually performing for an audience. Brown's subsequent interviews with musicians and industry figures confirmed this impression. Over the course of his life and career, Spector imposed his will on everyone and everything: he insisted upon artistic control, co-wrote most of the songs he produced, and ran recording sessions with irreproachable authority.

In examining his work, the term "Wall of Sound" turns out to be quite literal. Spector's technique involved adding multiple layers to each track (employing orchestral instruments alongside guitars and overlapping vocals), which resulted in a sonic onslaught akin to a live orchestra performance. Despite occasional artistic opposition, Spector remained determinedly convinced that he was changing the world. And, by all accounts, he was right — the work he did with the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, John Lennon, and even the Ramones has been heralded for decades.

Spector brought integrity to pop music, and he may be the closest thing to a genius that the industry has ever seen. He set impossibly high artistic standards for himself and those around him, and he obsessively relished the accompanying accolades for each accomplishment. And yet, the same insatiable ego that motivated Spector's art was also the source of his ultimate, tragic undoing. It is only in examining both the man and his music that the wall between them truly comes crashing down.
- Tom Roberge

INTERVIEW Jad Abumrad		WNYC's Radiolab is breaking new ground with its innovative audio storytelling, with each episode tackling sprawling topics such as music or morality from various scientific and anecdotal angles. Co-hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the radio program is broadcast regularly on NPR stations; its newest season — with episodes on lies, laughter, and more — can be heard either on the air or online. Boldtype's Toby Warner spoke with Abumrad about how telling a story is like composing music, what makes for a good science read, and why Orson Welles was an evil genius. Boldtype: You have a background in musical composition. How has that influenced your approach to storytelling? Jad Abumrad: I got into storytelling very much through music, not through journalism. I was never good as a pure composer, but doing it in the service of storytelling somehow makes it so much easier. When you've got hours and hours of raw tape, it becomes a compositional exercise. To figure out what the story is, you try to approach it in terms of sound and texture. With musical composition, you want certain parts to be dense and others to be sparse. You're thinking in terms of syncopation, beats, and rhythms. It's very gestural, and it applies almost exactly to storytelling. Sometimes, you feel like a story is too regular, too metronomic. You can change a story's "time signature," so to speak, by creating little surprises and altering the rhythms on a micro level. BT: What are some of your favorite stories told with sound? Keep reading »

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FEATURE Rip It Up, and Start Again A Book Guide for the Aspiring Obscurist		In 2004, Wired editor Chris Anderson outlined the Long Tail hypothesis. The prophetic business theory claims that the Internet revolutionizes niche markets, allowing new models for personally tailored products to emerge. Subverting the bestseller race with a series of hyper-targeted relays, the phenomenon has fundamentally shifted the way book publishers now approach music. Many houses have begun to test the waters of super-specialized music books — everything from obscure band bios and lost-music anthologies to memoirs, road diaries, and journalistic diatribes. Meanwhile, imprints such as Continuum — home to the popular 33 1/3 series — and Process have emerged to document music's outer edges. Sure, the advent of such music books is a boon for out-and-out obsessives, but what about the more casual reader, who, you know, just really likes to rock? Plucking accessible oddities from the maelstrom of esoteric dorkitude can be a bit like exploring Bob Dylan's extended discog (stick to Highway 61's smooth pavement and you're fine, but take one misstep, and you're wallowing in some pretty thick weeds). On the other hand, it's impossible to ignore the allure: hidden in the brush are stories that make Mötley Crüe's Behind the Music look like a month with the Monkees. So, how to unearth engaging music books without ending up unbelievably bored? Like the polka, the waltz, and the pony, it takes a little rhythm and three simple steps. 1. Start small or, rather, well-regimented. It's not the length, but the density that makes or breaks a niche-music book. Like the snarky, down-and-dirty Devo songs it explores, Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again is at once inviting and alienating — an exhaustive, rigidly executed exploration of late-'70s and early-'80s post-punk. While the insider knowledge and obscure facts on bands like the Fall and Devo make this the be-all and end-all for genre buffs, at 432 tightly packed pages, it's a bit overwhelming. By contrast, Michael Azerrad's 522-page-long Our Band Could Be Your Life reads faster than many books half its size. Why? Azerrad segments his exploration of the '80s American indie underground into individual (yet often intersecting) biographies of 13 landmark bands. The result is an evolving narrative that balances the engaging anecdotes of acts like Black Flag, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi with enough history and trivia to keep the nerds in check. Keep reading »

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BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
More fictional "memoirs" revealed (Mediabistro)
More than two years after the James Frey fiasco, two alleged memoirs (one about the Holocaust and one about growing up on the streets of South Central LA) are exposed as fictive.
Slate examines the truth in autobiographies (Slate)
In the wake of recent literary hoaxes, Slate's Anna Applebaum explores authenticity.
NY Public Library receives $100 million gift (NY Times)
The NY Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences branch will soon be renamed after Wall Street tycoon Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has pledged to donate $100 million of his own personal wealth for a planned $1 billion expansion.
The battle over Potter (Guardian)
J.K. Rowling wages legal war over a fan-compiled A-Z reference book called The Harry Potter Lexicon.
New Orleans jazz-library proposal (NOLA)
New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield proposes a multimillion-dollar library system to improve the city's archive of early recordings and reviews.
Arthur C. Clarke dies (IHT)
The legendary science-fiction author passes away at 90.
Milton gets an epic tribute (NY Times)
The NY Public Library hosts a stunning display of artifacts spotlighting John Milton's life and legacy.
Watchwords (Paper Cuts)
Bob Harris calls out the seven deadly cliches of book reviewing. (Note that none of these words appear in this issue.)
The Rooster Crows (The Morning News)
Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wins this year's Tournament of Books. Read our interview with Díaz here.


CREDITS Managing Editor Toby Warner Deputy Editor Chelsea Bauch Contributing Editors Mark Mangan Chris Parris-Lamb Paul Laster Jennifer Chen Doug Levy Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors Adam Lefton Kai Hsing Andrew Phillips H.G. Masters Tom Roberge Production & Design Anjuli Ayer Adda Birnir Morgan Croney Sascha Lewis Andrew Steinmetz Daphne Yang Cover Art La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela Dream House: The Well-Tuned Piano in the Magenta Lights (detail), 1998 Installation view at the Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Germany From the book Sound Art: Beyond Music, Beyond Categories Published by Rizzoli, 2007 All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill publishes a series of online magazines, covering ART, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in six cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON. Coming soon: STYLE/DESIGN and FILM. Subscribe now. MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive media partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

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