Word: soule
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing...
...Such rock luminaries as Eric Clapton (late of Cream), Stephen Stills (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) and John McLaughlin (soon to found the Mahavishnu Orchestra) would drop by. Hendrix would unwind, stretch and bend the notes as he never could onstage. He would make his guitar wail like a lost soul on the Delta. Sometimes it sounded like a horn, sometimes like a violin. Suddenly it would laugh its way to a final cadence. An old bottle-neck blues number might go on for a half-hour...
...there any way out of the dilemma? Intimations of immortality still infuse your soul, and the whiff of greatness is almost as strong as the smell of print in Samuelson. But, on the other hand, you're not willing to sacrifice the pleasures necessary if you want to climb the ladder of academic success. There are the movies that you've heard so much about but never seen, the trips to New Hampshire and Vermont, the bars and restaurants of Cambridge and Boston, walks along the river and talks with friends. Are these simple experiences, these fleeting moments of sensual...
...rancor and the humor they generate, becomes a shallow, vicarious one. That at least had been my impression of much of Goldman's earlier work. It was hamstrung in diction and conceptualization between two worlds. So I expected a misshapen book, claiming to be inside Lenny Bruce's soul on one page and attempting to deliver rounded critical assessments on the next. A monster hybrid, half Tom Wolfe, half Lionel Trilling. And I was reasonably close in surmising what Goldman would set out to do, but dead wrong about the shape of his new enterprise...
...Goldman does thrust us inside the soul of Lenny Bruce and of scores of people who nurtured, cared for, lionized or harassed and preyed on him. He does so without in the least sanctifying Bruce himself, and he renders dignity and wholeness to people whom Bruce scorned. Goldman employs the same narrative techniques and extremities of diction, the verbal overkill, that characterize a faulted New Journalism, but he uses them with a measure of critical judgment, detached reflection and craft that others lack...