Gary Snyder, born May 8, 1930

Gary Snyder at home near Nevada City (photo by Dan Chung, Guardian UK, 2008)

Old Bones
Gary Snyder

Out there walking round, looking out for food,
a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack
plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,
barely getting by,

no food out there on dusty slopes of scree—
carry some—look for some,
go for a hungry dream.
Deer bone, Dall sheep,
bones hunger home.

Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.

What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.

"A Pasolini Anthology" (2011): the traps we make for ourselves

Even in the anything-goes decade of the 1970s the work of film-maker, author and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini appeared over-the-top. His art was too much for some, who found his open homosexuality too challenging, and yet his Communist politics didn't go far enough for others. His life and work didn't hew to perceived boundaries, and his polemics challenged even revolutionary ideologues to the point of anger.

In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology presents the first translations of much of Pasolini's work in English, and although the book covers a dizzying amount of ground from poetry to polemics, it's a valuable resource toward an understanding of the Italian multi-media artist, who relished confronting realism with firebrand idealism and constantly questioned the effect of mainstream culture on human values.

This constant shift toward extremes of thought kept even his admirers off balance, and it may not be unrelated that his murder at the age of 53 remains a mystery of unresolved motive, an un-captured assailant, and a creative life cut short just at the point of a robust middle-age. Many point to his final essay, "What Is This Coup? I Know," as a cause of his final confrontation between art and life in a polarized and very politicized Italy.

These personal politics make Pasolini's inscrutable creativity a great source of intellectual challenge and interest for his translators and others interested in Pasolini's creative process. He was willing to consider many ideas in his desire to understand the simple thing that art creates: a reaction, no matter how inexplicable or iinescapable. Jack Hirschman, himself a multi-faceted artist, has edited these translations not so much with an eye toward easy comprehension (which Pasolini himself would likely abhor) but with a depth of feeling in the language, a sorting-out of ideas.

Class-consciousness, to get into the head of an American, needs a long, twisting road, an immensely complex operation: it needs the mediation of idealism, let’s say the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois variety, which for every American gives meaning to his entire life and which he absolutely cannot disregard. There they call it spiritualism. But both idealism in our interpretation and spiritualism in theirs are two ambiguous and incorrect words. Better, perhaps, it’s about the moralism (Anglo-Saxon in origin and naively adopted by the other Americans) that rules and shapes the facts of life, and that, in literature for instance — even the popular kind — is exactly the opposite of realism. Americans always need to idealize in the arts (especially at the level of average taste; for instance, the “illustrative” representation of their lives and their cities in their popular movies are forms of an immediate need to idealize).

The poems, essays and reviews feature an array of translators. Pasolini's earliest poetry -- strong, declarative, youthful -- is translated from the Friulian by Lucia Gazzino ("I leave my image to the conscience of the rich ... Long live the courage and the sorrow and the innocence of the poor!"). A growing disillusionment in a poem from 1960, "The Rage," is captured by musician Jonathan Richman ("I can't pretend now that I don't know the world / or that I don't know how it wants me.") Because he was also a film-maker much of Pasolini's writing is visually evocative: this is especially so of autobiographical poems that circle about ideas of youth and vulnerability but also the enthusiasm of the young ("I'm insatiable about our life / because something unique in the world can never be exhausted," he writes to one lover.)

I know, because I wake up with so much strength in my head:

the strength to suck up the new, sweet

power of daylight woken ahead of me,

and to express the absolute, already attained in secret and

in peace, with the most naked words: it's grief, my pain

that always has a reason, is never without an object,

is not neuroses, it's anger, disappointment,

it's fear, it's fury that physically bleeds

in my chest and throat.

Ah, morning! I know it, it's summertime, steady

as a sea, in it's freshness

the city's ready for an entire day,

and its noises are sheer and deeply grieving

like human beings become cool

doves, gentle elephants ... animals in life ...

(Summer, 1961)

As his poetry -- and world-view -- matures to a kind of wary disenchantment in the political upheavals that never really seem to change anything, he attaches a deepening mistrust of the right wing in politics. But he also faulted the hippie culture for losing its energy as it spread into a bourgeois mainstream of "hipness" and "cool" ideas that were co-opted into advertising and the culture at large.

Yet he held fast to his cantankerous heroes for their indomitable spirit: Ezra Pound, for one, even though he had ardently supported Fascism during the war -- and after it, as well. This is, after reading several of the essays here, a provocative stance meant as a pin-prick to easy categorization. Many of his more blatantly acid judgements ("Neruda is a bad poet") read as asides to a larger arguments rather than generalities by themselves.

Reading the twisting and ideological essays in translation, one might understand the difficulty in determining Pasolini's intent and his expression. Philosophical word-play and semantics can spring their own traps in any language. Since the writer himself was walking an ideological balance-beam of ideas it is uncertain whether the often complex result is Pasolini's thought, or the individual translator's effect of the phrasing he chooses. This is less so in the poetry, which offers itself a wider field of meaning.

The individual concerns of Pasolini's essays -- fascism, racism, intolerance, poverty -- remain universal though his targets are specific: the very first essay included, "Civil War," is a Pasolini blast aimed at racism of all kinds: "It is racist hatred -- that is, nothing less than the exterior aspect of the deep aberration of every conservatism and every fascism." It would be more than interesting to read what the agent-provocateur would make of recent political uprisings, as well as the latest outrages by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and what's about to happen as we peer with one eye covered into the future. A reader has a pretty firm idea it would be best to keep our wits about us.

His last observation -- "we're all in danger" -- was made in a final interview hours before he died in a mysterious assault, and it acts as an ultimate warning and a final lesson to watch out for all the traps, to be wary of the comfortable solutions that seem not to threaten us, but to enfold us in their easy choices. In our own creative life, and in our culture of affluence, many times these are traps we make for ourselves.

The art and ethnography of Miguel Covarrubias: "Mexico South" (1946)

A map of Mexico, as illustrated by Miguel Covarrubias

The history of Mexico is a surprising story to most Americans, if they are aware of any events beyond the American defense of the Alamo. Today's holiday, Cinco de Mayo, commemorates the Mexican military surprise victory over French occupying forces at the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. It's not even considered the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico, which occurs on September 16th, celebrating the country's declaration of Independence from Spain in 1810. Mexico's large history, like many of its artists, remains primarily an unexplored story north of the Rio Grande.

Mexico South is one of those truly rare finds at a library book sale. For fifty cents I discovered in this lavish, out-of-print volume the ancient pre-Columbian culture of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the area shared by the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas -- in the writing of a witty and charming guide, Miguel Covarrubias, one of Mexico's premier twentieth-century artists.

Covarrubias in his various careers was also a filmmaker, ethnographer, linguist, and commercial artist who created covers for many magazines. He spent years researching the ancient Olmec culture, documenting the land and the people of Tehuantepec, as well as its seven languages. And this was only one of his cultural studies; his 1936 book, The Island of Bali, is still in print, and was just republished in 2008.

Young tehunas carrying flowers, illustration by M. Covarrubias

Mexico South is filled with Covarrubias's own colorful paintings and detailed photographs. It's a travel book of the researched, historical past and the busy, daily life in the area stretching the 117 miles at Mexico's narrowest point between Juchitan on the west and Coatzacoalcos on the east. He illustrates the region's ancient history and details the peoples' complex relationship with the Spanish conquistadores who transformed the culture in the 16th century.

These ideas are part of a larger Covarrubias theme, which he developed over years: that the Indian cultures of Mexico became a dynamic force on Pacific Ocean civilizations as far away as Easter Island.

Chiapas (detail), by M. Covarrubias

While some of his speculations have been described as the ideas of one who "talked too much, knew too much, and felt too deeply about his subject," some of Covarrubias's ideas have since been proven to have some basis in fact. In Mexico South, the study of the Tehuantepec festivals show how much the ancient religious beliefs melded with the Catholic, Spanish rituals of holy days and the role of the saints in daily life.

"It is difficult to understand the religious outlook of the people, and, for that matter, of most Mexicans, if measured from the orthodox Catholic point of view. The Indians first became Catholics at the point of a sword and they ended by sincerely believing in and loving the saints, not only because they found moral comfort and spiritual glamour in them, but also because the religious ceremonial provided an outlet for drama and fun.

... the Indians had a sumptuous and intensely dramatic ceremonial of their own before the coming of the Spaniards, with much music and dancing, with luxurious pageants and awesome rites staged in an outdoor setting of ample plazas, platforms, pyramids and pennants. ... Esoteric mysticism was one of their strongest traits, and in many instances their religious concepts coincided with those of their conquerors."

Miguel Covarrubias

Although Spanish Catholics discontinued the festival of Mardi Gras for a time during the 1700s in New Orleans, in Tehuantepec the spring festivals surrounding an area's patron saint took on some of the trappings familiar to anyone on Bourbon Street: brass bands, parades of colorful, decorated floats, food and trinkets tossed from a great height to a waiting -- and mostly drunk -- crowd below. Here's a description of the end of the Spring festival in Jucatan, which the author witnessed:

"The climax came when the clarinets announced the regional tune of Tehuantepec, the Zandunga. Cymbals clashed; the saxophone and trumpet and four clarinets played as if each man was playing for himself, a pandemonium of flowery variations punctuated by the stately, awkward beats on the bass drum. The band then played a diana to announce the culmination of the entire feast; the time had come for the Tirada de Fruta, the fruit-throwing ...

A group of handsome girls appeared at the end of the street. They bore on their heads brightly-colored xicalpextles, lacquered gourds full of fruit, cakes, and clay toys, topped by a monumental arrangement of tissue-paper flags cut into lacy patterns. It was a luscious spectacle of reds, yellows, black and gold , the little flags fluttering overhead.

The girls climbed the church steps to the roof, the bells tolled rapidly, firecrackers exploded, ragamuffins took positions. The flute and drum played an exciting "war" theme, and fruits of all sorts -- mangoes, bananas, large pineapples -- and toys began to fly down from the roof. ...

Bowl after bowl of fruit was emptied into the mostly-drunk crowd; coconuts and pineapples added a touch of danger to the sport. The excitement lasted until the last xicalpextle of fruit and toys was emptied. Then everybody went home to rest, some with bruises and bumps but proud of their prizes, not because of their intrinsic value, but because they were captured so dangerously."

Covarrubias ends Mexico South on a somber note. When he was traveling and writing after World War II, Covarrubias was aware that extremism could easily take root in the unsettled politics of Mexico and its poverty. "Fascism lies defeated and broken in Europe, but it survives in the New World. The native variety is run on a more modest scale ... its ideal of society remains the pattern of a docile and serviceable lower class of pious, ignorant, and contented peasants ruled by that privileged triumverate: the Church, the Military, and the Landlord -- or his modern counterpart, the business executive." More than sixty years later, the threat of Fascism has receded while the poverty remains, even as American corporations find in Mexico a labor market -- and a troubled economy -- expanding with the ever-increasing speed of the 21st century.

"Tree of Smoke" (2007): rollin' through the combat zone

There's a black Mercedes rollin' through the combat zone
Your servants are half dead you're down to the bone
Tell me, tall man, where would you like to be overthrown
Maybe down in Jerusalem or Argentina

Beat a path of retreat up them spiral staircases
Pass the tree of smoke, pass the angel with four faces
Begging God for mercy and weepin' in unholy places

(Bob Dylan, 1981)

When it was published in 2007, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke was acclaimed as one of the year's most ambitious novels. It made many ten-best lists, and earned Mr. Johnson the cache of having written an "important" novel about the Vietnam War. He has some heady company in writing about the watershed event of the 1960s, but at this remove from the events of 1963-1970 (the span of time covered in Tree of Smoke) Vietnam is less a place of combat than a canvas to spread his cast of characters. Reviewers and many readers were dazzled by the novel's hallucinogenic tone ("whacked-out" was another positive accolade) in which plot is secondary to the effect of the author's spiraling prose.

The novel is big, convoluted, and meant to be consumed whole in a long read, immersing the reader in the reflections of a fun-house mirror, the military's disintegrating role in Vietnam. There's a flood of imagery, an exhausting descriptive style that one appreciates or soon is overwhelmed by (the language can be almost Biblical, and often rhetorical). In its 600 pages are characters that, true to the times, seem to be aimless, or at least helpless in the way of unfolding disaster. The potent confusion is striking, but the impact somehow diminishes as the book rolls on:

"Skip stepped from perhaps the evening's eleventh tavern and ended his first day in Vietnam walking away from Thi Sach with only a general idea where he lived, amid the swarming throng, through the gritty diesel smoke, past the breath of bars and their throbbing interiors -- what songs? He couldn't tell. There -- a recent hit stateside -- "When a Man Loves a Woman" -- then the music twisted around on itself as he passed the anonymous doorway and it might have been anything. He bartered with a cyclo driver who took him across the river and dropped him on Chi Long Street. Here, among the quieter lanes he breathed the fumes of blossoms and rot, smoldering charcoal, frying food, and heard the distant roar of jets and the drumming of helicopter gunships, and even the thousand-pound bombs exploding thirty kilometers away, not so much a sound as an intestinal fact -- it was there, he felt it, it thudded in his soul."

Johnson is good at evoking mood, but the thicket of his words eventually becomes an obstacle to the tale's telling. Though the novel is marked in chronological order by year, it's only a panoramic framing device allowing the book's characters to spin wildly throughout, so that a plot description of Tree of Smoke becomes moot. It's simpler, as in many a Dylan song, to describe characters than the thread of a plot: there's a novice C.I.A. operative, his unhinged uncle, two brothers who survive Vietnam and return to Arizona, an intelligence officer named Storm, and a Canadian Seventh-Day Adventist aid worker whose grief and sadness provide a coda to the war's insanity. None of them provides an emotional center to the action, or gives the reader much to care about.

As the plot lurches about, the novel loses its way. The intent is to convey the undeniably chaotic forces at work in this unwinnable war; every man must find reasons for his survival, or work toward his redemption. Some find nothing but the heart of darkness. But survival or redemption requires a moral certainty, and here there is none. The characters only become more obscured in their jungle hell, and the Vietnam war oddly recedes from view as the novel progresses. The war remains central to the action, but as a refraction of the country's moral dilemma, not in the direct way more war-era contemporary novels and essays conveyed so well. For a novel with so much technical detail, which is considerable, Johnson manages to make Vietnam into a Hollywood abstraction.

Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974) and Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977), perhaps because of their relative timeliness, still read like fresh reports from the front. By the end of Tree of Smoke, the Vietnam experience is a story told from a distance -- fragments of an era that have been rearranged for an entertainment, rather than an experience. It's the somewhat worn, twice-told aura that Johnson achieves that ultimately makes the book a frustrating disappointment. Without any narrative center, there's not much to hope for after all of Johnson's pyrotechnics, and the book ends, wearily, with a postscript dated 1983. Perhaps it's just the march of time, maybe the Iraq experience has supplanted Vietnam in the American conscience, or that we as a country have never been much interested in our failures. We like to believe that we can still be winners, after all; it's the American way.

"Everything he looked at was suddenly and inexplicably smothered by a particular, irrelevant memory, a moment he'd experienced many years ago, driving with his fellow undergraduates from Louisville to Bloomington after a weekend holiday, his hands on the wheel, three in the morning, headlights opening up fifty yards of amber silence in the darkness. The heater blowing, the boozy odor of young men in a closed car. His friends had slept and he'd driven the car while music came over the radio, and the star-spangled American night, absolutely infinite, surrounded the world."

Such certainty and directness of writing is rare in the novel, and the story could use more of it. Much has been written about the book's echoes of Graham Greene in The Quiet American, his tale of Vietnam during the French colonial period of the 1950s, and the character of Skip Sands does share some of the optimistic idealism of that novel's Alden Pyle. Both men have their dreams turn dark as their idealism fades. But this is just one aspect of Tree of Smoke. Greene's story revealed itself in its British reserve; Johnson's novel is overstuffed with meaning, and spins with centrifugal force, filled with characters we have a hard time knowing.

Tree of Smoke has its admirers, and won the National Book Award for 2007. A big topic, a big book: reviewers and readers have given Johnson a large pass for this, but many of them may mistake the book's sheer weight for seriousness. Through the smoke and confusion we learn little about war or the human condition we don't already know, and of Vietnam even less.

UbuWeb turns fifteen: "it could vanish any day"

UbuWeb has reached its fifteenth anniversary -- quite an accomplishment for an arts website run by volunteers, with content skirting copyright requirements, and financed on the proverbial shoestring. Here's an excerpt from founder Kenneth Goldsmith's recent post at Harriet, the blog at Poetry magazine. And if you're unfamiliar with the delights available at UbuWeb, it's worth a browse, always challenging, often surprising, and frequently offbeat: while you won’t find reproductions of Dalí’s paintings on UbuWeb, you will find a 1967 recording of an advertisement he made for a bank.

It’s amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money and put together pretty much without permission, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the end, we’re giving to all. ...

The socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we’re still going strong. We’re lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket bandwidth, we’ve consented to be objects of university research in the ideology and practice of radical distribution.

But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it.

Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We don’t touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham, Julian Schnabel’s country music, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the diaries of John Lennon, the rants of Karen Finley, and pop songs by Joseph Beuys—all of which was originally put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly. ...

How does it all work? Most importantly, UbuWeb functions on no money: all work is done by volunteers. Our server space and bandwidth is donated by several universities, who use UbuWeb as an object of study for ideas related to radical distribution and gift economies on the web. In terms of content, each section has an editor who brings to the site their area of expertise.

Ubu is constantly being updated but the mission is different from the flotsam and jetsam of a blog; rather, we liken it to a library which is ever-expanding in uncanny—and often uncategorizable—directions. Fifteen years into it, UbuWeb hosts over 7,500 artists and several thousand works of art. You’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. UbuWeb has always been and will always be free and open to all...

Kenneth Goldsmith

We’re distressed that there is only one UbuWeb: why aren’t there dozens like it? Looking at the art world, the problem appears to be a combination of an adherence to an old economy (one that is working very well with a booming market) and sense of trepidation, particularly in academic circles, where work on the internet is often not considered valid for academic credit. As long as the art world continues to prize economies of scarcity over those based on plentitude, the change will be a long time coming.

And yet . . . it could vanish any day. Beggars can’t be choosers and we gladly take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; hacks and crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; occasionally the army of volunteers dwindles to a team of one.

But that’s the beauty of it: UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise our audience . . . and even ourselves.

Proetry, a new literary magazine, celebrates tonight in Athens

It seems the creativity just keeps happening in Athens. Proetry magazine celebrates its first issue, both in print and online (at www.proetrymagazine.com), with a party and a reading tonight at Flicker Theatre and Bar. The magazine's editor, Julie Wells, writes that tonight's celebration will feature readings by contributors to the first issue with the party itself scheduled to run from 6 pm to 9 pm. Copies of the magazine will also be for sale at Flicker this Monday night and at poetry open mics in Athens for the next month. Here, a sample from the pages of Proetry by the editor herself, who hopes to make the magazine a regular feature for writers of all kinds.

"Right"
by Julie Wells

We the people who prophesy in moonlight
seek defiance in tastings eatings food pocketbooks lines stores mouths words
websites visits blogs anarchies governments
We the people eat bullshit for breakfast for naked lunch
for supper to break our fast of streetlamps alleys dark nights holes
We read scripture holy texts Allah Yahweh Muhammad Jesus Christ
Satan TV Bibles Water Crucifixion Babies of the cross
People of the end We hear apocalyptic messages in the news
in the media in the press in the pages in the noise in the
holy rolling in the word We the people of a nation of a fool of a tendency
to lie exaggerate greedy money lie to the people We look at signs as if people
as if mad crazy Hell Heaven seven virgins seven sins Seven the film
seven yous mes you me separate seven not six not six six six not holy not Vatican
Rome Italian bakeries We the people of bread and water and sand and water
and tea and coffee and French press leaves grinds cups mugs We the people
of caffeine no sleep no time closed eyes no water no sugar but caffeine
We of fast food fast cars fast girls and boys and people and we who lie
who lie awake
who lie dreaming
who lie with opened eyes
who lie behind skulls and balls and feet
who lie awake in bed
who lie in words texts prophesies tongues touch fingers ears hearing
eyes seeing lies finding lies in midnights We meditate for compassion
for truth never find truth never look for truth meditate for peace for now
for dishes vacuums dusters laundry beds made clothes put away
We the people of mindful waking eyes open but nevertheless seeing
in the dark night vision video games 3D movies imax theaters We the people of
magicians extortionists sorcerers yogis gurus shamans doctors healers Christ
Himself We the body of people of bread and wine We all Romans all Catholics
in the highest sense of the word meaning We the Roman Catholics of Virgin Mary
candles We the Roman Catholics of poetic wastelands We the Roman Catholics
of hazelnut gelato We the people the American people the Jewish Irish Dutch Italian
Korean Native American people We the people of burning sage and megachurches
marijuana and Budweiser matzo ball soup and dolmades from diners
where they serve extra lemons with water free of charge no prix fixe
no deals here but lemons lemons lemons are free lemons for salad
or Greek fries or saganaki or spanakopita free lemons to juice
over life no lemonade no no sugar but lemons
over everything We the people We people
We the people who turned resumes
into an art form who demand patience
from waiters who drink thirty-two
calorie beer and expect it to taste
good We the economy on the verge of collapse
We the government
lying to its children
We the oceans drowning
birds fish tigers bears people
We the people We the corporations
owning land owning earth owning life
owning people We the people pretending
to love corporate warfare We the soldiers
dying for oil and greed We the poor soldiers
not knowing what we die for We the poor
whose children die too often
for nothing We the poor children
who must die or something
We the something which aches in the hearts
of mothers allowing tax cuts to starve more children
We the more We the hunger the hungry the starving We
the wanting the needing the empty hands and eyes and bellies
We the empty souls needing food We the empty bellies needing truth
We the truthseekers the people leftover the artists left alone
We the seekers the dreamers the Jesus Christs and John Lennons
the Buddahs and Muhammads We the monks priests nuns
of our ancestors forefathers We the forerunners of emptiness
We the new age of nothingness We the lost We the saved
We the baptized We the confirmed We the refused We the untouchables
We the water wind fire dirt sky We people of the earth
We the people of the people who prophesy sunlight daybreak dawn
apocalyptic ends means new beginnings open windows closed doors
We the apocalypse the horsemen the flames the saddles the nostrils
the chains the manes
We the dawn the sun the light
the fading moon the mist dew
flowers grass breeze yellow sky
We the orange We the red
We the rainbows pots of gold
clouds We the people
We the names
ages times we live in
times of now days and times
days of our lives days getting longer
shorter history days We the days
of you We the days of us We the us
imprisoned in small minds small bodies
too small places and buildings and times
We the people of Abraham and David and Mary
and Joseph and you We the people of our parents
of our children of our futures and pasts We the present
We the people of the present who prophesy the present who live
the present who work breathe eat the present We the poets prophets
dreamers of the present We the people of the moon

"33 Revolutions Per Minute," Dorian Lynskey: Songs that shook the world

... In his colorful memoir Bound for Glory Woody Guthrie expressed his ambitions for the songs he wrote: "Remember, it's just maybe, someday, sometime, somebody will pick you up and look at your picture and read your message, and carry you in his pocket, and lay you on his shelf, and burn you in his stove. But he'll have your message in his head and he'll talk it and it'll get around. I'm blowing, and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times I've been picked up, throwed down, and picked up, but my eyes have been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs have been messages that I tried to scatter along the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and the dark halls."

To a current generation that has just witnessed the instant combustion of revolts in Egypt and Libya and beyond, the idea that music can carry the weight of a revolution may seem obvious, but 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (Ecco) is a good history lesson on the challenges presented by "protest music" over the past sixty years, and the threat some well-turned and sharp lyrics posed to contemporary standards and social expectations.

This book is about those scattered messages and the impact they had on audiences, from Billie Holiday's stunning revelation of "Strange Fruit" to Guthrie's Okie dustbowl tales, from Dylan's incendiary folk to Sam Cooke's smooth croon, from the Clash to Green Day. What these songs and singers have in common is that they reach beyond the conventions of popular music of their day to deliver specific, and very pointed, contemporary messages.

Music of protest has taken many shapes reaching back to the blues, which often couched its protest of working conditions, poverty, and social inequality in metaphor and humor. Beginning with Billie Holiday's intentional song choice in a smoky Manhattan nightclub in 1939 -- "Southern trees bear a strange fruit / blood on the leaves / blood at the root / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" -- songwriter Abel Meeropol's sad metaphor was impossible to miss: here was a song about a lynching.

Lynskey takes 33 songs and traces their impact on popular culture. In Holiday's case the impact was personally damaging; Columbia refused to record the song, and even John Hammond advised her against it because it would cause a possible boycott of CBS Records. Holiday herself broke down in tears when she sang the song but kept it in her repertoire. For all the boldness and beauty inherent in her career there was addiction, loneliness, and police harassment right to the end of her life, at the age of 44, in a New York hospital.

But her courage opened the door for a coming generation returning from World War Two, and with a new frankness in dealing with forbidden topics. Jazz became a springboard for sophisticated, challenging lyrics. Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" was written in a burst of anger that she herself says overcame her initial feelings: "Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning," Simone wrote.

Yet the events of 1964, the murder of Medgar Evers, and the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls, forced her hand, and the result -- "Alabama's got me so upset, Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam" -- got the song banned in the South. And for the burgeoning civil rights movement there was no mistaking the meaning, or the challenge, in her lyrics: "Keep on sayin' 'go slow'...to do things gradually would bring more tragedy. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it? I don't know, I don't know. You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality!"

"Mississippi Goddam" was bold but banned, jazz-inflected anger. The song that really broke the rules for radio play came from an unexpected source: James Brown. In a song whose message was unstoppable as its beat, no matter how many stations refused to play it, "Say it Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud" became a street anthem as well as a rallying cry. The walls between protest music and the popular music chart came tumbling down.

Dorian Lynskey

There was the storming at the walls of folk music as well: after he plugged-in, Dylan rattled more than the nerves at Newport 1965. His lyrics to 1963's "Masters of War" were as direct as "Blowin' in the Wind" had been metaphorical:

... How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul. ...

Some of Lynskey's choices may be surprising -- Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" is here, but so is "The Message," rightly so, as well as R.E.M., and Green Day's "American Idiot" -- and there's no real reason to quibble over what's left out in Lynskey's personal survey. Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is included, but Max Roach's "Mendacity" is missing and so is "Compared To What" by Eddie Harris. The author's self-imposed limits of 33 songs might have seemed a good idea in relation to a title, but here's an idea: perhaps a second, expanded edition could include "45."

As an introduction, or even a refresher course for those old enough to have forgotten some history, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is a good reminder that songs can have a life beyond the chart and shape history itself. John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" may have been recorded in a raw, raucous one-take in a Toronto hotel room in 1969, but with its very lack of polish and undeniable one-line refrain, the song remains a revolutionary cry straight from the heart.