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    Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music
    Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music
    Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music
    Audiobook7 hours

    Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music

    Written by Michael Robbins

    Narrated by Rudy Sanda

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    How can art help us make sense of the world? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all.

    Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. His singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples (Friedrich Kittler and Taylor Swift, W. B. Yeats and Anna Kendrick's "Cups") will change the way you listen to music and read poetry. He weaves a discussion of poet Juliana Spahr with the different subsets of Scandinavian black metal, attaining insights few scholars can achieve. Equipment for Living is also a wonderful guide to essential poetry and popular music.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 18, 2017
    ISBN9781541474635

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    • 4/5
      I agree with a lot of what Michael Robbins says, I disagree with a lot else, but most of all I deeply disagree with the way he says it. Louis Menand wrote a review of this book in The New Yorker that contains what I thought was a spot-on parody of a certain strain of pop criticism: "It yields sentences like 'I assume that what Burke'—the literary theorist Kenneth Burke—'says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard.'" Ha! Little did I suspect that this gaseous pronouncement is taken directly from the first chapter—except that it's been cleaned up to make it less bloated and irritating. What Robbins actually wrote was: "I assume that what Burke says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard, though they are hardly alembicated at all." Alembicated: excessively refined, precious. Thanks for that.Robbins is the kind of writer who won't say limited when he can reach for foreclosed. His author bio boasts that he received his Ph.D. (in English) from the University of Chicago, the most academic of universities. I envy anyone who was able to attend the U. of C., but he seems to have gotten the worst of it. As a blurb on the back cover puts it, "Ugh, there should be a law against being as smart as Michael Robbins." No, there shouldn't be a law against being smart, but maybe there should be a law against writing as if you're afraid someone will think you're not. I don't know what Michael Robbins does for a living—poetry and criticism don't pay the bills these days. But if he were my professor, I would be ashamed to get anything but an F from him. Recently a co-worker of mine told me, in what I think was meant as praise, that I had the largest vocabulary of anyone she knew. I was appalled to have let it show. Over a lifetime—I'm roughly the same age as Michael Robbins—I've come to see that the beauty of the English language is in the power of its simplest words. As a poet, Robbins should know that. Instead, he writes turgid crud such as "By not writing in propria persona, Browning builds the politico-ideological problem of agency 'into the very structure of the poem as a problem.'" Ugh.The other irritation in Robbins' style is his way of letting drop an opinion in an aside, and then leaving it there without bothering to support it. This kind of thing has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink, ho-ho, don't-you-and-I-know-it offensiveness to it: "There is a quirkiness to Thomas's disregard for what part of speech a word usually is that at its best recalls Stevens...but at its worst sounds like E. E. Cummings....Of course, Thomas is a better poet than Cummings (who isn't?), but..." I can think of some candidates. But even if I'm wrong, and Cummings is the worst poet ever, respect for the reader demands that the writer back this kind of thing up. Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion. But unless you're God, the king, or a close friend, it's overreaching to just drop condemnations without a word of explanation. Robbins does this over and over, about both poetry and music.Some of this hit-and-run, overly abbreviated criticism owes as much to early rock critics such as Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and Robert Christgau as it does to the French intellectual tradition. These guys assumed an air of superiority to combat the idea that all pop culture was disposable fluff: by writing about Elvis in academic style, they implicitly proclaimed that Elvis was as worthy of serious consideration as a highbrow novelist, and by compressing their judgment into enthusiastic one-paragraph hosannas (Marsh) or single-sentence prose poems (Christgau), they had maximum impact for the fewest column inches in Rolling Stone or the Village Voice. This is most apparent in the final chapter, "Playlist," Robbins' catalog of the songs, albums, and poems he likes best. Here's Robbins in his least academic, yet most impenetrable mode: "I don't trust moralists who can't hear Britney Spears over the roar of their prejudices, but this record is the guitar equivalent of the final shoot-out in The Wild Bunch." That's the entire review of a 1987 record by the Chicago punk-metal band Big Black. Enough not said.Yet I read this book all the way through. I hope I haven't given the impression that there are no ideas here. There are, and passion too, however annoyingly both are expressed. I read this book from cover to cover because, like Robbins, I love rock music, and because although much poetry leaves me cold, enough of it has moved me that I'm always eager to learn more about it. I disagree with about half of what Robbins says about music, but he and I love it with the same intensity, and that makes him not just another opinionated gasbag, but that most exasperating of folk: The Insufferable Friend.