Trash

How do you know trash when you encounter it? Is there any reason to ask the question? Labeling things is often a way of pushing them away to a certain distance, not necessarily a bad thing. When we call someone "distant" we are not offering a compliment, and that's a shame. Compliments sound like this: open, warm, engaging, effervescent. I'm not against Champagne (as long as it's from Champagne), but I don't want it all the time. Four times a year is about right. Compare that to twenty times a year for Riesling, fifty for apple juice, one thousand for water. Water is divine, yet it's still, colorless, kind of distant. I am quite fond, maybe too fond, of labels. As a teenager I was fascinated by what Milan Kundera said about kitsch and figured he had to be right. So Horowitz was forever shit (a subset of k, i, t, s, s, h). The beauty of labels is they come off whenever you peel them. The book I'm reading about Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and (to a lesser extent) Joan's little sister and the man she married is called Positively 4th Street, and it's trash. Very well researched and entertainingly set forth, with plenty of intelligence and a bit too much smartyness, the book is loaded with substantiated gossip, cheap shots, infelicitous turns of phrase (page 181: "a handful of the espoused's friends"), contradictions within the same paragraph (see p. 165, lines 7-11, 21-23), and solecisms (routine use of adjectives as adverbs). But these things don't make it trash. It's the misapplication of talent and smarts that do that: the book succeeds at doing what it intends to, but it never rises to the level of either providing a penetrating insight or moving one to much beyond the occasional laugh.