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Maybe the People Would Be the Times
In his second collection (after Kill All Your Darlings, 2007), Luc Sante pays homage to Patti Smith, Rene Ricard, and Georges Simenon; traces the history of tabloids; surveys the landscape that gave birth to the Beastie Boys; explores the back alleys of vernacular photography; sounds a threnody for the forgotten dead of New York City.
The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante's youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and '80s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences, in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry, the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form.
The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante's youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and '80s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences, in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry, the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form.
Editorial Reviews
"Luc Sante is a superb writer who can give astonishing form to floating moods and thoughts that no one noticed before." - John Ashbery
Readers Top Reviews
Alan Lord
Each successive book or piece of writing by Luc Sante is a fresh beginning. His writing evolves, is unpredictable, he finds a novel way of expressing himself each time. And he never fails to astound. One day he raps like a brilliant stoner on music, another he's an archaeologist of urban decadence, then he's a scientist exploring French cinema, and after that he'll deliver a savvy treatise on... you name it.
erisgeenhoop
The first book by Luc Sante that I read was "The Factory of Facts" and it remains my favorite after recently rereading it . Part of the reason is , that I ,like him , have a background of migration , but mainly I treasure that book because of Sante's unexpected perspectives on the " Things in Life". And those "Things" are manifold as proven once again in his new book , a collection of articles written for a variety of magazines or from his blog. It seems that Sante has read every book and magazine since the Sumerian stone tablets , looked at every photograph since the Daguerreotype, and listened to every song since the invention of the vinyl record . The wonder of his recent book is that he has something new or unusual to say about all those books , magazines , films . On occasion he does that by using Difficult Words , but there is always enough humor and insight to forgive him for that. I will remain grateful to him for discovering Richard Stark's Parker novels, reminding me of the slackness of Papa Michigan and General Smiley , when I too tried to move to their rhythm on a square foot tile , even though that was a long time and a few islands away. If only the French would know about it.
