Paperback

In this, her third, collection Lucy Sante learns to dance by watching Soul Train, dissects the image of the cowboy, reads the telephone book, visits famous writers, tours dead factories, wonders whatever happened to the revolution, plunges into the vast sea of discarded snapshots, asks whether ‘surrealist photography’ might be a redundancy, imagines Andy Warhol’s unmade movie, traces how Bob Dylan wrote his songs, observes the transience of all things with the Kinks. Many of the pieces here were written on commission for magazines, publishers, and art catalogs, yet Sante’s writing always coheres around an enduring set of concerns: cities, social progress, photography, the semi-popular arts, and the detritus of daily life. Beginning with poems and concluding with fiction and memoir, the collection is divided into segments based on affinity. The first stretches back to the night of a century and a half ago; the second traces the long fall of utopian hopes over the last fifty years; the third observes great narrative travelers on their roads; the fourth is all image and flash; the fifth has a rhythm track running under it. There are hit singles here, as well as album cuts, non-LP B-sides, import-only EPs, and at least one bootleg.