"He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him some time before they reached her." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Tender Is The Night"

Greil Marcus is one of the finest musicians rock criticism has to offer, simultaneously mysterious and erudite. His writing unveils the cultural landscape like an obscure treasure map, offering clues as to what might be buried within. In "Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley In A Land of No Alternatives", Marcus gets in way over his head, as he is wont to do.

His premise is simple: to explore why it is that people are "drawn so helplessly to the identification of Bill Clinton with Elvis Presley" (xiv) -- the power of Elvis Presley as metaphor, and why Bill Clinton was able to successfully appropriate Elvis over the course of his eight years in office. Indeed, he does deal with Clinton and Presley at various points throughout the volume but, for the most part, the book is just a collection of essays and articles written over an eight year period with little reflection done on them.

They are documents of the moment and they do trace something -- but I suspect they trace something in Marcus far more than they trace something in American culture.  Marcus serves well to point out invited and uninvited Clinton/Elvis parallels and analyze what they mean in specific incidences, but he never draws any sort of overall conclusion from them.

And there's so much pure noise in here that, without the introduction, this is just a book of articles in which the author returns to similar themes. If one wants the full impact of Marcus's Elvis-as-metaphor, it's probably best read as a companion piece, an update, to Marcus's other book about Elvis: "Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of Cultural Obsession" (1991), which sets up all kinds of meanings in the image of Elvis.

Marcus is as deliberately obscure in a way that Bob Dylan was during his "Blonde On Blonde" period. I'm convinced that Dylan himself didn't always know what he was writing about, other than to create a general impression of words and images that left something more emotional than intellectual imprinted on the listener's mind. Granted, Marcus is geekier and more coherent than Dylan, but the sense of referential overload is similarly beautiful and confusing. As Dylan called - and calls - on the magical language of American folk songs, Marcus calls on esoteric historical personages and events to place his story in context.

In dealing with the figures of cultural history not so much as historical objects but as characters, each with a novel life of his own, Marcus plots their ascents and demises in ambitious half-scene. The stories overlap, but one is hard-pressed to figure out if they do so naturally or only because Marcus has shown them to. The total picture forms a world apart from our own, as Marcus's character histories seem so far removed from the internal voices of real people.

"Cobain rails out a blank curse," he writes, describing Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. "'A denial! A denial! A denial!' Of what? By whom? Moments before, he'd named the irony the song comes from. He's screaming, but still carrying that same sense of difficulty, as if he'd damn you to hell if he could only summon the will to get out of bed: 'here we are now, entertain us.' He's trying to say that whatever it is he's doing, it's not entertainment. He's saying that the noise he and his friends are making is entertainment only insofar as it fails, only to the degree that their vague intimations of utopia and annihilation... mean nothing, to him or anyone else" (24).

Marcus describes ideas as if they were things with definite physical properties. And once he makes that assumption and tricks the reader into doing the same, he can do whatever he wants with them, as if they were trained birds. He can make them perch, soar, dive, cry, eat, sing, shit, fuck, or anything else. All it takes is a tiny crack of light somewhere along the line and, all of a sudden, it's anybody's game. Or, actually, it's Marcus's game, as his language is constantly disarming. Take three random descriptions:

"Near the end of [Heroin by the Velvet Underground], when Maureen Tucker stops playing and [Lou] Reed and [John] Cale criss-cross lines so crazily it seems certain the piece will break up in the air, you can almost believe the song doesn't mean what it says" (68).

"In the world of signs and meanings, of symbols and epiphanies, Andy Warhol's 'Elvis' did not come without a price any more than Bill Clinton's Heartbreak Hotel came without a price -- at least not in the iconography of our culture, where Elvis, as an image, a sound, an idea, floats free" (185).

"[The history of Elvis] means an untold story: the still emerging fragments of his music as he made it, abandoned it, or forgot it, his testimony as he gave it, and then, with its echoes still reverberating everywhere, ceased to understand it" (123).

Just what the fuck does any or all of this mean?

The first thing that strikes me about it is that any one of these lines - and these are just random lines - can be used to encapsulate what the book is about, both in terms of content and form. And if, presumably, any sentence of the book can encapsulate the meaning of the entire book, then what - how - can the book possibly mean? By the same token, each one of these sentences feels like it could be either the opening or closing to an essay or story. The fact that they are plucked from the middles is not irrelevant.

Greil Marcus is a wonderful and challenging writer who reads more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than a modern critic, often resorting to metaphor where most critics fall to jargon. Subsequently, his work comes off more like elongated prose-poems than it does reportage or commentary, relating to the world in the same way that a dream does.

Jesse Jarnow has reason to believe that we will be received at Graceland