She's My Soft-Touch Typewriter

Franklin Bruno's book for 33 1/3  has struck a really interesting way to write about music. It's an abecedary of Armed Forces' song titles, motifs, themes, important figures in 20th century fascism, etc., with only passing regard to Elvis Costello's private life (beyond those things that illuminate or problematize items listed above). By organizing the book alphabetically by key terms, Bruno can deal with the album's themes of militarism and imperialism in both the political and personal arenas in a way that connects by inference and foregrounding and callback. The album itself isn't Costello's best, and may not even make it into my All Time Favorite Desert Island Costello list, but it's probably the most worth examination and consideration in exactly the way Bruno goes about it. 

Really the only aspect of Costello's personal life that plays a part in this book has to do with an ugly argument with Bonnie Bramlett and the Stephen Stills Band in a hotel bar in Columbus, OH, in 1979.  Costello says things in this altercation that, whatever the motivation (i.e., trying to irritate Bonnie Bramlett) and how great the intoxication, are pretty unforgivable.  (Although apparently his targets, James Brown and Ray Charles, did, or sort of did, forgive him.)  Bruno's concern is only how that complicates, underscores, and cross-cuts Costello's aim on this album to twin interpersonal behavior with imperial and impersonal state actions, particular in regard to Costello's own connection to black American beat music.

I've not read much of the 33 1/3 books but this was far different from the "fan's notes" I was expecting -- it's hard (and probably beside the point) to even detect whether Bruno even cares for Costello's record all that much, except as a kind of text to be read against its author's concerns.   If more of these 33 1/3 books approach their subjects in this sort of lit-crit way, rather than in a "How They Made It" or "What the Lyrics Mean" fashion, count me in.  I'm looking towards Lethem's book on Fear of Music, or maybe the one covering Paul's Boutique.