Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript

Dec 02, 2008

The New York Times enjoyed the newly published Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript, with photographs by Barry Feinstein and text by Bob Dylan:

Another book with a strange, scarred, resonating old soul is Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost ManuscriptAmazon.comHollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript } (Simon & Schuster, $30), with text by Bob Dylan and photographs by Barry Feinstein. This book is made up of 23 of Mr. Dylan’s cosmic prose poems, written in the 1960s, inspired by a series of Mr. Feinstein’s moody black-and-white photographs of movie stars, casting couches and back lots. As Luc Sante writes in his introduction, “Although the photographs were made for a variety of assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood.” Mr. Feinstein’s pictures, reminiscent of both Robert Frank’s and Diane Arbus’s, are impossible to turn away from. And Mr. Dylan’s poems? Well, they aren’t totally unreadable. But they will not send you rushing back for a critical reconsideration of “Tarantula.”

Read a fascinating review from the International Herald-Tribune by Charles McGrath.

Jesse Jarnow’s interesting review in the Forward.