Pretty Polly and the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Strange fascinations and mysterious bloodshed in the wilderness of folk song October 15, 2008

Lyricist, short story writer, and sometime vocalist and instrumentalist Rennie Sparks, one half of the perversely luminous folk duo the Handsome Family, talks to Greil Marcus, rock and roll scholar and Winton Chair in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Recent albums by the Handsome Family include Odessa (1994), Milk and Scissors (1996), Through the Trees (1998), In the Air (1999), Down in the Valley (1999), Singing Bones (2003), and The Last Days of Wonder (2006). Greil Marcus is the author of "The Shape of Things to Come" (2006), "Lipstick Traces" (1989), "Mystery Train" (1975; 5th revised edition 2008), and other books. With Werner Sollors, he is the co-editor of "A New Literary History of America," forthcoming from Harvard in 2009.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Studies and Comparative Literature, the College of Liberal Arts and the Institute for Advanced Study