If it weren’t for Eadward Muybridge’s photography, we would not know that a galloping horse does in fact have all four feet off the ground at some point in its stride. Also, because we have human eyes and human brains, we can *see* movement in a strange new way by moving our eyes across these images. We see into the horse’s stride, we have a secret about how a horse moves. We know the bigger picture the horse doesn’t know.

 We like to do this. We like to stop time, trace the arrangements that can’t be seen in the moment of their passing, or in their own motion. We  hold the pause button, make the cross-section, see what’s lying still before us. Observation yields knowledge.

Let’s get back to Bob Dylan, and our guests from last night’s class, through this timepiece, which both stops time by claiming that Bob Dylan is indeed iconic–someone whose value and visibility in culture are cemented and permanent, no longer in question–and it keeps time a-movin’—I’m late for that Bob Dylan concert where what’s familiar to me could be an astonishment to the person next to me, and where I know at some point I will be… moved. 

Robert Polito, David Hajdu, and Ben Hedin have each performed cross-sections of Bob Dylan’s art/life/career. I can talk about the great service Hedin provides by assembling a chorus of many timbres that have talked about Bob Dylan over the decades.  Studio A is a treasure chest for serious listeners, who might not believe they can have the New Yorker piece on the recording of Another Side of Bob Dylan right in the same package as Rick Moody’s wild and beautiful ride through Blood on the Tracks. David Hajdu really does take on the stories of the Baez sisters, Bob Dylan, and Richard Farina, with a novelist’s sense of character and plot. The feat of not allowing Bob Dylan to dominate the narrative is remarkable, and the book has to be read to really appreciate its uniqueness in the Dylan library. I am making my way slowly through the Cambridge Companion, and can’t speak yet to Robert Polito’s work. Let’s say that if their work is effective for us, it is like the Oris  Bob Dylan watch: by conferring a certain value and telling a certain story,  it makes History out of Time; and if their work lights up/changes/refreshes your listening to Bob Dylan’s music….if it moves your relation to the art it engages, then it’s keeping time, fluid and forward and no stopping.

The writing itself fed into last night’s discussion, but the discussion itself is what matters here. Hedin, Polito, and Hajdu invited different kinds of cross-sectioning, and it’s for each of us to decide how and where we’re moved by their invitations.

Polito and Hajdu spoke interestingly about the anatomy of Dylan’s later songs. Polito talked about Dylan as “collage artist.”  A collage can “intensify” boundaries between its assembled parts, or it can erase boundaries. Dylan has always incorporated matter from other origins into his work, and he is doing this lately with a peculiar emphasis on literary sources, and with a peculiar promiscuity. Polito described Dylan “dropping lyrics in with tweezers….He’s interested in seamlessness.”  David Hajdu spoke about Dylan being criticized by people who are “applying the wrong set of standards” to his compositions, which challenge the commercial models of assumed *originality*, songs as discrete and frozen objects.  Ben Hedin added to this discussion by remarking that with  the “allusions on “Love and Theft” …the simple act of using [other people's work] is integral to the renaissance he began to enjoy in his late 50s.”

Don’t start me talkin’–Everything about collage can be found in Dylan’s recent work. The greatest collage work combines illusion, audacity, the thrilling razor’s edge between order and disorder, and  between new and used. Great collage demands great impudence and extraordinary formal control. Great collage makes its audience feel inexplicably voyeuristic, inexplicably cheating,  inexplicably cheated, and offers its own special intoxication. It’s incredibly hard to pull off, and the artist has to be so fluent, have such command, over the form they’re working in. David Hajdu talked about the “line” of the song, Dylan’s effort to keep “paraphrasable meaning at bay.” Because the coherence of a collage is an illusion, it can’t be honestly paraphrased. And because a song is not an idea, but an address to feeling, it can’t be paraphrased. Because Dylan seems so often so effortlessly able to make syntax and melody one single thing, and then put across a character behind the lyric–that can’t be paraphrased neither. Ben Hedin mentioned “some kind of inevitability” in Dylan’s turn from “conventional originality” into this collage mode.  I find this idea so intriguing, the inevitability, of loveandtheft, that if I start dissecting it now, I’ll just kill it dead.  

There’s anatomy, and there’s excavation too. David Hajdu excavated documents and a recording to provide more fodder for observation and scrutiny. He read from a 1965 interview with Robert Shelton, in which Dylan riffed a little acidly on the label “poet.”  ”Anyone who would call themselves a poet is not a poet.”  ”To be a poet doesn’t mean you have to write down words on paper.” Even though we know it’s self-defeating, we have such a strong hunger for any declarative statement Dylan has made. We sift through the record, and painstakingly remove and examine anything that looks as though he might be saying something we can frame and freeze. This is a futility we have awful trouble resisting.  Even beyond that, we’re comfortable criticizing the original preservers of this history. Hajdu was certainly right when he gently dispraised Shelton for letting his “celebration” of Bob interfere with creating the most thorough documentation possible. Bob’s unhealthy habits, the confounding contradictions and tensions and “chaos” of his mind–Shelton glossed over these rough spots and the Bob Dylan of Oris Watches has attained, in his lifetime, a status where we can be discontented with poor Robert Shelton’s misguided and affectionate reverence for a young artist who merits austere reverence. Then I listened with practiced and exceptional alertness to a perfectly uninteresting recording of young Bob Dylan playing the harmonica somewhere behind Richard Farina and Eric Von Schmidt. Such is the life.

If we pick up and travel to locales of historic interest, we thicken up those cross sections. Our Bob Levinson shared his pilgrimage to The Basement, and I saw for myself that The Basement is indeed a basement.  I guess in 1967 squirrels could have scampered outside and footsteps could have been heard overhead and maybe a phone ringing in a distant room, and meanwhile Tears of Rage.  Robert Polito talked of Hibbing, and the impossibility of condescending to the place once you’ve seen it. The way the ordered and scaled town winds down into that gigantic iron pit, past the foundations of the old Hibbing that a person can stand on–the sense of place here  offers too strong a feeling of time, and too many visual contrasts, to be at all insipid. The high school is everything you may have heard it to be: a glorious monument to a frontier community’s devotion to ideals of assimilation and permanence that I dare anyone to belittle once you have stood beneath the crystal chandeliers in the auditorium. Where the piano Bob assaulted still stands. The photo shows  yours truly and BJ Rolfzen, the man who gave Robert Zimmerman the B on that Steinbeck essay. We talked about teaching high school, about William Carlos Williams,  and nothing about Bob Dylan. If you’re a Dylan fan and you want to be humbled and troubled by the Search for History, go visit Hibbing. 

Ben Hedin says, “You put on Dylan because you want to have your heart broken.” He feels Together Through Life is “a dud.” David Hajdu spoke elegantly about the “diminishment of strengths” that is influencing Bob Dylan’s recent compositions. As a songwriter who composes with his voice, the soi disant deterioration of his voice has prevented him from creating complex melodies. Robert Polito feels Together Through Life sounds like “outtakes,” with all the songs at a “certain level of quality,” which is not especially high. 

 Stop. Observe. Determine. Stop. Go.  I’ll be missing class next week. I’ll be on a plane to Milwaukee to see Bob Dylan perform there on July 1. I’ll be in the seventh row, almost close enough.

It’s 1977 in Los Angeles, Ron Rosenbaum is done with that day’s two-hour interview of Bob Dylan at the studio where Bob was working on post production of Renaldo and Clara, and Ron is eating a green chili omelet. I learned last night that after each session of the multi-part interview Dylan granted Playboy’s young journalist, the young journalist would go eat a green chili omelet. Did Ron Rosenbaum gaze out at the Angelenos and consider which ones would become murderous or stupefied with envy to know how he had spent the afternoon? And then I think that at some point that same day, appearances  to the contrary, Bob Dylan had something to eat which he likely does not recall in 2009. And I wonder what it is like to be a young man who has become accustomed to other young men being visibly nervous in his company. A little stammering, eye contact a little too focused and then darting away. Accustomed to an awareness that what he is wearing, how he is holding his hands, the expressions on his face, the most trivial topical comment he makes, will be registered on his companion’s awareness like a trilobite’s shell in a riverbed. 

  I’ll probably never eat an omelet again without somehow thinking absurdly of the orange and black scarf Ron Rosenbaum wore throughout his talk at class last night, and the poster to Renaldo and Clara. This is why I’m no reporter. 

Back to the cold metal of history. Ron Rosenbaum, in the company of marketwatch.com’s Jon Friedman, spoke generously about the 77 interview (published in 1978) , and his current Bob Dylan project, and Bob Dylan more or less in general, for our two hours.  Rosenbaum is the interviewer whose conversation with Dylan in 1977 was the occasion for what has become the most quoted comment Dylan ever made about his own music: “the thin wild mercury sound.” And he was the interviewer  whose conversation with Dylan was the occasion for what’s become another quintessential quip: “If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think Bob Dylan has a lot of the answers myself.” 

Rosenbaum was candid and self-effacing and also vivid in his description of the 77 interview, which I now am able to picture as something like the image here: apparently the conversations took place in a small backlot building at Warner Bros, and Rosenbaum brought a half bottle of Tequila to steady his nerves. I like the Skid Row tawdriness of the half bottle of booze, and I see a picturesque Depression-era  shack rather than what I know was  a portable office situated  yards from a busy movie studio, but this is why I’m not a reporter. We know that Bob’s anxiousness over Renaldo and Clara motivated him to participate in a lengthier interview than he’d done for some time, and his anxiousness also brought him to the interview focused and eager to explain. “The first few sessions were terrible,” Rosenbaum confessed. Dylan’s preoccupation at the time with Renaldo and Clara led to “painstaking explanations” of the film’s symbolism. AlthoughRosenbaum was not persuaded in 1977 (nor yet in 2009) that this movie is the strongest representative of Dylan’s art, Dylan needed this chance to talk about the film before moving on to other topics. As Rosenbaum  said yesterday, “Once we got off the bullshit of Renaldo and Clara and onto music” the talk became easier. Rosenbaum did not approach each day’s session with a strategy, and his loose approach to letting Dylan speak, and prompting clarifications with brief comments or questions, of course led to the captivating material we have today. You can read the entire interview here: http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm

Rosenbaum played a minute or two of the recorded interview. Bob sounded….familiar, much closer to the brisk and youthful  Dont Look Back voice than to the  hypnotic singsong rasp he’d develop just two years later with which to terrorize his gospel audiences. Even so, it was impossible to hear this voice and then  picture RollingThunder’s white-faced hellion spitting out the lyrics to Isis.

Back to His Master’s Voice: Rosenbaum is clear about his impatience with the wretched excess of Renaldo and Clara, and he made an interesting point regarding what might have been behind the excess. He says that Dylan “listens to people he mistakenly believes are more intelligent than he is.” Allen Ginsberg, a great influence on R&C, is one example Rosenbaum uses, as well as Norman Raeben, the painter whose classes led Dylan to renovate his muse into a conscious one. The movie was ruined by Ginsberg’s “scheme of personae.”  Rosenbaum argues that Dylan has found himself in need of “an intellectual framework to hold on to as a filter for the gusher of talent in there.”   Let’s take up somewhere else the question of whether Bob Dylan is a special case of the problem of appetite for influence as opposed to anxiety of influence.

Rosenbaum  was present, no not just present, but an important witness, to the period before Dylan mutated into the unfamiliar figure of  the gospel years. Rosenbaum’s new  project is a book about Dylan’s spirituality and belief, about “Dylan’s argument with God.” He  confesses to having felt “betrayed” by the Christian period, betrayed “as a Jew.” His books on Hitler and Shakespeare speak to their subjects through personal contemplation and experience, and I am hoping his full scale book on Dylan and belief will do the same. I’ll hope for the same combination of candor and scrupulous research. 

But back to the timeline of human evolution. Rosenbaum feels that Dylan post Greil Marcus’s Old Weird America, Dylan post Marcus’s construction of him as the “revivalist” of American music, Dylan post 1997, is “boring.” The albums sound the same. He is in a “safety zone” in this “roots period.”  He is not working at the same intensity of creativity that brought us the work through 1966, and then Blood on the Tracks. (Didn’t mention John Wesley Harding, so I can’t vouch for his opinion there.)

The exception is Chronicles, which passes the carbon dating test for fully-evolved brilliance. Rosenbaum enthused over the book’s “amazing clarity.”  He was “knocked out” by the book: “The voice in the book was so much the voice of his best musical work.”

I’m among the standard bearers for believing that Dylan’s “best musical work” is scattered very fertilely from, oh, 1961 to spring of 2009, and I respect that for Rosenbaum, I likely fall into the category of Dylanolatry, for the very reason that I do not think Desolation Row is definitively a better song than ‘Cross the Green Mountain. Neither one of us has the stone tablets to win an argument on this point, but I guess I want to add two more coats of (solid?) gold to my calf:

In Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars—which you’ll find yourself wanting to read in one sitting—you can find an excerpt from the NY Times Book Review discussion of the book, which begins with the phrase “In his besotted, passionate new book….” Rosenbaum asks the question “Why do we feel–those of us who do–that there is something in Shakespeare beyond what we find in other literature?”  He describes a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was “disturbingly, mysteriously more than an intellectual experience.” His introduction contains seven paragraphs that begin with a variation on the phrase “I want you to care…” an intimate emotional appeal to a personal reader, and not a journalistic or academic appeal to credibility.

It isn’t that this degree of intensity and scrutiny can’t be found in writing and speaking about Bob Dylan. But to be “besotted” with Shakespeare is to be enriched, and inspired, and articulated, with grave justification. To be “besotted” by Bob Dylan’s art is to be eccentric at best, truly besotted without grave justification.  At worst, you’re just a person who doesn’t listen to enough Neil Young.

There are  many tedious arguments of more or less insidious intent about the social construction of popular culture, about the institutionalization of elite culture, about why an exegesis or a syllabus will mummify Desolation Row. I’m not completely allergic to these arguments, but I think the resolution is finding more and more and more and more voices bringing besotted and passionate attention to Dylan’s art.

My other coat of solid gold could be a little flaky. My impossible dream is not to disprove, but to disarm the mythic argument that Dylan rocked the world to bits by 1966 and never reached that height on the   Richter scale again.  This narrative is based on a lust, a famishment, for artists to perform revolutions that the rest of us can join in passively, at no cost. Rock my world to bits, make it new, make me the chosen one who really  gets what you’re doing, who’s on the right side, who gets the great thrill of being changed forever, at your expense. Make me see truth and light and god, but not any truth or light or god my parents saw. Make it all new and make it for me. And do it again and again and again, keep doing it for me.  Then I’ll love you for good. 

Art that’s a rich, deep, deft, and unique expression of the texture and presence of human life. Fierce and impotent feeling, failures and raptures of desire, thoughts pointless and the sudden glimpse of something that could be Something. This can’t satisfy the hunger for a world blown to bits. I hear it everywhere in Dylan’s work 1989-2009, regardless of what hole in a tree in Alabama he got it from.

I’m not accusing Ron Rosenbaum of being deaf to what I hear in Time Out of Mind. I’m trying to use what I hear to tell a different story about an artist’s “arc”, a story that has its own hungers, that’s for someone else to diagnose perhaps, but a story that doesn’t demand the artist be a hero and a martyr every day to earn my love. 

Don’t let other people get your kicks for you.

 Cultivation. Cult. Culture. Agriculture. Got a head full of ideas and they’re driving me insane. Our guest in Bob Levinson’s class this Tuesday, week 2, was writer-theologian Stephen Hazan Arnoff. I’ve had the pleasure of learning from him the last time I attended this course, and also in correspondence outside of class. He roots Bob Dylan in time-out-of-mind traditions of religious visionaries, oral and textual expressions of faith and doubt, and the strange new worlds some few people in all of time have taken the rest of us to show us how far we can go. From these roots, Hazan-Arnoff sprouted a lecture on cultivation: the “intention” and “technique” of Dylan’s art that produces the harvest of Dylan’s transformation of culture. The tools, the material, the seeds and I would say ultimately the fruits are Man, God, Law. 

We started with Maggie’s Farm, where cultivation is trampled by power, and the false vain paranoid power that’s the enemy of the free person’s loyalty to truth and to right. Nothing cultivated on this farm, and the abused and exploited singer is the only person who gets what a farmer is supposed to do: supplicate nature so things will grow. Maggie’s Ma comes on to the servants with man and god and law, but only the singer is using the language of prayer.

What is growing on the farm? Hazan Arnoff offers “salvation” as the answer, and used the clip from I’m Not There, where Allen Ginsberg pulls alongside Jude Quinn on the highway, asks Jude what’s next, Jude looks heavenward and says “salvation.” What could be left for the artist who is spading through culture all the way to bedrock?  A bigger audience?  Better reviews?  Salvation….? Stephen turned to Desolation Row as both the labor and the harvest of this cultivation. Stephen calls Desolation Row the ‘secret history of Maggie’s Farm.”

It’s important to remember that there really were postcards of the hanging. You really could buy souvenir lynching photos. So the song is launched from a world where atrocity is commodified as culture.  It’s launched into  the singer’s imagination where every category of meaning–every form of culture that humans have invented to make ordered sense of themselves and the world–is inverted, exploited, manipulated into the one vision and voice of the young singer leaning into Desolation Row. Politics, literature, religion, pop culture, myth and folklore, history, science and the industry it spawns–these forms are all playthings for the artist whose vision is strong enough to see that indeed all of culture has been a matter of humankind playing with life in order to “unlock its secrets”, to quote Stephen. 

So the song cultivates culture, and its tools are certain gifts of composition and performance granted to one Bob Dylan, and the harvest is pretty close to the secrets of this universe: we find out that the great unending work of culture has been an odyssey along desolation row, as idols and texts and stories and discoveries and lovers too, are fighting and destroying each other to win the high ground of Truth. I have to reap the awe-ful  bounty of the singer’s labor but what’s the cost for him? He’s really done the work, I’m just buying his goods at this produce market.

Well, he doesn’t feel too good. Somehow the doorknob broke and he’s trapped and alone, don’t ask him how he’s doing, you’ve already heard the song for crying out loud. He’s spent and sick from the labor and harvest of  his own song, and unless I get it, unless I get that from selling postcards of lynchings to worshipping Noah’s great rainbow to building ships that sail the ocean and then sink in it, to making a song called Desolation Row, we’re all cultivating together, he doesn’t want to hear from me. 

Stephen went on to talk about Augustine of Hippo’s own conversion at the voice of a child, and Bob Dylan’s cold and angry and frightening vision of I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, and the not-so “secret history” of Dylan’s song:  I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill. Stephen talked about the world without martyrs that Dylan feels he’s discovered in his dream, and he  explained the root of this word: witness. And what’s the cultivation the artist can do in a world without martyrs or witnesses? He can offer us, for starters, the nightmare vision of those purposeless, darting, fearful people on the watchtower, who see approaching towards them what has already happened. He can offer us the nightmare image of a jury crying “for more”–more what? justice? drama? facts? All a jury has to do is follow the law–isn’t that enough? Ah, but the law is just what we set up in a fallen world where we can’t see our way by nature’s fair light.

The human mind can only stand so much. It’s hard to win with a losing hand.

And down the highway, down the tracks–Stephen discussed man and God and law in Senor and Franz Kafka and Highway 61 Revisited and Hasidic traditions and Lord Protect My Child and then the 2 hours were up and I had to get on that train and ride home.

On the #4 train, I thought about how much Stephen’s lecture is going to fertilize the happy idle hours I spend digging around in Ain’t Talkin’– ”There’s no one here, the gardener is gone”–that line is already sprouting all manner of weird new shoots thanks to Stephen’s cult/culture/cultivation/agriculture….. 

(And that insolent drawl he gets in his voice on Maggie’s Farm–how the hell did he pull off exactly the right voice for that? Like I haven’t listened to BIABH 263 times, and I’m only hearing this now? I give up.)