Comments on: Old Infidel, Old Vagrant–Stand Us Now In Good Stead

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:30:56 +0000

Of course, it’s a matter of taste, but some tastes have more acuity (or different acuities) than others, which is why I like reading your takes on Dylan. They sharpen and enrich my own taste. And yes, Lott’s essay is one of the highlight’s of the Cambridge Companion. Michael Gray also fixed on that radio/mother connection in a talk he gave at the Minnesota conference (unfortunately not included in the book that just came out), calling it “a wonderful old geezer moment.” (He jokingly called Love & Theft “Highway 61 Revisited on a Bus Pass.”) I share your delight in the “shifts of attention and feeling” encoded in Dylan’s later style, but my experience is that it will indeed take something on the order of a crusade to get a lot of his longtime fans & admirers not to dismiss this looseness as the product of carelessness or indifference.

And yes, I was being super finicky (you might even say pedantic) regarding “surreal.” I’ve always tried to maintain a narrow definition for it, using it only when the “surrealism” (in the loose sense) actually somewhat reminds me of the work of the actual Surrealists. “Geranium kisses” strikes me as more symbolist than surrealist, and “smoke your eyelids” sounds like something out of a frontier tall tale, or a schoolyard boast–though that’s because I take “smoke” here to mean “beat” or “clobber.” I’ve probably heard the sentence “He smoked him” a thousand times in my life, and it’s been when one guy beat another in sports or beat them up (of quickly dispatched them) in a fight. I think it was first used that way for foot races–where the metaphor of smoking is easier to fathom–but got generalized beyond that. And so that’s the lexical context in which I first heard (and still hear) Dylan’s line. But, of course, if Dylan’s smoking your eyelids like he smokes a cigarette (as he may well have intended), that is rather surreal.

By: eruke

eruke — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:44:03 +0000

Ah, it could be that my problem with Sweetheart Like You is theology and not Bob Dylan. I’ve always heard the singer as a modern parody of Satan: hubristic and still afraid of The Boss (whom I hear as being Heaven bound), self-loathing, flattering, knowing, corrupting. But I hadn’t considered that there are of course lackeys in Hell. I need to think about that when I hear the song. By the way, although in general I prefer the version on the record, it’s hard to beat the way he sings “cruel tutor” on the outtake.

OK, I think I was flabby in my use of surreal. Better to call the image of a little Boschian demon grinning and laughing while he uses my “skull” as a “barrel” to ride down the falls *fantastic* instead of *surreal*. It’s the incongruity of surrealism that you nail, and rightly so. But only in Farewell Angelina? Not in geranium kisses? Smoking someone’s eyeballs?

I believe I do understand your A-C incongruity idea. One of my crusades is to do justice to the kind of incongruity that seems central to Dylan’s songwriting in the last 15 or so years. Shifts of attention and feeling. Setting the dial on my radio, I wish my mother was still alive (Eric Lott gives an ingenious and moving reading of this line in his Cambridge Companion essay). The restless and fatiguing saccades of consciousness that come with age. A hair’s breadth from randomness. The surrenders in the constant battle between memory and present awareness, present feeling. For me, the unsettlement of this kind of incongruity is deeper, richer, longer-lasting, than the thrill of the “old procedure.” A matter of taste?

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:03:19 +0000

“pastiche of Satan and Eve?” please explain–Eve I get, but not Satan–the singer I’ve always heard as a peripheral figure, a character actor, the leading man’s (i.e., the “Boss,” i.e. “Satan) taken-for-granted (but secretly disgruntled) lackey.

And no, I didn’t mean “the surreal” and certainly not “the malign” but I meant the apparently off-the-wall notsequitur that turns out (when you stop to think about it) to be actually “right on target, so direct.” People did use to call this aspect of Dylan “surreal,” but it’s not really–that’s not what surrealism is about. (The closest Dylan ever comes to surrealism is “Farewell Angelina.” “King King little elves” is surreal!) Let me explain it this way: Dylan used to go A-C and leave it to you to figure out the “B” that connected the two. Now he goes A-B-C, where A is connected to B and B to C but A & C are in 2 different worlds, and you’re left wondering how we got here. His old procedure was more thrilling, but his new mode is more unsettling. I don’t know if this makes any sense.

By: eruke

eruke — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:07:14 +0000

The last verse has always been so distressing to me, and I’ve always heard it as an image of abandonment that’s inexorable–”cruel mockery” covers it much better. It’s ultimately a gruesome and not a poignant song. The record is not called Infidels for nothing, and the slithering in and out of masks is central to the album. I don’t get how anyone can hear Sweetheart Like You and not see a pastiche of Satan and Eve.
Can’t permit himself the surreal? The malign?

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:47:47 +0000

As always, your observations are very absorbing & suggestive. I sort of agree with you that there’s something “horribly wrong” with the Niagara Falls line, but I would not have put it that way. But now that you did put it that way, it makes me hear this line as the mask slipping off and the singer exposing his identity as Satan, the false man of Peace he’s singing about. Certainly a lot of what we’re told about him fits singers in general and Dylan in particular–all the things relating to his “sweet gift of gab,” and this song is from the same album that includes “Jokerman,” a song in which Dylan imagines himself as at once (or ambiguously both) Christ and Satan. I suspect something similar is going on here. And this way of hearing the song lends a rather urgent ambiguity to the final verse, which I am now hearing as both full of compassion for and cruel mockery of the (doomed) mother.

One final comment: the Niagara Falls line (to me) is simply splendid, a line that makes you do not a double take but a quadruple take, the kind of line that that used to pepper Dylan songs but which these days he no longer seems to permit himself.