Up to Me starts right off telling us that “money never changed a thing” in this story we’re going to hear of love corrupted and lost and undying. But the song’s vignettes, so lacerating to the singer and so entrancing to the listener, keep coming back to money. He didn’t buy a ticket to follow her into the officers’ club where she entertains the troops, who apparently did fork over the price of admission, till the break of day. He needs an income: he works as a postal clerk, in a cage no less, and risks breaking the rules to protect the free but hunted fugitive. One of them is going to pay the penalty of biting off more than they can chew, of taking more than they really need. Crystal wants to talk to the pimp, Dupree, and the singer is too self-involved, too discreet,or too high-handed, to keep tabs on whatever transaction might come of this. He assures whomever he’s singing to that the disguised and nameless girl with him isn’t his property, not anything he actually paid for and owns. And then finally he takes the song– this strangely poisoned and passionate and timeless world of Up to Me–and tragically and brutally giftwraps it and hands it to her. His lone guitar played sweet for her this old time melody. This phrase is preposterous, following the intimations of whoring, the admissions of betrayal, the disillusionment. It seems like the terrible sad delusion of the grieving lover. Then the next line: “The harmonica around my neck, I blow it for ya free.” He wears his noose or his shackle willingly, and indeed it’s his instrument, how he expresses himself, and without words. ”I blow it for ya free,” could be a candidate for the single nastiest line Dylan’s ever sung. Here, he says, all the pain and everything else, it’s yours anyway, and no one could sing it but me–so, no fee.
What are things worth? The song is an awful gift, isn’t it? It degrades and punctures and demonstrates and yearns for love, with different kinds of ugly price tags all through it. If the song were for me, would I want it? Would I want it because the song itself is Beautiful and True even though it has so much dirt and faithlessness in it?
I don’t know why, but this is what I thought about after I read Roy Kelly’s impressive essay on Bob Dylan’s plagiarism, titled “A Shiny Bed of Lights,” published in The Bridge. This was passed along to me by John Wesley Harding a/k/a Wes Stace, a person of varied accomplishment, playful identity, and consistent finesse, whom you may learn more about here: http://www.johnwesleyharding.com/. I don’t have here the date/issue for the essay, and I apologize to Roy Kelly and anyone else for that omission.
Kelly takes on the vexing issue of Bob Dylan’s recent songwriting method, which goes under many names, or rather, people identify themselves through the word they choose to describe this songwriting method. If you call it collage, you reveal yourself as an unreconstructed fan, perhaps an insufficiently skeptical fan. If you call it plagiarism, an unseemly word which seeks to erect a distance between right and wrong, you may be trying to speak Truth to Delusion. If you call it theft, which has romantic outlaw connotations, you may be trying for a kind of higher ground where you consider the issue of originality in the clear light of day, and continue to admire Dylan’s assaults on originality, as he lives outside the law in his own peculiar honesty.
Kelly begins by outing excerpts from Chronicles which were lifted from other sources. His article’s title appears on page 165 of Dylan’s memoirs, and formerly in Huckleberry Finn. He’s got a passage that appears on page 162 of Chronicles and formerly in Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. Kelly focuses throughout the essay on Chronicles and Modern Times, and he is informed, articulate, and unambivalent:
His songwriting now resembles desk research, where someone tries to gather various data from what exists and out there, and makes use of it commercially.
What seems to me to be different now is that hardly anything remains of the personal in the words of songs on “Love and Theft” and Modern Times. …The words recede. There is the illusion of the personal because of his singing.
I think there’s a world of difference in both method and the outcome of that method, between being inspired and influenced by the world you live in and the path you want to follow, and in deciding systematically to go through work that already exists, taking out other people’s lines and words in order to fit around them songs that you will then call your own.
Now that I am forewarned that any particular use of words that I admire or think absolutely apposite may not be his, I am as it were, more likely withhold the sun of my affection.
Kelly takes on people like myself with the assertiveness that runs through the essay:
There is always a queue of Bob apologists itching to tell us that either there is no such thing as plagiarism, or if there is that Bob is certainly not guilty of it.
It seems to me that despite the world of fans and blogs and various aerated theorists queueing to post their reasons why these reworkings are evidence of his superior, cunning, creative ability to make something new out of other people’s words, by changing the context and thus the meaning, none of it refers to qualities we once prized and praised in him. If being a Burroughs-style, cut-up, collagist post-modernist is such an admirable thing, why did we ever once rate his being a new, original, contemporary voice so highly?
Kelly supports his arguments with well-illustrated discussions of the ethics of plagiarism, the value of originality in literature, theories on the differing value of appropriation depending on who is doing the appropriating.
The two strongest currents activating the essay are the betrayal of a certain relationship between artist and audience, and the need for a theory that can guide our relation to Bob Dylan’s work. Kelly writes, “The question for Bob Dylan fans, and especially fans in these latter times, is to decide what we are meant to know, and how to think about the way he now works.”
Kelly’s essay is sound, superior, convincing, and I accept, without defensiveness, being the aerated target of Kelly’s contempt. There aren’t many points I would argue on rational ground: I think I could argue reasonably that Ain’t Talkin’ does not “attempt to do what Highlands does better,” but Kelly already predicts that people like me would say this. I do hear much that is “personal” in “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, but here I recognize that Kelly and I wouldn’t agree on what constitutes the personal, and that’s fine. Kelly mentions Dylan’s “box” of cuttings and clippings which he now picks through when the songassembling mood is upon him, and maintains a portrait of Dylan craftily inserting phrases here and there to modify or illustrate the topic at hand. I do maintain that much of anyone’s disillusionment and unhappiness with the result is a function of the uncannily invisible stitches. He does assimilate disparate registers into the song or the prose. But again, Kelly would justifiably argue that the impersonality he finds in the recent work is exactly a result of all this assimilation at the expense of inspired expression.
It’s the link between betrayal and theory that is the only thing I want to address in Kelly’s piece. His feeling of being disappointed, in a personal way, in his relation to an artist he’s admired for decades, is candid and emotional. He traces his feeling to ethics, and to ideas of the experience of originality in art. He employs the ideas to create arguments about bad art that betrays a trust between maker and audience, and to assert that bad art particularly degrades his relation to Bob Dylan: he will “withhold the sun of his affection” and I believe that Kelly believes that matters. The cost of betrayal can matter to Dylan, and this cost is higher because Kelly can back it with the credit of reason.
Given everything I know, given the fact that reading Chronicles was the most intimate connection I’ve ever had with a narrator and now I know for certain that much of what shattered the frozen sea inside me was little axes that belonged to other people rather than one big axe wielded by one writer–this means I’m different, changed, and not Bob Dylan. I still feel deeply the shape of an aged life in Floater, and part of this shape is truthfully another man’s life. As I listen to the song, and assimilate into myself what I feel to be illuminating and lovely in it, then I also assimilate into myself Floater‘s plausible fraud.
I think that to really relate to art is to assimilate it, and remain always conscious of what we’re assimilating, what we’re becoming as we listen or read or watch. The choice is always to refuse this assimilation if we identify a corrupting agent that we won’t tolerate. If I choose the fraud in Floater, I haven’t justified or excused it. I do believe Roy Kelly and I are both talking about loving art, we just see it from a different point of view.
One reason I left the academic world is because I didn’t think it was a place I could learn to write about literature without capturing meaning and feeling and housing them in a solid edifice, and then placing my little house in a neighborhood of more or less similar houses. This makes me sound like I’m aggrandizing myself into a Romantic free spirit idealizing Passion and Profundity, unwilling to sacrifice Beauty for Reason. I’ll take that hit, and offer only in my defense that I am probably too lazy to have worked towards the voice I wanted in a professional academic setting. I turned right from that world smack into Bob Dylan, and found a stronger reason than I could have imagined for finding that voice. I’m always so happy to find that I’m not completely alone in my quest, A recent comment here by Robert Reginio expressed frustration with Christopher Ricks’ style in Visions of Sin, as opposed to his arguments. Mr. Reginio writes,
Why did Ricks choose a voice which gave readers the impression that writing about Bob Dylan is a vacation from writing about John Milton? Absolutely true that someday the wheel may turn, and Ricks’ tone in Visions of Sin may become a standard for a kind of playful fellowship between critic-scholar and reader. Right now, I’m with Mr Reginio: Ricks isn’t speaking to me, soul to soul, through Dylan’s music.
George Steiner, who wrote the book pictured here, Real Presences, shares my quest in some fashion and I’m pretty certain he wouldn’t want me on his journey. I speculate that George Steiner is not familiar with the work of Bob Dylan, but I like to think that, given an hour, I could encourage him to see that Dylan delivers what I think he wants from art: the highest moral stakes, the severest doubt, the most intolerable mystery, beauty’s awful truth of how sweet life can be. This book is a plea to rescue art from the *linguistic turn* where the catalog in the previous sentence is pretty much dissolved into the boundless instabilities and illusions of language. Steiner would recreate the transcendent in our relation with art. Though this sounds here awfully reactionary, he gets the poststructuralists on their own terms, and he ultimately wants a new relation with art that can manifest real presence, not Romantic nostalgia. However, I personally am exempt from this experience, not because I’m a Bob Dylan fan, but because of something much less subjective and you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is
If you can’t keep making the language to get across how your attention is a living instrument for the art you’re describing, then find other art that hasn’t exhausted its ability to play through you, to other people. Soul to soul.
The photo at left shows the B. Altman department store as it looked in 1924, occupying the block between 34th and 35th streets, 5th Avenue to Madison Avenue. Some New Yorkers of my chronology may remember being dragged around Altman’s in an eternity of torpor while their mother looked for a blouse to match her blue slacks.
Here’s the same building in 2009. It’s been turned into the CUNY Graduate Center on one side and Oxford Univ Press on the other. I attended a talk and performance there on September 17. It was titled, “Bob Dylan: American Poet. The Musical Settings Inspired by Dylan’s Lyrics.” The focus of the evening was the work of composer John Corigliano, and of New York musician Howard Fishman. Mr. Corigliano has taken the lyrics to seven songs and set them to his own music, to create a song cycle he calls “Mr Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.” Note the very careful preposition in that title, which ambiguously links the work to Dylan. Howard Fishman may be familiar to some of you through his performances of The Basement Tapes material. Greil Marcus, who requires no explanation, moderated a discussion with Corigliano and Fishman, then a pianist and a soprano performed songs from Corigliano’s song cycle, followed by Fishman’s performance.
Here is something concrete and immutable and eternal that John Corigliano and Bob Dylan have in common: an Academy Award. They also have Pulitzer prizes in common but I don’t know if you get an object for display with that award. In his conversation with Marcus, Corigliano told the story of his artistic relation with Bob Dylan: he was not familiar with Dylan’s songs, as he had been listening to contemporary classical music in the 1960s, although he was “fascinated” by The Beatles’ music, which he found “natural and ingenious.” He admitted it may have come to pass that as he sat in a coffeehouse in the early 1960s, “sipping his cappuccino,” Bob Dylan could indeed have been singing within earshot, but Corigliano did not *hear* the song being performed. Folksinging entails “simple melody,” and “the song stays the same—verse, chorus. verse, chorus.” A folk song “does not change emotionally verse to verse.” The apparent monotony of folk songs deafened John Corigliano to distinguishing any one song, and therefore he came to Bob Dylan’s work “with innocence.”
What Corigliano wanted for his project was “an American poet.” A “great poet,” but a certain kind of great poet: “a great poet who speaks to everyone.” Something brought Bob Dylan to his attention, and he “sent away” for a book of Bob Dylan’s lyrics.
He found the lyrics of this man’s songs poetic, and set about using the lyrics of seven songs, and his own music, to “tell a story of political awakening.” The “Prelude” is Mr. Tambourine Man, followed by what we know as Clothes Line Saga but which was referred to as Clothes Line Blues, then Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, All Along the Watchtower, Chimes of Freedom, concluding with the “Postlude” of Forever Young.
Corigliano wanted an “amplified soprano” voice to perform his compositions. He wanted the effect of and opera singer’s “technique” without the sound of operatic singing. He talked of the amplified voice being more “natural” than the unamplified performance of an opera.
Howard Fishman and Greil Marcus talked about I’m Not There. Marcus’s description of the song was Big Letter True, and gorgeous: he talked about the inaudible lyrics as conveying textures of feeling that make the listener feel that everything is at stake for all of us: the singer, the woman in the song, me listening. Howard Fishman was so taken with the song that he wrote lyrics to fill the gaps in Dylan’s rendition. Also a devotee of Marcus’s Old Weird Republic, Fishman sought approval from the authoritative critic, sent him his new version, and Marcus apparently gave Fishman the thumbs up he desired.
That I simply do not have a taste for John Corigliano’s music is neither here nor there. That he began this project with a conclusive disparagement of the entire, apparently inexpressive, genre of folk music, a claim that many of us in the audience could have challenged right then and there with our own iPods–that is also neither here nor there. Ignorance and arrogance can certainly precede good art, and they often have. That a 71 year old American musical artist is not familiar with the tune to Blowin’ in the Wind–that’s a tough one, but, I want people to take me at my word, so we will take Mr Corigliano at his.
The class runs for 12 Tuesday sessions, 8-10 PM, beginning Oct 6. I am busy scheduling guests for the sessions, and hope to get together a range of writers, teachers, musicians, and other folk who are eager to offer what they know and what they do to discussions about Bob Dylan’s work then and now and everything in between. Over the years, Bob Levinson created a wonderful sense of ongoing community with this class: guests and attendees enjoyed an informal, enthusiastic, and challenging atmosphere in the room. My goal is to do exactly the same. I can post here the roster of guests as the scheduling firms up.
Here is the building on 92nd St and Lexington Ave where the class will be held, and here is the link to the class on 92Y’s web catalog: http://www.92y.org/shop/class_detail.asp?productid=AM3GA19
I guarantee lively conversations, a great selection of music, excellent people.
I’m reading Steven Heine’s book, Bargainin’ for Salvation: Bob Dylan, a Zen Master? (Continuum, 2009), and I wanted to start off here with something clever about GPS, the Christmas album, and delusion and desire. Months ago, someone reports apocryphally that Mr. No Direction Youknowwhere himself has joked about selling his voice to a GPS system, and this atomic irony ends up months later as absurd *news*. . Then, we learn of Mr Dylan’s holiday album, and the impulses of charity, caprice, and/or amusement that could answer for anyone’s Christmas in the Heart, are immediately doubted and analyzed, and a lightweight/lighthearted project becomes absurdly freighted with speculation. Each of these incidents seems to reflect the irresistibility of conflict, pessimism, and fantasy in all our affairs.
The cover of Heine’s book shows one of my favorite shots of Bob Dylan, from the Lynn Goldsmith photo shoot in NY in the early 80s. He looks like he’s standing on an ice floe, but is actually on a pier covered in snow and ice, behind him is the river very flat and white and bright in the winter light. His hatless head looking away from the camera, he is simply there in his inky cloak, in the cold air, patient and private and still ungrudging with his presence. The simple mystery of thereness is a good touch for Heine’s book, which, with great rigor and ardor, sets out to describe Bob Dylan’s “wide-ranging affinities with Zen Buddhism, which are in small part historical/biographical, and in large part spiritual/intellectual.” It’s the second pair in that sentence that justifies the book. As for Dylan’s historical/biographical Zen affinities, Heine intrepidly tries to use the liner notes of Live in Budokan as *evidence*, and then shrewdly gives that up and turns to examining the songs as enacting some of the principles of Zen. -”All and all can only fall with a crashing but meaningless blow,” ”I’ll make shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot,” ”The sound of one hand clapping”– If you’ve heard faint traces of Zen breezes blowing through lines like these, you will be immensely grateful to Steven Heine for giving real heft and gravity to your impressions.
If a person is going to attempt to baptize Bob Dylan into this philosophy, we’re lucky that Steven Heine has taken the plunge. He directs the Center for Asian Studies at Florida International University, has spent years studying the work of Dogen, a 13th century Zen master, and has had at least one epiphany listening to Dylan after getting high in Amsterdam. We applaud the recognition that the doors of perception have many knobs.
Heine’s discussion takes what we talk about when we talk about Dylan and then sets it into a framework that hasn’t been drawn this clearly and authoritatively before, as far as I know. There is not news of any kind in the numberless ways Bob Dylan’s songs yearn for and relinquish certainty, or pass through conflicting and vivid states of feeling, or fearlessly act out the delusion of an ongoing solid self. How many emotions can you name in Idiot Wind? In Highlands? In Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, the singer asks “the only love I’ve ever known,” to bless him as he leaves her. All of us who comprise the chattering monkey mind of Dylan listeners are already fluent in the language of desiring, seeking, confronting, and abandoning meaning. And in the relentless cycle of desiring then abandoning certainty. We already know about being seized, battered, and spent by feelings that we often can’t recall hours after they have done us in. Or wounds whose healing seems worse than the pain they cause.
Now I have a problem: I feel certain that Zen’s rational description of humankind’s persistent struggle to master delusion, manage passion, and endure mortality is valid. And I feel equally certain that I personally will never be available to the answers to what is real, what is good, and what is enduring, that are offered by Christianity, nor by the Judaism of my forefathers in their bone-filled graves. But I know that Heine’s sentence above is deeply wrong: it’s not inaccurate, and it’s not superficial, it’s just wrong. When I hear the recording of I Believe In You from my own favorite gospel show (Santa Monica, ’79), I’m listening to something I can never agree with, never remain unmoved by, never be bored by–and something that in no way contributes to a “dialectical movement of [an] overall approach to spirituality.” It is spirituality: awe-ful and painful and impossible and magnificent and sufficient unto itself. It’s not that Heine’s statement intellectualizes feeling and belief, it’s that in order to occupy the space from which I Believe In You
