Comments on: “Tell Me About It”–Sean Wilentz and Christopher Ricks On The Psychiatric Couch, Sort Of http://gardenerisgone.com/2009/11/17/tell-me-about-it-sean-wilentz-and-christopher-ricks-on-the-psychiatric-couch-sort-of/ All Art Aspires To The Condition of Bob Dylan Thu, 24 May 2012 18:07:25 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: eruke http://gardenerisgone.com/2009/11/17/tell-me-about-it-sean-wilentz-and-christopher-ricks-on-the-psychiatric-couch-sort-of/#comment-388 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:28:53 +0000 http://gardenerisgone.com/?p=1066#comment-388 You’re right that Wilentz and Ricks are good advertisements for college–they show that conversation can be sport that leads you out of the vacuous flippant volleys that pass for witty conversation. Forgetting about Bob Dylan, hearing Sean Wilentz and Christopher Ricks consider each other’s comments, and commit themselves to their own comments, was itself a great pleasure.
You’re very generous in your comments, but anyone reading your book, Like A Complete Unknown, would find right away that you yourself listen to Dylan with an openness that matches the matter. I once visited a beach in New Zealand where hot springs run below the sand. Any reasonably fit person with a shovel can dig in the sand for a few minutes and strike the hot water and create a small hot tub right then and there, as big or small as you like. Dylan’s songs are like that hot water beach: strike them anywhere, from any direction, and they will give back. That’s how I imagine self-replenishing. This he shares with Shakespeare, and that’s a party of 2.
I like your comparison to Whitman so much because Whitman’s generosity is key, and that is so often ignored or abused in Dylan, his generosity and his inclusiveness. Wilentz and Ricks both touched on this.
And ,oh the Philistines he has called out of the shadows over the years. The Death-Eaters, that’s what Philistines are ultimately, I think.

Thank you as always, and everyone else, please read Mr Hinchey’s book.

]]> By: John Hinchey http://gardenerisgone.com/2009/11/17/tell-me-about-it-sean-wilentz-and-christopher-ricks-on-the-psychiatric-couch-sort-of/#comment-385 Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:50:10 +0000 http://gardenerisgone.com/?p=1066#comment-385 As always, gratias.

Wilentz & Ricks are both (in different ways) walking talking advertisements for the value of going to college (just as as B. J. Rolfzen was for why not to drop out of high school) but (alas!) my impression is few undergraduates in most colleges these days are allowed anywhere near professors of their ilk, saddled instead with confused TA’s (like the one I once was).

One phrase I especially like is “the self-replenishing work of listening closely to Bob Dylan’s music and finding things to say about it.” “Self-replenishing” is the key word. And if you were to read back over your posts to this blog, you would find that this is a theme you keep returning to–and always eloquently–the theme, that is, of the power of Dylan’s work (and implicitly, great art generally) to rouse our acutest attention and conversely the role of that attention in making real–realizing–what Dylan has created (or if you will, discovered–etymologically “invention” and “discovery” are synonymous anyway). In one of the prefaces to Leaves of Grass (the 1856 one, I think–could be 1860) Whitman defines this as the nature of his work and implicitly of poetry in a democracy. (It’s a sentence that goes something like “The proof of my poems is that they are absorbed as affectionately by America as I absorb it”–except much more eloquently than I can either remember or fake.) Back in the early days (Dylan-wise) rock critics often (ignorantly) cited this phenomenon–that the depth of Dylan’s songs appeared only in our rapt responses to them–as evidence of his essential quackery–that he was merely a master faker, the emperor of prestidigitation. But you know better, and based on what you’ve already written, I think there’s a book–or at least a major essay–waiting for you to write it.

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