What’s nice about a blog is the infinite license to exploit all kinds of appealing contradictions. Lies, trivia, profanity, banality, slander, narcissism, ignorance, and confessions of malevolent or grotesque desires all appear in attractive layouts with professional fonts. The ravings of every fool and sinner come across as a formal publication, and although it is certainly possible to ornament these things with clear signs of psychopathology, we all–readers and writers–have come to expect a publication-worthy standard for all ravings . Then there is the irresistible fantasy of everyone and no one reading our unscrolling Times Roman vacuousness or night thoughts: I demand the *freedom* to say exactly what I think and feel with no shackles or repercussions of any kind, and I demand the dream of entranced or deliciously horrified readers hanging on every word. We must have all of these dichotomies right now, in the new spirit of crying baby gratification that characterizes La Vita Plugged.
So, in this spirit, I’m going to tell a story I guess I’ve told already, because I want to, and it doesn’t matter if I do. On the evening of January 24, 1961, Bob Dylan stamped snow from his boots, clambered down the steps of Cafe Wha?, struck another match and started anew. And on the evening of Jan 24, 1961, I was also, in my own small way, on the verge of an exciting new development. At the very moment Bob Dylan was sizing up the first of the little basements where there was just enough light for him to learn what he needed to learn, I was also in a tiny dark space farther uptown, albeit in an upstairs eatery with tablecloths and clean bathrooms, where my parents celebrated their first wedding anniversary over steaks and martinis and my father’s Lucky Strikes, and discussed whether I’d end up Natasha or Roger. These were very different times: pregnant women ate steaks and inhaled secondhand smoke and did not know the sex of their unborn child. Clinton Heylin reports that in late February 1961, Bob Dylan attended a Ramblin’ Jack Elliott concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, while my parents learned how to manage cloth diapers with sharp safety pins, and fortunately agreed that Natasha is a dreadful name for a baby girl. Me, my parents, and Bob Dylan all shivered in the very same cold New York winter at the very same time and developed new habits at the very same time.
In 2011, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to share our immeasurable gratitude for the fates and forces that gave Mr. Bob Dylan enough health and strength to share himself with us for these decades.
For now, let’s travel further into the past than 1961 or 1941. As Michel de Montaigne went out one morning in 1569 or 1570 to take the air around his own estate, he fell off his horse, and hit the ground really very hard. Hard enough that he hovered not unpleasantly and not uninterestingly, as he reported, between life and death for several days. His household and family believed they were tending to their dying master and Montaigne noted their agitations along with the strange repose accompanying his maybe-almost death. He recovered, and found himself in a new frame of mind which he chose to take as a new compass for his attention and energies (he had a nice amount of both to spare, being a landowning nobleman ). So Montaigne began the project of his Essays which have created for themselves many generations of ardent readers who have very little in common with each other and who would disagree strongly about which Montaigne is the real true Montaigne. This should start to sound familiar.
397 or 398 years later, another affluent young man of leisure falls to the ground and hurts himself, and then picks himself up with a refreshed outlook that he also puts to work in expressive pursuits. Montaigne would find a motorcycle a curious object. Otherwise, there’s very little in John Wesley Harding that a well-read 16th century French nobleman wouldn’t recognize –the only real anachronisms I can find are a telegraph, and the lightbulb and the record on the liner notes. I also don’t know if gold was measured in carats in the 16th century.
If you have not met Montaigne in his essays, you can meet him–and I do mean meet him, and not read about him–in Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful new book, How to Live? We travel with Montaigne through his inner and outer lives, and through his Europe, and Bakewell is an ideal guide: too informed to be superficial, too witty to be pompous, too vigorous in her intelligence to be glib and conclusive in her insights. Ignore the book’s marketing, which unfortunately makes an effort to set it alongside the current trend of high-class watered-down Philosophy 101 books whose authors shall remain nameless.
I’m only here to get from Montaigne to Bob Dylan. In her introduction, Bakewell touches on the Montaigne of the 21st-century, and the answer is blogs. As she decorously and kindly puts it,
Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self.
Montaigne’s Essays famously discourse upon Montaigne’s impressions, speculations, opinions, meditations, influences, in what we would call *real time* but was the only time Montaigne himself had to hand. Montaigne never lost interest in the world filtered through Montaigne, and this is where people like me, we countless millions publicizing our inner lives, come in. Bakewell writes, again with generosity and decorum,
This idea [i.e., blogs/forums/]–writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity–has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne…
The problem being that one person’s invitation to enjoy the companionship of an amiable, curious, and informed inner life is another person’s desultory narcissism. The unfortunate lesson of Montaigne is not exactly the invention of self-articulation without the framework of confessional or historical prompting. The lesson is that some people’s restless rambles create a far more worthwhile shared festival of humanity than others.
Here is a portrait of King William IV of England, sometimes known as Old Bill. I don’t know anything about him, but he has a vaguely anxious and pudgy look, and his hair seems on the verge of dishevelment, so perhaps his inner life is more of the White Rabbit always-too-late type than the Montaigne
let’s-take-a-break-and-think-about-this-for-a-moment type. Tell Ol’ Bill could be my very favorite song of restlessness, and I am delighted to find there are many interesting possibilities for the old bills among whom we can pick and choose an origin for the name Ol’ Bill. Many of them have to do with the law, and certainly our song’s hero seems bound and beleaguered, and miserably free as well. There are certainly many self-imposed forced marches in Bob Dylan’s later songs, and the rambling of Tell Ol’ Bill is a march I always like to accompany him on.
For one moment the singer lies restless in a heavy bed, otherwise he is outside, in a world that is summer and winter and day and night according to his own calendar and clock. 
By the river he’s penniless and alone, but he glows with flame (he once also slept by a stream with heaven blazing in his head–water and the burden of inspiration). The flame seems to ignite a song, which he sings to his lonely self. Hearing his own echoes, he thinks it could all drown him, like Orpheus. Or like an old man with nothing to his name and with only a river’s whisper for company.
On he goes, then, maybe one smiling face will drive the shadow from his head–the body’s fires apparently can’t light the brain’s shadows. A moment of inspiration cannot undo the vexations of memory. The chances of a smilling face retreat in a nameless place, where he is stranded, now tossing on a bed rooted heavily to the lonely ground.
We move inside the tossing and the vexation, to entreaties. I’ve given much thought to Larry Sloman’s notes on this for Tell Tale Signs–that the song is the torture of love gone ugly just like so many times before. But every time I come to a hill in Bob Dylan, a high hill especially, and every time kisses are placed on foreheads, I think I’m in a netherspace between Gethsemanes, Golgothas and restless quite ordinary human beds–and this is a space I believe Bob Dylan owns. (Remember that Golgotha means skull, and consider the amount of time it is we spend inside the pained confines of the singer’s miserable brain in these later songs–but we don’t like codes. We like….faint whiffs of suggestions.)
Now we’re hearing a man tormented by memory of love, and memory of destiny thrown to the winds, and the lonesomeness of his own song. He still is on the move. Following that coldest benediction, he is momentarily and suspiciously relieved of doubts and fears, which helps time move very quickly. The seasons are always new, and waters are tranquil lakes and streams, still and friendly. How long does peace last? Only to the next troubled night. The enemy at the gate: gates of horn are true dreams, gates of ivory, false dreams. The enemy is subtle, and sometimes the enemy is real.
The world gone cold, and the sound of the lost one’s voice is ringing off the tongue. How perfect that ringing is. It’s got connotations of hard cold metal, of love tokens, of the song that began this journey, and of the circularity of time and peace following pain following peace.
The stars are cold, but the night is young. The night is young. That romantic cliche is wonderfully placed here as a moment of hackneyed devil-may-care in a song where fate is so bitterly thrown to the clouds and winds. Now I raise my hand to the gods–tell ol’ Bill the battle’s still on. Tell him–when he comes home–to keep the faith, fight the good fight. Poor Bill is the only creature in the song who has a home, and his friend the singer would send him right back out of its warmth to the gray and stony sky above and hard ground beneath. The singer lies about his sad strandedness–I’m not alone! he says. We have reinforcements! Having sounded this battle charge at the end, he takes one look at the face that matters, breathes out his bravado, and utters the ordinary man’s version of fate. Ordinary convictions of fate can sound a little like plain insisting that someone else should agree with your version of things: How could it be any other way?
Whatever “it” is, I don’t care. The whole song seems to be a meditation, or unfolding of the moment of Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, wihch is alluded to in line the woods are dark, the town is too. The poem captures that moment of wanting to stop, sink, melt into things once and for all. We’re all heading for cold and dark for good, what are we waiting for? But the horse doesn’t know it’s mortal, and its blind animal impatience to get on with life wakes the rider’s obligation to keep on keepin’ on. I do think Tell Ol’ Bill‘s cold and exhausting world unfolds up and down and out and in from that mortal restlessness.
The recording sessions for the song that are in circulation are one of the inestimable treasures of the loveandtheft world of bootlegging. Dylan is patiently insistent with the band, and he is self-flustered and something called a “turnaround” gives him a big headache (do not tell me what this is, I don’t want to know). From the chatter and noodling between takes, there is a moment of empty charged time, the briefest moment when invisible things are gathered up, and in the next moment the shape of the song just happens. The difference between Dylan’s gruff speaking voice and the cadences and textures of the singing, where gruffness is put into many kinds of service, is always a surprise, something unaccountable. The rhythms of this song hold up to multiple listenings, the one really weak take loses the percussive dark joy of the music, and the take in a minor key is the one you want to go on forever, reminding you infinitely what keepin’ on feels like.
Here is Montaigne’s tower, where he sat and wrote, played with his cat, conferred with his servants, thought about cats and servants, and wrote some more. Montaigne was a happy accident of a writer wanting to write about nothing but the world as it occurred to him alone, having the time to do this at great length, and making the result worth our while. Bob Dylan sings that secret thoughts are hard to bear, and we make a grave mistake to take this to mean he is unburdening his secrets to us. He shows us what the burden feels like, that’s all he does and why ask for something else? We all can learn the lesson about emotions we can never share. Limning our solitudes with the richest palette is not the same as relentless confession.
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.
Here is a link to sharp piece written by Andy Moore for a site based in Madison, WI, called The Isthmus: 
Just a few weeks later, I attended Bob Dylan’s concert in Bethel Woods, NY. As a non-driver, this treat entailed a 3 hour bus ride from Manhattan to a lovely scenic spot high above any human settlement, a 5 hour wait for Bob Dylan to take the stage. High points of the energetic show for me were another glorious tragic Forgetful Heart, a strong Workingman’s Blues, and a lively Tweedledum/dee. Then followed an hour’s wait in the bus as the parking lot emptied, the ride back to Manhattan, the manifold charms of the MTA at 3 AM, and the final arrival home in Brooklyn at 4 AM Sunday. 
Of course one of the reasons Bob Dylan’s 1984 appearance on the David Letterman show is galvanizing, hilarious, and addictive is because of his audacious playfulness with the time constraints of live television. In Jokerman, he turns his back to the audience, dithers about for a harmonica, steps off the raised portion of the stage, abandons The Plugz to a trial by fire they do indeed pass–this is all nerve-wracking even for the viewer, and marvelously exposes the nonsense of “live” television.
Well, these were the thoughts I had when I read Alan Light’s piece in the Cambridge Companion on Bob Dylan the performer, and Martin Jacobi’s piece on collaboration. Both are solid overviews, largely chronological, that offer a catalogue of Dylan’s stage lives, and the musicians and writers Dylan has worked with, covered, ben influenced by, plundered from. The issue of whether or not we dignify the plundering, and how we dignify the plundering once we’ve decided to dignify it, is de rigueur in *serious* Dylan studies, and Jacobi takes it on briefly and cogently in his conclusion, making fashionable references to performance studies. This is what we want from a quasi-academic survey of the influences and collaborations of a serious popular artist: a skeletal but accurate catalogue that the whole range of his work merits attention, a nod to the idea that Bob Dylan’s plundering matters more than someone less serious, and the nod ennobled by fluency in sophisticated critical theory.
I know I’m just shadowboxing here. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan is not an adversary, in one way it’s just a bunch more voices about Bob Dylan and ion another way it is not. It’s a signal publication in the effort to yank this man into the inner circle of significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life. My boredom and frustration with so much of this signal publication comes from the fact that I’m not witnessing the messy birth pangs of a new kind of critical writing that does justice to the ways Bob Dylan plays with–tortures–categories: performance/composition, image/identity, authenticity, publicity. So much else to say…. Let’s try to make the language to say it, and let people in 2249 talk about significant contributors to cultural and intellectual……….
It’s no surprise to me that Ron Rosenbaum would be drawn to Bob Dylan. Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, and The Shakespeare Wars interviewed Bob for Playboy in 1970, and has referred to him several times in his current blog, for starters. After reading his books on Hitler and Shakespeare, I see where Bob Dylan fits into a peculiar sequence: a life in which the relation between effects and mortal facts seems so disproportionate as to create an aura of mystery that demands a sensible narrative. Now I’ll be accused of deranged or careless hyperbole: the paragon of evil, the ultra-touchstone of western culture, and a singer-songwriter with an uncharacteristically long career, all together. But there is a quality of extremity to the actions and productions of some lives, and in the imaginations of their contemporaries and those that follow them, the extremity fashions the individuals into symbols, myths, and places of violently contested meaning. While researching my dissertation on the Holocaust, I came to find Franz Stangl, Rudolph Hoess, and Heinrich Himmler much more terrifying men than I found Hitler, but that is because I saw them as three natural men making choices in their knowable lives, none of the three was already implanted in me as the inexplicable symbol of the conditions they governed. Certainly theater companies, actors, scholars, will argue about the most authentic or effective way to stage and perform Ibsen’s plays, but the piety and passion that goes into the quest to identify Shakespeare the man and identify the gospel versions of his plays is a one-of-a-kind argument in culture. Rosenbaum’s books tell stories about the drive to explain extremity, without competing for an explanation. 
I have a bookcase full of books about Bob Dylan. In one of them, you can find a capsule summary of nearly every documented action of Bob Dylan’s life and history from 1902 to 1995. In another one, you can read a chapter titled “Is Bob Dylan Also Among The Prophets?” In another one, you can read detailed descriptions of ordinary people’s accidental and fleeting interactions with Bob Dylan: what he said, what he wore, the expressions on his face, how tall or not he appeared. It is not hard to find evidence that this life is already fashioned in popular and critical imaginations as a kind of extremity.
Here’s the thing with stories: it just is a fact that when you come into a story midway, you’re at a loss. In a story, events cause other events, and you need to follow the pathways of meanings according to a sequence. The great bloviating world of postmodern *thought* has plenty to say about false narrative and let’s just not invite them to this party. Because our party is going on full swing without them, if indeed one became a serious Bob Dylan fan anytime in the last, oh, 30 years. Marshall is spot on about the unique achievement of the NET–unlike other long-lived stars, Bob Dylan has created a new audience for himself in the latter chapters of his story, an audience that does not understand that they shouldn’t get the story because they started it late. There are those among us who became interested in Bob Dylan through hearing Blood on the Tracks, or Time Out Of Mind, or–and I testify these people exist–Self-Portrait. These albums become keystones in these fans’ own relationship with Bob Dylan, and each of these relationships should have its own chronology. If a person is turned on in a big way to Dylan when Planet Waves came out, or after being dragged to a show in 2007 with a friend who couldn’t give away an extra ticket, then for both of these people hearing Highway 61 Revisited will be a chapter in a story about Dylan and his audience that can’t be captured by the historical narrative.
I’ve heard Bob Dylan perform what I’d call irreverent versions of Desolation Row on 175th Street in Manhattan, and at 211 Stockwell Road in London. In my own small way, I’ve become part of what Marshall calls the “NET cocoon,” and it’s the way that time and space are oddly collapsed in this cocoon that’s what I have to address next.
Thanks again to Schuyler Lake for a provocative and uncannily well-timed comment regarding how to do justice to the demands of listening to Dylan, when one of those demands becomes an irresistible urge to describe the experience of what all this listening is doing to one. When I was in Hibbing for Dylan Days in 2007, the library there had a small exhibit of artwork inspired by Dylan. I loved the range of things on that wall: portraits of Dylan, literal illustrations of lyrics, figurative and abstract drawings and paintings that expressed some response the artist has had to Dylan’s work. Much of what I saw were ardent and intimate attempts to somehow get out a feeling about a song or songs. I could sympathize strongly with the impulse I felt behind these paintings and drawings: this visceral urge to make something of your connection with immeasurably strong art. “Why it almost DEMANDS serious discussion.” I agree, and I agree–troublingly–with the comment that Dylan “upends” the academy. 
There is a promiscuous and uncategorizable intelligence at work in his songs that excites the mind, and I find that the more stuff I’ve stuffed into my own head, the more my mind is excited by Dylan.
In a New York sessions recording of Idiot Wind, the tempo is slow and dolorous, the vocal is musing and pensive in its pain and bewilderment. In this version, the singer has never known springtime to turn so quickly into autumn. In the official Minnesota session recording of the song, the listener can barely keep up with the wild energies of the song, the vocal is a marvel of Sturm und Drang elocution (this is a vile phrase, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I’ll take my hits), and the singer has never known springtime to turn so slowly into autumn. In both versions, this lyric gets across the singer’s self-absorption, anguish, alienation from the ordinary world, time passes for him according to his madness, it is arresting and vivid that in the dirge-like version, time is too fast, and in the whirlwind version, time is too slow. The antonyms are not interchangeable, but they deliver the same affect. In the Biograph studio version of Abandoned Love, the singer tells the woman to “take off your heavy makeup and your shawl,” in the live Other End recording of the song, he tells her to “put on your heavy makeup and your shawl.” Put on your costume; take off your costume; disguise yourself; reveal yourself. Both lines get across the terrible conflicts between desire and freedom, and truth and illusion, that run through this song, and the lines are both powerful images of command and surrender, and, again, the antonyms are still not interchangeable. I am glad for the time I spent studying Saussure, and Wittgenstein, and Austin: these theoreticians of the arbitrariness of language give me a way to think about Dylan’s brilliant, artful, reckless use of language. His quickly and slowly prove what I am happy I knew before I ever listened to Bob Dylan, which is that art precedes theory—you can always experience in art itself the conditions described by theorists. His quickly and slowly make theories of signifiers and language games into uniquely ingenious and expressive art. What are for him fleeting moments in the work of composition or performance, are lit up for meas marvels of intuition because of what I’ve learned, and I’m grateful.
“I’ve been here all day, watching the shadows lengthen, I want to sleep but it’s too hot–and even in my inertia, I know time is slipping away . I know my lover’s letter is true and honest–and even so, she hasn’t moved me. I’ve lost my sense of humanity, whatever it is that binds me to other people–but I still know that everything beautiful hides pain. Sometimes what I am seems unbearable–but here I am, achieving the impossible and making you feel my numbness.” This summary of Not Dark Yet tries to get across the condition that governs so much of his later work: the moment in which reaching out and turning away are the same gesture; the state in which vitality and torpor are one feeling. And I’m so grateful that I’ve read and studied Beyond the Pleasure Principle, because Freud’s vision of life caught between two relentless calls–to come forward to more life and to go back to the inorganic–helps me see more clearly the strange and inimitable effects of Dylan’s late work, in which desire and apathy, energy and inertia can never leave each other alone.
I simply find that because of all the time I’ve spent studying, teaching, and writing about art and literature and theories about both, the more sheer fascination Dylan’s work excites in me. Every idea I’ve dealt with, every sensory experience I’ve enjoyed, every moral and spiritual turn I’ve taken through art–his work illuminates or challenges or upends, usually all at once. I am grateful that the strength of all this illumination and challenge and upending is in proportion to how much I’ve got in me for Idiot Wind and ain’t Talkin’ to work against.
It’s easy to be anti-academic about Dylan, and I think it is not so easy to be anti-intellectual about him. Among my favorite writers on Dylan are Paul Williams, Christopher Ricks, and Stephen Scobie: they try to do justice to what is complex and allusive and challenging in his work by finding critical voices that are ardent and supple and responsive. They take risks with how they write about Dylan, instead of trying to prove his value by forcing him into the canon with conventional academic language. (I realize that Paul Williams is technically the odd man out here, but just about everything he’s written on Bob Dylan has been a model to me of thoughtful and informed passion.) 
I’ll have my chance to try to prove that Dylan can be served righteously in an academic setting: I’m scheduled to deliver a paper on Bob Dylan on a panel during the upcoming Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston in February. I was invited to do this by David Gaines of Southwestern University in Texas, and we’ll be joined by Nick Smart of the College of New Rochelle. David Gaines and Nick Smart are both serious Dylan listeners, impressive scholars, fine minds, this whole thing is an opportunity and challenge to me that way exceeds anything I’ve done in my measly professional life. It really is a test to me of whether I can do justice to Bob Dylan in a setting that I agree confines his work. I’ll be working on drafts of this talk here, and welcome every single comment and criticism anyone offers, and will of course cite properly any help I get.
