I’m very easily overwhelmed, depleted by the infinite midrash accompanying Bob Dylan. I make flippant comments about how it will be in the year 4018:  I will be vindicated and the great minds of the day will agree with me that Knocked Out Loaded is a superior album. In 4018, the first thing we teach each new extraterrestrial species we meet is the words to Ain’t Talkin‘. But, regrettably and seriously, there are far too many people like myself who do feel that we’re sharing time and space with someone whose art moves us enough to capture our responses to it, and document it, and explain it, because we simply believe that someone even in 2018, and then in 2038, and then in 2098, will feel the same way and want some company and some information. And  there are so, so many of us, and keeping up is so, so tiring and such a distraction from the art itself. It’s a special kind of fatigue and demoralization that sets in when you feel obliged to keep up with the books and the interviews and the articles and the blogs and the photos of Bill Pagel, god bless him, renovating the Zimmermans’ little Duluth house in the hopes of getting it listed in the National Register of Historic Places before 4018.  And you still can’t give up trying to say something about what passed through you the last time you listened to, oh, Dignity.

Clinton Heylin–high on the list of Obligatory Midrash– dons his Ephod, tirelessly composes, and produces the second volume of his annotated  catalogue of the original songs of Bob Dylan, their sources, occasions, intentions, effects, and values. The book is titled Still on the Road, a pretty clear falling-off from the title of the first volume, Revolution in the Air. The revolution, the transformation, which even occurred in the air and unbound by laws of gravity, apparently is done.  We’re still moving along, though, with all that being on the road implies: some liberty, some desultoriness, some adventure, some bickering,  some discovery, some tedium, all  governed by maps and the rules of the road and gravity.  I went straight to  Dignity, a song of particularly self-replenishing gloriosity for myself.  Heylin performs the necessary rituals on this song, in a brisk tour de force demonstration of his many fluencies:     “In one of those rare candid sections in his autobiography,”:  Clinton Heylin can evaluate the quality of intention in Dylan’s utterances. “It could be argued that the one song which defined the general artistic direction on all four of Dylan’s all-original eighties albums ended up being discarded–leaving a gaping hole at the heart of each released artefact”–Heylin’s critical acumen diagnoses the artist’s decisions and  determines that recordings are  whole or incomplete artefacts, and declares prognoses and/or prescribes remedies. “From now on the recording history gets messy”-- Heylin’s research provides reliable chronologies of events.“On the track sheet, it even says ‘transfer [to both channels?] and boost,’ like it needed highlighting”–  Heylin understands recording technology. “On March 29 [1995], at a show in Brixton, London, he delivered the definitive ‘Dignity’ vocal..”–Heylin’s access to Dylan’s recordings and performances is comprehensive, and his judgment is reliable. “JJ Jackson…turn[ed] the song inside and out without ever once getting in an inspired vocalist’s way”–Heylin can read a live performance  cool and vernacular:   we can get  thoroughness and accuracy from other sources, but Clinton Heylin can be a hip critic on top of all them facts. And so Clinton Heylin, his Ephod spattered righteously with the entrails of Dignity, rests, and turns to his next purpose–Handle with Care.

For right now, I’ll stick with Dignity. Dignity’s etymological  roots are in honor, and privilege, and worth, and proper, and fitting. Honor is exalted, privilege is the propers of superiority, but just proper is just correct. We don’t find this word comfortably to hand these days: we may use it to  describe an elderly person who is well-groomed and uncomplaining. We may use it to describe,  in a faintly disingenuous way,  someone whose posture,  grooming,  and elocution remain presentable despite sustained public humiliation, or suffering, or both. Dignity in currency today  describes my relief and gratitude that your appearance does not embarrass me nor make an unpleasant appeal to my sympathy. To acknowledge your dignity also buys me a penny’s worth of  self-love–I relish for a moment my own compassion, and the gracious taste required to know dignity when I see it. I am not a churl, am I.

But Dignity, the  song, embarrasses us.  The singer’s odyssey in search of honor and privilege and worth and proper teases us awfully. The hero allows us to laugh with and at him as he serves up witty images and also serves up himself as The Innocent Fool asking cops to help him, and keeps on his tireless and futile and occasionally truly heroic way.   We are amused and delighted and provoked to thoughtfulness by his quest. No version of this song is boring. And  the sound of the word dignity is central to any performance of the song.  Dylan’s magnificent enunciation of those dental consonants, “dig-ni-ty” — is  a hair’s breadth away from being thespian or pedantic. He voices the very word on the razor’s edge of parody and solemnity–what he’s looking for,  whether his quest is indeed foolish or heroic, is right there in the word every time he sings it. And this razor’s edge works through the song, and we start to hear the sound of what it may be to take something seriously. To risk foolishness and failure to find something to take seriously.

There is so much looking in this song. The singer looks for dignity, and his quest reveals others looking for it.  The song is thick with people looking through, looking into, looking for, looking within. The wise man indeed looks in the blade of grass, and finds eternity, and  the quest is over for the wise man. He is where the song should end, but that’s where it begins–the singer faces down that he hasn’t learned this lesson, and keeps looking. (If wit can be literally sublime, you don’t have to look much further than what Bob Dylan can do in fewer than 10 words.) Poor man looking through painted glass, for dignity. Here is a  poor man looking through a stained glass window. From the outside, looking through into the church,  he looks for  the worth that a community of the faithful in a house of faith promises the poorest. And he looks for the immanent and invisible dignity that faith believes is housed even in an empty church. It is the special privilege of the poorest to appeal to this immanent dignity. If the poor man is inside, looking out through the painted glass, he wonders if the dignity imputed to him, felt by him, in this space,  will endure outside that window, back in the world where he is simply another needy nuisance among millions.

Sympathy for the poor man’s looking, and the consolation he seeks from dignity,  is easy for me to manufacture. So too for  the thin man looking at his last meal — not knowing where the next will come from, nor even if it will come, and the poignant insight that the   starving’s man hunger  is less powerful than his desire for the dignity to endure his hunger with honor. These are fine-grained and clearly-felt images that I can respond to smoothly. The Englishman, though, is not so crystalline. He is certainly clear to see: combing his hair back, biting his bullet, looking within–he seems a virtuoso stiff-upper-lip  caricature.  The black hot wind is the problem. That’s the wind of Empire, blowing power and greed and something malodorous  called  *moral order*  thousands of miles from the cool and pleasant land of England. What’s his dignity, and what’s the pain he’s got to bite the bullet against? Is this a moment of self-knowledge? And that stranger in the Mexican night seems another difficult lesson in dignity and self-knowledge. He’s drawn irresistibly, as people so often are in Dylan’s songs, to a window through which  the fallen dark world appears as a true nightmare. A stranger alone in a strange place, all he sees are hideous threatening parasites–as indeed all creatures may appear to us when we’re strangers in a strange land. And he searches them for dignity, when perhaps he should question whether his own vision  may be corrupted by fear and isolation. (I’d also like to add that some of Dylan’s  lyrics offer a unique  thrill when first heard, and searching every bloodsucking thing in sight is certainly one of them.)

I like very much that the song can provide for me the experience of a quest, in which my search for dignity in the song hits dead ends as does the singer’s: I don’t know what Mary Lou could tell him, and why it would cost her her life. I can imagine, but I would be wrong. Prince Phillip will talk for money and anonymity—why is there a price, what’s he afraid of? It’s terrifically clever and suggestive, but an unnerving image also. I could be made to believe that the one true moment of dignity in the song is when the singer stands at the window, with the maid–they’ll always be silent to us, and what they see they only see together, and there is a beautiful brief calm to this tiny mystery, but it doesn’t end the quest. I know I will never have the ears to be initiated into the mystery of the tongues of angels and the tongues of men. I like very much  that in one tableau  the soul of a nation is under a the knife, and death is standing in the doorway of life, and in the same house, a man fights with his wife over dignity.  Nothing is worth the soul of a nation, or the threshold of life and death, if it isn’t worth a an argument between a man and his wife.

For me the whole quixotic romp  stops–and begins again–where the vultures feed. I’ve been down where the vultures feed/I would have gone deeper/But there wasn’t any need. All great heroes have to visit the underworld. They are heroes because they enter the world of the dead in terror of their souls, not in terror of their lives. But our Foolish Knight touches down exactly where life feeds on death, which is not the same as an underworld.  An underworld is a cul-de-sac, it is the no-turning-back, it is final. But there’s life where the vultures feed, where endless death feeds life’s insatiable hunger. This is the awful cycle, the awful conundrum, of life that would starve without death, and our hero recognizes the sheer fact of it, and realizes that even this doesn’t end his journey. All heroes must return from the underworld, back to life with the knowledge of what they’ve seen that no living man has. But our hero goes as far as any of us can go–we can all look straight at where the vultures feed,  submit to the death-eating fact of life and convince ourselves this fact makes all Quests futile and meaningless.  Or we can  return to the uproarious and neverending Search for that which is worthy, proper and fitting. Even though we can see for ourselves that we may be honoring vapors and illusions and eternal enigmas….then again, we can see for ourselves that we may not be. Admitting how much is at stake, and how hapless his odyssey has been already, our hero ends at the edge of the lake. For a moment we’re anxious–the edge of the lake? he’s given up. In the next moment we’re laughing at ourselves and our fears. He’s only starting the journey again. And we’re grateful, more grateful than we can say, but we waste all this time trying to say it anyway.

Our commitment is to soliciting critiques and examinations of Dylan’s work that can enjoy a respectable shelf-life and provoke lively discussions in the here and now.

The editors realize that competing with the indispensable resources Derek Barker provides in Isis, or the up-to-the-minute newsgathering of Expecting Rain is futile. It’s been a while since a strong print journal on Dylan has been up and running in the US, and the editors hope to fill that hole. Each issue will feature an assembly of writings on a theme as well as separate pieces on a variety of topics. Issue One features Oh Mercy as the theme, to honor the 20th anniversary of the album’s release, as well as a close reading of Masked and Anonymous, an interview with two New Yorkers who have provided invaluable service to generations of Dylan audiences, and other pieces. Contributors to this issue include notable Dylan writers Stephen Scobie, Lee Marshall, John Hinchey, and  Andrew Muir, as well as strong new voices, bound quite handsomely . You can read more about Montague Street, and order a copy if you like: http://www.montaguestreetjournal.com/ (this URL may work better if you copy and paste instead of clicking–thank you, and sorry for the nuisance, am working on it)

I know a lot about this because I’m one of the editors. I am especially happy with the name of the journal, since I grew up about 10 blocks from the Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, New York, featured in photos on the cover and inside the journal (taken by our gifted art director, Jesse Tobin). Is this the street from which stairs lead to a basement? We do not presume to answer.

Discovering how many excellent people come flying out of the woodwork when you invite them to donate their time and energy to writing about Bob Dylan was probably the greatest pleasure of the many hundred hours of work this project demanded. Now is the best part, though, getting feedback and responses from more good people we haven’t met yet,  and starting and nourishing conversations worth having.

The people responsible for Montague Street:

Nina Goss and Lucas Stensland: Editors

Jesse Tobin: Art Director

Charles Haeussler: Business Manager

Visit Montague Street if you’re interested, and let us know what you think.

Luckily, we can do better up at the 92nd St Y than my impertinence, and last night we enjoyed the company of Seth Rogovoy, author of the book, Bob Dylan: Prophet/Mystic/Poet, now available in hardcover from Scribner’s. I had tracked down Seth through his active and engaging blog, and he very generously agreed to make a trip into the city to discuss his work with our class. I did read the book prior to meeting him –and to comply with what I believe is now a law governing bloggers and electronic commerce, I reveal that I bought the book myself at the Barnes and Noble on Lexington Avenue and 86th Street.

I confess that I feared the book would make uncompromising and suffocating claims for Dylan’s essential Jewishness, and I am happy to be proven wrong. The book tells the story of Dylan’s career as a story of the demands of  being called to prophecy. In one person may coexist a certain vision of life’s conditions, a certain gift of articulating the vision, and a goading conscience that fights vagaries of one’s own energy and will and the attention span of one’s audience to persist in yoking the gift to the vision. The work of the yoking, and not just the privilege of the gift, becomes the arc of a life. Prophecy may be described this way. If  Jewish history,  scripture,  and ritual have provided one prevailing vessel for lives that play out these characteristics, then Seth Rogovoy does a fine and sane job of showing how Bob Dylan’s work can pilot this vessel of prophecy, and make room for Dylan to pilot other vessels.

Rogovoy’s talk began engagingly, way down on earth, in high school where he found Bob Dylan only after enjoying the spiritual sustenance of John Denver and Seals and Crofts. And *found* Dylan in that very big way that demonstrates what I had heard Christopher Ricks say a few weeks ago: “You don’t discover Dylan, Dylan discovers you.” It was Planet Waves that did it. And since I am eager to start a crusade that yanks this album into  center stage as a thing of greater beauty and depth than it’s generally granted, I was delighted to hear that Planet Waves was the door for Seth Rogovoy on which was written  Say Friend and Enter. My delight turned to bitter vindictive envy when Rogovoy told us that he saw Renaldo and Clara in the actual movie theater. Twice.

Back to Planet Waves. Rogovoy noticed that Dylan’s publishing company was newly named Ram’s Horn Music. The ram’s horn is the ancient instrument,  called the Shofar, used to call Jews to repentance on different holy days. “The call to repentance,” Rogovoy said, channeling the energy of his original epiphany into our little room on 92nd St. “How much was apparent to me,”  he said, that Dylan’s music is itself a call to repentance. What do prophets do? They call to repentance, as a universal and communal act.   They “wake people up.”  Wake them up to their own accountability for the fallen state of the world. The Ram’s Horn called Rogovoy to a possible field of meaning for his relation to Dylan’s songs.

When Rogovoy’s personal life, as an adult, took him into intense and intimate study of the teachings and beliefs of his Jewish heritage, he could not hold back the fecundity of this field of meaning. “The texts I memorized as a schoolboy were the lyrics of Bob Dylan.” And as an adult, he is startled and, in a way, awoken by the sounds of these phrases in the Jewish scripture and teaching. What happens then is the growing desire to tell a story with the harvest he’s reaping of all these connections: Ezekiel and The Wicked Messenger.  Amos and Long Time Gone (which I had the great pleasure of playing for him upon learning he’d never heard Bob’s actual performance). Priestly blessings and Forever Young. Judges and Tombstone Blues. He talked about these connections with a spiritedness that was never proprietary–he relived the pleasure of discovering these echoes. I asked him if he was able to recall the early emotions he had as this field of meaning grew with the new discoveries. Did he feel a new intimacy with the artist who already spoke so powerfully to him? Or did Dylan’s art now have a new authority to it imputed by the seeding of the scriptural matter? Rogovoy answered,”Both.”

In Rogovoy’s book, the inventory is extensive and more often than not, the connections are unforced. I don’t think I’ll ever hear  Yom Kippur  in Not Dark Yet, and the connection between Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window and the life of David is highly provocative and will take a while to sink in. He works hard to place Slow Train Coming, Saved, and other gospel material in the context of Jewish theology, to support the argument that Dylan’s *conversion* had subtle but unmistakable ambiguities in his theological language. That Dylan’s work in 79-80 is  spiritually complex and not simplistic, I agree with. I would like to see more work done on this, to do deeper justice to Dylan’s addresses to Jesus, and  his experience of being revived because of a relation with the figure he conceives in Jesus, and the imagery of crucifixion in the songs and the sermons. This section of Rogovoy’s book invites more listening and thinking.

The chronological structure of the book sometimes locks Rogovoy into a summary and familiar listing of Dylan’s output and activities, and loses the momentum of the story of what contemporary prophecy may look like. The summary, though, is a reasonable overview, which takes into account other influences and sources.  I can see the book being a useful introductory text to less informed but curious and serious  listeners who wish to get an accessible comprehensive overview of Dylan’s career through this lens of Judaism. In this regard, the book makes a nice companion to Scott Marshall’s Restless Pilgrim, and although I fear this pairing may not please Seth Rogovoy, I mean it as praise to two worthwhile books on Dylan and spirituality.

Rogovoy’s talk of course could not cover the range of examples in the book, and Rogovoy also shared biographical information on Dylan and Jewish life, showing video clips. Who can ever get tired of those Chabad telethons?

Oops! Wrong photo!

Who can ever get tired of those Chabad telethons? Rogovoy used clips of these to illustrate Bob Dylan’s somewhat public presence in this community. This generally makes me feel uncomfortable because on the one hand, it’s got vestiges of *outing* to it,  which causes me  confused and inarticulable discomfort, and on the other hand, I just love Bob’s modest and awkward presence on these makeshift television sets, and his impeccable timing in responding to the rabbi’s excited spiel.

Most interesting was Rogovoy’s unearthing a source for the notorious Grammy speech, which is another unquenchably and bizarrely captivating performance piece. More Buster Keaton, I think, than Charlie Chaplin? Well, Rogovoy found the Orthodox text (commentary not scripture) in a book of blessings intended for newcomers to Orthodox observance in which appears “Even if I were so depraved my own mother and father would abandon me to my own devices, God would still gather me up and believe in my ability to mend my ways.” That Dylan was able to unreel this text, make small changes to suit that moment and the rhythm of his speech, and then to own that passage…remarkable. To find the Grammy speech flippant or just more enigmatic kookiness from the supreme enigmatic kook, is not something I can ever do. And I thank Seth Rogovoy for bringing this material to my attention.

Rogovoy used a phrase I intend to steal and use at every possible opportunity: he referred to the “unaccountable heft and profundity of Dylan’s work.” That is simply beautiful and true, and I believe Christopher Ricks himself would give the thumbs up to the felicity of the phrase. What Seth Rogovoy does best is not to prove that Bob Dylan is 83% Jewish in 1987 or 59% Jewish in 2002. What he does best is show us what it looks like for Seth Rogovoy himself to be grateful for the unaccountable heft and profundity.  Read the book as an affecting personal narrative as well as for the useful inventory of allusions, and if Seth Rogovoy is speaking in your area, I strongly recommend making the trip to hear him, he’s very much in-the-moment himself as a speaker, and instantly sympatico for other passionate and committed Dylan listeners.

http://philoctetes.org/Past_Programs/The_Inventions_of_Bob_Dylan

The Philoctetes Center holds its talks on the top floor of a brownstone on East 82nd St. There was much to occupy one’s attention while waiting for the talk to begin. On the walls of this room were enormous metal decorations, like monstrous bundt pans.  People scurried about with great purpose, doing things with microphones and chairs. Someone scurried in with xeroxed papers and laid them on four chairs. Each paper read in large bold capital letters: RESERVED FOR GREIL MARCUS. I had just figured out  that the other three chairs were being held for Mr. Marcus’s food taster, juggler, and punka wallah, when a fresh scurrying broke out and I heard one staff member whisper to another “He’s not coming. Not coming.” And the papers were whisked off the seats, freeing them for ordinary buttocks of the realm. Professors Wilentz and Ricks manifested themselves, Prof. Wilentz quite as affable and comfortable as he was in the much more informal setting of our class at 92Y, and Prof. Ricks wearing a suit and no tie, which always has that Cosa Nostra look. They took places on facing couches, had little microphones clipped to them.

The gentleman introducing the talk explained proudly that the bundt pans were left over from the previous talk, in which author Brian Greene and scholar Elaine Scarry discussed the beauty of mathematics. There is nothing lightweight about the Philoctetes Center, as you can see.  I’m sorry I missed that talk, for what better way to introduce Bob Dylan than with a conversation on Facts, Truth, and Beauty with experts on physics and philosophy. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone, or something like.

Profs. Ricks and Wilentz are a contrast in forms of amiability, and that kind of quick wittedness that is able to find exactly the object it needs at any moment without rummaging about. Prof Wilentz brings up Woody Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd in connection with Christmas in the Heart, while Prof Ricks quotes Blake on the topic of appropriation (“Though they are not mine, I call them mine”).  Prof Wilentz plugs his son’s Web site, while Prof Ricks stands up to act out what happened when his elderly father attended one of his talks.  Those of you who’ve seen and heard Prof Ricks might agree with me that Christopher Ricks is ideally cast to play Christopher Ricks in The Christopher Ricks Story. I want to state here that Ricks in person is a welcome counteragent to the narrator  Ricks, whose  riffing and punning characterizes so much of Visions of Sin, and  pushes the book towards an archness that can leave those who don’t listen deeply to Dylan complacent in their resistance to his art.  In conversation, watched by a clock, there are checks and balances to Ricks’ riffs, there is his visible emphasis on the seriousness of what Dylan does and has done. The talk that ensued was well-served by  their matched wits, different styles, and a shared commitment to the self-replenishing work of listening closely to Bob Dylan’s music and finding things to say about it. The topic of The Inventions of Bob Dylan, moderated by Matthew von Unwerth, a scholar and a psychoanalyst-in-training, was supposed to be about “Dylan’s ongoing conversation with tradition.”  von Unwerth barely recited his introduction when Prof Ricks, not unamiably, put the kibosh on “inventions.” “Dylan doesn’t invent, he discovers.”  And so began a fine and discursive ramble through Perhaps The Discoveries of Bob Dylan and Other Things. There were swells of insight and feeling and a steady command of our attention.  A few of the swells:

Ricks says to von Unwerth, who related his affinity for Bob Dylan: “You didn’t discover Dylan, he discovered you. As he discovered all of us. Bob Dylan is not afraid of being just like everyone else.”  I like this twist on the commonplace of art’s universality. We hear ourselves named by great art, don’t we. It recognizes us as ourselves.

Wilentz:  ”Bob Dylan is an historian unlike any other.”  And this comment refreshed the by-now tedious discussion of Bob Dylan’s channeling the vocabulary and music of bygone bygones.  How is he a historian? Because he can make the conditions of the past present in my attention. The world of Together Through Life summons a world that just doesn’t match up to the world I’m sitting in while I play the record. Village priests and ships in harbors and memories that overtake this moment right now, and Houston seems incredibly far away–one thing a historian can do is simply make you believe that the conditions of the past were  actual and livable, not the quaint compromises or ignorances of people who knew and had so much less than we do. Eliot came up a fair amount during the afternoon, so we can pull him in here too, with his famous comment on our knowing more than what people knew in the past–”yes, and they are what we know.” Perhaps one thing a historian can do is make this palpable.  Wilentz meant this in a less abstract way, of course, and he praised Dylan’s concrete historical knowledge: “Factually, he’s pretty good.”

Ricks claimed the Christmas album is not really “religious” and a woman quickly pointed out that the album ends on the word “amen.” “But it still does not have the depth of really religious songs,” said Ricks. Which led him to this fascinating observation: “All great religious art has to be accusable of blasphemy.”  Now this seems to satisfy the notion that great art ignites revolutions in consciousness. Great art is not safe, it is not more-of-the-same-me-in-the-world. In Ricks’ view, these revolutions would be “discoveries” and not “novelties”, not the intoxication of a trick, but real blasphemy–a calling into question of received truths. I admire very much, I enjoy and learn from, writing on Dylan by authors whose religious lives are fed by his work, in ways that are different from my own spiritual life. I’m thinking of Stephen Webb, Michael Gilmour, Stephen Hazan-Arnoff. And while these writers feel their religious consciousnesses are animated, or refreshed, or challenged to new ways of being religious, they do not see themselves in contest with Dylan’s songs. I venture to say that Ricks’ idea appeals to atheists who wish to make good sense of the sensuous power of great religious art. If I can feel that the Sistine Chapel, George Herbert’s poems, and Bob Dylan’s songs rouse and transform me, despite that the traditions called upon in these works do not themselves answer the big questions of my life, it would be consoling and aggrandizing to believe that these works are somehow deeply transgressive of the traditions. I say take up a maybe (maybe not) harder challenge, and start with the human commonality (Prof Ricks likes this word) from which springs the spiritual impulse and the Sistine Chapel and In the Garden.

Wilentz: On the issue of appropriation/plagiarism, Prof Wilentz is wonderfully–inspiringly–irritable. Bob Dylan “inhabits” everything he steals. Foreign material becomes his. Prof. Wilentz talked of Confessions of a Yakuza, “My old man’s  like some feudal lord, he’s got more lives than a cat.” Well, the phrase “feudal lord” refers to something in Japanese  culture and history that is “completely different” from what it would mean to an American audience. This seems obvious, but I think Wilentz is pointing to the way an alien twig, when grafted onto one of Dylan’s songs, needs a botanist to show us where the graft begins and ends. The phrase calls attention  to itself, while it also scans and rhymes along with the other verses, and then supports the images in Floater of the fatigue that power can induce. Prof Wilentz did say he sometimes wishes Bob would credit some of his sources some of the time.

There was more, much more, to this winding road, and I was told the talk was streaming on YouTube but I can’t find it there. A Q&A session that, like all question and answer sessions, had almost no comments worth the interruption of the featured speakers.

Here’s the moment I’ll not ever forget. Christopher Ricks held up the paperback of Visions of Sin, and made great witty sport of the fact that the photo of Bob on the cover, in the stairwell of Cafe Wha? I believe, was also used in the CD of No Direction Home-and the cigarette in his mouth was airbrushed from the reproduction on the CD. We all had a good laugh at that Puritanical nonsense, and then Sean Wilentz said, with a warmth both mild and serious, “I wish he would quit smoking.” And Ricks’ wit left him for one moment–you could see it leave his face–and he said, “Yes, I do too, I wish he would quit smoking.”  And that, my little Neptunian, is what it looks like when you actually share the same time-space continuum with an artist whose work can marshal the forces of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination: you are blessed in ways you can’t find words for, and you’re too close to mortality for comfort.

And I feel certain that both Christopher Ricks and Sean Wilentz would have much  preferred to be cast as extras in the Must Be Santa video than be asked to explain Bob Dylan. Watch it yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLZ8LPIh4Xc&feature=player_embedded

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.

Ricks’ exhausting punning-for-the-sake-of-punning style suggests a lack of “seriousness” about the endeavor. Why not write about Dylan as he writes about Beckett or Keats or Milton, i.e., in a style he finds fit for a “great poet.”?

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
.

On I go in my search for writing about art that has real hineini in it. Hineini is “Here I am,” and it’s how Abraham answered Isaac on the way up Mt. Moriah. Just that–here I am.

Here’s an example that helps me identify what this voice looks like: http://www.slate.com/id/2229224/.  I’m not going to summarize it because I would rather people read it for themselves. What I like best about this piece that Ron Rosenbaum doesn’t presume Nabokov’s significance. He doesn’t write the essay from an implicit agreement with the reader that Vladimir Nabokov automatically merits this kind of attention. Instead, he works out his relation to Nabokov in this public forum, as the motive and justification for the essay. How is my attention an instrument for Nabokov’s prose? is the question Rosenbaum answers, and from that singular attention grows the curiosity and labor that produced an essay most worth reading.

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.

Moore does witty justice to the strange mixture of insolence, cojones, professional discipline, irreality, and image-making that only Bob Dylan can pour into three days in Madison, Wisconsin. 

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. 

When I listen to Real Live, I hear a terrific guitarist in the act of figuring out how to integrate his gifts into the peculiar demands and energies of performing with Bob Dylan. Mick Taylor’s gorgeous streams of note-bending solos sometimes upstage Bob Dylan’s vocals. Sometimes Taylor comes in too soon. Sometimes I can actually hear him pause, expecting Dylan to resume singing,  then Dylan lets the moment go longer than Taylor’s timing, and a little edgy pause, a moment of vertigo,  happens in the music onstage. These awkwardnesses are surely awkward. And because we’re listening to two great performers, the arguable  ill-matching can also give a tension and life to these performances that would be absent with weak performers. For me,  it all works in I and I, and partly because Dylan wrote the song with the voice he’s singing it with on this recording, so his phrasing  here has a particular strength and confidence and the trade-offs between the vocals and Taylor’s solos are thrilling and not clumsy.

Then there is the Tangled Up in Blue on Real Live, where Dylan takes us through  the song like a wormhole, you hold on for dear life, I think I know this song and now it’s exactly in the moment of shattering but never coming apart, the scans and rhymes impossibly holding together, the song impossibly depositing you in an alternate universe that is still Tangled Up in Blue. And I wonder whether night after night of singing alongside Mick Taylor’s guitar playing, the tortuous and insistent solos–could that kind of musical improvisation have influenced Dylan’s verbal improvisations, so that somehow this relation between music and words answers for  one small part of the outrageous inventiveness of that Tangled Up in Blue?

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.

Light surveys the performing career in the metier of a smart, knowledgeable music critic: there is a certain immediate, contingent value to a live music performance. Dylan and the Dead is “abysmal.” “Whatever one thinks of the content” of the gospel material,”there is no question that Dylan and his tight little band were making some glorious music.” Farm Aid was a “tough and rocking” performance. This is what we want from a smart music reviewer, thumbs ups and thumbs downs, respectful fluency in the vernacular of popular music, a comprehensive overview of an important career.

But if some of the members of the high culture board of admissions seem to be  at a stage in Bob Dylan’s career where they want to admit him to the club–examine and locate him as a central culture-making figure–does the fact of his performing career get in the way? Do we just not have a language that suits the special synthesis of composition and performance that’s just intrinsic to what Dylan does? A language for the way different musicians may have created different aural environments that impacted the timbre and phrasing of Dylan’s voice, and even the lyrics he composes? What about his manipulation of his appearance, his distinctive consciousness of being 0n-camera as opposed to being on stage? What about the idea of a performer’s relationship with his audience? What about the evolution of Dylan the musician? In the context of this kind of criticism, is it enough to say that Real Live is mediocre and Dylan and the Dead is abysmal?  Why not examine the role and influence of other musicians on these performances, the state of Dylan’s own musicianship in these tours,  if indeed they are stations in a career that merits the attention given the most significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life?

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……….

 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.

Lee Marshall’s 2007 book, Bob Dylan: The Neverending Star tells a story about Dylan’s life that tries to theorize the extremity without entirely  simplifying it.  The theme that coheres his story is stardom, and his method is contemporary critical theory. What we talk about when we talk about Bob Dylan is values and beliefs that appear authentic and self-justifying: “Stardom is intricately bound up with two key ideologies of modern society: individualism and democracy,”  Marshall writes. Modern society creates the star as the representative of these ideologies. We impute to stars the quality of being “an ultimate individual”  whose greatness depends on luck, talent, and effort, rather than the nominal and automatic superiority that’s the aristocrat’s stardom. A star is a commodity, a star feeds commerce, and the biggest stars are entire commercial solar systems on their own. Stars must be representative within their fields, they must become symbols, and symbols are easily reproduced and commodified, for they bring their whole constellation of values and meanings with them every time their image appears in any context. And stars “unite subjectivities”–here I think we do not have a modern/postmodern idea: It is a very non-modern fact that public individuals create communities around their presence and actions, and these communities may be manipulated to benefit those in power.

And so Marshall uses these definitions to narrate the peaks and valleys and plateaus of Dylan’s career in terms of Dylan’s stardom: the argument is not so much whether New Morning is not as good as Blonde on Blonde.  Marshall’s critique would ask us to see how the changing relationship between Dylan and his audience, based in part on changing values and meanings for rock music,  tells us how these albums are different. Marshall stays head to head with Dylan’s persistent and mercurial stardom, and Marshall respects Dylan’s own acute consciousness of himself as a symbol. [N:B: Here I have to say that I didn't know what to do with the fact that Chronicles only appears here in as an example of Dylan's late output, and is not used as a source throughout the book. Chronicles is Dylan's record of his consciousness, he is merciless in exposing his *subjectivity*  across decades of shifting winds of change. Why omit his voice? What is Marshall doing here that I'm missing  in my ignorance?]

Marshall confesses to being something of a fan, and this saves him trying to occupy the  captain’s tower, the fantasy land of most contemporary theory from which the writer surveys the tiny swarming creatures below him or her with very heavy dull tools. He really wants to respect Dylan’s songwriting and performance gifts, and set those gifts into widening circles of cultural shifts, politics, social change. This sounds not at all new when I set it out like this. The most original bits are when Marshall works hard to make the concept of performance, the singular here-and-now  of a singer singing a song, integral to his examination, and his discussion of NET, which I want to deal with on its own.

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.

 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.

1.  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.
2. “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.
3. 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.

SCHUYLER LAKE’S COMMENT EXCERPTED BELOW:

The very fact that it is so hard to classify, that it transgresses so many boundaries, and yet is so obviously influential and important, is what makes it worthy of serious discussion. Why it almost DEMANDS serious discussion. If that is, one is of an academic persuasion, which you have confessed to being, and which I have rambled around the edges of being, my life long. Dylan himself is most emphatically NOT academic. He has made a point of deliberately divorcing himself and all his work from anything that even has a whiff of academia to it. It might even be reasonably said that his work is a kind of spit in the face of academia. No wonder then, that it is so hard to analyse from a traditional platform. He simply overwhelms the academy, he upstages it, he upends it, and they don’t know where to put him. That alone

Below I’ve pasted most of a comment made by Schuyler Lake (hope I didn’t blow the name here) in response to my post regarding Richard Goldstein’s 2006 essay on Bob Dylan. I like so much the emphasis here on the error of pigeonholing any aspect of Dylan’s work, and the description of this work as a totality that is “both magnificent and self-contradictory” is simply terrific. Magnificent and self-contradictory–the deeper and longer one listens to Dylan the more transparent this becomes, and it is exhilarating  work to engage the contradictions without trying to resolve them, and also without making the sophomoric mistake that the contradictions add up to one big nihilism. I love the catalog here “(c)ompassion, humor, rage, humility, sensuality, delicacy, brutal honesty…all coexist within the canon.”  They all coexist in Idiot Wind. 

 These comments strike at something crucial to me in Dylan’s art–it may be experienced as a collage of emotions and values, in which love or faith or time or honesty or compassion or humility are viewed in hundreds of different lights, from hundreds of different perspectives, and listeners form their own narratives from the glimpses. I think the challenge is to accept the “totality of effect” of this collage of songs and performances, and not see it as a Magic Eye game in which some fundamental and essential shape–Bob Dylan’s political disillusionment, or Bob Dylan’s real religious belief, or Bob Dylan the American icon–emerges for you and everyone else has got to see it too. If I start squinting around for the naked parts in Duchamps’ painting, I’ve stopped seeing with Duchamps’ eyes.

Let’s say I consider this painting misogynistic. The women here flaunt a sexuality that’s unconstrained, enticing, intimidating. Can’t compete with this. At the same time, they live in a treacherous world of sharp edges and their faces are devolving into masks that make their heads primal, grotesque, emblems of savagery, ritual, desire that is obscure and forbidden. This female sexuality is both snare and weapon, it is pictured as idealized and dangerous, and it’s the women’s own fault for being so….so much what they are. Misogyny–as opposed to the reactionary or the patriarchal–seems to me to happen when the feminine is depicted as treacherous and destructive at the same proportions as it is seductive. It makes women feel shitty. It can make women feel both inadequate and toxic at the same time. This feeling  is not something I find much of at all in Bob Dylan’s work. I find it often in Leonard Cohen, and in Philip Roth, for comparison. Is it in Sara? The real woman turned into a fantastic mystical-mythological ideal and set repeatedly against images of motherhood and actual ordinary life? Is it in Man of Peace, where the singer introduces a silent and apparently trapped woman to the evil lurking in the world, and brings himself to the brink of identifying with that evil, all as a kind of seduction? 

Most often I feel women something like this in Dylan’s songs. Women who are yearned for, supplicated, spurned, cajoled, and who remain their silent selves, in important ways free of the singer and of the song, as Hopper’s partly undressed, exposed woman is both offered to the viewer and protected in her psychological space. Dylan’s women travel to Spain or Tangier without him; they sleep and dream their own dreams while he watches them; they have faith stronger than his that he craves like love; they don’t even look anything like their own passport; they are on their way out the door, leaving him behind. 

 What Schuyler Lake’s comments here helped me think about is pretty much this: if you don’t want the whole messy awful gamut of human life, best leave Bob Dylan alone. You’ll find plenty there that’s not very pretty, and it’s tempting to start thinking you’re too good for the ugliness. That’s when you’ve missed the whole boat.

HERE’S THE PORTION OF THIS COMMENT THAT WAS POSTED ON JAN 12 AT HARD IS THE FORTUNE OF ALL WOMANKIND. THANKS AGAIN.

“Taken as a whole, Dylan’s work is nearly impossible to classify. And while there certainly are elements of the mysogenistic in it, of the patriarchal, the reactionary…or what have you…these elements in no way add up to a totality of the effect that Dylan has created.

“Goldstein takes umbrage at the fact that Dylan’s work has recieved so much more attention than that of Lennon, Cohen, Simon, Mitchell, et. al. I agree these are all superb singer-poets, deserving of more attention than they’ve had, but they aren’t in the same league as Dylan. I’d be prepared to back up this assertion, but it would take a lot more writing than I’m willing to do at the moment.

“There has always been a strong prophetic element in Dylan’s art, an almost Old Testament aspect to it. But this aspect no more defines it, than many other elements define it. Compassion, humor, rage, humility, sensuality, delicacy, brutal honesty…all coexist within the canon. To regard this entire body of work (which as a whole is both maginificent and self-contradictory) in light of just one or two ideological stances, misses the point of it.

“It seems to me that here, Goldstein is conflating Dylan (as a man) with Dylan’s art. Many critics do that, but it’s a mistake. An artist’s work (if he is a good artist) stands wholly independent of his person. Or in Dylan’s case, that would be personae.