The photo at left shows the B. Altman department store as it looked in 1924, occupying the block between 34th and 35th streets, 5th Avenue to Madison Avenue. Some New Yorkers of my chronology may remember being dragged around Altman’s in an eternity of torpor while their mother looked for a blouse to match her blue slacks.
Here’s the same building in 2009. It’s been turned into the CUNY Graduate Center on one side and Oxford Univ Press on the other. I attended a talk and performance there on September 17. It was titled, “Bob Dylan: American Poet. The Musical Settings Inspired by Dylan’s Lyrics.” The focus of the evening was the work of composer John Corigliano, and of New York musician Howard Fishman. Mr. Corigliano has taken the lyrics to seven songs and set them to his own music, to create a song cycle he calls “Mr Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.” Note the very careful preposition in that title, which ambiguously links the work to Dylan. Howard Fishman may be familiar to some of you through his performances of The Basement Tapes material. Greil Marcus, who requires no explanation, moderated a discussion with Corigliano and Fishman, then a pianist and a soprano performed songs from Corigliano’s song cycle, followed by Fishman’s performance.
Here is something concrete and immutable and eternal that John Corigliano and Bob Dylan have in common: an Academy Award. They also have Pulitzer prizes in common but I don’t know if you get an object for display with that award. In his conversation with Marcus, Corigliano told the story of his artistic relation with Bob Dylan: he was not familiar with Dylan’s songs, as he had been listening to contemporary classical music in the 1960s, although he was “fascinated” by The Beatles’ music, which he found “natural and ingenious.” He admitted it may have come to pass that as he sat in a coffeehouse in the early 1960s, “sipping his cappuccino,” Bob Dylan could indeed have been singing within earshot, but Corigliano did not *hear* the song being performed. Folksinging entails “simple melody,” and “the song stays the same—verse, chorus. verse, chorus.” A folk song “does not change emotionally verse to verse.” The apparent monotony of folk songs deafened John Corigliano to distinguishing any one song, and therefore he came to Bob Dylan’s work “with innocence.”
What Corigliano wanted for his project was “an American poet.” A “great poet,” but a certain kind of great poet: “a great poet who speaks to everyone.” Something brought Bob Dylan to his attention, and he “sent away” for a book of Bob Dylan’s lyrics.
He found the lyrics of this man’s songs poetic, and set about using the lyrics of seven songs, and his own music, to “tell a story of political awakening.” The “Prelude” is Mr. Tambourine Man, followed by what we know as Clothes Line Saga but which was referred to as Clothes Line Blues, then Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, All Along the Watchtower, Chimes of Freedom, concluding with the “Postlude” of Forever Young.
Corigliano wanted an “amplified soprano” voice to perform his compositions. He wanted the effect of and opera singer’s “technique” without the sound of operatic singing. He talked of the amplified voice being more “natural” than the unamplified performance of an opera.
Corigliano and Greil Marcus talked about Masters of War and Clothes Line Saga. Marcus mentioned Viggo Mortensen’s cover of Masters of War at a Howard Zinn tribute, in which Aragon’s performance ”cut the song free” while still retaining its “vehemence” and “desperation.” Corigliano sought “ways of treating emotionally dense material” by “play(ing) against it.” The music is “distant (distinct?) from the savagery of the words.” He talked about the importance of the last line of Clothes Line Saga: the shutting of the door on the political reality of the world outside–then the door opened again to let the wind of political awareness come blowin’ in.
Howard Fishman and Greil Marcus talked about I’m Not There. Marcus’s description of the song was Big Letter True, and gorgeous: he talked about the inaudible lyrics as conveying textures of feeling that make the listener feel that everything is at stake for all of us: the singer, the woman in the song, me listening. Howard Fishman was so taken with the song that he wrote lyrics to fill the gaps in Dylan’s rendition. Also a devotee of Marcus’s Old Weird Republic, Fishman sought approval from the authoritative critic, sent him his new version, and Marcus apparently gave Fishman the thumbs up he desired.
OK, Not Ideas About The Thing, But The Thing Itself: singer Amy Burton and pianist Stephen Gosling performed four of the songs in Corigliano’s project, Mr Tambourine Man, Blowin’ in the Wind, Chimes of Freedom, and Forever Young. Ms. Burton sang in a lovely operatic soprano, doing her best to get the words across currents of music that swelled and dropped and lingered and halted in the way of contemporary classical music. She sounded in every way like an opera singer. In Chimes, she emphasized with great vigor the word “not” in the 5th line, so we could definitely appreciate the irony of a warrior who refrains from fighting. She lengthened and flailed with alarmingly effective histrionics in the verse cataloguing the rebel, the rake, the luckless, the abandon’d and forsak’d, so there was certainly no mistaking the great flashes of these chimes of freedom for the outcasts of the world. Forever Young was set to a comfortable melodic structure, Ms. Burton sang it straight, and I hope her friends will be begging for her Forever Young at weddings, anniversary parties, and brisses, which is right where it belongs. I had to leave before Howard Fishman’s performance, and I can say that I did see him play at Suze Rotolo’s reading for her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, and his covers were professional and faithful.
That I simply do not have a taste for John Corigliano’s music is neither here nor there. That he began this project with a conclusive disparagement of the entire, apparently inexpressive, genre of folk music, a claim that many of us in the audience could have challenged right then and there with our own iPods–that is also neither here nor there. Ignorance and arrogance can certainly precede good art, and they often have. That a 71 year old American musical artist is not familiar with the tune to Blowin’ in the Wind–that’s a tough one, but, I want people to take me at my word, so we will take Mr Corigliano at his.
It’s the whole implicit propriety of the experience that I hated. The whole effete conferral of legitimacy, the presumption of significance, the gloss of authority given by Marcus’s presence, and Corigliano’s utterly complacent tone—there just was no sense that one artist was hungry for something he found in another artist’s work and wanted to grab it fast. Corigliano condescended to the moral depth he hadn’t expected to find in Dylan’s lyrics, yet, as a musician sensitive to poetry, made no mention of the musicality of the words, the patterns of sound that are still present in the printed lyrics. He wanted a great and inclusive poet to transfuse his work with greatness and inclusivity, and perhaps for some listeners the bloodless operation was a success, and they didn’t notice there was no love and theft at work, none at all.
Bob Levinson’s skills as facilitator were tested this Tuesday, when the guests in our class turned out to be Mr. Alan Light, music critic and journalist, and Mr. Pat Guadagno, musical musician. Bob Levinson had to conduct the two-hour session between erudite overviews of Bob Dylan’s career, and ardent performances of Bob Dylan’s songs by Mr Guadagno as well as the class’s own Toby Fagenson, whose 12-string guitar first impressed everyone in the room as a show-and-tell object, and then was put to good use. And indeed Bob Levinson made the whole evening move smoothly, and made certain that both guests enjoyed adequate air-time to do justice to their particular Bob Dylan skill set.
Alan Light–whose essay providing an overview of Bob Dylan’s performing history can be found in the Cambridge Companion to BD–began the evening with a great rush of feeling in response to his participation in different memorial events following Michael Jackson’s death. He seemed sincerely impressed and unnerved by the emotional theatrics, their scope and intensity, that he’d witnessed this past week, and also sincerely impressed with the deftness of the hastily assembled public memorial show. Light could not help reviewing for us the inarguable significance of Jackson’s contributions to American music and culture. We are a decorous and warm bunch in room 280 at the 92nd St Y, and we listened with respect. I would have enjoyed seeing the We Are The World video on the large TV we have in the room, but there was no time for that and maybe it’s insufficiently respectful of me to have wanted to see the shots of Bob peering with great fascination at the music sheet in his hand while he sings his bit, as though this man has discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. 
After paying our respects, we more or less gently segued to Bob Dylan via comments regarding stardom and public reception. Light reminded us of the astonishing speed of Bob’s rising star in the early 60s. That things were happening literally “in a matter of months.” From the Gaslight to Carnegie Hall. From singing Barbara Allen to writing Hard Rain. The astonishingly intrinsic differences in the young man at the three consecutive Newports. It can be a strange kind of startling refreshment to be offered for contemplation facts one already is familiar with. 
Bob Levinson asked Alan Light for his impressions of Together Through Life. He “likes it a lot.” He addressed the criticisms of the album as unoriginal and not rich with the ambitious portent of some of the songs on Modern Times (which Light does not enjoy as much as TTL). Light argued that it’s a mistake to “fault him for setting a different target and hitting that target.” It’s not “visionary,” and “you can’t force that every time.” Hear, hear, I say. Light also calls TTL a “sound record” as opposed to a “words record.” MT is a words record. We all wanted to pursue this distinction: what else is a “sound” record? Predictably, Light identified the thin wild youknowwhat, and the Lanoisian works. I wonder myself about this distinction. One can hardly call Oh Mercy not a words record, but of course the sound remains in one’s mind as a singular flavor, a color. Maybe we can test the sound records with the synesthesia method, by asking whether they do create a color and flavor of their own. A quick run through in my own head tells me that Another Side and John Wesley Harding would be sound records in this way. The recently remastered New Morning would also qualify: the remaster unveils Bob’s strong piano playing throughout, which was not so audible on the previous CD, and which does create a luscious tone binding the songs together. 
Pat Guadagno gave us ardent and tuneful renditions of Visions of Johanna and Sweetheart Like You.
Pat gave us ardent and tuneful renditions of Romance in Durango and I Want You. I may not be getting the order right here, I apologize for that. He is a wonderful guitarist and accompanies himself with beautiful verve. 
Alan Light gave us a thoroughly depressing history lesson about the superannuation of print media. He was a founding editor of the magazines Vibe and Trax and it is his professional opinion that the print magazine and the journal as forms of media cannot survive against the immediacy of the Internet. He talked about finding ways to write both substantively and electronically. We all have our fingers crossed with you, Mr Light. 
Alan Light played for us a recording he brought of Rosanne Cash singing a perfectly lovely version of Girl From the North Country. Apparently Johnny Cash once gave his daughter a list of the 100 greatest country songs and now she is recording a number of them on an album called “The List.” This reminded me of her exciting rendition of License to Kill which I had the pleasure of seeing her do at the 2006 Lincoln Center tribute. All of which made me think about what a cover version of a song is. Sometimes it’s like a photograph of someone you love. Sometimes it’s like a captivating discussion of the song. Sometimes it’s a love letter to the song. Sometimes it’s an x-ray of the song. Barb Junger’s versions of Bob Dylan songs are love letters to the songs. Jim James’ version of Goin to Acapulco is like an x-ray of the song. I have a very short list of covers of Bob Dylan songs that satisfy any of these categories. Very short, like a micron long. If you haven’t heard The Roots’ Masters of War, that is in a category of its own. 
If it weren’t for Eadward Muybridge’s photography, we would not know that a galloping horse does in fact have all four feet off the ground at some point in its stride. Also, because we have human eyes and human brains, we can *see* movement in a strange new way by moving our eyes across these images. We see into the horse’s stride, we have a secret about how a horse moves. We know the bigger picture the horse doesn’t know.
Let’s get back to Bob Dylan, and our guests from last night’s class, through this timepiece, which both stops time by claiming that Bob Dylan is indeed iconic–someone whose value and visibility in culture are cemented and permanent, no longer in question–and it keeps time a-movin’—I’m late for that Bob Dylan concert where what’s familiar to me could be an astonishment to the person next to me, and where I know at some point I will be… moved. 
The writing itself fed into last night’s discussion, but the discussion itself is what matters here. Hedin, Polito, and Hajdu invited different kinds of cross-sectioning, and it’s for each of us to decide how and where we’re moved by their invitations.
Polito and Hajdu spoke interestingly about the anatomy of Dylan’s later songs. Polito talked about Dylan as “collage artist.” A collage can “intensify” boundaries between its assembled parts, or it can erase boundaries. Dylan has always incorporated matter from other origins into his work, and he is doing this lately with a peculiar emphasis on literary sources, and with a peculiar promiscuity. Polito described Dylan “dropping lyrics in with tweezers….He’s interested in seamlessness.” David Hajdu spoke about Dylan being criticized by people who are “applying the wrong set of standards” to his compositions, which challenge the commercial models of assumed *originality*, songs as discrete and frozen objects. Ben Hedin added to this discussion by remarking that with the “allusions on “Love and Theft” …the simple act of using [other people's work] is integral to the renaissance he began to enjoy in his late 50s.”
Don’t start me talkin’–Everything about collage can be found in Dylan’s recent work. The greatest collage work combines illusion, audacity, the thrilling razor’s edge between order and disorder, and between new and used. Great collage demands great impudence and extraordinary formal control. Great collage makes its audience feel inexplicably voyeuristic, inexplicably cheating, inexplicably cheated, and offers its own special intoxication. It’s incredibly hard to pull off, and the artist has to be so fluent, have such command, over the form they’re working in. David Hajdu talked about the “line” of the song, Dylan’s effort to keep “paraphrasable meaning at bay.” Because the coherence of a collage is an illusion, it can’t be honestly paraphrased. And because a song is not an idea, but an address to feeling, it can’t be paraphrased. Because Dylan seems so often so effortlessly able to make syntax and melody one single thing, and then put across a character behind the lyric–that can’t be paraphrased neither. Ben Hedin mentioned “some kind of inevitability” in Dylan’s turn from “conventional originality” into this collage mode. I find this idea so intriguing, the 
There’s anatomy, and there’s excavation too. David Hajdu excavated documents and a recording to provide more fodder for observation and scrutiny. He read from a 1965 interview with Robert Shelton, in which Dylan riffed a little acidly on the label “poet.” ”Anyone who would call themselves a poet is not a poet.” ”To be a poet doesn’t mean you have to write down words on paper.” Even though we know it’s self-defeating, we have such a strong hunger for any 
If we pick up and travel to locales of historic interest, we thicken up those cross sections. Our Bob Levinson shared his pilgrimage to The Basement, and I saw for myself that The Basement is indeed a basement. I guess in 1967 squirrels could have scampered outside and footsteps could have been heard overhead and maybe a phone ringing in a distant room, and meanwhile Tears of Rage. Robert Polito talked of Hibbing, and the impossibility of condescending to the place once you’ve seen it. The way the ordered and scaled town winds down into that gigantic iron pit, past the foundations of the old Hibbing that a person can stand on–the sense of place here offers too strong a feeling of time, and too many visual contrasts, to be at all insipid. The high school is everything you may have heard it to be: a glorious monument to a frontier community’s devotion to ideals of assimilation and permanence that I dare anyone to belittle once you have stood beneath the crystal chandeliers in the auditorium. Where the piano Bob assaulted still stands. The photo shows yours truly and BJ Rolfzen, the man who gave Robert Zimmerman the B on that Steinbeck essay. We talked about teaching high school, about William Carlos Williams, and nothing about Bob Dylan. If you’re a Dylan fan and you want to be humbled and troubled by the Search for History, go visit Hibbing. 
Ben Hedin says, “You put on Dylan because you want to have your heart broken.” He feels Together Through Life is “a dud.” David Hajdu spoke elegantly about the “diminishment of strengths” that is influencing Bob Dylan’s recent compositions. As a songwriter who composes with his voice, the soi disant deterioration of his voice has prevented him from creating complex melodies. Robert Polito feels Together Through Life sounds like “outtakes,” with all the songs at a “certain level of quality,” which is not especially high. 
Stop. Observe. Determine. Stop. Go. I’ll be missing class next week. I’ll be on a plane to Milwaukee to see Bob Dylan perform there on July 1. I’ll be in the seventh row, almost close enough.
It’s 1977 in Los Angeles, Ron Rosenbaum is done with that day’s two-hour interview of Bob Dylan at the studio where Bob was working on post production of Renaldo and Clara, and Ron is eating a green chili omelet. I learned last night that after each session of the multi-part interview Dylan granted Playboy’s young journalist, the young journalist would go eat a green chili omelet. Did Ron Rosenbaum gaze out at the Angelenos and consider which ones would become murderous or stupefied with envy to know how he had spent the afternoon? And then I think that at some point that same day, appearances to the contrary, Bob Dylan had something to eat which he likely does not recall in 2009. And I wonder what it is like to be a young man who has become accustomed to other young men being visibly nervous in his company. A little stammering, eye contact a little too focused and then darting away. Accustomed to an awareness that what he is wearing, how he is holding his hands, the expressions on his face, the most trivial topical comment he makes, will be registered on his companion’s awareness like a trilobite’s shell in a riverbed. 
I’ll probably never eat an omelet again without somehow thinking absurdly of the orange and black scarf Ron Rosenbaum wore throughout his talk at class last night, and the poster to Renaldo and Clara. This is why I’m no reporter. 
Back to the cold metal of history. Ron Rosenbaum, in the company of marketwatch.com’s Jon Friedman, spoke generously about the 77 interview (published in 1978) , and his current Bob Dylan project, and Bob Dylan more or less in general, for our two hours. Rosenbaum is the interviewer whose conversation with Dylan in 1977 was the occasion for what has become the most quoted comment Dylan ever made about his own music: “the thin wild mercury sound.” And he was the interviewer whose conversation with Dylan was the occasion for what’s become another quintessential quip: “If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think Bob Dylan has a lot of the answers myself.” 
Rosenbaum played a minute or two of the recorded interview. Bob sounded….familiar, much closer to the brisk and youthful Dont Look Back voice than to the hypnotic singsong rasp he’d develop just two years later with which to terrorize his gospel audiences. Even so, it was impossible to hear this voice and then picture RollingThunder’s white-faced hellion spitting out the lyrics to Isis.
Rosenbaum was present, no not just present, but an important witness, to the period before Dylan mutated into the unfamiliar figure of the gospel years. Rosenbaum’s new project is a book about Dylan’s spirituality and belief, about “Dylan’s argument with God.” He confesses to having felt “betrayed” by the Christian period, betrayed “as a Jew.” His books on Hitler and Shakespeare speak to their subjects through personal contemplation and experience, and I am hoping his full scale book on Dylan and belief will do the same. I’ll hope for the same combination of candor and scrupulous research. 
I’m among the standard bearers for believing that Dylan’s “best musical work” is scattered very fertilely from, oh, 1961 to spring of 2009, and I respect that for Rosenbaum, I likely fall into the category of Dylanolatry, for the very reason that I do not think Desolation Row is definitively a better song than ‘Cross the Green Mountain. Neither one of us has the stone tablets to win an argument on this point, but I guess I want to add two more coats of (solid?) gold to my calf:
In Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars—which you’ll find yourself wanting to read in one sitting—you can find an excerpt from the NY Times Book Review discussion of the book, which begins with the phrase “In his besotted, passionate new book….” Rosenbaum asks the question “Why do we feel–those of us who do–that there is something in Shakespeare beyond what we find in other literature?” He describes a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was “disturbingly, mysteriously more than an intellectual experience.” His introduction contains seven paragraphs that begin with a variation on the phrase “I want you to care…” an intimate emotional appeal to a personal reader, and not a journalistic or academic appeal to credibility.
It isn’t that this degree of intensity and scrutiny can’t be found in writing and speaking about Bob Dylan. But to be “besotted” with Shakespeare is to be enriched, and inspired, and articulated, with grave justification. To be “besotted” by Bob Dylan’s art is to be eccentric at best, truly besotted without grave justification. At worst, you’re just a person who doesn’t listen to enough Neil Young.
My other coat of solid gold could be a little flaky. My impossible dream is not to disprove, but to disarm the mythic argument that Dylan rocked the world to bits by 1966 and never reached that height on the Richter scale again. This narrative is based on a lust, a famishment, for artists to perform revolutions that the rest of us can join in passively, at no cost. Rock my world to bits, make it new, make me the chosen one who really gets what you’re doing, who’s on the right side, who gets the great thrill of being changed forever, at your expense. Make me see truth and light and god, but not any truth or light or god my parents saw. Make it all new and make it for me. And do it again and again and again, keep doing it for me. Then I’ll love you for good. 
Art that’s a rich, deep, deft, and unique expression of the texture and presence of human life. Fierce and impotent feeling, failures and raptures of desire, thoughts pointless and the sudden glimpse of something that could be Something. This can’t satisfy the hunger for a world blown to bits. I hear it everywhere in Dylan’s work 1989-2009, regardless of what hole in a tree in Alabama he got it from.
Cultivation. Cult. Culture. Agriculture. Got a head full of ideas and they’re driving me insane. Our guest in Bob Levinson’s class this Tuesday, week 2, was writer-theologian Stephen Hazan Arnoff. I’ve had the pleasure of learning from him the last time I attended this course, and also in correspondence outside of class. He roots Bob Dylan in time-out-of-mind traditions of religious visionaries, oral and textual expressions of faith and doubt, and the strange new worlds some few people in all of time have taken the rest of us to show us how far we can go. From these roots, Hazan-Arnoff sprouted a lecture on cultivation: the “intention” and “technique” of Dylan’s art that produces the harvest of Dylan’s transformation of culture. The tools, the material, the seeds and I would say ultimately the fruits are Man, God, Law. 
What is growing on the farm? Hazan Arnoff offers “salvation” as the answer, and used the clip from I’m Not There, where Allen Ginsberg pulls alongside Jude Quinn on the highway, asks Jude what’s next, Jude looks heavenward and says “salvation.” What could be left for the artist who is spading through culture all the way to bedrock? A bigger audience? Better reviews? Salvation….? Stephen turned to Desolation Row as both the labor and the harvest of this cultivation. Stephen calls Desolation Row the ‘secret history of Maggie’s Farm.”
It’s important to remember that there really were postcards of the hanging. You really could buy souvenir lynching photos. So the song is launched from a world where atrocity is commodified as culture. It’s launched into the singer’s imagination where every category of meaning–every form of culture that humans have invented to make ordered sense of themselves and the world–is inverted, exploited, manipulated into the one vision and voice of the young singer leaning into Desolation Row. Politics, literature, religion, pop culture, myth and folklore, history, science and the industry it spawns–these forms are all playthings for the artist whose vision is strong enough to see that indeed all of culture has been a matter of humankind playing with life in order to “unlock its secrets”, to quote Stephen. 
So the song cultivates culture, and its tools are certain gifts of composition and performance granted to one Bob Dylan, and the harvest is pretty close to the secrets of this universe: we find out that the great unending work of culture has been an odyssey along desolation row, as idols and texts and stories and discoveries and lovers too, are fighting and destroying each other to win the high ground of Truth. I have to reap the awe-ful bounty of the singer’s labor but what’s the cost for him? He’s really done the work, I’m just buying his goods at this produce market.
Well, he doesn’t feel too good. Somehow the doorknob broke and he’s trapped and alone, don’t ask him how he’s doing, you’ve already heard the song for crying out loud. He’s spent and sick from the labor and harvest of his own song, and unless I get it, unless I get that from selling postcards of lynchings to worshipping Noah’s great rainbow to building ships that sail the ocean and then sink in it, to making a song called Desolation Row, we’re all cultivating together, he doesn’t want to hear from me. 
Stephen went on to talk about Augustine of Hippo’s own conversion at the voice of a child, and Bob Dylan’s cold and angry and frightening vision of I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, and the not-so “secret history” of Dylan’s song: I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill. Stephen talked about the world without martyrs that Dylan feels he’s discovered in his dream, and he explained the root of this word: witness. And what’s the cultivation the artist can do in a world without martyrs or witnesses? He can offer us, for starters, the nightmare vision of those purposeless, darting, fearful people on the watchtower, who see approaching towards them what has already happened. He can offer us the nightmare image of a jury crying “for more”–more what? justice? drama? facts? All a jury has to do is follow the law–isn’t that enough? Ah, but the law is just what we set up in a fallen world where we can’t see our way by nature’s fair light.
On the #4 train, I thought about how much Stephen’s lecture is going to fertilize the happy idle hours I spend digging around in Ain’t Talkin’– ”There’s no one here, the gardener is gone”–that line is already sprouting all manner of weird new shoots thanks to Stephen’s cult/culture/cultivation/agriculture….. 
Bob Levinson’s class, which I write about here, places me in the healthy and uncomfortable position of having to talk in front of strangers about What Bob Dylan Means To Me. Bob Levinson relentlessly invites us to join in discussions, and he models enthusiastic and utterly non-judgmental listening, so there’s just no hope for it: if you talk in that room, you might as well say what you think and feel. I’ve fashioned a workable persona for Other People, in which I can mock myself for having four thousand three hundred Bob Dylan tracks on my iPod, and I can mock myself for considering 5 days in Hibbing, Minnesota, to be about the most glorious vacation I ever enjoyed. Even at a concert, this persona goes to work, because chances are that the person sitting next to me does not feel as though every cell in their body is ringed with flames at the prospect of seeing Bob Dylan in profile for 2 hours performing songs they’ve seen him perform dozens of times before. Which is how I feel.
But I have to function without my Other People persona in Bob Levinson’s class. This exposure invites me to look at what I’m exposing to myself as well as sharing with the people in the class, what I take for granted when I type away self-indulgently on this blog, or what I take for granted when I’m bickering with my Inner Circle about which Born in Time is the most poignant. 
If I had to look at the parts of what I take for granted and give an answer devoid of wit to the question: why Bob Dylan day after day?– what would show up? No funny pictures, just answers…
I give up.
These classes are organized and led by Bob Levinson, a man whose ardor for Bob Dylan’s work passes every test my arrogant self could apply: Bob L. has not only seen Dylan step forth from the shadows into the Gaslight in 1962, he has wept at a 2007 performance of Shelter from the Storm. By his own account, Bob has “grown” with Dylan through the decades, always saying “Yes,” to Dylan’s new invitiations to thought and feeling. Also. being a mensch of the highest degree, Bob Levinson’s connections to La Vita Dylan are numberless and invariably a matter of mutual grace, courtesy, and admiration. I need only offer one example to prove my point: the very first class of Bob’s I attended was in 2007, through New York University’s Continuing Studies Program. I walked into the assigned room on the first evening, and found in the center of the classroom, an affable mustachioed man seated next to…..Clinton Heylin. Prior to this moment I had read much of Mr Heylin’s writing on Dylan and was impressed with his singleness of purpose and severity of attitude: if the position of guarding the Gates of Hell ever becomes available, Clinton Heylin is the man for the job. In person, even in a denim jacket, he confirmed my impression. The one question I quakingly asked him was treated with what I realize now was the tone it must have deserved, yet Mr Heylin was decorous and considerate towards Bob Levinson. That’s when I knew Bob Levinson was an exceptional person in addition to being the kind of Dylan enthusiast that draws the rest of us like magnets. 
As the weeks go by, my undistilled and weakly bridled interest in the topic at hand will become increasingly apparent to the other people in the class and their indulgence, should they bestow it, will be a gift I’d never take for granted.
