Our excellent and tireless archaeologist, Mr. Scott Warmuth, has once again discovered shards of English in Mr. Bob Dylan’s output that can be traced to other material. His muse having abandoned him mid-sentence sporadically throughout Chronicles, Dylan paged frantically through a 1961 Time magazine for phrases that could help him describe the cultural and political context of the 1960s. Then, either snickering with a shoplifter’s cheap sense of victory, or showing the mild and unreadable mien of the habitual liar , he dropped them into the holes in the sentences he’d left hanging. The purloined passages were skillfully sutured into the body of of nimble, vivid, and engaging prose that surrounded them, and lay there undetectable to the reader’s ear, and unattributed to their original author. The devil is in the details, is he not.
This seems like a lot of work, but we know that Bob Dylan is practiced at his crimes. Stymied by the task he set himself to write a song that muses restlessly about the frustration and torpor of age, and the burden of memory, he paged through the memoirs of a dying Japanese gangster and luckily found just the phrases to round out lyrics that had left him stuck. Once again, another convenient, unattributed and unthanked writer saved our lazy and duplicitous hero the trouble of inspiration.
We can relieve the anger and disappointment at Bob Dylan’s dereliction of originality, and we can give in and join him. The possibility can’t exist that Bob Dylan can scan text, store, retrieve, and synthesize language more quickly and unconsciously than we can. Nor that as the years go by, his reliance on facile memory and synthesis has grown. He’s a charlatan, picking and purloining and pretending, consciously, and betraying the sacred myth of the pure original artist. Let’s prove we can do it too. Give yourself a challenging writing assignment, something that demands a high degree of expressive and descriptive language, and that demonstrates a compelling and distinctive voice. Pull something off the shelf–maybe Montaigne’s essays, or last month’s Harper’s, or Mickey Mantle’s biography, or Bob Dylan’s memoirs. Flip through, pick out some phrases that appeal to you. Insert them into your piece of writing, disguising any seams in the tone, and voila. No irony here. If he can do it, you can too.
I give up. What is the great pleasure people have in accusing Bob Dylan of fraudulent artistry? Scott Warmuth merely does the hard work of research, it’s the rapturous dismay of Dylan’s audience that I wonder about. What is the standard for originality in art? John Heartfield puts his name to collage pieces that are no more than jigsaws of found materials. Duchamp signs this fountain, or scrawls a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa, and these objects end up in museums and textbooks. Christopher Logue’s War Music rewrites the Iliad from English translations, and if you think this is an adolescent exercise in postmodern playfulness, I urge you to read some of it. It’s fascinating and moving and extremely strange. Anne Carson has done similar work with classical literature. We don’t condemn Logue because Homer can’t be financially or personally harmed by Logue’s theft? But that still leaves the problem of being impressed and captivated by Logue’s unoriginal work. What are exactly the standards of originality and ethics in creation that Bob Dylan is violating? Who gets to get away with these violations, and who doesn’t?
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. 
Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.
Temptation’s flame is very angry indeed. I yield to it, and I get to name it Satan, and the partner of my sin, she’s the very demon itself, but I know good from evil–and god I tell you, it hurt to lose her and it hurt to destroy her, but I did what I had to do. I swear, and I suffer–I still have a soul, don’t I? 
And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name. That gun is still smoking, and they still won’t leave me alone. Miss X, one X or another, these sweet dispositions, these honey traps, they’re wily, I can’t outguess them. I fall like prey, I can’t be blamed.
That Miss X–oh god, what this new pony can do! And look at her! Make me chaste…but not yet.
The morals of despair. I’m lost, and I can’t know I’m Lost unless I can still suffer for not being Found. That new pony, she belongs to a trickster god, a god that throws your prayers in your face, a god of magic, a god of bodies without spirits. Don’t think I can’t tell the difference. …But not yet. 
I’ve been slowly picking my way through The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. I placed it near the bottom of my To Read pile after coming across this interview with Kevin Dettmar, editor of the volume, on SouthCoastToday.com, March 28, 2009:
I
Now, having your own Cambridge Companion should mean that you’ve passed the infinity trial, it shouldn’t be the trial itself. But the publishers’ desire not to assign the volume to a “die-hard fan” shows some anxiety about the subject at hand: maybe the jury is still out on Bob Dylan’s infinity trial, and we need to keep fans and all their uncritical excesses out of the courtroom. But Dettmar might not be exactly what CUP originally had in mind. He uses awkward incompatible tones in the introduction, which betray…something. His opening paragraph quotes Clinton Heylin on Dylan’s “oeuvre” being “the most important canon in rock music,” then Dettmar suggests “Dylan’s is the most important canon in all of twentieth century popular music.” But he goes on to write that Heylin’s statement implies that “Dylan has long since passed into the Academy, making a Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan a logical addition to this distinguished series.” It is unlikely that the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, or Kant, felt any urge to declare the logic of that volume’s addition to the series. 
Not a significant poet, but a first-order literary artist. I do have sympathy for Dettmar, he is sincerely trying to name Something that will justify a Cambridge Companion, but also do justice to the Specialness of the Something. 
To be continued. I am still sifting through the individual pieces in the book. 
Here are Leeuwenhoek’s microscope and the Hubble telescope. They let us see things we couldn’t see without the devices, and then we fret over what it is to make visible something that in the natural order of things would remain hidden. These things are exactly what Freud had in mind when he sighed over our poor species’ efforts to become “prosthetic gods,” and what Bob Dylan may have been sighing over when he claims we invented our doom. Of course, the man with the wooden leg really can get across the room on his own, that’s the thing about prosthetics. I think about what I was able to see with my own eyes on Wednesday night when Bob Dylan performed Forgetful Heart for a public audience for the first time.
I’m in seat 5 in the 7th row of the Marcus Amphitheater at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. Seats 5, 6, and 7 of the 6th row are occupied by three tall and high-spirited men who are enjoying each other’s company very much.They’re standing up, and I’m standing too, to try to see past them to the stage. To my right is a woman sitting down, head lowered, sending and reading text messages. Behind me are rows of chairs, behind them is a steeply sloping lawn filled with people. There’s a roof over us in the more expensive seats; if it rains, the people on the lawn will get wet. In the aisle to my right are burly men in red shirts, the security staff, who push into aisles and step over seats, grim and aggressive and intimidating, and make people like me stop standing on their chairs, and other people stop taking photos. Dozens of photos are available on the internet right this minute. 
And here I am in row 7 seat 5, ahead of me are 6 rows of people plus the security space plus the appr. 4 foot height of the stage, and maybe 8 feet back from the edge of the stage, Bob Dylan has stalked from his keyboard to the microphone stand in front of George Recile’s drums. He has nothing but his harmonica. Through everything around me that wants my attention, I can hear the guitar notes that begin Forgetful Heart.
Don’t these goddamned people know that the person in row 7, seat 5, is deeply and truly PRESENT AND LISTENING, and just about everyone else is not? Don’t these goddamned people know that right in front of them is the World Premiere of Something Magnificent? Myself, I sat on a plane on a runway at Newark Airport for 3 and 1/2 hours in a rainstorm waiting to take off and fly to Milwaukee JUST FOR THIS. Will you goddamned people shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down?
We decode set lists when he’s on tour, and use those lists to decide whether a show is same-old-same-old, whether he’s pulled out something of particular value to a hardcore fan. We puff our cigars and wonder if Stu will be gone, if Bob will play guitar. 
We know if it was a Good show, a Great show, or neither. Some of us yearn for Larry Campbell, some are tired of Cat’s in the Well. We yawn when the row in front of us is shouting “HOW DOES IT FEEL?” Other people are in the way, or sympatico, or irrelevant.
It’s not the set list. It’s not what I know, and the fact that I know more than most people in the venue with me, and it’s not how all this quantity of what I know imputes value to whatever Bob Dylan decides to do that night. You have got to be a transparent eyeball that takes in the man in front of you who talks all during Forgetful Heart. So next time you get the chance to see him perform, take in everything, and remember that this is what a concert is. 
And think about this too: it’s a common and fraternal activity, this decoding and tallying. But while all this tallying and decoding is going on, Bob Dylan is performing yet another set list consisting of yet more shifts in tone and texture, somewhere else he’s giving the crowd a pile-driving Highway 61 Revisited and then lulling them with This Dream of You. Somewhere else he’s being generous with his energy and his ability to communicate entirely different and potent emotional worlds as rapidly as some of us wish he’d toss off those hats we’re not so crazy about. How hard is it to see his touring schedule as an embarrassment of riches?
I also want to add what a great pleasure it was to see Stu back in front, and taking lead prominently and deliciously—he nearly made me love Honest With Me. 
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.
I’m avoiding the Together Through Life flotsam bombarding us in these weeks leading up to the album’s *release.* I’m sure there is much to be said about knowledge, community, discourse, the self-deconstruction of the phrase “release date”, in our world, just from examining the wild web of rumors, facts, opinions, photos, snippets that’s growing from an album that technically isn’t yet available. I’m worn out already by all the chatter, so I want to crawl inside a song that is about how we can know anything at all, a song that grows inside the listener’s mind like a glorious black bloom. A song which recalls us from arguing about whether Robert Hunter contributed all the prepositions and 75% of the adverbs to Bob Dylan’s new songs, or vice versa, to more interesting questions and more exhilarating sensations. I don’t know what I can do with this song, and I predict a certain amount of incoherence. 
George Bernard Shaw said, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” Just so you know where he’s coming from. Because it’s this same George Bernard Shaw who also said that the music Mozart wrote for the role of Sarastro in The Magic Flute is the only music Shaw could imagine coming from the mouth of god. When beauty undoes us, instead of simply pleasing us, even a George Bernard Shaw turns to the vocabulary of the divine.
Shaw was undone by Mozart’s myth brought to life, by the controlled majestic work required of a singer taking on a fictional role. Here’s another singer in a costume, like Sarastro above, and our guy will also bring a myth to life, and offer us controlled majesty in his voice, and we’ll just have to be kind and realize that Shaw in his day could do no better than Sarastro, he just was too early for ‘Cross the Green Mountain. I’ll never do justice to this song. 
All of these qualities–the exhale of the voice, the waves of crescendos, and the words that can’t be memorized within a regular structure–are part of the reason that every time I hear ‘Cross the Green Mountain, I step outside the hour I’m living in, I enter his dream, like entering a chamber, and when it’s over, I’m still half in that chamber and half in my own world. Do you know the songs that do this? The ones that overlay your own world even after they’re over?
So this information increased the quantity of stuff I understood in the song’s lyrics. But there’s a photo in the book that cast air and light into that chamber I live in when I hear the song. It’s on page 81, if you want to see it yourself. The photographer would be standing about ten feet from one dead man, and fifteen feet maybe from a living man who seems to be looking at the dead man. The title of the photo is “A Contrast: Federal Buried, Confederate Unburied, Where They Fell On The Battlefield of Antietam.” 
And you know what, this is where I wanted to get. This is all I know and all I need to know: that art is the submission to beauty. When art is informed by a profound moral vision, then this submission becomes an exquisite struggle. The submission is the greater rapture because of the greater contest between the urgency of the moral life and the bliss of pleasure. This song is the ode to the monstrosity of the Civil War, fields stinking with corpses, the moral fate of America at stake, the unity of the country at stake–we know how this mythic familiar history has captivated Dylan since his youth. The severity and compass of his knowledge of the monstrosity of this history, coupled with his gifts as composer and singer, are in proportion to each other in this song. And the result for the listener riding that one breath is the constant falling into enchantment from moral horror. This is the very condition of the human spirit, and to make this a “physical reality” as Stephen Webb writes of Dylan’s voice in his book Dylan Redeemed–well, now we are as close to divine as we’re going to get in this post.
(This is a photo of the nebula known as “God’s Eye.” This is what the voice of ‘Cross the Green Mountain sounds like to me.)
Seems to be the title of the forthcoming album. Here I sit so patiently…
I try to avoid newsy news here because it is always available elsewhere, but a new album is a new album. Below is an item which appeared in the most recent Rolling Stone (Mar 4 2009) and offers tantalizing whiffs of what we ordinarily dare not hope to hope: a new album of original material, hard on the heels of the still-revelatory, ever-thrilling Tell Tale Signs. The description below may lead us to expect Bob being mordant, caustic, and yearning, foraging wildly through genres and influences, and being entirely unpredictable. All at once. Sir, those of us in the stalls wait patiently for this upcoming offering. We don’t care what you put on the cover, what it’ll cost, or who the fuck plays bass. 
