The Best American Poetry

The Bob Dylan Entry in the "Oxford Book of American Poetry"

We repost this piece, which first appeared on 8 / 9 / 08, eight years before Dylan won the Nobel Prize. The questions raised remain worth asking. It never fails to amuse me that the lines about Eliot and Pound in “Desolation Row” were analyzed at length by one of the premier close readers of our time, who may have vastly overestimated the extent of Dylan’s knowledge about Eliot and Pound.

Milton Glaser's portrait of Dylan is reproduced on the left.

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Bob Dylan is represented in the 2006 edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry with "Desolation Row" and this head note. We're curious to know how readers react to the inclusion of Dylan's work, the specific choice of "Desolation Row," and the statements made in the head note below. -- DL

Bob Dylan, b. 1941. The songwriter and singer was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and spent much of his boyhood in Hibbing, near the Canadian border. He named himself after Dylan Thomas. The lyrics in three of his record albums from the mid-1960s –– Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde –– particularly reward close analysis of the sort given to demanding examples of modern poetry. Read on the page, independent of musical accompaniment or vocal delivery, "Desolation Row" may be his finest lyric. The critic Christopher Ricks, who had previously written books about Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett, devoted a lengthy volume to Dylan’s Visions of Sin in 2004. Ricks analyzes a stanza in "Desolation Row" –– the one in which Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are "fighting in the captain’s tower" –– in relation to Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'' Archibald MacLeish once complimented Dylan on the same lines. "Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren't they?'' MacLeish said. "I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain's tower.'' Recalling MacLeish’s words, Dylan made no comment other than to allow that he liked Eliot, who was "worth reading,'' but disapproved of Pound's anti-American propaganda from Italy in World War II and never did read him

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 09, 2008 at 10:00 AM in Dylan Watch | Permalink

Comments

like many very talented people bob seems able to channel many voices and express them in a really pure way. he's not a deep thinker. he can just get into a vein. his song "joey," about the mafioso joey gallo, has no soprano-style irony. there's humor in that song, but it's not "knowing" humor. as is clear from his book entitled chronicles, bob can see what's good in so many different kinds of acts, from the royal teens to frank sinatra. there's nothing snobbish about him. yardbird parker had something of that too. if there was somebody really bad playing, he would say, "i see what you're trying to do," and he would sit in with them. btw: i will buy a mcdonald's happy meal (boy's or girl's, your choice) for anyone who can explain why charlie p. was called "yardbird." not bird, yardbird!
Posted by: | August 09, 2008 at 01:53 PM

I think it is perfectly appropriate to include Bob Dylan in an anthology of American Poetry, however, what should be included is one of Mr. Dylan's poems, not a song lyric. I think Dylan's poem "Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie" is a great American poem. You can find the text here: http://orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dylan/lasthowg.html

A recording from 1963-64 of Dylan reading the poem is in on the "Original Bootleg Series Vol 1-3" release on Columbia Records.
Posted by: Stan Denski | August 10, 2008 at 07:32 AM

Saying he took his name after Dylan Thomas is incredibly slack journalism, i.e. utterly unsubstantiated drivel that's been repeated so often it's taken by fools to be something you don't even have to bother researching. (More plausible is the story that he was walking around NY with a little notebook full of song titles, and one day after the rain he opened it and part of the name of the song 'Candyland' had been obliterated by the rain, leaving only 'xxxdylanx').
I do think there's a rabble-rousing minority in the poetry world that's keen to include dylan, but the obvious problem is that words to a song aren't meant to stand alone as poetry. At least they've chosen a lyric that isn't augmented too radically by the music that goes with it, but i still think it's out of place. Poetry is meant to be enjoyed on the page, music is multi-media in nature. That said, what distinguishes dylan among vocal performers is that he approaches his work with a poetic eye.
Posted by: AndoDoug | August 10, 2008 at 01:22 PM

I think the inclusion of any number of Bob Dylan's works is more than appropriate. There are so many works to choose from, both in terms of poetic and musical merit. In particular, his lyrics coupled with the piano have created some extraordinary works of art. "Oh Mercy" has a few songs on it worth taking a look at.
Posted by: Amy | August 10, 2008 at 05:29 PM

Stan Denski's suggestion re. "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" is a good one, but the distinction between song lyrics and poems is weak at best, in the history of English literature (Elizabethan sonnets, for example). Just take his best verse, song-lyric or otherwise, and he'll beat many's the long-included poet in the canon. Pick one, any one, from ""The Times They Are A'Changing" to ""Mr Tambourine Man" to " Go 'Way From My Window" (A perfect aubade!), you can't go wrong.
Posted by: John McLaughlin | August 10, 2008 at 09:20 PM

Have to disagree. The better the song, the worse the poem. Studying song lyrics as poetry is akin to studying the paintings of Van Gough from 4 X 6 black & white photographs. See: bad idea.
Posted by: Stan Denski | September 13, 2008 at 09:46 AM
>>>>

There is No Final Word [by Vincent Katz]

For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.

First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:

In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.

Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.

She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:

Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.

Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”

The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.

Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:

yes! radiant lyre speak to me

become a voice

Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.

Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…

Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:

Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.

In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.

We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:

When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…

Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:

It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.

Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!

The People Dylan Left Behind (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bobby Zimmerman knew at an early age that he was bound for musical glory. The pain in his soul could be managed whenever he held a guitar. And he knew his connection to the music he heard all about him was a special.

Dylan was unstoppable. He got rare records any way he could and swallowed America’s musical heritage. Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie showed him that the poetry that he had written could be transformed into lyrics. At the beginning, his confidence was indistinguishable from adolescent bravado. But reality soon verified his expectations.

His personality was a vital component of his success. His caution seemed to have been amputated. He wasn’t slowed by the emotional stop signs and red lights that deaccelerate the speed with which most of us charge ahead

The moments of success accumulated. Some must have stood out to him. Maybe it was the writing of Blowin’ in the Wind, which was far more sophisticated than his earlier work. Or maybe it was when he asked Tom Paxton whether the words of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall formed a poem or a song lyric.

At one point during the staggering rise of his career, Dylan began to see that he was better than anyone else. Other people noticed it too. Some were jealous and angry. Some were impressed.

But this explosion of raw talent into an artist and a person unlike any other left the early Dylan with a dilemma. What should he do with people from his past? He was, after all, Bob Dylan, and they weren’t. Joan Didion once wrote of Joan Baez that she was a personality before she was a person. Dylan had that same reality.

Dylan wrote about this dilemma in several songs. Let’s consider three relatively early ones.

Take “Long Time Gone.” As with many of his early songs, this one was adapted from other songs. The lyrics are a re-working of “Maggie Walker Blues.” The tune was lifted from Kelly Harrell & The Virginia String Band’s “My Name is John Johanna” which Dylan heard on the influential Anthology of American Folk Music compiled by Harry Smith. In a telling sample of how Dylan worked, Dylan’s lyrics are far superior to the material he borrowed from. He was a master thief with a unique access to language.

At one point in the song, he sings:

“You might see me on your crossroads
When I’m a-passin’ through
Remember me how you wish to
As I’m a-driftin’ from your view
I ain’t got the time to think about it
I got too much to get done”

Here Dylan defines his feelings towards the people he meets along the way as he speeds along his career track. He tells them that he doesn’t much care what they think of him. He needs, instead, to use his time to think about what his art calls upon him to do next. His work is more important than worrying about the reactions of others. This might uncharitably be seen as a dismissal of other people, but from another point of view it defines the quiet focus artists require to do their work. It’s selfish if the artist lacks true talent. A talented artist like Dylan makes the issue more complicated. What is, after all, the appropriate relationship between talented artists and people who want to interview them, get their help becoming famous, hang out with them, and in other ways deprive the talented artist of the private space needed to create?

Dylan also addresses his own attitude to those he leaves behind in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” the final track of his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.

Dylan begins the final stanza of the song with these lines:

“Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you”

This is similar to “Long Time Gone” and adds some credence to those who interpret the identity of “Baby Blue” as Dylan himself. But Dylan’s poetic abilities have greatly increased. The second line has impressive assonance as he repeats the sound of a vowel:

“Forget the dead you’ve left”

Dylan has also gone from not thinking about those whose lives he has passed to actively trying to forget them, to erase them as if their existence in his mind will interfere in his art. He has a realization that most people are stuck in their lives and won’t explore in the way he thinks is crucial to artistic creation.

Finally, consider “I Want You” on Blonde on Blonde. The album has been inadequately recognized for its Christian content. This is pertinent for the lines to be examined. Those lines are:

“Now all my fathers, they’ve gone down
True love they’ve been without it
But all their daughters put me down
’Cause I don’t think about it.”

In these lines, Dylan is talking about how his Jewish fathers, that is his ancestors, have been without a belief in Christian love, which Dylan asserts is the “true love.” Reminded of this by Jewish women, the daughters of the fathers, Dylan says he doesn’t even think about it. There seems to be a simple indifference in these lines. It’s possible to read some cruelty into the lines, some angry refusal to even think about the long Jewish genealogy that led to his birth.

As these lines indicate, Dylan the artist wants to be alone with his own mind and to do so needs to stop caring, to forget, to ignore, to willfully be indifferent to others. It seems as though it’s a sad way to live, but perhaps one filled with the necessary mental isolation to see what others can’t see, to find language that others don’t hear, and to transform tunes that others hear only in the familiar way.

Bob Dylan on standards and Sinatra [by David Lehman]

What a great and unlikely conjunction of names and sensibilities: Bob Dylan opens up about his recent turn to the standards that Sinatra, Ella, Nat Cole, Crosby, Torme, Judy Garland and Jo Stafford sang. Dylan's understanding of the music is impressive, and if only he had a better voice the records would be wonderful. As it is I would sooner listen to Dylan sing an Irving Berlin song than, say, Rod Stewart, who turns everything into elevator music. Dylan can feel the lyrics and knows his job is to serve them as best he can. The voice carries conviction if not always the tune. It is easy to imagine young Bob listening to Sinatra. Bob loved Harold Arlen and no one sang Arlen songs better than Sinatra: 'Blues in the Night,' 'Last Night when We Were Young,' 'That Old Black Magic," 'I've Got the World on a String.'  I can't imagine Sinatra listening to Dylan records, but the scene of the blue-eyed boys as described by Dylan below has the smack of truth.-- DL

Q&A with Bill Flanagan

MAR 22, 2017

Bob Dylan, from an interview with Bill Flanagan, March 22, 2017

Exclusive to bobdylan.com

Up to the sixties, these songs were everywhere – now they have almost faded away. Do they mean more to you when you hear them now? 

They do mean a lot more. These songs are some of the most heartbreaking stuff ever put on record and I wanted to do them justice. Now that I have lived them and lived through them I understand them better. They take you out of that mainstream grind where you’re trapped between differences which might seem different but are essentially the same. Modern music and songs are so institutionalized that you don’t realize it. These songs are cold and clear-sighted, there is a direct realism in them, faith in ordinary life just like in early rock and roll.

It’s hard not to think of World War II when we hear some of these. You were born during the war – do you remember anything about it?

Not much. I was born in Duluth – industrial town, ship yards, ore docks, grain elevators, mainline train yards, switching yards. It’s on the banks of Lake Superior, built on granite rock. Lot of fog horns, sailors, loggers, storms, blizzards. My mom says there were food shortages, food rationing, hardly any gas, electricity cutting off – everything metal in your house you gave to the war effort. It was a dark place, even in the light of day – curfews, gloomy, lonely, all that sort of stuff – we lived there till I was about five, till the end of the war.

***

People called Shadows in the Night a tribute to Frank Sinatra. Did you know Sinatra had recorded all those songs when you put that record out?

Yeah, I knew he did, but a lot of other people recorded them as well, it just so happened that he had the best versions of them. When I recorded these songs I had to make believe that I never heard of Sinatra, that he didn’t exist. He’s a guide. He’ll point the way and lead you to the entrance but from there you’re on your own.

There is a famous story that you and Springsteen were invited to a dinner party at Sinatra’s house around the time you did that TV tribute to him. Had you met him before? Did you feel like he knew your stuff?

Not really. I think he knew “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Blowin’ In the Wind.” I know he liked “Forever Young,” he told me that. He was funny, we were standing out on his patio at night and he said to me, “You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there,” and he pointed to the stars. “These other bums are from down here.” I remember thinking that he might be right.

Everybody on that show did a Sinatra song except you. You sang “Restless Farewell.” How come?

Frank himself requested that I do it. One of the producers had played it for him and showed him the lyrics.

Was that the last time you saw Sinatra?

Maybe once after that.

What was the first time you saw him?

Pittsburgh, maybe ‘67 or ‘68 at the Civic Arena. He sang “Summer Wind,” “Day In, Day Out,” “Moonlight in Vermont.”

Sinatra did a lot of songs about growing old, but “The Best Is Yet to Come” is about defying age. It was the last song he ever sang on stage. How did you get inside that song? What do you think you bring to it that makes it worth your cutting? 

It wasn’t difficult. I didn’t bring anything unusual to it. There are a lot of key shifts and modulations in that song and you have to slide your way in and out of them. It’s a bit of a challenge, but once you figure it out, it’s pretty easy. It’s just a straight-ahead blues-based ballad, unique in its own way. It’s like “Mack the Knife,” but nothing like “Mack the Knife.” It’s such an old-fashioned phrase, you wouldn’t think anybody could do anything with it. “The best is yet to come” could be both a threat and a promise; the lyrics sort of insinuate that even though the world is falling down, a better one is already in its place. The song kind of levitates itself, you don’t have to do much to get it off the ground. I like all of Carolyn Leigh’s lyrics too; she wrote the lyrics to “Stay with Me.”

 

 

"Leonard Cohen's Psalms" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

King David was Leonard Cohen’s most influential artistic ancestor. As the supposed author of the Book of Psalms, David wrote poetry that was meant to be sung. And not just any poetry, but poetry that commingled two sorts of deep longing, one for women and one for God. Leonard Cohen saw King David as the first and most important model of what he wanted to do. Leonard Cohen, that is, is best understood as a psalmist.

It is no wonder then that Cohen’s most famous song, “Hallelujah,” begins with David playing his secret chord to God. David’s is a Biblical story of lust leading the King (in the Bible, though not in the song) to arrange for the death of the husband of the woman he desires. Cohen’s song combines a praise of God with very explicit sexual references.

If we think of Cohen as a psalmist like David, we can understand his focus on both the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the sexual, in his songs. And we also understand the impetus to get the words exactly right. Cohen reportedly sometimes took years to get every word and phrase the way he wanted it. As a psalmist, he was writing for and to God and so offhand efforts were blasphemous. (There were also practical reasons for such precision: he was proud of his language and he knew he would have to sing the song for a long while and wanted to feel it was the best he could do).

The practical side of him was important. Cohen was no fool. He worked and wanted success in an industry feeding on an audience’s endless hunger for songs about desire, true love, romantic longing, and painful loss. It made no sense to isolate questions of spirituality. His songs use the spiritual as a flavoring, but the focus, for the audience at least, was most frequently on the romantic. He kept his own spiritual experiences and beliefs private.

And yet the spiritual resources he drew upon for his songs were plentiful. He found in Jewish, Christian, Sufi, and Buddhist traditions, among others, an enriching way of understanding a path to embracing the transcendent. It should be emphasized that Cohen didn’t shed one religion for another. Even as he stayed in a Rinzai Zen monastery, he continued to identify as a Jew.

He was a Jew who tried on different spiritual garments. He drew from a variety of different Jewish sources. Some songs, such as “The Story of Isaac,” come from the Bible. Some songs come from Jewish liturgy. “Who By Fire” is adapted from Unetanneh Tokef, the central prayer of the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. “Dance Me to the End of Love” was inspired by a story Cohen read about involving Jewish concentration camp inmates who continued to play music despite the horrors of their lives. Cohen wrote “Lover, Lover, Lover” (also known as “Lover Come Back to Me”) when he performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. After that war, Cohen said, “I’ve never disguised the fact that I’m Jewish, and in any crisis in Israel I would be there. I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people.”

He absorbed a desperation from Jewish history, but a hope as well, a belief, as he put it, that there was a crack even in despair and in that crack some light could enter. He wrote until the end. His last album, only the fourteenth of his career, was titled “You Want it Darker.” It was an album of resignation in both senses of the word. He was ready to resign from life, but he was resigned to his fate. “Hineni” [in English "here I am"] he calls out to God. He announces his readiness to meet the Almighty.

The Bible records 150 psalms by King David. And now we have Leonard Cohen’s psalms in the Tower of Song. Both sets of psalms bring us peace, beauty, a sense that we will survive through the pain, and that we can, if we wish, hear the still, small voice of God.

Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize in Literature (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

The day after Jack Kerouac’s funeral, I was sitting around a table of Beat writers. Allen Ginsberg was across from me. Gregory Corso and I were discussing the merits of various writers. I then unintentionally provoked the verbally combative Corso. I told him that I was going to attend a Bob Dylan concert, and I began to praise Dylan. Corso went into a five minute tirade about Dylan and other singer-songwriters who claimed to be poets. Corso was not amused.

Not all the Beats agreed, of course. Ginsberg genuinely admired Dylan. Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s important early girlfriend in New York once told me that if I want to understand Dylan, I should talk to Ginsberg. But, from the beginning of his career, Dylan provoked considerable jealousy and anger in his less emotionally generous competitors and colleagues.

When the announcement of Dylan’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature was made, there were reportedly audible murmurs in the hall. Wasn’t the Prize for writers rather than this…this song maker? I thought of those writers around the world who felt deflated, cheated, and upset at the announcement.

Even Dylan’s most fervent fans surely felt some surprise. I was following the announcement from Sweden on a live blog. When I read Dylan’s name I waited a few minutes thinking there might be some kind of mistake. The greatest song lyricist ever? In my opinion, clearly yes. And Dylan himself seemed to think so. In the current New Yorker, there is an article about Leonard Cohen. In the article, Cohen told of a conversation he had with Dylan, who said, “As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number 1. I’m Number Zero.” Cohen went on to explain how he interpreted the statement: “Meaning, as I understood it at the time—and I was not ready to dispute it—that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.”

But, at the end, Dylan was and is a writer of lyrics and music. No one can dispute his abilities in that role. But there will be, beyond the glee or anguish that different people feel, the simple question: Does Dylan deserve the Nobel in Literature? It’s not an idle question. After all, Tolstoy, Proust, Ibsen, Joyce, Zola, Twain, Chekhov, and Auden are among many literary geniuses who didn’t receive the Literature prize.

Perhaps the principal objection to Dylan getting the award is that his work is meant to be presented not read. As if by fate, an answer to that objection has been provided. Today, on the very day of Dylan’s winning, Dario Fo, the 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died. Fo won the award as a playwright. Other playwrights who have won include George Bernard Shaw, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett. Playwrights are not meant to be read. Their work is meant to be performed, with sound, costume, and the other elements of a theatrical event. These playwrights are the appropriate precedents for awarding the Prize to Bob Dylan.

Additionally, Dylan’s influence on others, including novelists, poets, and short story writers, is extraordinary. Virtually by himself, Dylan changed the borders of a song’s possibilities. From the beginning, armed with Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie as his models, he ignored the rules and the pressures of fans.

His detractors can legitimately point to the way he treated women in his life. Some would object to his supposed glorification of drugs. He himself felt some guilt about removing God from his listeners’ lives. But no one can legitimately dispute that Dylan virtually single-handedly transformed at the very least music and, more arguably, all of American culture.

There is a question, though, that I think is more telling. That question is not if Dylan deserves it but rather whether someone else deserves it more. Just to name five, among others, a case can be made that Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, and Thomas Pyncheon all are more deserving.

I’ll confess that I don’t much care for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is political as much as literary in its choices. Even the choice of Dylan can be understood as a publicity stunt. If it was, it worked. Everyone will be talking about Dylan winning.

I’ll leave it to readers to determine if anyone was more deserving, but I’m pleased Bob Dylan won. I’m happy for the great lyricists, the Harts, Berlins and so many others who have retrospectively gained a measure of respect because one of their own has attained such recognition as a Nobel Prize. I’m happy for those who write songs now. The bar has been raised for them to push themselves harder. And I’m very happy for Dylan’s fans, some of whom no doubt will do as I did and listen to Dylan. I immediately played “The Times They Are A-Changin’” which was the first Dylan song I ever heard.

Looking Back at Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan’s 75^th birthday on May 24^th almost coincides with the 50^th anniversary of D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable film Dont Look Back. To celebrate all this, the Morrison Hotel Gallery (at 116 Prince Street, 2^nd Floor, New York), in partnership with Arthouse 18, will offer a Dylan exhibit from the film from May 18^th to June 14th. The exhibit will also be at the Gallery inside the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood from June 11^th through June 26^th. All the images displayed in these exhibits are available for purchase.

I still vividly recall seeing the film in September 1967 when it arrived in New York. I didn’t realize it would provide a record of Dylan’s final solo acoustic tour. It was filmed in England from the end of April to May 10, 1965. I was impressed watching Allen Ginsberg in the background of the famous opening with Dylan tossing aside large cards with parts of the lyrics to the accompanying sounds of Subterranean Homesick Blues. The great irony is that the whole song is performed, unlike the relatively brief snippets of songs in the film itself. In that sense it’s a deliberately anti-documentary. It’s in black and white. It’s jumpy. The refusal to use an apostrophe in the film’s first word might be a sly wink at Dylan’s attitude toward grammatical rules or it might be a Joycean attempt to play with language or it might be a mistake. At any rate, Dylan didn’t need to follow Satchel Paige’s dictum. No one was ever going to gain on Bob Dylan.

The film’s virtue was to capture a crucial moment, a pivotal moment, in Dylan’s life. He was under enormous pressure. On July 25^th he would be at Newport and ignite a storm because the ghost of electricity would howl in the bones of his guitar. He would soon be marrying Sara, but Joan Baez took herself along on the trip, and he had to find a way to come to distances with her. Everybody wanted a piece of Bob Dylan.

Every time I saw the film, I was attracted and repelled by an overwrought, spoiled, or petty Dylan struggling to balance his responsibilities and his audience and his art. Some (but not all) of the outtakes of the film were released as Bob Dylan 65 Revisited. In that film, we see another side of Bob Dylan, one in which, for example, he talks kindly to British children and teenagers. It was almost like this sweet side was expunged from the original to create a particular image.

I once asked Pennebaker what it was like to work with Dylan, and the director offered an interesting response. “In everybody’s life he was like a shadow. He just sort of went through their lives and out the front door…He just was hardly there.” It’s a telling observation. Dylan’s elusive lyrics emerge from an elusive person, as though he needs to keep the heart of his being completely private. That unsettled self can shock us or lead us to consider the stability that we think we have.

There are little gems in the film, such as seeing Dylan being able to concentrate in the surrounding chaotic circus of his entourage. There’s a fascinating scene in which Dylan, Baez, and Bobby Neuwirth are singing Leon Payne’s remarkable song Lost Highway, a song Hank Williams made famous. Neuwirth has to prompt Dylan about the first verse, which begins with “I’m a rolling stone.” Dylan wrote Like a Rolling Stone at the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington and released the song a few months later on July 20, 1965.

When Dylan fans look back at this film, they will find a lot to see.

Happy 75^th to the man we can see but never know.

BOB DYLAN'S PATHS OF VICTORY (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

The Reverend John B. Matthias was born on the first day of 1767. He eventually joined the clergy of the Methodist Episcopal Church and, like other ministers of the church, he became a circuit rider traveling around his assigned territory serving those who lived there and starting new congregations. In 1836, he was serving the areas of South Huntington and Islip on Long Island, and it is then that he supposedly wrote a gospel song titled Palms of Victory (alternate titles are The Wayworn Traveler and Deliverance Will Come).

That, at least, is what is presumed. The song, unlike other hymns, doesn’t have the easily memorable lines associated with a composition that arose bit by bit from a community. So it seems to have sprung from the mind of one author, an author deeply influenced by John Bunyan’s religious classic The Pilgrim’s Progress. Nevertheless, in truth the authorship is unclear in part because the Reverend Matthias was not known as a songwriter and no other song is attributed to him. He died in 1848. His singular achievement in songwriting was not widely known or used in church circles.

But it was recorded by various singers, most famously by the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, and Ralph Stanley.

It is not clear how or when Bob Dylan heard the song, but its melody certainly impressed him.  The most plausible explanation is that Dylan heard the Carter Family’s version which used the title Wayworn Traveler. He probably wrote his song Paths of Victory around July 1963. What Dylan did to the song was interesting. He took a traditional gospel song and made it secular. Even more particularly, he made it political. In Dylan’s hands, the song became an anthem of hope for those engaged in social action, not a song to nourish believers.

On August 12, 1963, Dylan was in the studio for a recording session for his third album.  None of the songs recorded that day, including Paths of Victory, was considered good enough to be included on the album. Dylan then took a break, briefly traveling with Joan Baez and performing in a number of concerts. Evidently in the time gap between sessions for the album, Dylan re-considered Paths of Victory. He had a new vision and transformed it, reworking the verses in a whole new, much more sophisticated, way, changed the time signature to ¾, and had a new song, the one that became the remarkable song that gave its name to the album’s title: The Times They Are a-Changin’. He recorded the song on October 24, 1963. Paths of Victory is included on Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 released in 1991.  

Once Dylan, seeking artistic freedom, separated himself from those who wished to have him keep writing protest songs, he soon found himself caught in an emotional and spiritual maelstrom. Seeking a new form of shelter from this emotional storm, he experimented with religion, family, and rural values before settling on a more or less consistent religious view. For the past decades, this religious lodestar has, with moments of deep doubt and confusion along the way, guided Bob Dylan on his Earthly journey.

What he did then was exactly the opposite of what he did with Paths of Victory. Instead of transforming religious songs into secular sounds, he took secular experiences and found religious meaning in them. Last year he sang songs Frank Sinatra performed. These songs were meant to be entirely secular, but in Dylan’s rendition, they have deep religious undertones. He may do the same on his forthcoming album of other songs Sinatra performed.

Such is the unique artistry of Bob Dylan.

A Personal Note: The Times They Are a-Changin’ was the first Bob Dylan song I ever heard. Without knowing of its connection to Paths of Victory, I used to play Paths every day during the writing of one of my books.

Neighborhood Bully (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I have been thinking about Israel a lot in the last few months as I finished off work on a new book titled The Dream of Zion: The Story of the First Zionist Congress. The book will be published in January, and I’ve been doing the normal preparation for its release.

As I write this, there are ongoing disputes about cultural boycotts of Israel and artists visiting there. J.K. Rowling recently signed a letter with others denouncing such boycotts, but there are British intellectuals who support it. Roger Waters, a founding member of Pink Floyd, keeps belittling performers who appear in Israel and others, like Howard Stern, rightly defend the artists who go.

For people like Waters, Israel is still a neighborhood bully. I am thinking of that Bob Dylan song, because Infidels, the album on which it appears, was released thirty-two years ago today.

Dylan spent a total of nineteen recording sessions from April 11th to May 17th 1983 trying to get the album right. He hadn’t had a real artistic success since Blood on the Tracks in 1975. His religious albums had not produced the stirring effects he evidently had hoped for. On April 19^th, he turned to his new song, “Neighborhood Bully,” singing six separate versions of the song. Evidently still unhappy, he returned to it on May 17^th, the final song sung at the final recording session for the album. Clearly, getting the song right was on his mind, and he refused to be satisfied until the song accomplished the goal he intended.

"Neighborhood Bully" is a Zionist anthem. It is a raucous, sarcastic, unvarnished full-throated defense of Israel. For Dylan, the Israelis, ironically and with deep injustice called the bully of the neighborhood, have "got no place to escape to, no place to run." They are "criticized and condemned for being alive." There is no attempt to be subtle here. There is no nuanced view of Middle Eastern history. The persecuted and embattled Jews are in the right and are simply defending their lives. Dylan invokes the Jewish people's tragic history as a way of defending Israel:

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.

I wrote my book about Zionism to unearth the story of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland. Of course, reality is always more complicated than the tale contained in a story or a book. I was after logical arguments. Dylan was after the emotions behind the support of Israel.

He and his then wife Sara had visited Israel in May 1971. They traveled there without their children, hoping to escape the ravenous American media and the fans who too often mistook Dylan for God. Dylan’s father had died on June 5, 1968, and a trip to Israel was also part of his quest to explore his Jewish roots after that death.

On May 24th, 1971, Dylan's 30th birthday, a photographer got a shot of him praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem while wearing a kippah, the traditional Jewish head covering. The photo ended any possible privacy.

In late May or early June, the Dylans visited Givat Haim, a kibbutz, to explore the possibility of staying there for a while. Dylan evidently wished to stay in a guest house but not work on the kibbutz. The kibbutz members were understandably concerned that their home would be a magnet for the curious.

As he was thinking about the materials that would appear on Infidels, Dylan went again to Israel in 1983. His son Jesse had a bar mitzvah (somewhat late; Jesse was then seventeen).

Dylan didn’t play his first concerts in Israel for several more years, until he appeared there on September 5th and 7th 1987. No doubt by coincidence, Dylan’s next concert after his appearance in Israel that year was in Basel, Switzerland. Basel has come to mean a lot to me because it was the site of the First Zionist Congress in 1897 therefore the very city I've been writing about for months. I try to imagine Dylan wandering through those streets.

“Neighborhood Bully” remains a remarkable song, one as sadly pertinent today as it was when Dylan wrote it.

The Dylan Highway (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

The highway is one of the most compelling of American symbols. Constant travel went from being a necessity for the hobos during the Great Depression to being a source for inspiration. Tennessee Williams has his character Tom observe at the end of The Glass Menagerie that he was “attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.” He couldn’t find the answer, his place in the cosmos, at home so he had to be moving all the time. Jack Kerouac, of course, influenced an entire generation and its inheritors in On the Road about characters feverishly in search of a meaning that is never found, characters who speed from one broken dream to the next. Beyond the highway as the pathway to a life search, it can also be a pathway to doom as in Leon Payne’s remarkable song Lost Highway, a song Hank William made famous.

Singers, comedians, and other performers go on the road for these but also for professional reasons. Some singers can’t wait to get out there and do what they love the most—sing with their friends. This was the entire theme as Willie Nelson sang “On the Road Again.” (Bob Dylan also sang a song titled “On the Road Again,” but his wasn’t about touring but about a deeply flawed romantic relationship. The title was most probably not taken from Kerouac but from the Memphis Jug Band’s 1928 song also titled “On the Road Again”). Not every singer, though, was so happy to be touring. The lonely grind, the aching sameness, and the longing to return to the familiar are summed up in Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound.”

These touring songs may or may not include a singer’s exploration of the locales where they perform. But whether they do or not, when a singer like Dylan tours, the primary purpose is not to search for meaning, not to find a pathway for life, but to appear in front of an appreciate and paying audience.

Dylan’s constant travels, then, are not like Kerouac’s or Allen Ginsberg’s or Woody Guthrie’s. The travels Dylan takes don’t exemplify the myth of the open American road. And these tour trips are not taken on the real Dylan Highway.

Dylan goes on his own highway by changing identities, musical styles and interests, and belief systems. His highway is internal and eternal. He doesn’t have a single place to return to on this internal journey; he really doesn’t have a direction home because he has no settled self. Home isn’t a place for him. It’s a fixed, unchanging identity.

Most of Dylan’s listeners aren’t like him. They do have a settled self, an evolving but still identifiable being. But Dylan is precisely valuable to all of us because he can destabilize our settled selves. He can force us to look at ourselves as we watch him discard selves like last year’s distasteful choices. We watch him go through the cycle: get a self, use it, throw it away, get another self. And as we witness this, as some people get furious with every style he dismisses and every new self he embraces, he gives us a glimpse of the alternative lives that lurk within us. He forces us to see our settled selves and in so doing forces us to decide whether or not we want to keep it. He is a salesman of selves, parading his large collection of wares for us to witness.

Dylan’s Highway is a learning highway, an internal journey from home to all the possible homes in which we might live.

So, angry at him or not, he makes us see that we don’t have to settle. He offers us a map if we wish to travel on the Dylan Highway.

Dylan, The Escape Artist (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

A Facebook friend posed a question online asking people to identify two men he described without naming. I answered that he was referring to “Houdini and that other escape artist Bobby Dylan.”

I had been thinking about escape artists, though not in the usual sense. I’m writing a book about the origins of Zionism and how the persecuted Jews especially in Eastern Europe felt a deep and sometimes painful yearning to escape so that they might lead a new life. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, was one man who needed an escape from the failures of the European attempt to assimilate Jews and from much else.

I realized as I explored this theme that while we often think of an escape as getting away from a place, escaping also means escaping from the travails of the world, from the traumas and terrors of our own body, and from our own minds--the stifling emotions, the ideological rigidity that prevents liberating thoughts, the pattern of emotional reactions that can undermine our treatment of ourselves and others.

In thinking about my flip answer to my friend, I realized that Bob Dylan had indeed been a master escape artist. He had to escape Hibbing, his parents, the intellectual choke hold of a politically needy folk community, Albert Grossman, and Joan Baez—the woman who had a principal role in making him famous but whom he had to escape from to be with his first wife, Sara. Dylan had to escape from the annoyingly aggressive press and the earnest, sometimes helpful and well-meaning but often self-aggrandizing and misleading critics who wrote about him. (I include myself in this ever-growing group). He had to escape his own fans. Dylan had to escape each succeeding identity he acquired so that his identity of the moment wouldn’t become a straightjacket preventing his soul from moving about freely.  

And just like Dylan needed to escape others and sometimes himself, others sometimes had to escape him. Women made up most of those escapees. Women, from the young, decent, loving, kind, confused Suze Rotolo who started out dating a singer and ended up with a celebrity and going through the “pretty maids all in a row” that he encountered in his life. They ended up needing to escape Dylan’s tornadic life. And other singers found they needed to escape Dylan’s musical orbit. At the beginning, in Greenwich Village, many of the musicians were jealous of the shocking expanse of Dylan’s talent and the velocity of its growth. Many, like Tom Paxton, reconciled themselves to the realities of their competitor and just accepted Dylan. But some, like Phil Ochs, couldn’t accept that their talent was lesser than Dylan’s. They tried to escape and, in Ochs’ case, could not. Ochs surely must have understood that without Dylan on the scene, Ochs could easily have been accepted as the boy genius, the heir to Woody Guthrie, the greatest writer of political folk music.

Of course, I was punning in calling Dylan an “escape artist.” He was unusual in his adeptness at escaping from some kind of confinement. Houdini didn’t do this, say, as a prisoner who could keep escaping jails, but as a performer. Dylan also did it as a performer but he was an artist at more than escaping. He was a musical genius who could write captivating songs about escaping.

There are many love songs that Dylan wrote about escaping. But perhaps “Drifter’s Escape” is his most interesting song about the subject. The song opens from God’s point of view as a drifter calls out for God’s help.  “’Oh, help me in my weakness,’ I heard the drifter say.” A mob is carrying the poor man from the courtroom even though “I still do not know/ what it was that I’ve done wrong.” The judge works up a tear, but he is part of the system and tells the drifter not to try to understand his fate. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning, delivered by God, strikes the courthouse. The mob, misunderstanding God, kneels to pray presumably for their own safety, and in the confusion, the drifter escapes.

Dylan is making a clear allusion to Kafka, and had a good reason. The song was written in 1967, as Dylan was put on musical trial by some of his fans for abandoning folk music for rock music. Those fans found him guilty, but Dylan found the strength to escape them through God’s help, as could be seen on Blonde on Blonde and much more explicitly in later albums.

We often think of ourselves as being powerful enough to be the agent of our own escape. That is what Herzl thought. He didn’t rely on God’s intervention or the kindness of nations for the Jewish people to re-establish their ancient nation. Herzl thought agency was self-fueled. Dylan held a similar view on earlier albums, and his switch to a God-centered world was not only a major change in his life but also a major change in how he saw the human ability to escape.

To contact the author: lawrencejepstein@gmail.com.

 

 

Dylan Sings to God [by Lawrence J. Epstein]

This post is dedicated to the great David Lehman.

In his latest album, Shadows in The Night, Bob Dylan sings ten songs to God. For Dylan, singing is the most authentic form of prayer. The songs aren’t his own but come from the Great American Songbook as filtered through Frank Sinatra’s inimitable voice. Why not Dylan’s own songs? And, if not his songs, why Sinatra’s?

To answer these questions, it is crucial to understand Dylan’s aim in the album. Dylan was after an album of allegorical love songs. This tradition started for him with “Visions of Johanna.” In that song Dylan is with the earthly Louise while yearning for the spiritual Johanna. The exact nature of Johanna's Godliness is not clear in the song. She could be God as represented by a female, or a metaphor as in the "Song of Songs" tradition, or one aspect of God, or a private way that Dylan experiences God.  It is very likely that Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess influenced Dylan. That complex book is about a muse, a White Goddess, who was a single Goddess behind the various mythological goddesses. In his book Graves argues that “pure” poetry is linked to the White Goddess. That is, however Dylan formed the idea, he sometimes appears to be singing to a woman but in reality is singing also or exclusively to God. Other examples of his allegorical love songs include “Shelter From the Storm” and "Red River Shore."

Therefore, while it’s easy to hear the songs on Shadows in The Night as standard love songs, they are more resonant, closer to Dylan’s intentions, if they are heard as songs to a feminine representation of God.

That in part explains the use of Frank Sinatra’s songs. Sinatra provides a perfect counterpoint to the idea of woman as God because Sinatra could uniquely deliver love songs. That is, his songs were sung to woman as woman. Dylan takes these great love songs and uses them in a new way, expanding them, not just reinterpreting their sound but also their meaning.

Interpreted in this way, the Sinatra songs of romantic longing remain intact but suddenly also include a desperate plea, an intense spiritual longing. These are not the songs of Dylan on a spiritual quest or Dylan in the rapture of religious embrace. These are the songs of a lost God, of Dylan wondering why God has gone. A shadow in the night is a darker shade of what is already dark. These songs long for an absent God.

The album operates by looking at all angles of this longing. In “I’m a Fool to Want You” Dylan berates himself for even wanting God. In “Stay With Me,” just the opposite is true because “every path leads to Thee.” Dylan wants God to be near. “Autumn Leaves” sounds like a whole new song on the album. In “Why Try to Change Me Now,” Dylan begs God to accept him as he is: “Don’t you remember? I was always your clown.” It almost sounds as though Dylan wrote those lyrics. In “Where Are You” Dylan longs for the absent God.

There’s a crucial insight about belief in these songs. Religious belief is dynamic. It changes over time. Dylan believed, but God has abandoned him. And that’s why Dylan is not singing his own songs. The otherness of the songs is a metaphor for the distance he feels from God. He can’t even pray with his own words.

The real brilliance of the album’s song choices stems from the notion that God’s relationship with Dylan is exactly like the relationship between romantic partners. Such a relationship can change over time. Feelings can get close and then sometimes retreat. And so in singing to a gone God, it makes good sense to sing love songs of longing for reconciliation.

Dylan’s is a perfect voice for these songs. As many listeners have noted, his voice sounds fresh and clear. He doesn’t just sing; he begs. There is a plea in every song offered by a voice that has lived. It is a voice weighted down by the accumulated strains of life.

And then there’s “That Lucky Old Sun,” the final song on the album. Dylan sometimes ends an album with a hint about his future direction. If so, it is a sad direction home. In the song, Dylan is envious of the sun because it can “roll around Heaven all day.” The way Dylan sings it, it is a song of someone weary of life, someone who desires death. And yet his is a voice that won’t be stilled. His feet still move on to the next stop on the tour.  

This is simply an incredible album.

"It's Life and Life Only" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

DYLAN: THE BIOGRAPHY. Dennis McDougal. Turner Publishing Company.

There are a thousand doors that lead into the House of Dylan. Dennis McDougal has managed to open a new door. Applying a muckraking sensibility to Dylan’s life, McDougal has opened the door of snarky biography. His book is chock full of revealing and sometimes unflattering incidents, gossip, and well-researched facts. There are nuggets of juicy information on every page.

This constantly entertaining approach has, however, some built-in limitations. To focus so exclusively on Dylan’s life means McDougal has to strain out extended discussions of the lyrics and the music. It might be argued that such efforts already exist or that they are unhelpful since so many of Dylan’s best lyrics are private to the point of being inexplicable. McDougal inherently argues that the life is so jam-packed, so quivering with meaning, so curious with its parade of characters, so endlessly fascinating to legions of obsessed fans, that trying to decipher the lyrics is best left to the professors who like Dylan’s poetic looks. Still, some readers will be disappointed. All biographies of Dylan have the same big problem. We know a lot about Dylan, but we also don’t know a lot. Dylan’s life is marked by interiority. No one has access to his thought dreams. No one can unpack all the lies, all the deceptions. It should be noted that McDougal’s book is particularly valuable because he emphasizes Dylan’s many false identities, “borrowing” lines, and misleading stories. 

With all the facts, it would have been interesting for McDougal to pause and reflect more. He has a very insightful understanding of Dylan’s audience, and I’d like to have read more of his thoughts about them. He writes in an eye-opening way about Dylan’s mother and her ability to make up stories or invent new lines for Mother Goose rhymes. I wonder to what extent Dylan’s linguistic skills, evident early to his Hibbing friends, were inherited. And do Dylan’s misdirections to everyone indicate a manipulative personalityor is there another explanation? Allen Ginsberg said of Dylan in 1976, "I don't know him because I don't think there is any him. I don't think he's got a self."

McDougal is a talented journalist, and he includes material not found elsewhere. I’m impressed, for example, at how intelligently he describes the privately-printed memoir of B.J. Rolfzen, Dylan’s influential high school English teacher. But the very inclusion of such interesting material brings up a wider question. What is amazing is that even with the heft of the book, even with McDougal’s impressive research, there are compelling stories that are not included. For example, Rolfzen told me that he used to go to a local cemetery jotting down epitaphs, connecting them together, and reading that list to Dylan’s class. For the effect of this, see “11 Outlined Epitaphs” in the liner notes to The Times They Are A-Changin’. In a way, McDougal’s book makes it abundantly clear that an artist like Dylan ultimately needs a very long multi-volume biography.  

The writing, crisp and always readable, is untainted by jargon or unnecessarily dense prose. Still, McDougal does have an odd locution or two. For instance, he refers to Greenwich Village as “Greenwich” which no resident there does; they always call it the Village.

The book, though, is valuable for its unmatched approach to Dylan’s life and his providing an important corrective by focusing so much on Dylan’s later life bringing his story up-to-date and offering an appreciation of Dylan’s many later achievements.

Dylan: The Biography displays a jaw-dropping amount of tales told in admirable prose. The book is very suitable for Dylan fans and those who wonder why so many people keep knocking on one of Dylan’s doors.

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Bob Dylan Forecasts the 2016 Presidential Election [by David Lehman]

"Hillary Clinton is Gladys Knight, and all the rest of them are the pips." -- Robert Zimmerman (alias Bob Dylan). See Peter Nicholas, "Clinton Freezes Rest of '16 Field" in the Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2014, front page (above the fold). On Billie Holiday's birthday no less!That's Gladys on the left. Where are the pips? Can't find 'em, but . . .that's the point. -- DL

In Defense of Bob Dylan? [by D.L.]

(Ed note: In a file of rejected letters to the editor from 2011, this epistle emerged. It was never published, perhaps because of the editors’ not unreasonable suspicion that the undersigned was either a pseudonym, a hoax, or a stand-in for the wounded performer.) -- DL

To the Editor,

I am writing in response to today’s front-page article asking when the time is right for an old geezer past his prime to get off the stage. The piece begins with a scathing account of a recent concert by Bob Dylan. You illustrated it with a cartoon of Dylan with a prune juice bottle at his elbow.

My first reaction was yeah. I was at that concert. I’ll never pay to hear him anymore. And it was expensive. The cost to pleasure ratio was way out of whack. However, then I considered the unexamined premise behind the piece, which is that age brings infirmity and loss of prowess without a compensatory gift, in this case the beautiful nobility of Mr. Dylan’s professional presence. I’d rather have a croaking Bob Dylan than 90% of what’s out there.

 And how typically inconsistent for the Wall Street Journal to say in one breath that Dylan at 69 is too old to perform and in the next breath that we should extend the retirement age to 69.

As a free-market capitalist I feel that Dylan should retire when the market says he should.

            (signed) R. Zimmerman

The Basic Beliefs of Bob Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

My book The Basic Beliefs of Judaism: A Twenty-first-Century Guide to a Timeless Tradition has just been published. Writing it compelled me to think of how idea systems are structured and about the nature of their constituent elements. Of course, my mind inevitably wandered from trying to provide an organized and systematic explanation of the Jewish articles of faith to other belief systems.

Since I’ve written so much about Bob Dylan, I began to wonder what it would look like to examine Dylan’s basic beliefs. I quickly concluded that, very much like the Judaism I had just written about, it wasn’t possible or even desirable to pretend that there was an easily defined set of such beliefs. Still, surely Dylan had strongly-held beliefs. So I wondered how to locate them.

I finally decided to consider a representative song. My choice is completely arbitrary. I chose it because it was written at a creative and pivotal moment in Dylan’s career.

“Maggie’s Farm,” recorded on January 15, 1965, is most frequently is understood as Dylan’s refusal to go along with the folk movement’s expectations of him, especially that he stick to acoustic rather than electric music and continue to write social and political protests against injustice exclusively rather than write about his personal feelings. The song became a living symbol at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric as he sang it.

Proponents of the view that this song is a rebellion against the folk community point out the similarity of Maggie’s name to that of Silas McGee. It was on McGee’s farm that Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game” for a 1963 civil rights gathering. This song can be seen performed in Dont Look Back. However, it is also plausible that Dylan took the idea of complaining about working on a farm from the 1929 song “Down on Penny’s Farm,” which Dylan had heard on Harry Smith’s iconic collection Anthology of American Folk Music and had used as the basis of an earlier song, “Hard Times in New York Town.” “Maggie’s Farm” also bears some similarities to Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett’s “Tanner’s Farm,” recorded in 1934.

There are two beliefs inherent in these observations. Dylan’s foundational belief in the song is that he will not be chained to any movement, any group that wants to claim and own him as their own. As he asserts in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” another song on the same Bringing It All Back Home album: “It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.” He laments that “everybody wants you to be just like them.” Dylan’s crucial belief is in artistic and intellectual independence.

As a rebellion against the folk music movement, it is possible to read the song’s characters as either general types or specific people Dylan knew. For example, when you ask what female ran the “folk music farm,” the answer is obvious: Joan Baez. On this level, the song is a protest against Baez. Pete Seeger was her “brother” in folk legend and power. And who’s the father figure for Dylan in this plot to get him to sing while he slaved? Albert Grossman, his manager. This making the work a song with a key only goes so far, of course, and it’s all conjecture anyway. The bigger point is that the folk community wanted to control Dylan, and he didn’t want to be controlled. To see the characters in more general terms consider Maggie’s ma who is the sort of person who attempts to manipulate others by invoking the support of and hiding behind the authority of “Man and God and Law.”

Dylan’s second basic belief evident in the song is his faith is in traditional music. He may not like movements, but he is grounded in the roots music of American life. If the Bible later came to either replace or supplement the American musical canon, at this stage of his life, Dylan’s truest guide was what he heard in the great music of the country, especially early 20^th century blues and country music. If there is any group in which he feels comfortable, it is the community of musicians, so long as he’s not limited to any one musical influence or heritage or any one type of song that he must sing.

There’s a third belief almost hidden away. It’s in the third and fourth lines of the song when he wakes in the morning folds his hands and prays for rain. It’s an odd statement in this angry song because the song mocks belief in others but not in the power of prayer to produce rain. It may be he wants the rain so he won’t have to go outside and pray. The point, though, is he prays at all and believes in the power of prayer. This belief became central as he got older. And just as Dylan didn’t want to be chained to a musical movement, so, too, it would turn out that he didn’t want to be chained to a particular religion. He mistrusted religious groups as much as he mistrusted any other kind of group, and his religion would, stemming from his foundational belief in complete personal freedom, focus on his own relationship to God rather than on his attachment to a religious group.

“Maggie’s Farm” also contains a seemingly ironic belief. The fourth belief in the song is in the importance of protest. That is, Dylan believes it is an individual’s moral duty to protest, but not to do so as part of a movement. In this song, Dylan complains about the National Guard standing around the door. Because the farm is run by so many oppressive people, the farm itself might be seen as the symbol of an oppressive state. It should be noted, though, that it’s no accident that it was Dylan who suggested what became Farm Aid in a comment made at the 1985 Live Aid concert. For Dylan, farms weren’t oppressive, but a symbol of family and home. Hollis Brown and his family, for example, lived on a South Dakota farm in Dylan’s song about the family’s tragedy. On that reading, Maggie and her family are ruining Eden, turning what should be a family refuge into a horrific place. Dylan in this sense longs for simplicity, for a return. Instead of the song being a cry for fighting against an oppressive state it becomes a cry for returning to lost traditions.

So, the fourth belief is indeed a call to protest, but it is not a call to protest from a particular political viewpoint. Dylan doesn’t want to be owned by any one political ideology.

The Bookstore [by Michael Schiavo]

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Bob Dylan's Identity (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Imagination takes precedence over intellect for Bob Dylan. David Dalton tries to trace the career of that remarkable imagination in his book Who Is That Man?: In Search of the Real Bob Dylan (Hyperion) which is being published today. Dalton, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, originally titled his work Bob's Brain. I suppose he did this because he wanted to attempt the impossible: a provide a written MRI of the creator of what some people claim to be the best songs ever written.

Bob Dylan's identity is, to understate the point laughably, elusive, starting with his Jewishness. Karl Shapiro, in his work In Defense of Ignorance, wrote: "The European Jew was always a visitor...But in America everybody is a visitor. In the United States the Jewish writer is free to create his own consciousness." But the Jewish writer has a more complex identity than other American writers. In Ravelstein, Saul Bellow noted that "As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are not." That was Dylan's status. He was an outsider as a Jew in America, but doubly so in Hibbing, Minnesota. As a rural Jew, he was, in Dalton's phrase, "an outsider in a community of outsiders."

This status led him to be free to invent a self while simultaneously feeling outside of any genuine self. In one sense he had no identity at all. In 1976 Allen Ginsberg said about Dylan: "I don't know him because I don't think there is any him. I don't think he's got a self."

Dylan rebelled against his birth self in every possible way. He changed his name. He changed where he lived. He believed he had been born into the wrong family. He looked for a direction to his real self and could not find it. Robert Zimmerman had a profound sense of disquiet. And so, when he got to New York, he invented stories to everyone who would listen. He was an orphan, a circus performer, a Native American. He was anybody but a small town son of a Jewish appliance dealer.

But accompanying this all--inclusive self-rejection was an intense belief in himself, a sense that Fate had cleared a path in life for him that would lead to his being the most important singer in America. For me, this juxtaposition provides an approach to Dylan's identity: to look at the rapport and the rancor between his private and public selves. To do this, I think it's useful to consider Dylan as an actor. Lies are the truth for an actor. The world has facts, but for Dylan those facts didn't explain inner turmoil, the ever-moving, ever-changing, often closely-related feelings of desire and loathing, the ways that words and sounds just came to him, often when prompted by a song that moved him. He loved those songs, and then stole them, and then made them his own, inevitably vastly improving them.

Actors are frequently alienated from themselves. (The best book I know about this is Simon Callow's Being An Actor). They often can't find a real self. That was Ginsberg's point about Dylan. To overcome these dreadful feelings, actors have to think the thoughts of others, in their cases the imaginative characters created by dramatists and screenwriters. Dylan absorbed the imaginative characters of American popular music. He was the hobo and the troubadour, the endless traveler and the misunderstood artist. As with actors, he was far more comfortable on stage than off. But unlike actors he didn't have a Shakespeare who had written for him. He tried. He had Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and the whole of American popular music. But eventually he discovered he needed to sing songs that didn't yet exist. Eventually he became his own dramatist and screenwriter and created the songs and then acted them out on stage. He was the writer, the actor, and the director. And, some say, he became his own Shakespeare.

GREIL MARCUS AND DYLAN (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

What is this gold?

This is Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Writings 1968-2010 (PublicAffairs), a just-published treasure trove of the author's indispensable riffs on America's enigmatic musical legend. As the most interesting writer about Bob Dylan, Marcus is brutally honest, often with a trenchant wit, capable of seeing connections invisible to everyone else, and brimming with unpredictable passion. And doesn't that description fit Dylan himself? Maybe that's why Marcus is such a perfect Dylan audience.

The book opens in the summer of 1963 with Marcus in a New Jersey field eager to hear Joan Baez and surprised when she introduces a friend, a "scruffy looking guy with a a guitar" whose name Marcus didn't catch. After the show, Marcus found the young Bob Dylan crouching behind the tent trying to light a cigarette. Marcus tried to offer praise, but Dylan would have none of it. And so it began, Greil Marcus' quest to look at Bob Dylan and see how America was reflected in him and how his reflection changed America. It is a long, dazzling journey. It includes the notorious four word opening line of Marcus' 1970 review of Dylan's album Self Portrait, a review that was a succinct declaration of independence from uncritical Dylan adoration. There's a 1979 review of Slow Train Coming about Dylan's embrace of a version of fundamentalist Christianity Marcus calls "southern Californian suburban." Marcus' brilliant take in the review titled "Amazing Chutzpah" is that this kind of religious conversion seems like one more stop on Dylan's restless journey but that such a conversion can end a quest for answers by seeming, falsely, to settle every question. Over and over in this book, Marcus looks at Dylan and uses the singer to offer bulletins from the front lines of American culture. There are great essays on "the myth of the open road," the location of Desolation Row, and much else. I particularly liked Marcus' recounting his visit to Hibbing High School and Dylan's famed English teacher, the late and wonderful B.J. Rolfzen. And then there's "High Water Everywhere," Marcus' response to the September 11th attacks. The "article" is a jarring collection of quotations that, taken together, provides a penetrating look into the American soul. The book concludes on election night 2008 in Minneapolis.

It is difficult to convey the energy of Marcus writing style. I think of it as linguistic pointillism, with Marcus' precise and daring dots of Dylan's career ultimately forming a larger image, a picture of a very strange landscape called America. Whatever Marcus' style is called, it is riveting. Readers won't always agree with him. Indeed, that's the fun. He's so engaging you want to enter the debate.

Greil Marcus is justifiably noted for a string of terrific books, especially about American music. This anthology, vital for every Dylan fan and for those who wish to understand the last forty years of American culture, provides powerful support to those arguing for Marcus' place as the preeminent cultural critic of the country.

The Bob Dylan Mask (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

There are those artists who never have an unuttered thought. They feel compelled to reveal their most intimate feelings, their nastiest habits, and the messiest clutter of their personal lives. The caution light in their brain has gone out.

And then there's Bob Dylan. He hid behind an adopted name and contradictory, phony biographies until some of his real past was discovered. His brilliant songs seem simultaneously confessional and mysteries beyond our reach, meaning they fail to let us see him. His interviews are notorious jousts with journalists as he reveals, hints at, hides, lies, and attacks. Here he is, having just turned sixty-nine, and we know all about him except that part that is significant and revelatory.

When he was very young discovering what it meant to be a songwriter and singer and charting his future, Bob Dylan created a persona, a character, someone unlettered and untutored with a reflexive, natural grasp of language and a jukebox for a mind. He developed a singing voice that growled. He play-acted at being Woody Guthrie. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, well-off middle class Jewish kid from, of all places, Hibbing, Minnesota. No, he was Bob Dylan, a man of the people who sprang spontaneously from nowhere, a traveling troubadour for the downtrodden.

The persona was very useful to him in many ways as he began his career. He could in his new identity feel part of the folk. Bob Dylan was a hobo, a rambler and a gambler, someone who knew hard times. Of course, Robert Zimmerman had no experience with such a life. But Bob Dylan, well he was different.

The Dylan who couldn't put two grammatically correct sentences together, who seemed on unfriendly terms with proper English, fooled some people who thought he was a simple rustic. That perception gave him an advantage over those who misjudged him.

His Bob Dylan mask allowed him to gauge people according to how they reacted to him as someone (seemingly) poor and uneducated. Later he could use the mask in anger to assert that people didn't understand him. The mask was a useful device to keep people at a distance.

The folk audiences he originally played for desperately sought authenticity. They wanted a young Woody Guthrie, an heir to Pete Seeger. And here was this young rebel whose vague origins and odd behavior and ever-present song allowed them to fill him in as they wished. They pictured the person they wanted behind the mask without ever being allowed to look at who was really there.

Dylan's persona let him keep the most precious part of himself private, behind the front of a kid on the run, abandoned by parents and society, someone who blew in with the wind. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, college dropout. He was Bob Dylan, master folksinger, the man who knew, like Woody, that guitars don't lie, who knew words placed just right could lead people over pain, who burned with a fiery drive to sing truth to power.

Dylan's keeping part of himself permanently private has, to understate, worked for him. It's hard to imagine that he will change. Of course, his ongoing march toward an ever-closer eternity may cause some re-thinking. Does he want to be understood or does he want to go out a mystery?

For now, the Bob Dylan mask remains firmly in place.