"..derivative not great."
ROBBIE
The Sunday Times - Books
September 14, 2003
Review: Cover book: Dylan's Vision of Sin by Christopher Ricks
JOHN CAREY
DYLAN'S VISIONS OF SIN
by Christopher Ricks
Viking £25 pp518
Is Bob Dylan as great a poet as John Keats? Proponents of high and low
culture have been squabbling over this question ever since David Hare
formulated it in 1992. Accusations of snobbery fly in one direction and of
philistinism in the other. Christopher Ricks, Warren Professor of the
Humanities at Boston University, is a dazzling analyst of poetic styles,
whose early books changed the way a whole generation read Milton and Keats.
He is also a Dylan worshipper, remembering the "sweet startlement" with
which he listened to new releases 30 years ago. In this book, his longest to
date, he puts Dylan on a level not just with Keats but with a whole spread
of other greats - Tennyson, Milton, Hopkins, Housman and "that Dylanesque
writer William Shakespeare".
Dylan's Visions of Sin is a misleading title. Ricks has nothing interesting
to say about sin, nor has Dylan, though his songs mention it fairly often.
There are writers - Blake, Wordsworth, D H Lawrence - who reinvent the
concept of sin. Dylan is not among them. Ricks does not even bother to ask
how Dylan's ideas about sin changed, if at all, in the course of his
conversion from Judaism to born-again Christianity and back to Judaism. Nor
does he discuss the relation of sin to secular morality. His ethical
ponderings seldom rise above pulpit-style admonition ("to give gratitude is
to be the richer, not the poorer, for the giving"). The 36 Dylan songs he
selects are arranged under the chapter headings of deadly sins, cardinal
virtues and heavenly graces, but this is merely to give an appearance of
order and progression to what are essentially 36 separate essays in
practical criticism, designed to demonstrate Dylan's poetic greatness.
The reasoned verbal analysis at which Ricks excels is not an ideal tool for
probing Dylan, because quite a lot of lines in his songs are lax or
meaningless. They seem to be just a kind of filler for the music. Dylan
himself makes no bones about this. Recalling the composition of Lay, Lady,
Lay he says, "The song came out of those first four chords. I filled it up
with lyrics then, the la la la type thing." This relative verbal poverty
drives Ricks to concentrate largely on matters of form and structure. There
are microscopic investigations of rhyme-schemes and discourses on grammar,
particularly pronouns, which Ricks keeps counting to show that there are
more or fewer in each verse than you might have expected. The aim is to
prove that what appears slovenly in Dylan is actually beautifully intricate.
It is a prodigious effort. But it cuts less ice than it might, partly
because Ricks could prove that the telephone directory was beautifully
intricate if he tried, and partly because the section of his brain that
dishes out adverse criticism seems to have shut down. The book is
relentlessly eulogistic. Not a single fault is found with anything Dylan
says or writes from start to finish. When he makes sense it is welcomed with
rapture, and when he does not it is better than making sense - "one of those
mysterious triumphs of phrasing that exquisitely elude paraphrase". The
effort of reading becomes more and more difficult as it dawns on you that
nothing more lies in wait than another barrage of plaudits, very similar to
the last.
Ricks's other critical recourse is comparison. Phrases from Dylan are set
beside similar, or roughly similar, phrases from other writers ranging from
Shakespeare to abstruse theological and literary figures such as Isaac
Barrow and William Barnes. This was the method he used brilliantly in his
book Inventions of the March Hare, where he showed how phrases from the
young T S Eliot's reading turned up transformed in his early poetry. With
Dylan it is more difficult, because it is not clear which other writers he
has read. Most of the time Ricks acknowledges that the similarities he spots
are probably coincidental. He includes them, it seems, on the principle that
if Dylan uses words used by recognised literary writers, he must be writing
literature. In some of the songs, though, Ricks unearths what seem
unmistakable traces of literary texts - King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, the Ode
to a Nightingale, The Journey of the Magi, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
These discoveries are the most exciting part of the book - Ricks on his old
form, plucking rabbits from hats with breathtaking adroitness. At the same
time, they do nothing, in themselves, to advance the case for Dylan's poetic
greatness. Being indebted to other writers makes him derivative, not great.
What Ricks's comparisons paradoxically make clear is not how like but how
unlike the literary poets Dylan is. Again and again, when he sets a Dylan
song beside an excerpt from Tennyson or Hopkins or Larkin, the difference is
glaring. The poets are articulate and cadenced, whereas Dylan's words seem
inert, stumbling, and curiously rhythmless. The obvious reason for this is
that he is not a poet but a song writer. Music and performance are needed to
complete his artworks, and to add dimensions that are inaccessible to poetry
as text. Ricks knows this, of course. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of
Dylan's performances, commenting on studio out-takes and bootlegged
recordings with train-spotterish fervour. But he does not seem to appreciate
how far it undermines his enterprise. Judging a Dylan song as if it
consisted of words on the page is as cockeyed as expecting that Keats's odes
would be better if set to music.
It is not only the giants of English literature who emerge as totally unlike
Dylan. So does Ricks. He surrounds Dylan's laconic utterances with swirls of
mandarin prose. His commentaries add dramatic fancies not present in Dylan's
plain words. The phrase "but you who", for example, has, for Ricks, "the
effect of a tank turret turning in threat". Commonplace idioms in Dylan send
him fluttering into ecstasies. "You got a lotta nerve" prompts the
ejaculation "Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every
arrow-strung line." Dylan never sounds like that, which is why he is a great
popular writer whose songs reach countless people. "Is there one line from a
Dylan song that you think of every day?" asks the Dylan website. The answers
run to thousands. Dylan never alienates his audience by seeming educated,
and it is a lesson Ricks might learn. His prose is strenuously puckish.
There are puns galore, comic literary allusions, jocular redefinitions
(celebrities, "the lavish people before whom we are slavish"). Yet it
remains extraordinarily unfunny, and when you try to work out why, you
realise that it is because it is saying all the time "I am cleverer than
you." Successful humorists are careful to avoid that message. Ricks belts it
out fortissimo. The fact that in his case it is almost certainly true makes
it, of course, even less amusing.
--
Incapacity Benefits~ the blog
http://robbie.journalspace.com/
Alan Hogue
>John Carey diagnoses an all too common ailment among Dylan fans....
>
>
>The Sunday Times - Books
>
>
>
>September 14, 2003
>
>Review: Cover book: Dylan's Vision of Sin by Christopher Ricks
>JOHN CAREY
>
>
>
>DYLAN'S VISIONS OF SIN
>by Christopher Ricks
>Viking £25 pp518
>Is Bob Dylan as great a poet as John Keats? Proponents of high and low
>culture have been squabbling over this question ever since David Hare
>formulated it in 1992. Accusations of snobbery fly in one direction and of
>philistinism in the other. Christopher Ricks, Warren Professor of the
>Humanities at Boston University, is a dazzling analyst of poetic styles,
>whose early books changed the way a whole generation read Milton and Keats.
>He is also a Dylan worshipper, remembering the "sweet startlement" with
>which he listened to new releases 30 years ago. In this book, his longest to
>date, he puts Dylan on a level not just with Keats but with a whole spread
>of other greats - Tennyson, Milton, Hopkins, Housman and "that Dylanesque
>writer William Shakespeare".
>[snip]
>
Yawn. These canonical debates are such a waste of time.
Alan H.
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
> John Carey diagnoses an all too common ailment among Dylan fans....
>
> ....Dylan's Visions of Sin is a misleading title. Ricks has nothing
> interesting
> to say about sin, nor has Dylan, though his songs mention it fairly often.
> There are writers - Blake, Wordsworth, D H Lawrence - who reinvent the
> concept of sin. Dylan is not among them. Ricks does not even bother to ask
> how Dylan's ideas about sin changed, if at all, in the course of his
> conversion from Judaism to born-again Christianity and back to Judaism. Nor
> does he discuss the relation of sin to secular morality. His ethical
> ponderings seldom rise above pulpit-style admonition ("to give gratitude is
> to be the richer, not the poorer, for the giving"). The 36 Dylan songs he
> selects are arranged under the chapter headings of deadly sins, cardinal
> virtues and heavenly graces, but this is merely to give an appearance of
> order and progression to what are essentially 36 separate essays in
> practical criticism....
Nah, I'd guess this is merely to keep people reading by holding out the hope of
tasty specifics about sin.
/M
Jonathan Mason
> John Carey diagnoses an all too common ailment among Dylan fans....
>
>
> The Sunday Times - Books
>
>
>
> September 14, 2003
>
> Review: Cover book: Dylan's Vision of Sin by Christopher Ricks
> JOHN CAREY
>
>
>
> DYLAN'S VISIONS OF SIN
> by Christopher Ricks
> Viking £25 pp518
> Is Bob Dylan as great a poet as John Keats?
Nah, Bob Marley might be, though:
I remember when-a we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown.
And then Georgie would make the fire lights,
As it was logwood burnin' through the nights.
Then we would cook cornmeal porridge,
Of which I'll share with you;
My feet is my only carriage,
So I've got to push on through.
(No Woman No Cry)
ROBBIE
"Jonathan Mason" <jm_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:fc36aad3.0309...@posting.google.com...
I think writing song lyrics is a very low art form, inflated by
beatle-browed bedroom narcissists the world over.
>
> (No Woman No Cry)
ROBBIE
"Alan Hogue" <aho...@lawdot.berkeleydot.edu> wrote in message
news:bk5he7$18d2$1...@agate.berkeley.edu...
> ROBBIE wrote:
>
> >
>
> Yawn. These canonical debates are such a waste of time.
>
> Alan H.
>
I think they're quite interesting actually.
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
Tell that one to Homer, buddy.
/M
ROBBIE
"Martha Bridegam" <brid...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:3F675986...@pacbell.net...
Blimey, Mab's talking to littel old me again! Yeah but Homer's favourite
band was Grand Funk Railroad!! (Was thinking mainly of the post-Dylan/Beatle
lyric-fetish)
>
> /M
>
Gene Zitver
>> Is Bob Dylan as great a poet as John Keats?
>
>Nah, Bob Marley might be, though:
>
>I remember when-a we used to sit
>In the government yard in Trenchtown.
>And then Georgie would make the fire lights,
>As it was logwood burnin' through the nights.
>Then we would cook cornmeal porridge,
>Of which I'll share with you;
>My feet is my only carriage,
>So I've got to push on through.
>
>(No Woman No Cry)
And all these years, I thought it was, "No woman, no pride" (i.e., without a
woman, a man lacks pride).
Gene
Alan Hogue
ROBBIE wrote:
>"Martha Bridegam" <brid...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
>news:3F675986...@pacbell.net...
>
>
>>Tell that one to Homer, buddy.
>>
>>
>
>Blimey, Mab's talking to littel old me again! Yeah but Homer's favourite
>band was Grand Funk Railroad!! (Was thinking mainly of the post-Dylan/Beatle
>lyric-fetish)
>
>
>
Say what you will about Leonard Cohen, his lyrics are often excellent.
Of course, people start calling his lyrics "poetry" and, voila, circular
definition. Lyrics are cut-rate poetry. Any lyrics, therefore, that are
good must be poetry. Then they print books of his "poems" and all that.
Sad that people have to call it poetry to convince themselves to pay it
any mind.
One problem I have with the whole canon debate is that it's all based on
rather arbitrary assumptions that people are almost never willing to
examine. I'm not sure, for instance, why a song can't have some la las
in it and still be respectable. Because that makes it boring to read on
paper? That's not the point. They're lyrics. But the written word has
this cache that the spoken word doesn't. Or is it because this means
that "Lay Lady Lay" wasn't as difficult to write as Sonnet 114? Well,
and what of it? Is this a horse race? And, anyway, having that kind of
structure to work with can actually make writing easier.
If a poet goes around denigrating his work his followers (we can't call
them fans because this is poetry, very high stuff, you know), will pat
him on the head and think he's just eccentric or modest. A pop singer
does it, and the critics can't wait to carve up his reputation.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Dylan's the greatest, and there's a
tendency to attack people who are worshipped as he is in some circles.
But I do think snobbery comes into the picture any time you talk about
the canon. That's what I find tiresome.
Alan H.
ROBBIE
I've only seen the Simpsons twice but I'm reliably informed.
ROBBIE
Well I don't claim to be world expert on semantics and aesthetics and all
that caper BUT I will say, as a veteran of these sort of arguments, that a
canon and a set of levels has to be worked out cos if you do it by the,
shall we say Aw Shucks Hogue method of Critical Analysis you'll soon have
someone kick your sandcastle over and have old Misery Len on an equal level
as Christine Aguilera and you'll be back to the drawing board.
>
> Alan H.
>
Alan Hogue
> Well I don't claim to be world expert on semantics and aesthetics and all
If I gave the impression that I thought I was, I appologize. I just
think these topics are interesting and I know a bit about them. Okay,
that's not quite true. I think they are important, too.
> that caper BUT I will say, as a veteran of these sort of arguments, that a
>
>canon and a set of levels has to be worked out cos if you do it by the,
>shall we say Aw Shucks Hogue method of Critical Analysis you'll soon have
>someone kick your sandcastle over and have old Misery Len on an equal level
>as Christine Aguilera and you'll be back to the drawing board.
>
>
Yeah, this is one reason people think canons are important, but I don't
buy it. Canons, like languages, are naturally occuring things, and they
get along fine without intervention. Then a certain group comes along
and says "We're going to straighten things out and let you know what's
really good and what's bad." and everyone wants the status that comes
with being approved of by this group of arbiters or, if they aren't
artists, at least wants to be seen as sharing the same taste. After a
while this starts to seem necessary and everyone thinks that without
this arbitration civilization will fall and we'll be teaching Brittany
Speares studies in school.
If everyone stopped talking about canons Brittany Speares still wouldn't
be remembered five years from now. It doesn't take an academic elite for
that to happen.
Alan H.
jmc
> >Of which I'll share with you;
> >My feet is my only carriage,
> >So I've got to push on through.
> >
> >(No Woman No Cry)
>
Does anyone think that the problems with tense in this section of the lyric
were deliberate or merely Marley's mistake?
Henry
Actually, of course, it's an imperative, meaning 'Don't cry, woman!'
(You might say that the context makes it a tender 'please don't cry',
and that's as may be; grammatically, however, it's still an imperative.)
Creole languages in general are intriguing and Jamaican Creole, being
English-based, is particularly fascinating for English speakers. I read
a paper many years ago (sorry, author and title long gone) where a field
worker was asking schoolchildren to repeat speech strings they heard,
ranging from short phrases to complete sentences. The one that sticks
in my mind is when she asked the kids: 'repeat after me: There are no
giants in Jamaica.' Most of them heard what she said, processed it in
their brains, and 'repeated' it, _in their own language_: 'No giants no
are in Jamaica.' Great stuff.
cheers,
Henry
Alan Hogue
I don't know much about it, but I'd assume that the "is" is a feature of
his native dialect. You see that in "black english vernacular", too,
though not so much anymore. Would - I'll is a construction I hear people
use all the time in casual speech, so I don't know how much of a mistake
it really is. Isn't this just another example of the shedding of the
subjunctive in spoken english?
Alan H.
Jonathan Mason
> Gene Zitver <gzi...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Jonathan Mason wrote
> >
> > >> Is Bob Dylan as great a poet as John Keats?
> > >
> > >Nah, Bob Marley might be, though:
> > >
> > >I remember when-a we used to sit
> > >In the government yard in Trenchtown.
> > >And then Georgie would make the fire lights,
> > >As it was logwood burnin' through the nights.
> > >Then we would cook cornmeal porridge,
> > >Of which I'll share with you;
> > >My feet is my only carriage,
> > >So I've got to push on through.
> > >
> > >(No Woman No Cry)
> >
> > And all these years, I thought it was, "No woman, no pride" (i.e., without a
> > woman, a man lacks pride).
>
> Actually, of course, it's an imperative, meaning 'Don't cry, woman!'
>
> (You might say that the context makes it a tender 'please don't cry',
> and that's as may be; grammatically, however, it's still an imperative.)
>
> Creole languages in general are intriguing and Jamaican Creole, being
> English-based, is particularly fascinating for English speakers.
Indeed, and no doubt partly because it is a purely oral tradition. On
of my favorite phrases is from another Marley song about telling a cop
"I ain't got no birth surfer-ticket on me now", an interesting
transposition of syllables.
Poetry, no doubt, started in oral cultures as a way of remembering
stories, the meter and the rhyme acting as a kind of check system
agains forgetting the words. Then in the print era it became refined
into more of an elite art, with huge sales in the age of Byron and the
like. (Publication of Keats' Ode to A Grecian Urn was probably the
historical equivalent of a new Harry Potter book hitting the stores.)
But poetry is basically a dead language now, like opera, the darling
of a few buffs, but not part of the popular discourse.
Authors of pop songs don't have the same technical skills as top
poets, but as George Orwell said of Kipling's poems, (words to the
effect of) these are not great art, but often they express common
ideas in a memorable way, and when you want a neat way to express a
certain idea, then Kipling has the words precast and ready to go.
Same thing with authors of popular songs. "Yesterday all my troubles
seemed so far away", "I did it my way".
Marley's lyrics do, I think, have great vitality because they stem
from on oral tradition and are also fuelled by the religious
sentiments of Rastafarianism. One lyric, not Marley's, that sticks in
my mind is almost Orwellian (as you will see) as it promises that
"African people will be free, by the year 1983!"
Martha Bridegam
Jonathan Mason wrote:
> ....
>
> Authors of pop songs don't have the same technical skills as top
> poets,
That's a tautology, innit? Or can't the same writer count as both?
> but as George Orwell said of Kipling's poems, (words to the
> effect of) these are not great art, but often they express common
> ideas in a memorable way, and when you want a neat way to express a
> certain idea, then Kipling has the words precast and ready to go.
....
"...it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One example from
Kipling will do:
'White hands cling to the tightened rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel,
Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again,'
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel,
High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone --
He travels the fastest who travels alone.'
There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought
that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travelsthe fastest who
travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So the chances
are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it."
Actually what I remembered was the couplet originally published -- a misremembering of two verses
jammed together -- in which the final couplet is:
"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne
He travels the fastest who travels alone."
That's much better if you ask me.
--
Men that age were taught to see women as causes of weakness and stumbling, weren't they.
/M
jmc
It was the first couplet I was concerned about. The first line is in the
past tense. The second, which presumably refers to the same past event - the
cooking of the porridge - is in the present tense ("I'll" instead of "I'd").
Is he having a game with his tenses, or is this "black English vernacular"?
I have never heard anyone say anything like "I'll met you down the cinema
yesterday" or "we'll gone out last Tuesday." I don't really understand how
you can say that it is an everday construction. Can you give me an example
of it in use that you have actually heard.
Btw, Alan - English is ALWAYS capitalised...
Alan Hogue
God, you are such an unpleasant fuck.
Alan H.
jmc
> jmc wrote:
>
> >
> >It was the first couplet I was concerned about. The first line is in the
> >past tense. The second, which presumably refers to the same past event -
the
> >cooking of the porridge - is in the present tense ("I'll" instead of
"I'd").
> >Is he having a game with his tenses, or is this "black English
vernacular"?
> >I have never heard anyone say anything like "I'll met you down the cinema
> >yesterday" or "we'll gone out last Tuesday." I don't really understand
how
> >you can say that it is an everday construction. Can you give me an
example
> >of it in use that you have actually heard.
> >
> >Btw, Alan - English is ALWAYS capitalised...
> >
> >
>
> God, you are such an unpleasant fuck.
>
And you are obviously a humourless one! It was a silly comment as we were
talking (in fun, I thought) about grammar. Why the extreme reaction? Bad
hair day?
ROBBIE
"jmc" <jamesmart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:bkkj2s$f07$1...@sparta.btinternet.com...
>
> > God, you are such an unpleasant fuck.
> >
>
> And you are obviously a humourless one! It was a silly comment as we were
> talking (in fun, I thought) about grammar. Why the extreme reaction? Bad
> hair day?
I imagine Hogue to be the kind of argumentative Australian/American you'll
find cross legged on a settee at a party mashing marijuana around in a
cereal bowl prior to smoking a bong, gnashing his teeth on speed and saying
things like 'oh I hate debates about the Canon; y'know I like Dylan more
than Keats, like so what, so stuffy all that shit. Its all the fault of the
fuggin English and anyway have you got a cigarette?'
>
>
>
ROBBIE
wot cunt wrote that?