Timrod Revisited
tricia.j
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=178703
Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited
When Bob Dylan lifted lines from an obscure Civil War poet, he wasn't
plagiarizing. He was sampling.
by Robert Polito
These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!
—Henry Timrod, “A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night,” from
Poems (1860)
. . . and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.
—Henry Timrod, “A Vision of Poesy,” from Poems (1860)
The moon gives light and it shines by night
Well, I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O’er the road we’re bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
—Bob Dylan, “When the Deal Goes Down,” from Modern Times (2006)
As a culture we appear to have forgotten how to experience works of art,
or at least how to talk about them plausibly and smartly. The latest
instance is the “controversy” shadowing Bob Dylan’s new record, Modern
Times, wherein he recurrently adapts phrases from poems by Henry Timrod,
a nearly-vanished 19th-century American poet, essayist, and Civil War
newspaper correspondent.
That our nation’s most gifted and ambitious songwriter would revive
Timrod on the number-one best-selling CD across America, Europe, and
Australia might prompt a lively concatenation of responses, ranging from
“Huh? Henry Timrod? Isn’t that interesting. . . .” to “Why?” But to
narrow the Dylan/Timrod phenomenon (see the New York Times article
“Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines from Henry Timrod?” and a
subsequent op-ed piece, “The Ballad of Henry Timrod,” by
singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega) into a story of possible plagiarism is
to confuse, well, art with a term paper.
Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828, his arrival in
this world falling two years after Stephen Foster but two years before
Emily Dickinson. His work, too, might be styled as falling between
theirs: sometimes dark and skeptical, other times mawkish and
old-fashioned. (Dylan, I’m guessing, is fascinated by both aspects of
Timrod, the antique alongside the brooding.) Often tagged the “laureate
of the Confederacy”—a title apparently conferred upon him by none other
than Tennyson—Timrod still shows up in anthologies because of the poems
he wrote celebrating and then mourning the new Southern nation,
particularly “Ethnogenesis” and “Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating
the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery.” Early on,
Whittier and Longfellow admired Timrod, and his “Ode” stands behind
Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (and thus in turn behind
Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”).
On Modern Times Dylan avoids anthology favorites, but his album contains
at least ten instances of lines or phrases culled from seven different
Timrod poems, mostly poems about love, friendship, death, and poetry.
Dylan also quoted Timrod’s “Charleston” in “Cross the Green Mountain,” a
song he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2003 Civil War film Gods
and Generals; two years earlier he glanced at Timrod’s “Vision of Poesy”
for “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” on his CD “Love and Theft.” (Various
Dylan Web sites annotate his lyrics, but I found these two related sites
invaluable: http://republika.pl/bobdylan/mt/ and
http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/.)
From the dustup in the Times—after our paper of record found a
middle-school teacher who branded Dylan “duplicitous,” Vega earnestly
supposed that Dylan probably hadn’t lifted the texts “on purpose”—you
might not guess that we’ve just lived through some two and a half
decades of hip-hop sampling, not to mention a century of Modernism. For
the neglected Henry Timrod is just the tantalizing threshold into
Dylan’s vast memory palace of echoes.
Besides Timrod, for instance, Modern Times taps into the Bible (Genesis,
Exodus, Samuel, John, and Luke, among others), Robert Johnson, Memphis
Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon
Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole
Porter, Jerome Kern, and standards popularized by Jeanette MacDonald,
Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, as well as vintage folk songs such as
“Wild Mountain Thyme,” “Frankie and Albert,” and “Gentle Nettie Moore.”
It’s possible, in fact, to see his prior two recordings, Time Out of
Mind and “Love and Theft,” as rearranging the entire American musical
and literary landscape of the past 150 years, except that the sources he
adapts aren’t always American or so recent. Please forgive another
Homeric (if partial) catalog, but the scale and range of Dylan’s
allusive textures are vital to an appreciation of what he’s after on his
recent recordings.
On Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,” Dylan refracts folk, blues,
and pop songs created by or associated with Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie
Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr,
Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big
Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin
alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes.
But the revelation is the sly cavalcade of film and literature
fragments: W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs, As You
Like It, Othello, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Timrod, T.D. Rice’s
blackface Otello, Huckleberry Finn, The Aeneid, The Great Gatsby, the
Japanese true crime paperback Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga,
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Wise Blood. So pervasive
and crafty are Dylan’s recastings for “Love and Theft” that I wouldn’t
be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the
album—no matter how intimate or Dylanesque—can be tracked back to
another song, poem, movie, or novel.
One conventional approach to Dylan’s songwriting references “folk
process” (and also, in his case, “blues process”) and recognizes that
he’s always acted as a magpie, recovering and transforming borrowed
materials, lyrics, tunes, and even film dialogue (notably on his 1985
album Empire Burlesque). Folk process can readily map early Dylan, the
associations linking say, “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Go ’Way from My
Window” with his current variations on traditional blues couplets in his
update of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” for Modern Times.
Yet what about Twain, Fitzgerald, O’Connor, Confessions of a Yakuza, and
Timrod? If those gestures are also folk process, then a folk process
pursued with such intensity, scope, audacity, and verve eventually
explodes into Modernism. As far back as “Desolation Row,” Dylan sang of
“Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While
calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers.” Dylan’s
insistent nods to the past on Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” and
Modern Times can probably best be apprehended as Modernist collages.
To clarify what I mean by Modernist collages, think of them as verbal
echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations that tend to
organize into two types: those collaged texts, like Pound’s Cantos or
Eliot’s “The Waste Land, ” where we are meant to remark on the
discrepant tones and idioms of the original texts bumping up against one
another, and those collaged texts, composed by poets as various as
Kenneth Fearing, Lorine Niedecker, Frank Bidart, and John Ashbery, that
aim for an apparently seamless surface. A conspicuous model of the
former is the ending of “The Waste Land”:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
The following passage by Frank Bidart, from his poem “The Second Hour of
the Night,” actually proves as allusive as Eliot’s, nearly every line
rearranging elements assembled not only from Ovid, his main source for
the Myrrha story, but also from Plotinus and even Eliot. But instead of
incessant fragmentation, we experience narrative sweep and urgency:
As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father
not free not to desire
what draws her forward is neither COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:—
or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
imagined as action upon
preference: no creature is free to choose what
allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:
I fulfill it, because I contain it—
it prevails, because it is within me—
it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that
realm to which I am called from within. . . .
Dylan’s songwriting tilts toward the cagier, deflected mode that Bidart
is using here. We would scarcely realize we were inside a collage unless
someone told us, or unless we abruptly registered a familiar locution.
The wonder of the dozen or so snippets that Dylan sifted from
Confessions of a Yakuza for “Love and Theft” is how casual and personal
they sound dropped into his songs—not one of those songs, of course,
remotely about a yakuza, or a gangster of any persuasion.
Some of Dylan’s borrowings operate as allusions in the accustomed sense,
urging us back into the wellspring texts. Timrod, I think, works as a
citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on
that notice. Dylan manifestly is fixated on the American Civil War. In
his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, he recounted that during the early
1960s he systematically read every newspaper at the New York Public
Library for the years 1855 to 1865. “The age that I was living in didn’t
resemble this age,” he wrote, “but it did in some mysterious and
traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad
spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic
psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the
light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature.
Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected.
There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would
be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.”
His 2003 film Masked and Anonymous takes place against the backdrop of
another interminable domestic war during an unspecified future. Dylan
clearly sees links between the Civil War and America now—and once you
consult a historical map of the red and blue states, would you
contradict him? The echoes of Timrod help him frame and sustain those
links. For Dylan, Modern Times (and this is the joke in his title, along
with the reference to the Chaplin movie) are also old times, ancient
times. “The age I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but it did. . . .”
Other borrowings, such as the tidbits of yakuza oral history, aren’t so
much formal allusions as curios of vernacular speech picked up from
reading or listening that shade his songs into something like
collective, as against individual, utterances. But here, too, it’s hard
not to discern specific designs. On recordings steeped in empire,
corruption, masks, male power, and self-delusion, aren’t Tokyo
racketeers (or Virgilian ghosts) as apt as Huck Finn, Confederate poets,
and Charlie Patton?
Without ever winking, Dylan is inveterately canny and sophisticated
about all this, though after a fashion that recalls Laurence Sterne’s
celebrated attack on plagiarism in Tristram Shandy, itself plagiarized
from The Anatomy of Melancholy. On “Summer Days” from “Love and Theft,”
Dylan sings:
She’s looking into my eyes, and she’s a-holding my hand
She looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand,
She says, “You can’t repeat the past,” I say, “You can’t? What do you
mean, you
can’t? Of course you can.”
His puckish, snaky lines dramatize precisely how one could, in fact,
“repeat the past,” since the lyrics reproduce a conversation between
Nick and Gatsby from chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby. On “Rollin’ and
Tumblin’” from Modern Times, Dylan follows another oblique intimation of
Timrod with the confession “I’ve been conjuring up all these long-dead
souls from their crumbling tombs.” The quotation marks in the title of
“Love and Theft” signal Dylan’s debts to Eric Lott’s academic study Love
and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class; the
secondhand title of the CD also specifies his status as a white blues
and rock ’n’ roll performer inside an American minstrelsy tradition, as
well as his songwriting proclivities (loving stuff enough to filch it).
In a 1996 interview for Newsweek, novelist David Gates asked Dylan what
he believed. He replied, “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the
music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a
Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. I don’t
adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more
from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The
songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”
Let’s presume that by “songs” Dylan also now must mean poems, such as
Henry Timrod’s, and novels, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, as well as
traditional folk hymns and blues. His invocation of that expanded
“lexicon” might be surprising, and daunting, but it certainly isn’t
plagiarism. Who else writes, has ever written, songs like these? Poems,
novels, films, songs all partake of a conversation with the great dead—a
“conjuring,” as Dylan would say. The embodiment of his conjuring, those
conversations with his dead on his recent recordings are among the most
daring and original signatures of his art.
Robert Polito writes regularly for BOOKFORUM, and his most recent book
is The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing, from the Library of America.
Other recent edited books include Crime Novels: American Noir of the
1930s...
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Foundation Contact: ma...@poetryfoundation.org
Privacy Policy / Terms of Use
Mr Jinx
What a brilliant piece. It is great to see that someone has the
intellect and insight (as well as the breadth of knowledge) to set this
issue down so clearly.
The article says it all. Great, great stuff.
Mr Jinx
Temporary Like Achilles
such as Henry Timrod's, and novels, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's,
as well as traditional folk hymns and blues. His invocation of that
expanded "lexicon" might be surprising, and daunting, but it
certainly isn't
plagiarism. Who else writes, has ever written, songs like these? Poems,
novels, films, songs all partake of a conversation with the great
conjuring, those conversations with his dead on his recent recordings
are among the most daring and original signatures of his art.
Bravo, Mr. Polito! This is what great writers have always done: they
converse with their audience, their peers and their forebears. Is Dylan
a great writer? I would say he is. Mr. Polito's article demonstrates
the key reasons why that assessment is justified.
Temporary
Jumbo
> finally some sense on the issue...
>
Thanks.
bobette
tricia.j wrote:
> finally some sense on the issue...
>
> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=178703
>
> Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited
> When Bob Dylan lifted lines from an obscure Civil War poet, he wasn't
> plagiarizing. He was sampling.
>
> by Robert Polito
>
> These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
> Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
> A round of precious hours.
> Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
> And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
> To justify a life of sensuous rest,
> A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
> And without language answered. I was blest!
> Poems (1860)
>
>
> . . . and at times
> A strange far look would come into his eyes,
> As if he saw a vision in the skies.
>
>
> The moon gives light and it shines by night
> Well, I scarcely feel the glow
> We learn to live and then we forgive
> O'er the road we're bound to go
> More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
> That keep us so tightly bound
> You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
> And I'll be with you when the deal goes down
>
>
> As a culture we appear to have forgotten how to experience works of art,
> or at least how to talk about them plausibly and smartly. The latest
> instance is the "controversy" shadowing Bob Dylan's new record, Modern
> Times, wherein he recurrently adapts phrases from poems by Henry Timrod,
> a nearly-vanished 19th-century American poet, essayist, and Civil War
> newspaper correspondent.
>
> That our nation's most gifted and ambitious songwriter would revive
> Timrod on the number-one best-selling CD across America, Europe, and
> Australia might prompt a lively concatenation of responses, ranging from
> "Huh? Henry Timrod? Isn't that interesting. . . ." to "Why?" But to
> narrow the Dylan/Timrod phenomenon (see the New York Times article
> "Who's This Guy Dylan Who's Borrowing Lines from Henry Timrod?" and a
> subsequent op-ed piece, "The Ballad of Henry Timrod," by
> singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega) into a story of possible plagiarism is
> to confuse, well, art with a term paper.
>
> Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828, his arrival in
> this world falling two years after Stephen Foster but two years before
> Emily Dickinson. His work, too, might be styled as falling between
> theirs: sometimes dark and skeptical, other times mawkish and
> old-fashioned. (Dylan, I'm guessing, is fascinated by both aspects of
> Timrod, the antique alongside the brooding.) Often tagged the "laureate
> than Tennyson-Timrod still shows up in anthologies because of the poems
> he wrote celebrating and then mourning the new Southern nation,
> particularly "Ethnogenesis" and "Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating
> the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery." Early on,
> Whittier and Longfellow admired Timrod, and his "Ode" stands behind
> Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (and thus in turn behind
> Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead").
>
> On Modern Times Dylan avoids anthology favorites, but his album contains
> at least ten instances of lines or phrases culled from seven different
> Timrod poems, mostly poems about love, friendship, death, and poetry.
> Dylan also quoted Timrod's "Charleston" in "Cross the Green Mountain," a
> song he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2003 Civil War film Gods
> and Generals; two years earlier he glanced at Timrod's "Vision of Poesy"
> for "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" on his CD "Love and Theft." (Various
> Dylan Web sites annotate his lyrics, but I found these two related sites
> invaluable: http://republika.pl/bobdylan/mt/ and
> http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/.)
>
> middle-school teacher who branded Dylan "duplicitous," Vega earnestly
> Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
> These fragments I have shored against my ruins
> Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
> Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
> Shantih shantih shantih
>
> The following passage by Frank Bidart, from his poem "The Second Hour of
> the Night," actually proves as allusive as Eliot's, nearly every line
> rearranging elements assembled not only from Ovid, his main source for
> the Myrrha story, but also from Plotinus and even Eliot. But instead of
> incessant fragmentation, we experience narrative sweep and urgency:
>
> As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father
>
> not free not to desire
>
>
> or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
> imagined as action upon
>
> preference: no creature is free to choose what
> allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:
>
> it prevails, because it is within me-
>
> it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that
> realm to which I am called from within. . . .
>
> Dylan's songwriting tilts toward the cagier, deflected mode that Bidart
> is using here. We would scarcely realize we were inside a collage unless
> someone told us, or unless we abruptly registered a familiar locution.
> The wonder of the dozen or so snippets that Dylan sifted from
> Confessions of a Yakuza for "Love and Theft" is how casual and personal
> remotely about a yakuza, or a gangster of any persuasion.
>
> Some of Dylan's borrowings operate as allusions in the accustomed sense,
> urging us back into the wellspring texts. Timrod, I think, works as a
> citation we're ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on
> that notice. Dylan manifestly is fixated on the American Civil War. In
> his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, he recounted that during the early
> 1960s he systematically read every newspaper at the New York Public
> Library for the years 1855 to 1865. "The age that I was living in didn't
> resemble this age," he wrote, "but it did in some mysterious and
> traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad
> spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic
> psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the
> light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature.
> Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected.
> There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would
> be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write."
>
> His 2003 film Masked and Anonymous takes place against the backdrop of
> another interminable domestic war during an unspecified future. Dylan
> adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more
> from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The
> songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs."
>
> Let's presume that by "songs" Dylan also now must mean poems, such as
> Henry Timrod's, and novels, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's, as well as
> traditional folk hymns and blues. His invocation of that expanded
> "lexicon" might be surprising, and daunting, but it certainly isn't
> plagiarism. Who else writes, has ever written, songs like these? Poems,
> "conjuring," as Dylan would say. The embodiment of his conjuring, those
> conversations with his dead on his recent recordings are among the most
> daring and original signatures of his art.
>
>
> Robert Polito writes regularly for BOOKFORUM, and his most recent book
> is The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing, from the Library of America.
> Other recent edited books include Crime Novels: American Noir of the
> 1930s...
>
> Copyright © 2006 Poetry Foundation Contact: ma...@poetryfoundation.org
> Privacy Policy / Terms of Use
Fantastic article. Bob's a clever little monkey, isnt he?!
j_ns...@msn.com
> "Love and Theft" signal Dylan's debts to Eric Lott's academic study Love
> and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class; the
> secondhand title of the CD also specifies his status as a white blues
Blues and rock and roll don't have much to do with the minstrelsy
tradition, in general, and Bob in particular has even less. It's not as
if he has a "black"-influenced visual act nearly to the degree Presley
did, for example.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
> "Love and Theft" signal Dylan's debts to Eric Lott's academic study Love
> and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class; the
> secondhand title of the CD also specifies his status as a white blues
Blues and rock and roll have little to do with minstrelsy. For
instance, (1) the lyrics of the earliest blues, as recorded by "blacks"
and "whites," have little actual overlap with the lyrics of "coon
songs" (as written and recorded by "whites" and "blacks") despite their
chronological closeness to them, and (2) which artists were wearing
blackface in the '20s-'40s (Emmett Miller and Timmie Rogers, e.g.) has
little to do with which '20s-'40s music was the roots of rock and roll
-- e.g. there doesn't seem to be much connection between jump blues
(Wynonie Harris, etc.) and the most blackface-ish stuff of its own era.
And Bob in particular has even less to do with minstrelsy -- it's not
as if he presents a "black"-influenced visual act to nearly the extent
that Elvis Presley did, for instance. Most rock and roll performers
have been "white" during the entire period that Bob has been performing
rock and roll, and he doesn't attempt singing along the lines of
Elvis's and McCartney's occasional Little Richard impressions. There
have been important and distinctive (and influential on Bob's sound)
"white" blues performers since before Bob was born -- it's not as if
he's even comparable to "Pick Up The Pieces" by the Average White Band
and that sort of thing.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
Ah, this did post, huh? Well there's a longer version on its way too.
gabriel
There's perhaps a more subtle link with the cultural implications of
white appropriation of black culture, an interview with Eric Lott soon
after 'Love & Theft' was released explored some of these points.
Here's just some of it :
Why do you think he used the title of your book? Do you think Dylan is
making some connection to minstrelsy? Is the idea of "love and theft,"
as you understand it, a presence in the album? Might it be that in much
the same way that "love and theft" for you sums up the concept of white
expropriation of black culture in the form of minstrelsy-what you
refer to as "minstrelsy's mixed erotic economy of celebration and
exploitation"-for Dylan symbolizes his relationship with the old
blues/country artists? In other words, is what Dylan does in performing
the blues/country stuff and borrowing from it in any way a modern
equivalent of blackface?
My title is actually a riff on one of Leslie Fiedler's; he wrote a
famous book of literary criticism called Love and Death in the American
Novel, and, among other things, it suggests that classic U.S. fiction
is continually possessed by the idea of two men, one white and one
dark, alone together in the wilderness or on the open sea, like Huck
and Jim, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg-on up to
Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal
Weapon movies, and beyond, I suppose. I think the minstrel show isn't
too far from this notion; with white men putting on blackface to mimic
and lampoon black people and black culture, there's the same kind of
imaginary proximity of white and black men. So "Love and Theft" it was:
the fascination with and heisting of black cultural materials.
One can't know this, of course, but I imagine Dylan liked, first of
all, the general resonance of the title, in which stolen hearts and
emotional misdemeanors always stalk the sweetness of love, as they do
in Dylan's songs. More generally, though, I think you're right; he
knows full well his musical indebtedness and is playing with it in the
songs as well as title of "Love and Theft." "High Water" sounds the
most like actual minstrel show music from the 19th century, which is
interesting not only since it's dedicated specifically to black blues
singer (donor?) Charley Patton but also because it's a song of high
seriousness, as though ultimate truths are rooted in cultural plunder.
Dylan knows whereof he speaks, too. There's a great line on "Sugar
Baby" that goes, "Some of these bootleggers/They make pretty good
stuff/Plenty of places to hide things here/If you want to hide them bad
enough." Sure, he's talking about moonshiners; he can't help but also
be talking about pirated recordings since he's been so richly
bootlegged himself. Best of all, though, he's bootlegging all kinds of
music on Love and Theft, and in lines like these he shows he knows it.
(By the way, Sean Wilentz's magnificent article on the album nails a
number of these sources; you can find it at bobdylan.com.)
This isn't to say that Dylan's just a blackface artist, like Michelle
Shocked abjectly claimed herself to be on her record Arkansas Traveler.
He's one of those rare people, like Michelle Shocked, in fact, for whom
cultural miscegenation is a spur to cultural newness and uniqueness.
Dylan goes his own way. Of course he pokes fun at himself in the middle
of "Brownsville Girl" when he goes, "If there's an original thought out
there, I could use it right now." He's obviously always been full of
original thoughts.
gabriel
Bob Dylan's music. From his early days emulating Woody Guthrie to the
Beat poetry-influenced mid-sixties, to the bordertown feel that
permeates Desire, different artists and styles have inspired his music.
With his new album, Dylan accomplishes a complete artistic synthesis.
On "Love and Theft," country, blues, folk, swing, and rock all converge
with Dylan's husky growl into a form of music that he has himself
described as "all mashed up." But Dylan also grabbed from other areas
to create this amazing amalgamation, most notably from literary
sources. Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald are obvious imprints,
however a lesser known but equally important one may be Eric Lott's
detailed study of the history of minstrelsy, Love & Theft. Besides the
title which Dylan seems to have borrowed, Love & Theft also involves a
discussion of the earliest forms of American music and also the first
major artistic relationship between the black and white cultures.
Hence, minstrelsy is directly related to much of the music Dylan draws
upon to make his music, especially his most recent album."
http://www.gadflyonline.com/12-10-01/book-ericlott.html
introduction to interview with Eric Lott...
and fixing the changed subject!!!
David O'Brien
the line "as frail as the flowers, these prescious hours" and thought, 'wow
that Bob's got a way with words', well no he doesn't, Henry Timrod does.
It's dissapointing artistically, I could care less about the ethics
involved. I mean what if you found out that "when you ain't got nothing you
got nothing to lose" or "he not busy being born is busy dying" were actually
from some poet from the French Revolution?
Dave O
"tricia.j" <tric...@aardvark.net.au> wrote in message
news:452CA354...@aardvark.net.au...
Barbara
"David O'Brien" <davi...@octa4.net.au> wrote in message
news:452df53d$0$4671$61c6...@un-2park-reader-01.sydney.pipenetworks.com.au.
..
> > Poems (1860)
> >
> >
> > . . . and at times
> > A strange far look would come into his eyes,
> > As if he saw a vision in the skies.
> >
> >
> > The moon gives light and it shines by night
> > Well, I scarcely feel the glow
> > We learn to live and then we forgive
> > O'er the road we're bound to go
> > More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
> > That keep us so tightly bound
> > You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
> > And I'll be with you when the deal goes down
> > title apparently conferred upon him by none other than Tennyson-Timrod
> > still shows up in anthologies because of the poems he wrote celebrating
> > and then mourning the new Southern nation, particularly "Ethnogenesis"
and
> > "Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate
Dead
> > at Magnolia Cemetery." Early on, Whittier and Longfellow admired Timrod,
> > and his "Ode" stands behind Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead"
> > (and thus in turn behind Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead").
> >
> > On Modern Times Dylan avoids anthology favorites, but his album contains
> > at least ten instances of lines or phrases culled from seven different
> > Timrod poems, mostly poems about love, friendship, death, and poetry.
> > Dylan also quoted Timrod's "Charleston" in "Cross the Green Mountain," a
> > song he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2003 Civil War film Gods
and
> > Generals; two years earlier he glanced at Timrod's "Vision of Poesy" for
> > "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" on his CD "Love and Theft." (Various Dylan
Web
> > sites annotate his lyrics, but I found these two related sites
invaluable:
> > http://republika.pl/bobdylan/mt/ and http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/.)
> >
> > middle-school teacher who branded Dylan "duplicitous," Vega earnestly
> > intimate or Dylanesque-can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie,
> > Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
> > These fragments I have shored against my ruins
> > Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
> > Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
> > Shantih shantih shantih
> >
> > The following passage by Frank Bidart, from his poem "The Second Hour of
> > the Night," actually proves as allusive as Eliot's, nearly every line
> > rearranging elements assembled not only from Ovid, his main source for
the
> > Myrrha story, but also from Plotinus and even Eliot. But instead of
> > incessant fragmentation, we experience narrative sweep and urgency:
> >
> > As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father
> >
> > not free not to desire
> >
> >
> > or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
> > imagined as action upon
> >
> > preference: no creature is free to choose what
> > allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:
> >
> > it prevails, because it is within me-
> >
> > it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that
> > realm to which I am called from within. . . .
> >
> > Dylan's songwriting tilts toward the cagier, deflected mode that Bidart
is
> > using here. We would scarcely realize we were inside a collage unless
> > someone told us, or unless we abruptly registered a familiar locution.
The
> > wonder of the dozen or so snippets that Dylan sifted from Confessions of
a
> > Yakuza for "Love and Theft" is how casual and personal they sound
dropped
yakuza,
> > or a gangster of any persuasion.
> >
> > Some of Dylan's borrowings operate as allusions in the accustomed sense,
> > urging us back into the wellspring texts. Timrod, I think, works as a
> > citation we're ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on
> > that notice. Dylan manifestly is fixated on the American Civil War. In
his
> > memoir Chronicles, Volume One, he recounted that during the early 1960s
he
> > systematically read every newspaper at the New York Public Library for
the
> > years 1855 to 1865. "The age that I was living in didn't resemble this
> > age," he wrote, "but it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not
> > just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and
commonwealth
> > that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every
> > bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the
> > full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the
cross,
> > died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The
> > godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind
> > everything I would write."
> >
> > His 2003 film Masked and Anonymous takes place against the backdrop of
> > another interminable domestic war during an unspecified future. Dylan
> > rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the
> > songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are
my
> > lexicon. I believe the songs."
> >
> > Let's presume that by "songs" Dylan also now must mean poems, such as
> > Henry Timrod's, and novels, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's, as well as
> > traditional folk hymns and blues. His invocation of that expanded
> > "lexicon" might be surprising, and daunting, but it certainly isn't
> > plagiarism. Who else writes, has ever written, songs like these? Poems,
> > "conjuring," as Dylan would say. The embodiment of his conjuring, those
> > conversations with his dead on his recent recordings are among the most
> > daring and original signatures of his art.
> >
> >
> > Robert Polito writes regularly for BOOKFORUM, and his most recent book
is
> > The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing, from the Library of America.
Other
> > recent edited books include Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s...
> >
> > Copyright © 2006 Poetry Foundation Contact: ma...@poetryfoundation.org
> > Privacy Policy / Terms of Use
>
>
all that's been discussed lately, more articles are come out.
I love Bob Dylan, love his work yet I understand what you are saying. It
makes me wonder how many more lines are not original. I still enjoy
listening to his songs but now when I hear those lines, I'm thinking Timrod
or whoever, I can't help it. I admit Bob is a genius, does wonderful things
musically, there's no denying that and I understand that others have done
similiar things. I don't care what others have done.
Jumbo
> Forgetting the plagiarism issue, I look at it all like this. If you heard
> the line "as frail as the flowers, these prescious hours" and thought, 'wow
> that Bob's got a way with words', well no he doesn't, Henry Timrod does.
It's a fair point, David. You're certainly entitled to your own views
re: literary "worth". Yes, ssomeone listening to MT "innocently" might
think like you say, but can anyone listening to MT with a full
knowledge of what was (explicitly) going on in "L&T" honestly think
like that? On hearing ANY new Bob lyric, when I hear a "clever" or
"pretty" or "unusual" bit, my first thought is something like "I like
that, wonder where he got it from ..." It doesn't bother me at all,
that is, if he didn't "make it up". What always impresses me is how
well he has "made it" into a new thing.
> It's dissapointing artistically,
See above. That's just your view on what being "artistic" means.
> I could care less about the ethics
> involved. I mean what if you found out that "when you ain't got nothing you
> got nothing to lose" or "he not busy being born is busy dying" were actually
> from some poet from the French Revolution?
I'd be impressed at how well he "made" a new thing out of them.
>
Dylanetics
David O'Brien
"Jumbo" <ch...@cupolagallery.com> wrote in message
news:1160685003.4...@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
And you'd be even more impressed if he'd made something new up all by
himself right?
Dave O
Mr Jinx
He has. All art is allusive as this article brilliantly demonstrates.
The 'something new' you refer to is to be found in Dylan's assemblange
of found materials to form a unique and original whole configuaration
and work of art.
Mr Jinx
Jumbo
> And you'd be even more impressed if he'd made something new up all by
> himself right?
I'd be more than impressed, I'd be awestricken ... the first since God
to do it!
AndoDoug
I would only add that if it turns out to be true that virtually every
line on Love and Theft "can be tracked back to another song, poem,
movie, or novel," it's done out of a kind of deep caution, some would
say superstition, about honoring his progenitors and holding to a
"faith that's been long abandoned".
And as far as this being some kind of indulgence we should tolerate,
using lines from old poets bluesman and folk singers in the traditions
dylan inhabits is something he HAS to do, like a traveller tossing
pistachio husks or some other vinyl keepsake behind him as he goes, to
trace where he came from in case he has to get back there and fast.
It's far more serious a business than keeping everyone copywritten and
under contract
David O'Brien
You guys are fighting a losing battle with credibility. You can't praise
Dylan's way with words on the one hand and say it's an equal accomplishment
to rearrange other people's words as well. "He not busy being born is busy
dying" is an original line, original thought in an original context,
brilliantly concieved, brilliantly delivered, the whole verse is arguably
his greatest claim to genius.
Yet if he never wrote that (and everything else) but simply rearranged some
Platoism into that, then he ceases to be a genius and becomes a clever
songwriter and petty thief and not much more.
Are you two honestly saying that there's no difference in accomplishment
from swiping some old forgotten lines for a song, and writing your own
lines? Or are you seriously going to fall back on pedantic questions of what
constitutes genuine originality to avoid the argument alltogether?
It's not even that serious anyway, there's plenty of stuff in Love & Theft,
Chronicles and Modern Times that Bob did write and write wonderfully, what's
wrong with admitting disapointment that some of the nicer lines weren't his?
Dave O
Jumbo
> "Jumbo" <ch...@cupolagallery.com> wrote in message
> news:1160859737....@m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com...
> > David O'Brien wrote:
> >
> >> And you'd be even more impressed if he'd made something new up all by
> >> himself right?
> >
> > I'd be more than impressed, I'd be awestricken ... the first since God
> > to do it!
> >
>
> You guys
There's only one of me. Jumbo's a singular.
> are fighting a losing battle with credibility.
I lost that years ago. How did you get on?
>You can't praise
> Dylan's way with words on the one hand and say it's an equal accomplishment
> to rearrange other people's words as well.
I didn't praise Dylan's way with NEW words (I can't speak for any of
the other "guys"). I praised his way with old words.
> "He not busy being born is busy
> dying" is an original line,
Original phrasing, maybe; could be borrowed - I honestly don't care.
> original thought
Original thought? And you say I'm fighting a losing battle with
credibility? David, I respect your opinions, but this particular part
is an overstatement. Surely you can see that?
> in an original context,
Yes, that's it, a thousand times YES. We can agree here. The context is
what makes it brilliant.
> brilliantly concieved, brilliantly delivered,
Yes and yes.
> the whole verse is arguably
> his greatest claim to genius.
Well, that's down to taste. As of this morning, I think the way he says
"Botany Bay" on Jim Jones is his "greatest claim" to immortality.
> Yet if he never wrote that (and everything else) but simply rearranged some
> Platoism into that, then he ceases to be a genius
Can you explain why he ceases to be a genius just because he uses found
materials? Personally, I try to avoid the word "genius". I'm not sure
it applies to Dylan. That's more Jinx's turf. (We are not a combined
argument taskforce, btw.) But if I was going to apply it to writers I'd
go for Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dante, Virgil, Proust, people like that.
All disqualified by what you say here.
> and becomes a clever
> songwriter and petty thief and not much more.
"Clever songwriter". I'd go with that. But not the "not much more"
part. He's a vocalist without parallel. As for the "theft", at least
admit it's grand larceny!
> Are you two honestly saying that there's no difference in accomplishment
> from swiping some old forgotten lines for a song, and writing your own
> lines?
Again, there's only one of me. It's not very helpful to throw questions
at non-existent corporations so no individual can answer.
>Or are you seriously going to fall back on pedantic questions of what
> constitutes genuine originality to avoid the argument alltogether?
But I consider YOUR idea of what constitutes "writing" to be incredibly
pedantic. We can call each other pedantic all night, where does it get
us?
>
> It's not even that serious anyway, there's plenty of stuff in Love & Theft,
> Chronicles and Modern Times that Bob did write and write wonderfully, what's
> wrong with admitting disapointment that some of the nicer lines weren't his?
That's a little disrespectful. I respect your opinion, whereas here you
say that my "opinions" are really attempts to avoid admitting you are
right ... Hmm.
David O'Brien
Just admit I'm right and everything's cool, both of you!
Dave
moto
gabriel
Treadleson wrote:
>
> What you, me and a bunch of
> other people have not realized (for better or worse) is that there is
> clearly a core group of people who have never prized Dylan and his work
> for originality in lyric or music composing.
Those disturbed by Dylan's lack of 'originality' on 'Modern Times'
remind me of Captain Renault...
"I am shocked, SHOCKED, to find gambling going on here... "
Originality in art is a mythical concept. Everything made by the mind
of man or woman has roots. If you're aware of the roots, it can make
for a richer experience. If you're unaware of the roots, the experience
can still be rewarding. Dylan is hardly the first artist to employ the
words of others in the service of his own art. Since his lyrics are
more scrutinised and analysed than any other songwriter, he can hardly
have been unaware that the roots of the songs would be "uncovered".
Jumbo
>
> Well, David...of course you're right. What you, me and a bunch of
> other people have not realized (for better or worse) is that there is
> clearly a core group of people who have never prized Dylan and his work
> this whole controversy couldn't make that clearer. There's nothing
> wrong with that. It's only that I really never understood that there
> were so many people who saw it that way. To some people there is
> obviously something greatly to be valued in being a wonderful pastiche
> artist, collage maker of found objects, etc. Originality just isn't
> that big a deal in that way of enjoying the music. It's more HOW he
> treats the stuff he's found, the way he rearranages it and rephrases
> it.
>
Treadleson ... I feel like we're getting somewhere ... I agree, David
is right, in that, from his pov, MT is derivative where, say, BIABH is
"original". And from mine, MT is a virtuosic masterpiece where BIABH is
a young guy who doesn't know any better learning the ropes and coming
out with some great lines in the process.
And I prefer the vocal delivery on MT as well, though there's obviously
a lot to be said for the young Dylan's tone and power.
Where (you know it's coming) I have to disagree is with your implied
suggestion that ANY artist is anything but a pastiche artist. That's
what being alive and making is: imitation. Originality just isn't
available. It's an ego-driven myth based on theories of the artist and
the artistic process which really rose to cultural dominance during the
Romantic period (i.e. that of, say, Keats and Shelley) and which we're
still heavily influenced by.
Shakespeare was valued by contemporaries for his invention, not his
"originality" (the term would be anachronistic, Shakespeare being, of
course, pre-Romantic). I mean invention in the sense it was used in
Classical poetic theories: "the bringing together of material" for
purposes of imitation and emulation.
j_ns...@msn.com
> This article says absolutely nothing.
I'm not the only one who noticed!
Joseph Scott
David O'Brien
It sure sounds like we're changing the rules of the game 40 years in. What
is all this nonsense that there's no such thing as originality? Of course
there is, but that doesn't mean it has to be like Adam in the garden! Bob
Dylan and everyone else is a combination of their influences, and that
amalgamation leads to originality, for instance: Dylan wasn't just a Woody
Guthrie fan, he'd been a rock 'n' roller, a Hank Williams fan, and at the
same time as he was singing Guthrie blue collar folk tunes he was reading
philosophy and literature, not to mention the influence of the beats.
And the sum total of all these influences created a new man, created a new
vision, and so it was "original". Nobody had ever written anything like Hard
Rain or Hattie Carrol or It Ain't Me Babe or Like A Rolling Stone before. Of
course it was original, because the opposite type of work is called
"derivitive" or worse yet: "plagiarism".
Hell I've personally written many a poem that was a total "IwishIwereDylan"
derivitive dribble, and yet there's originality in there, just not much of
it.
Dylan doesn't just bring influences together, he creates new art. That's
what artists do, they expand the boundaries, originality is everything in
art. If you're not saying something new and interesting then don't bother
showing up. So what is this nonsense that nothing is original?
Well it's a pretty damn lame excuse to justify Dylan stealing lines for his
book and his last two albums. And all I was asking is some kind of
concession that it's not quite as great an achievement to rearrange Timrod
poems as it is to write new lines, don't distract me with crazy monkeys and
theories of originality as myth.
Of course if we really wanted to go into this, we could bring up the core
issue which is why some people, some Dylan fans are absolutely insistant on
assuring themselves that Dylan is still as great a genius as ever. Like if
he weren't the world would fall in, there's issues there a plenty if we were
really ever gonna get into it...
Dave O
David O'Brien
"Treadleson" <trea...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1161063498....@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> a little fresh air and some common sense. I can't add anything better
> or more to the point. I doubt you'll get that concession.
>>
>> Dave O
>
Woohoo! Someone agrees with me on something!
Dave O
Mr Jinx
If Dylan is not a genius any more, David, perhaps you would like to
tell us all the exact day, month, hour and minute when he ceased to be
a genius. Then we can see how many people agree with you on that.
It funny how vague you 'he used to be a genius but he has lost it'
boys get when pressed on this. None of you can quite agree. So come
on. Day, hour, minute.
Mr Jinx
Jumbo
Sigh. You haven't understood a thing I've said. I don't personally give
a shit if Dylan is / was/ will be /a genius.
The idea that combining Hank Williams with Guthrie and everyone else is
MORE original than combining Timrod with Sun Records just STAGGERS ME
and I cannot be arsed to argue with someone who believes that and
doesn't properly attend to what is said any more.
Sorry.
moto
> Well it's a pretty damn lame excuse to justify Dylan stealing lines for his
> book and his last two albums. And all I was asking is some kind of
> concession that it's not quite as great an achievement to rearrange Timrod
> poems as it is to write new lines, don't distract me with crazy monkeys and
> theories of originality as myth.
I agree with you 100% Dave, but I tried arguing with these types. Its
like trying to squeeze banana juice from a typewriter.
> Of course if we really wanted to go into this, we could bring up the core
> issue which is why some people, some Dylan fans are absolutely insistant on
> assuring themselves that Dylan is still as great a genius as ever. Like if
> he weren't the world would fall in, there's issues there a plenty if we were
> really ever gonna get into it...
Yea. it seems like they have too strong an identification with him.
David O'Brien
"Mr Jinx" <vernon_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1161084412....@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
Round 91 I'd say, everything since then has been minor accomplishments in
respect to what came before. Anyway it's not that he's not an artistic
genius, it's just that's it's faded a little, I mean three original albums
in 16 years? And in my opinion the last two aren't much special anyway.
Dylan said himself that he only got back into it cos they gave him another
record contract, I mean it's more his artistic dedication or inspiration
that I think is missing.
I don't buy the whole line that just cos he's 65 we should be thankful for
whatever we get. But I ask you, if you're so rhapsodic about his
accomplishments as a live performer these last few years, and of his last
two albums, what in the blue hell would happen to you if he actually put out
an album the quality of Street Legal or Blood On The Tracks again? Which I
think he's entirely still capable of doing and is overdue for one. Hell Time
Out Of Mind was pretty close anyway in my books.
So maybe he's still a genius, I just think he's in a bit of a rut and not
really inspired anymore. The last two albums and the last five years of live
performance have been many things, well crafted, brilliantly played,
sensitively sung, but inspired? Sincere?
I think he just does it now cos it's what he does, luckily for us, even half
baked Dylan these days is still pretty good, heck I like the last two
albums, just not all that much, and if I had to give an opinion, I wouldn't
rate them as terribly important or sincere works, but I still enjoy them.
They're fun, you can dance to them.
Dave O
j_ns...@msn.com
> an album the quality of Street Legal or Blood On The Tracks again? Which I
> think he's entirely still capable of doing and is overdue for one. Hell Time
> Out Of Mind was pretty close anyway in my books.
I think Love And Theft is better than Street Legal. I was really
pleasantly surprised how superb it was, that was a memorable day first
hearing it. His songwriting aside, he's a great _performer_ (how many
songs did Ella Fitzgerald or Roger Daltrey write?).
Oh, while we're on the subject of Love And Theft again, what does
bluegrass banjo have to do with minstrelsy? Not much! Bluegrass is
younger than Bob is.
Joseph Scott
Temporary Like Achilles
David O'Brien wrote:
Hmmm ... I've kept out of this discussion for a while because I have
really had to think and re-think my position on it. I believe I was
among the group here who first identified Dylan's borrowing from Timrod
in "Love and Theft", and argued that Dylan was simply (?) engaging in a
process of allusiveness that is characteristic of all great writers,
and that taking lines from a variety of sources was both traditional
and legitimate. Now, I have to admit I was wrong and that "it's not
quite as great an achievement to rearrange Timrod poems as it is to
write new lines." I still accept that the process in which Dylan is
currently engaged has merit -- it certainly carries on the Beat process
of "cut ups" as he has described it. But it has to be evaluated
according to different criteria.
I wonder if this is what Dylan meant when he said, and I am
paraphrasing, that he could no longer write songs in the same way he
did when he was younger -- that he had to use other methods? I'm not
sure, but this could be what he meant -- that this method is what he
now has to employ. Yes, throughout his career he has taken lines from
traditional folk songs, for example, and placed them in a new context;
or as he put it in Chronicles, "turned them on their heads." It's the
same kind of thing he would do with cliches ...
But this current tendency *is* different. The lines are taken as a
whole, for the most part, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of
re-contextualization at work. So I want to thank you for your comments
on this, Dave. It is never pleasant to have to re-evaluate one's
position on such a key matter, nor is is agreeable to admit one was
wrong. But both actions are required from time to time. Cheers!
Temporary
Barbara
"Temporary Like Achilles" <temporaryl...@hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:1161216406....@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
heart. We as people do it all the time but not all of us come forward and
admit it to others. I like that.
Barbara
Martin Grossman
convinced me. While MT may not be the achievement that a handful of this
other albums unquestionably are, it is stunning late career addition to
Dylan's oeuvre. I find it satisfying on many levels and listen often,
finding more in it with each hearing. I disagree that "there doesn't
compelling as Dylan's use of their lines and phrases to build something
new. Just as a visual artist uses bits and pieces of other media to
create a collage, Dylan fills his aural canvas with words and sounds
that recall, revise and extend the sources. Discovering the sources is
part of the pleasure of analyzing the songs. "Om Shanti Om" in Four
Quartets, for example is original in nothing but its context. And so
on... ad infinitum.
David O'Brien
"Temporary Like Achilles" <temporaryl...@hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:1161216406....@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
Thank you! Great post, don't see too many people doing that sort of thing. I
hope the discussion got some thoughts on the topic going in general.
Dave O