Like Christopher Ricks, newly elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, who has a new book out on the subject that many might consider ... granular:
- In a corner by the desk there is also a boom box. Mr. Ricks brings this to lectures when he wants to talk about another of his favorite poets: Bob Dylan.
Mr. Ricks, who is 70 and was born in Britain and educated at Oxford, is a professor's professor, a don's don. He is courtly, charming and fond of wicked anecdotes about academic backbiting. He is also immensely learned. It's a tossup whether he or Harold Bloom knows more English verse by heart, but Mr. Ricks surely knows more Led Zeppelin lyrics than Mr. Bloom does, and can recite them on request. His love of Mr. Dylan's work is not an affectation, though - the pathetic impersonation of an old prof trying to prove how cool he is - but a genuine passion. He has just added to the not inconsiderable body of Dylan scholarship with a book of his own, his longest to date, "Dylan's Visions of Sin" (Ecco Press), which devotes some 500 pages to a close analysis, line by line sometimes, of the master's greatest hits.
The book begins with an address to the reader that is a little riff on one of Mr. Dylan's best-known early songs: "All I really want to do is — what, exactly? Be friends with you? Assuredly, I don't want to do you in, or select you or dissect you or inspect you or reject you." And it continues in much the same vein. Mr. Ricks's writing style is not unlike his conversational style: witty, allusive, punning (in the book, for example, he talks about a "crèche course" and "bed-rheumy eyes"), digressive and free-ranging, darting off to make connections that are sometimes baffling but more often surprising and provocative. At various points he compares Mr. Dylan to Marvell, Marlowe, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats and Marlon Brando, to cite just a few of his references.
One of Mr. Ricks's critics, the Oxford don John Carey, has complained that there is something slightly "trainspotter-ish" - or obsessively detailed - about "Dylan's Visions of Sin," and he points out that Mr. Ricks is so ingenious he "could prove the telephone book was beautifully intricate if he tried." The book pays no attention at all to Mr. Dylan's life - no mention here of his famous shift from acoustic to electric guitar, of his conversions from Judaism to Christianity and back again, or of his recent appearance in a Victoria's Secret commercial - and is more interested in the form of the songs than their content.
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Article comments
1 - Al Barger
Dylan is NOT a poet- he's a SONGWRITER. People may talk themselves into believing anything (academics are great at this), but merely printed on a page his words are 99% not very interesting. It's the MELODY that makes "Mr Tambourine Man" or "Tangled Up in Blue" intriguing and memorable.
2 - Eric Olsen
Most precisely, I would say it's the intersection of words and melody that is the locus of the power. And regarding Dylan's own performances, it's the intersection of words, music and singer.
3 - Tom Johnson
I think Eric's got it here. If it were only the melody, I would have been a lot more interested in Dylan long ago, when I paid attention only to the music. Now that I'm older, I've found a real appreciation for how Dylan weaves words around the music, much the same goes for Elvis Costello - and these are two artist that I simply had no interest in before about 5 years ago.
4 - Bob A. Booey
"Apart from certain obvious exceptions at either end of the spectrum of commodification (represented, say, by the MC-5 at one end and the Monkees at the other) it was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counter-culture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were rock stars and celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies. From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contrived cursing to saintly communalism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Bob Dylan and to the astoundingly pretentious works of groups like Iron Butterfly and The Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s."
-- Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, 1997, p. 8 (U. Chicago Press)
5 - srp
i like this piece - and i am a Dylan fan. I was listening to History Lesson Part II by the Minutemen, and there's a line,that I think is great, "Mr. Narrator, This is Bob Dylan to me!"- like Dylan of a new generation. Maybe for us it is The Minutemen-who,for me anyway and other GenXrs that I know,The Minutemen somehow accomplish what Dylan did - which is to voice our concerns. Sort of give us a soundtrack. May not be true for everybody, but certainly, true for me...
Good piece -- I also met Christopher Ricks when he was at BU (for a time) and i was working at the now defunct Partisan Review.
6 - Eric Olsen
thanks SRP, you get around.
Bob, I think Frank misses the point (I have read this book): the terms "authentic" and "fake" counterculture are fairly meaningless because he is talking about from whence the item originated, which is vastly less important than whether or not a given artist/work/whatever struck a chord, and if they did, then they have "authenticity" regardless of their origins and/or affectations.
7 - Rodney Welch
Bob Dylan is a poet, and you need not be an academic to grasp that his best work -- see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for starters -- have a deep evocative power just on the page. On some of those songs cited, the backing is fairly sparse, mainly because the words and the words alone do the work. This is only part of the story, of course, as Dylan's greatest work -- such as his string of masterpieces in the 1960s -- is great for more than just his lyrics: they are great rock and roll, period, both because of him and the bands -- and The Band -- who backed him.
8 - Eric Olsen
Also, the main point of Frank's book is that the counterculture became the dominant culture, a victim of its own success, but I don't see this as invalidating it.
9 - Bob A. Booey
Olsen:
Actually, you're slightly off. Frank's point is that what we associate with the counterculture (note he brackets off the term "counterculture" in opposition to bohemias in the quotation above) WAS the dominant culture to begin with. That advertising, corporate media, and major label music shaped the so-called counterculture for the majority of upper-middle class white young people. That's one of the explanations for his criticism of the relative inefficacy of "yippie" politics that failed to embrace the real radicalism of the 60s Left in anything more than a symbolic, consumptive way. As he puts it in the title of another one of his books he edited, dissent was both commodified, and largely a commodity to begin with in the form in which it was consumed by that generation. Hence his critique of the word "co-option" when used by hippies to refer to Dylan's popularity, for example. There was nothing to be co-opted since Dylan was a product from the start and never represented any truly subversive elements of the counterculture.
Frank means the term "authentic" in the context of actual genesis in political or artistic subcultures of the time.
The distinction between "fake" and "authentic" counterculture ISN'T meaningless. In fact, it's the most important distinction in all of art and rock music of the past 50 some years. Authenticity is important in a time of so much fake resistance and manufactured rebellion.
"the counterculture became the dominant culture, a victim of its own success"
This is actually more the argument in David Brooks's excellent Bobos in Paradise, which explains the pseudo-hippie stock-broker-in-Birkenstocks Republican phenomenon. It's also a very good book, but I think Brooks is fairly anecdotal and observational in his analysis while Frank's more rigorous historicism clearly demonstrated the influence and predation of corporate imagery and product on the "counterculture."
10 - Bob A. Booey
I should add that measuring the "success" of a counterculture by its sales is highly problematic and probably indicates that we're not talking about a counterculture to begin with. Brooks is a conservative writer and assumes that there was a legitimate mainstream counterculture (what an oxymoron that is) to begin with, while Frank would critique the premise that Dylan et al ever really represented a counter-culture so much as a poetic, pseudo-mystic diversion for mainstream pop music. People bought (quite literally) the attitude of the REAL counterculture occuring at the time; they just weren't nearly as committed to the politics and radical social philosophies of the time that would have forced them to give up comfortable materialism and their way of life. They wanted a safer, vaguer version of that rebellion that didn't unsettle their social location. Ergo, Dylan and "hippie poetics."
Frank wrote his book as an extension of his doctorate at the University of Chicago whereas Brooks wrote his book as a lark away from his usual political coverage, so that might also explain why Frank's book is slightly more rigorous in its use of history.
That is all.
11 - Bob A. Booey
Here's a funny joke for ya. I annotated this story a little bit -- my comments are in brackets.
Updated: 11:00 PM EDT
College Dropout Bob Dylan Now a 'Dr.'
By JILL LAWLESS, AP
LONDON (June 23) - Bob Dylan's lyrics have been taught in universities and debated at academic conferences. Not bad for a college dropout who railed, in "Tombstone Blues" against too much "useless and pointless knowledge."
Well, the times they are a-changin'. Dylan, dressed in a black academic gown, was awarded an honorary doctorate Wednesday by Scotland's oldest university.
The University of St. Andrews said it was making Dylan, 63, an honorary Doctor of Music in recognition of his "outstanding contribution to musical and literary culture."
"Many members of my generation can't separate a sense of our own identity from his music and lyrics," said professor of English Neil Corcoran in an awe-struck address.
Dylan's fusion of folk, blues, country, rock and poetry, Corcoran said, "moved everything on to a place it never expected to go and left the deepest imprint on human consciousness."
"His magnificent songs will last as long as song itself does," he added.
Dylan, who received his doctorate alongside Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam and biologist Cheryll Tickle, arrived 50 minutes into the 90-minute ceremony and did not address the audience of 180 graduating students and their relatives. But his silent - and sometimes yawning - presence onstage brought a strong dose of star power to the university's wood-paneled Younger Hall.
Dylan sat motionless and showed no reaction as a university choir performed a version of his early classic, "Blowin' in the Wind."
Founded in 1413, St. Andrews, northeast of Edinburgh, is Britain's third-oldest university and one of its most prestigious. Its current students include Prince William, second in line to the throne.
Announcing the honorary degree earlier this month, university chancellor Brian Lang called Dylan "an iconic figure for the 20th century, particularly for those of us whose formative years were in the 1960s and '70s."
The university also cited Dylan's long-standing interest in Scottish culture. Corcoran said Scottish folk songs and border ballads influenced his early work, while a later song, "Highlands," is based on a poem by Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet.
The musician has many fans among postwar and baby boomer academics. Last month Christopher Ricks, author of the critical analysis "Dylan's Visions of Sin," was elected Oxford University's professor of poetry.
Corcoran said Dylan was "a supremely interesting and significant figure in modern culture."
"I think he's akin to Pablo Picasso in many ways - his staying power, his resilience, the metamorphoses of a very long career," he told BBC radio.
Dylan, who is touring Britain, is due to play the first of two concerts in Glasgow on Wednesday night.
Dylan has accepted only one previous honorary degree, from Princeton in 1970 - a commencement ceremony memorable in part because of a noisy invasion of cicadas.
Dylan seems to have had mixed feelings about the event, which inspired the song "Day of the Locusts":
"I put down my robe, picked up my diploma,
"Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive,
"Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota,
"Sure was glad to get out of there alive."
12 - Bob A. Booey
Huh. Crap. I tried using the pointy brackets, but it just made my comments disappear. Whatever. I'm too lazy to write them again.
The only thing I'll point out is the hilarious Picasso analogy. The only reason that dude said that was because Dylan tries so hard to look like Picasso with his ridiculous outfits and that even more ridiculous pointy mustache. Comparing their art makes that an even more ridiculous analogy.
13 - JR
Huh. Crap. I tried using the pointy brackets, but it just made my comments disappear. Whatever. I'm too lazy to write them again.
They're still there; I clicked on "View" and "Source" and opened up that notepad with all the coding. It's a pain in the ass to read, of course.