Bob Dylan One, Two and Three: Mingus, Hemingway and Blavatsky

I noticed Austin Kleon, author of the forthcoming book Steal Like an Artist, recently tweeted about my 2010 post "The Strange Case of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell & Michael Stipe," which regards allegations of plagiarism directed at Dylan by Mitchell. He suggests, "...maybe Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, two friends and peer songwriters, give us two models of the artist, or at least two ends of a spectrum: the artist who gleefully thieves and borrows influence and the artist who tries to avoid thievery at all all costs in the quest for personal authenticity."

Kleon presents a lot of good ideas on art and theft. I particularly like, "The secret: do good work and put it where people can see it." That is a rule that I can abide by. My post also turned up on jonimitchell.com with the disclaimer "Copyrighted material on this website is used in accordance with 'Fair Use', for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of the copyright owner(s)." I'm all for fair use.

Most of the responses to Joni Mitchell's comments that I read were fairly ugly in nature, but one email I received did stand out, as it was not the typical knee-jerk reaction. A friend commented, "I am now of the opinion that she is in on all of these veiled devices & like some kind of earthly Athena or even more appropriately, like Saraswati, using radical speech to awaken the lethargic population." I dig his sunny disposition; I think that Mitchell just might have been having a bad day. Maybe it was the Mingus.

The exploration into the range and extent of how Bob Dylan uses material from other sources in his recent work has just barely begun. There is a richness that has not been properly appreciated. My essay in the Summer 2010 issue of New Haven Review, a publication that aims to "resuscitate the art of the book review,” demonstrates, among other things, how Dylan used a step-by-step guide on how to be a charlatan that appears in Robert Greene's bestseller The 48 Laws of Power to construct a section of his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

The January/February 2012 issue of American Songwriter features the cover story "The Reawakening of Bob Dylan" by Stephen Deusner and I suggest that parts of it seem informed by my essay, especially the passages regarding Bono and the birthplace of America. Deusner is clumsy, for instance, he writes, “But 2001’s 'Love and Theft' and 2006’s Modern Times further refine Dylan’s modular approach to songwriting and borrow phrases and occasionally entire lines from a wide range of sources: an obscure Civil War poet, a contemporary business best-seller, a largely forgotten jump-blues number." I have to assume that the "contemporary business best-seller" that he refers has got to be The 48 Laws of Power. While Dylan does use material from Greene's book numerous times in Chronicles: Volume One he did not use it as source material for song lyrics. Deusner and his editors are not paying attention and I prefer people who don’t plunder so poorly.

One element that I mentioned in passing in my New Haven Review essay is Dylan's use of material from the writing of composer and musician Charles Mingus. If I had known at the time that Joni Mitchell had such strong views regarding Dylan I might have expanded upon it more, in that both Dylan and Mitchell have used material from the same Mingus work, albeit in very different ways.

Joni Mitchell's 1979 collaboration with Charles Mingus, the album titled Mingus, includes the song "God Must Be A Boogie Man." Mitchell constructed the lyrics of the song out of material from the opening pages of Mingus' 1971 autobiography Beneath The Underdog. The book begins with Mingus in the middle of a conversation with his psychologist:

'In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't - he goes back inside himself.'
'Which one is real?'
'They're all real.'
''The man who watches and waits, the man who attacks because he's afraid, and the man who wants to trust and love but retreats each time he finds himself betrayed. Mingus One, Two and Three. Which is the image you want the world to see?'

That opening, with those questions of identity, sets the tenor for the entire book. Mingus lets you know that even though many of the tales that he is about to tell are apocryphal, full of intentional button-pushing and wild braggadocio, at their core they are all real, in regards to what they reveal about the man and his many sides. It case one didn't catch that Mingus was tipping you off to this approach the publisher hammers the point home by including, "Some names in this work have been changed and some of the characters and incidents are fictitious."

Bob Dylan read the opening paragraphs from Beneath The Underdog before playing Mingus' "Eat That Chicken" on an episode of his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. He called the book "riveting reading." A close look at how Dylan opens Chronicles: Volume One reveals him doing some literary jamming with Mingus. Dylan essentially tells you that some of the characters and incidents in his book are fictitious as well, that we are dealing with Dylan One, Two and Three, by his use of material from Mingus' book on the first page of his own book.

Chronicles: Volume One begins with this passage:

LOU LEVY, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’ — then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window.
Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me.
‘You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds. You're gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper-not that you'll need much in the way of clothes when you're in the ring--don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard.’

It is nearly invisible, but what Dylan seems to be doing here is asking the reader to consider his book in the same manner that one would consider Mingus' book. Jack Dempsey is actually Charles Mingus in disguise. To use material from the first page of Mingus' book on the first page of his own book would have been too obvious, so Dylan appears to have delved a bit deeper. Mingus' book exists in a couple of different editions and they are paginated in different ways. In one of them the following passage from chapter 17 appears on facing pages. In this section of the book Mingus, trying on his pimp persona, practices being intentionally cruel to a woman. The passage begins with Cindy responding to Mingus.

Beneath The Underdog, pp. 104-105:

'Here, you chilly bastard. You got a pocket-sized air conditioner stuck up your butt. Take it, it's money.'
'This hundred don't impress me none too much. They print fives and thousands too. . . That's better, bitch. Ha! I'll be back.'
'You'd be back if I didn't have a dime. Wouldn't you?'
'That's right, baby. Because you're wonderful. A beautiful, lady-style woman.'

'Hey, Timothy, did you say this bitch was rich?'
'She is, man, but she's tired of having cats take her bread and cut out.'
'She gave me a hundred when I sounded about smokes. Then she flashed this five-C note when I told her I wasn't impressed.'
'Let me see it, Ming. . . . Yeah, it's good. Keep it. Keep it all, and think about bigger ones to come. Don't look around, she just held up a fistful and gave me the wink. I'll tell her you're waiting outside in her car. But we gotta get back on the stand in about ten minutes, c.p. time. Love her up a little. Take her purse and take every penny for flashin' like that.'
'Take everything? What if she needs gas or something?'
'Man, don't go for that schitt. You can bet she's got a few bills in her stocking or up her ass. Take it all. You can strip a woman buck naked, take her belongings and lock her in the room, and when you come back she'll be wrapped in ermine and the walls all lined gold.'
'Okay, send her on out, Timothy. But what I got here is enough. I feel self-conscious. I ain't got that cold act down yet'
'You will. Don't forget the stocking top.'
'Later, Timmy.'

This bitch talking about she ain't got no money? Big white convertible, white top, white sidewall tires - damn! - white leather upholstery! White sable coat, white satin shoes, that platinum hair — a pure-dee white woman — except for those blue veins and green eyes. I definitely got me a white woman. Schitt! Where is that bitch?
'Timmy said you wanted me.'
'That's right, baby. Get in. Crazy car.'
'Uh huh, and you can't have it.'
'I wouldn't want it. Too light for a heavyweight like Mingus. Next I'm going Lincoln Continental. On my own.'
'Are you really, you big, sweet bastard!'
'You crazy white bitch! Yeah! Love me!'

It appears that Dylan has used three elements from this passage in the beginning of his own book - "pocket sized," the leather upholstery and the part about being "too light for a heavyweight." Dylan flips the meaning of “too light for a heavyweight” and may be playing with the notion that while he might not look like a heavyweight, he actually is – just not in the ring.

Dylan employs this method of phrases lifted from other works hundreds of times throughout Chronicles: Volume One, including very similar instances of creating dialogue out of passages from another jazzbo autobiography, Mezz Mezzrow's Really The Blues. By using the material from Beneath The Underdog in the very first sentence of his memoir it seems that he might be letting the careful reader know that while many of the tales he is about to tell are lifted directly from other writers that essentially they are all real as well, just like tales Mingus told.

In his book Mingus writes about how when he was a young boy he would bring pieces of broken pottery to Simon Rodia, who was building the Watts Towers at the time, essentially casting Rodia as a mirror image of himself. As I mentioned above, Mingus' book famously begins with the sentence, "In other words, I am three." The portion of the book regarding Rodia and the Watts Towers begins with, "At that time in Watts there was an Italian man, named Simon Rodia - though some people said his name was Sabatino Rodella, and his neighbors called him Sam." Three names - in other words, Rodia is three as well.

Mingus recognized the similarities in the ways that they each approached assemblage and structured improvisation. The Watts Towers are jazz and indeed have a little bit of Mingus in them. Dylan paints himself as Mingus through assemblage; he is therefore incorporating a little bit of Rodia by default. In an odd twist Dylan and Rodia appear side by side in one of the most iconic pop assemblages of the 20th century - the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Robert Duncan's poem "Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita" celebrates the Watts Towers, and considering Duncan's "grand collage" concept of poetry it is easy to see why. Approaching Chronicles: Volume One with Duncan in mind can be useful. In her essay “Robert Duncan and the Question of Law: Ernst Kantorowicz and the Poet's Two Bodies” Graça Capinha suggests that Duncan, "...works toward a language capable of dealing with complexity and with multiple and superimposed layers of meaning — the Blakean struggle of contraries." and adds that, "The poet used the jigsaw puzzle and the mobile as metaphors to define his project of the grand collage. He saw his poetry as an act of participation in a major grand collage of all the possible wisdoms, of all the possible knowledges within languages, within societies, within galaxies, within the universe — in motion."

Duncan, like alchemist Harry Smith, was raised by Theosophists and he had an interesting take on the major works of Helena Blavatsky. It is a viewpoint that is worth exploring, in that Dylan uses passages from Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled in Chronicles: Volume One. Here are some examples of how Dylan used her work.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 219:

Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it ... be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He'd be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you'd know him when he came-there'd be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn't blame them.

Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol II - Theology by Helena Blavatsky, p. 3:

Since the day when modern science gave what may be considered the death-blow to dogmatic theology by assuming the ground that religion was full of mystery, and mystery is unscientific, the mental state of the educated class has presented a curious aspect. Society seems from that time to have been ever balancing itself upon one leg on an unseen tight-rope stretched from our visible universe into the invisible one; uncertain whether the end hooked on faith in the latter might not suddenly break and hurl it into final annihilation.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 220:

You live with what life deals you. We have to make things fit. The voice on the record was never going to be the voice of the martyred man of constant sorrow, and I think in the beginning, Danny had to come to terms with that, and when he gave that notion up, that's when things started to work.

Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol II - Theology by Helena Blavatsky, pp. 8-9:

When dying on the cross, the martyred Man of Sorrows forgave his enemies. His last words were a prayer in their behalf. He taught his disciples to curse not, but to bless, even their foes. But the heirs of St. Peter, the self-constituted representatives on earth of that same meek Jesus, unhesitatingly curse whoever resists their despotic will.

Note that Dylan plays with “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a song he recorded on his first album, in his reworking of the material from Blavatsky, an interesting touch.

An important thing to grasp here is that both Chronicles: Volume One and Isis Unveiled are elaborate works of collage, incorporating lots of uncredited material from the works of others. The book A Modern Priestess of Isis by Vsevolod Sergyeevich Solovyoff, from 1895, includes an interesting appendix titled "The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings" by William Emmette Coleman. Here are the first two paragraphs:

During the past three years I have made a more or less exhaustive analysis of the contents of the writings of Madame H. P. Blavatsky; and I have traced the sources whence she derived - and mostly without credit being given - nearly the whole of their subject-matter. The presentation, in detail, of the evidences of this derivation would constitute a volume; but the limitations of this paper will admit only of a brief summary of the results attained by my analysis of these writings. The detailed proofs and evidence of every assertion herein are now partly in print and partly in manuscript; and they will be embodied in full in a work I am preparing for publication, - an exposé of theosophy as a whole. So far as pertains to Isis Unveiled, Madame Blavatsky’s first work, the proofs of its wholesale plagiarisms have been in print two years, and no attempt has been made to deny or discredit any of the data therein contained. In that portion of my work which is already in print, as well as that as yet in manuscript, many parallel passages are given from the two sets of writings, - the works of Madame Blavatsky, and the books whence she copied the plagiarised passages; they also contain complete lists of the passages plagiarised, giving in each case the page of Madame Blavatsky’s work in which the passage is found, and the page and name of the book whence she copied it. Any one can, therefore, easily test the accuracy of my statements.

In Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, I discovered some 2000 passages copied from other books without proper credit. By careful analysis I found that in compiling Isis about 100 books were used. About 1400 books are quoted from and referred to in this work; but, from the 100 books which its author possessed, she copied everything in Isis taken from and relating to the other 1300. There are in Isis about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copied, at second-hand, from books other than the originals; and of this number only about 140 are credited to the books from which Madame Blavatsky copied them at second-hand. The others are quoted in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Madame Blavatsky had read and utilised the original works, and had quoted from them at first-hand, - the truth being that these originals had evidently never been read by Madame Blavatsky. By this means many readers of Isis, and subsequently those of her Secret Doctrine and Theosophical Glossary, have been misled into thinking Madame Blavatsky an enormous reader, possessed of vast erudition; while the fact is her reading was very limited, and her ignorance was profound in all branches of knowledge.

I can relate to the exhaustive analysis aspects of Coleman's work, but his approach leaves me cold. In the 1952 book Plagiarism and Originality Alexander Lindey discusses the vices inherent in the method that Coleman took, what Jack London called the "deadly parallel" approach in a letter defending his own use of other writer’s material. Lindey suggests that, "Parallel-hunters do not, as a rule, set out to be truthful and impartial. They are hell-bent on proving a point." This does not always have to be the case, I believe that one can look for parallels without a set agenda, but Coleman clearly had an ax to grind.

Lindey also states, "A double-column analysis is a dissection. An autopsy will reveal a great deal about a cadaver, but very little about the spirit of the man who once inhabited it." I suggest that in the case of Dylan’s memoir very often the opposite is at play. Frequently what Dylan is saying on the surface is false, with many tales that are clearly not based in reality and through the dissection one can sometimes catch the occasional soupçon of the spirit of the man.

Robert Duncan had a much different take on Blavatsky's use of the material of others. Consider this passage from the book Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art by Stephen Fredman:

'In the mess of astrology, alchemy, numerology, magic orders, neo-Platonic, kabbalistic, and Vedic systems, combined, confused, and explained, queered evolution and wishful geology, transposed heads,' Blavatsky discovered, Duncan claims, 'the collagist’s art.' The elements of collage he discerns in Blavatsky include a 'charged fascination' with the material being composed, an obedience to unknown but compelling feelings, and a new respect for discarded phenomena: 'Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, midden heaps that they are of unreasonable sources, are midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures…to form the figures of a new composition.'

The collagist’s art forming the figures of a new composition is a great way to approach Chronicles: Volume One. In The H.D. Book Duncan writes that, "...in Blavatsky’s theosophy the individual psyche inhabits every place and time..." Dylan constantly plays with place and time in Chronicles: Volume One. He very often has one character inhabit multiple places and times, if you look closely at how they have been constructed.

A good example of this is Billy the Butcher, someone Dylan writes about encountering at the Café Wha?. In my New Haven Review essay I show how he is, in part, a disguised version of the 19th century scoundrel William "Bill the Butcher" Poole. At the very same time he is also one of the characters from the Hemingway short story "The Killers." Dylan writes, “The Butcher wore an overcoat that was too small for him, buttoned tight across the chest."

"The Killers":

He wore a derby hat and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was small and white and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves.
'Give me bacon and eggs,' said the other man. He was about the same size as Al. Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them.

Why would Dylan have a character from "The Killers" playing the Café Wha?? I believe that the answer has to do with vaudeville. Hemingway writes, "In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team." Dylan returns to "The Killers" later on in the book, when he partners with artist Robyn Whitlaw and does a vaudeville routine.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 66:

One of them, Robyn Whitlaw, the outlaw artist walked by in a motion like a slow dance. I said to her, 'What's happening?' 'I'm here to eat the big dinner', she responded.

"The Killers":

'What do they do here nights?' Al asked.
'They eat the dinner," his friend said. 'They all come here and eat the big dinner.'

Dylan also incorporates an element from one of Hemingway's letters regarding "The Killers" into Chronicles: Volume One, and lines from many other Hemingway stories appear throughout the book.

Regarding Billy the Butcher Dylan writes, “…sometime in the past he'd been in a straitjacket in Bellevue…” and that just might be another flash of Mingus, because Mingus in a straitjacket in Bellevue is a pivotal moment in Beneath The Underdog.

One character, in just a few sentences, zips through space and time. Many other characters do this as well. A close look at the description of John Hammond on page five of Chronicles: Volume One reveals a nod to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. This playing with time is a scheme that is used throughout the book, one of many that deserve a closer look.

Combining the diligence of William Emmette Coleman in uncovering the source material with the approach suggested by Robert Duncan may be a path to a better understanding what Dylan was up to regarding his extensive use of the material of others. When it comes to Blavatsky it is especially worth exploring the view of her as a charlatan, considering the way that charlatanism plays a key role in the hidden subtext of Chronicles: Volume One. In 2003 A.O. Scott wrote an interesting review of Dylan’s film Masked and Anonymous for The New York Times. He commented, “His lifelong foraging in the overgrown pastures of American popular culture has taught him that the true prophet is often indistinguishable from the snake-oil salesman, and his gaunt, weathered frame contains both personas.” That snake-oil salesman mask intrigues me, and there is a lot to learn about that persona if one takes the time to look at the rough ore that Dylan stamped with his own die.

Deciphering The Asia Series: Courtier Bob with Churchill's Sheep in Dullsville

Courtiers are like magicians: They deceptively play with appearances, only letting those around them see what they want them to see. With so much deception and manipulation afoot, it is essential to keep people from seeing your tricks and glimpsing your sleight of hand. - Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

Open confidences are being made every day, and it remains for the eye to train itself to see them without prejudice or restraint. - Man Ray, "The Age of Light"

A way to gain some insight into what Bob Dylan might have had in mind with his controversial Gagosian Gallery show The Asia Series is to examine the clues that he has planted in the interview that appears in the catalog. I've covered a few of these in my two previous posts and there are still many more to consider.

In the interview Dylan states, "Winston Churchill made a lot of paintings, mostly landscapes and cottages. Nobody compares his artistry with his diplomacy. He said that he knew of nothing else that more completely occupied the mind without exhausting the body. That's probably a clue to why people paint."

Dylan flat out tells you that this is a clue. He also just told you that black is white; Churchill's artistry and his diplomacy are intertwined and Dylan is quite aware of this. In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One Dylan uses elements from a section of Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power titled “The Science of Charlatanism, or How to Create a Cult in Five Easy Steps" in a most intriguing way. I explore this in my 2010 New Haven Review essay "Bob Charlatan." In Greene's book Law 24 is "Play The Perfect Courtier" and I suggest that Courtier Bob is referencing this example given by Greene:

Scene XI
Winston Churchill was an amateur artist, and after World War II his paintings became collector's items. The American publisher Henry Luce, in fact, creator of Time and Life magazines, kept one of Churchill's landscapes hanging in his private office in New York. On a tour through the United States once, Churchill visited Luce in his office, and the two men looked at the painting together. The publisher remarked, "It's a good picture, but I think it needs something in the foreground — a sheep, perhaps.” Much to Luce's horror, Churchill's secretary called the publisher the next day and asked him to have the painting sent to England. Luce did so, mortified that he had perhaps offended the former prime minister. A few days later, however, the painting was shipped back, but slightly altered: a single sheep now grazed peacefully in the foreground.

Interpretation
In stature and fame, Churchill stood head and shoulders above Luce, but Luce was certainly a man of power, so let us imagine a slight equality between them. Still, what did Churchill have to fear from an American publisher? Why bow to the criticism of a dilettante? A court—in this case the entire world of diplomats and international statesmen, and also of the journalists who court them—is a place of mutual dependence. It is unwise to insult or offend the taste of people of power, even if they are below or equal to you. If a man like Churchill can swallow the criticisms of a man like Luce, he proves himself a courtier without peer. (Perhaps his correction of the painting implied a certain condescension as well, but he did it so subtly that Luce did not perceive any slight.) Imitate Churchill: Put in the sheep. It is always beneficial to play the obliging courtier, even when you are not serving a master.

Other elements from this section of Greene's book show up in Chronicles: Volume One. Regarding Fred Neil at The Café Wha? Dylan writes, "He was the emperor of the place, even had his own harem, his devotees. You couldn't touch him. Everything revolved around him." That is right out of Scene II in the "Play The Perfect Courtier" chapter. There Greene writes, "The Chinese emperor was considered more than a man—he was a force of nature. His kingdom was the center of the universe, and everything revolved around him."

Dylan balances his portrait of Fred Neil with some interesting nuances. Not only is Neil part Chinese emperor, but Dylan also has painted him with colors drawn from Sax Rohmer's description of Dr. Fu-Manchu's slave girl Kâramanèh. (I owe the Rohmer observation to Ed Cook.)

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 10:

Freddy had the flow, dressed conservatively, sullen and brooding, with an enigmatical gaze, peachlike complexion, hair splashed with curls and an angry and powerful baritone voice that struck blue notes and blasted them to the rafters with or without a mike.

The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer:

What eyes she had!—of that blackly lustrous sort nearly always associated with unusually dark complexions; but Kâramanèh's complexion was peachlike, or rather of an exquisite and delicate fairness which reminded me of the petal of a rose. By some I have been accused of romancing about this girl's beauty, but only by those who had not met her; for indeed she was astonishingly lovely.

At last her eyes fell, the long lashes drooped upon her cheeks. She turned and walked slowly to the chair in which Fu-Manchu had sat. Placing the keys upon the table amid the scientific litter, she rested one dimpled elbow upon the yellow page of the book, and with her chin in her palm, again directed upon me that enigmatical gaze.

In a review of the Dylan show that appeared in The New York Times yesterday Holland Cotter writes, "It’s just dull, and in the context of the present pervasive dullness and unoriginality of a lot of painting in New York, it fits in all too well." Context is critical when considering what Dylan is doing. It is easy to just place Dylan's work in a boring context and label it boring as well, but Cotter does more. He hints that there might be something else going on, hedging his bet by noting, "...unless there’s some Duchampian gesture afoot here..." in his review. I pointed out such a Duchampian gesture in my post "Dylan, Duchamp and the Letter from Woody" two weeks ago.

I suggest that the editors at The New York Times give staff enigmatologist Will Shortz a crack at The Asia Series. He is better equipped to recognize the schemes that are afoot in the puzzles that surround the paintings. He might have a view that plunges past "remarkably dull."

Dylan makes a game out of being labeled dull by critics in Chronicles: Volume One. When writing about hearing Roy Orbison on the radio he notes, "I'd listen and wait for another song, but next to Roy the playlist was strictly dullsville . . . gutless and flabby." One of the things that Dylan is doing there is referencing a review of one of his concerts that appeared in Variety. The headline was "BOB DYLAN DESTROYS HIS LEGEND IN MELBOURNE: CONCERT STRICTLY DULLSVILLE." That review was published on April 27, 1966. Nearly half a century later some recent headlines might as well have read "BOB DYLAN DESTROYS HIS LEGEND IN NEW YORK: PAINTINGS STRICTLY DULLSVILLE." Dylan's dullsville dispatches deserve a deeper dive.

Deciphering The Asia Series: Dylan and The Pied Piper of Tucson

"They hadn't been on ship but about two weeks, I'm sure it was not three/When she espied his cloven hoof and wept most bitterly" - "The House Carpenter"

The processes used by Bob Dylan in his art are fascinating and in John Elderfield's introduction to his interview with Dylan that appears in the catalog for The Asia Series he gives a bit of background on the collaborative process they used to craft it. He writes, "It developed in the precise sequence in which it is printed, our conversations continuing—such is Dylan's focus on getting things right—until it reached what Marcel Duchamp would call a 'definitively incomplete' state at the end of June."

I find Dylan's use of the interview as art form, that "focus on getting things right," to be far more interesting than the paintings that they discuss. In my previous post, which centered on what appears to be a hidden nod by Dylan to Duchamp, I mentioned that there are other coded references to explore. My previous post established how Dylan discusses Woody Guthrie on the surface of the interview and also in a coded fashion by using an element from one of Guthrie's letters. Dylan employs this same strategy several times in the interview.

A comment that Dylan makes in the interview is, "Painting is visual. There isn't anything Darwinistic about it, whereas making music is more like stunt flying or bullfighting." What Dylan seems to be doing here is referencing an essay on the fall of boxer Mike Tyson by Joyce Carol Oates.

"Rape and the Boxing Ring" Newsweek February 24, 1992:

The paradox of boxing is that it so excessively rewards men for inflicting injury upon one another that, outside the ring, with less 'art,' would be punishable as aggravated assault, or manslaughter. Boxing belongs to that species of mysterious masculine activity for which anthropologists use such terms as 'deep play': activity that is wholly without utilitarian value, in fact contrary to utilitarian value, so dangerous that no amount of money can justify it. Sports-car racing, stunt flying, mountain climbing, bullfighting, dueling — these activities, through history, have provided ways in which the individual can dramatically, if sometimes fatally, distinguish himself from the crowd, usually with the adulation and envy of the crowd, and traditionally, the love of women. Women — in essence, Woman — is the prize, usually self-proffered. To look upon organized sports as a continuum of Darwinian theory — in which the sports-star hero flaunts the superiority of his genes — is to see how displays of masculine aggression have their sexual component, as ingrained in human beings as any instinct for self-preservation and reproduction. In a capitalist society, the secret is to capitalize upon instinct.

Of course playing music is not like stunt flying or bullfighting, in that one is unlikely to die by engaging in the act, but the distinctions between playing music for the adulation of the crowd, the love of women and the inherent sexual component versus the solitary act of painting that Dylan makes in this way are interesting. Boxing as Dylan's sport of choice is well known, but the subject matter here is not what draws my attention - it is the author of the piece. Joyce Carol Oates' haunting short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," perhaps her most noted work, begins with the dedication "For Bob Dylan."

Dylan's planting of the reference to Oates in this interview could serve as a marker or clue in his vast array of puzzles and games. In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" a young girl is led to her doom by one Arnold Friend. In an interview with John Knott and Christopher Keaske for their book Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature Oates stated, "Arnold Friend is a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is the 'elf-knight' of the ballads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that."

Oates' description of the daemon lover in her short story includes, "The driver's glasses were metallic and mirrored everything in miniature." Later she adds, "He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatine hardening, and in the midst of it Connie's bright green blouse."

I've long considered that a passage in Chronicles: Volume One, a book that is filled with hundreds of reworked lines from other sources, could be an allusion to the mirrored sunglasses of an old fiend known as A. Friend. On page 164 of his memoir Dylan makes a quick passing comment regarding his wife:

She could make me feel like I wasn't in some godforsaken hole. One day when she was wearing metallic sunglasses I could see myself in miniature and thought how small everything had become.

This section of Chronicles: Volume One is loaded with word play. For instance, the previous page has a tale about seeing soul singer Joe Tex on The Tonight Show that is crafted out of elements from Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere to Run. The following page has a line from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Go another page in either direction and you'll find reworked material from Jack London, Joe Eszterhas, Marcel Proust and Sax Rohmer - if you know where to look.

It has been noted that disc jockey Bobby King in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" may reflect aspects of Dylan as well. In their essay "Connie's Tambourine Man: A New Reading of Arnold Friend" Mike Tierce and John Michael Crafton explore the messianic aspects of Friend. They write, "Rising out of Connie's radio, Arnold Friend/Bob Dylan is a magical, musical messiah; he persuades Connie to abandon her father's house. As a manifestation of her own desires, he frees her from the limitations of a fifteen-year-old girl, assisting her maturation by stripping her of her childlike vision."

Over the years I've clocked thousands and thousands of hours on the air as a disc jockey, so I tend to pay especial attention to the role of the disc jockey in literature. I'm struck by a passage where Oates captures a bit of Bobby King's patter:

She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from "Bobby King": "An' look here, you girls at Napoleon's — Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!"  

As a student of the blues when I read "Son and Charley" I immediately think of Son House and Charley Patton. I can't help but wonder if Oates might have considered that too. I imagine disc jockey Bobby King working in oblique references to some of his favorite artists in between the shrieking songs in a way that would go over the heads of his teenage listeners.

"Along with Son House and Charley Patton no one was more important to the development of Delta blues than Tommy Johnson" said Dylan the disc jockey on an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour. It's as if Bobby King, the blues fanatic who had to play the Top 40 of the day, finally got to spin the records that he loved on the radio so many decades later. 

Of critical writing on "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" there is no shortage. Much is made of this passage: "'Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,' Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn't think much of it."

I am taken by the broad range of interpretations of what the secret code that is painted on Friend's golden car might mean. One interpretation has you counting the books of the Bible in reverse, another posits that the numbers add up to a sexual position. Yet another suggests that it represents the true age of Friend followed by the ages of his previous victims. I think that there is a chance that Dylan has come up with his own code, one that points in the direction of Arnold Friend.

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" was sparked in part by the true crimes of the notorious Charles "Smitty" Schmid. This strange charismatic thrill-killer was dubbed "The Pied Piper of Tucson" by LIFE magazine in an article of the same name back in 1966. Oates comments on this in one of her books.

From (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities:

He charmed his victims as charismatic psychopaths have always charmed their victims, to the bewilderment of others who fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions. The Pied Piper of Tucson: a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon — surrounded, however improbably, and finally tragically, by real people. You think that, if you look twice, he won't be there. But there he is. I don't remember any longer where I first read about this Pied Piper — very likely in Life Magazine. I do recall deliberately not reading the full article because I didn't want to be distracted by too much detail. It was not after all the mass murderer himself who intrigued me, but the disturbing fact that a number of teenagers — from "good" families — aided and abetted his crimes.

I'll give Oates a pass for not recognizing the difference between a mass murderer and a serial killer. In my previous post I mentioned that the eight foot tall image of a 1966 LIFE magazine cover with added cryptic text by Dylan that is on the Gagosian Gallery website deserves additional scrutiny. Here is Dylan's added text:

The Shadow
The Mask
The Bowl
The Underworld
The Birds
The Enemy
The Prick
The Tower
The Risk Taking
The Test of Time
Thinking Outside the Box
What Happens Next

"What Happens Next" added to the cover of the February 25, 1966 issue of LIFE could be interpreted in a number of ways. An approach that incorporates the cliched "Thinking Outside the Box" would be to consider the following issue of LIFE, in that it is what happens next. The next issue of LIFE was dated March 4, 1966. That just happens to be the issue that features the article "The Pied Piper of Tucson" by Don Moser.

There is much more going on here. If you can tune out the noise coming from the echo chamber of accusations leveled towards Dylan over the past few weeks and look at the work there are plenty of intriguing things to find.

Deciphering The Asia Series: Dylan, Duchamp and the Letter from Woody

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp

When considering what Bob Dylan might have had in mind with his new collection of paintings The Asia Series, which has raised a bit of a hubbub, a good place to start is the interview with John Elderfield that is in the catalog for the series.

Dylan has been using the interview form to incorporate hidden messages and subtext. For instance, in the 2009 interview with Bill Flanagan to promote the album Together Through Life, which appears to have been conducted via email, Dylan included a series of hidden references to the poems of Juvenal. I covered this in a pair of posts at the time. Sean Wilentz makes reference to my posts in his book Bob Dylan in America when he writes, "By 2009, Dylan, knowingly or not, was mixing other allusions with his carnival reveries—Atlas the Dwarf and Miss Europe probably come out of Juvenal's Satires—but then again, the late Roman Empire was a circus, too."   

That Wilentz writes "knowingly or not" is a cop-out, a big one. I have provided hundreds of examples of Dylan using material from other sources in his work, from his songs to his memoir to his interviews, often with clear winks or nods. It is part of his method, an aspect of his art that has not been fully explored or appreciated.

In my previous post I demonstrated how Dylan's description of artist Red Grooms in Chronicles: Volume One is, in part, a collage constructed out of passages from articles on Grooms that appeared in TIME and New York Magazine. I showed how Dylan seems to have included a hidden reference to muralist José Clemente Orozco in that discussion of Grooms. I mentioned that Dylan uses similar methods to incorporate hidden references to other visual artists, particularly Kandinsky and Rouault.

Because of that this series of exchanges in the Elderfield interview caught my eye:

You are reported as having said in the late 1970s, "I've learned as much from Cézanne as I have from Woody Guthrie." Before getting to Cézanne, are you interested in Guthrie's paintings as well as his songs? And did you talk to him about them when you visited him?
Woody made simple sketches for small publications, and he was a sign painter before becoming a musician. But I never did talk to him about it.

Staying with American art for a while, you have spoken of your interest in the paintings of George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton. I can see how makers of narrative figure compositions would attract you, but why them in particular—if, indeed, they are particular favorites?
Benton is the Uncle Dave Macon of painting. Most of his pictures have a knee-slapping, banjo-riffing, farmyard quality. And it looks to me like he knew something about the camera obscura, though to what degree it's hard to say. Whether he painted his models upside down, I don't know, but that style has always fascinated me. As for Bellows, I just like his themes and his color combinations.

Among more recent Americans, you have spoken about Red Grooms. When did you become interested in his work?
I think I talked about Red Grooms in my book. I saw a few of his exhibitions back in the '60s and have always marveled at his ability to create excitement out of mundanity. Fantastic dreams, mass wealth on a little scale, preposterous and satirical, but very imposing.

That Dylan calls Thomas Hart Benton the "Uncle Dave Macon of painting" is peculiar, in that Dylan calls Red Grooms the "the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world" in Chronicles: Volume One. Dylan is drawing attention to this for a reason. He is continuing his discussion of Woody Guthrie from the previous question in the interview, but in a way that needs to be deciphered.

I've written about and demonstrated Dylan's use of the letters of Jack London, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Dylan also uses material from the letters of Woody Guthrie and he is acknowledging this here. In a colorful 1941 letter to Millard Lampell of the Almanac Singers Guthrie refers to Pete Seeger as "the Uncle Dave Macon of the labor movement." Here's part of the letter:    

Dear Mill, Howdy Boy,

How's the writers cramps? Making lots of money? It looks like the more money you make the worse it cramps your writing. Same way with singing or anything else. But the way you old boys are set up there in your old loft I imagine there aint no way in the world you could let money cramp you. The more dough you go to making the more you get to run around with the white collars. I hope you don't ever let their ideas soak in on you. It was such a good stew that you old boys made and the best time was had right there too. Your songs and the stuff you wrote were worth a lot to either side and will attract attention for you from both sides. The other side sucks you dry and dont give you nothing. Our side gives you the real stuff you need and whole train loads of good fresh material, but not much money. We aint on the money side and dont fight with money, but we use the Truth and its like a spring of cold water. Hows the Ciscoes and have you seen them lately? I wrote to them and their address has been changed. You big horse you must have been awful busy a getting rich. You aint wrote me a drop. Old Pete's still a throwing his head way back like a coyote and a frailing that old banjo. Petes really been around. He's the Uncle Dave Macon of the labor movement.

That the original context of the Uncle Dave Macon comment in Guthrie's letter has to do with the labor movement adds another dimension to Dylan's comments regarding Benton, bringing to mind a number of Benton's works on the subject. It is put to better use here than it was in Chronicles: Volume One, where it was applied to Red Grooms.

When Dylan comments on Grooms in this new interview he may be using some of the same techniques that he uses in that section of Chronicles: Volume One that he just called attention to. First, notice that Dylan makes a passing reference to camera obscura. Dylan probably used a similar method for the paintings in The Asia Series. He also may be making a reference to another artist who often took a confrontational approach in his art. When discussing Red Grooms he uses the odd phrase "preposterous and satirical." I suggest that those three words are a key, just as "Uncle Dave Macon" serves as a key. In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan hid that reference to Orozco while discussing Grooms. This time he could be discussing the work of Marcel Duchamp through the same method.

From the 1945 essay "Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist" by Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis:

The Coffee-grinder is Duchamp's earliest proto-dada work, his first gesture of turning against the practises as well as the symbols of the traditional artist. Here for the first time, he dissects the machine, and in exploring its parts, makes a new machine, showing in the process sardonic amusement with, and irreverence for, the power of the machine and the modern sanctities of efficiency and utility. Something of this general attitude is present in Rube Goldberg's humorous play on mechanization, where a complex and fantastic display of ingenuity is employed to obtain a disarmingly simple result; in Ed Wynn's delightfully preposterous and satirical invention, contrived on the principle of the typewriter, as an aid for eating corn on the cob; and in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, especially where the efficiency of the system for feeding the worker seeks to destroy the last vestige of human will and to convert him into a robot or a cog in the machinery.

That the same sentence as my suspected key phrase includes "Modern Times," the title of a recent Dylan album, draws my attention as well.

I suggest that The Asia Series could be a subversive act created with thoughts of Duchamp. If the intent was to cause controversy then the installation at the Gagosian Gallery is wildly successful. Dylan as Duchamp is not a new idea, Milton Glaser's iconic portrait of Dylan is just that.

There is much, much more going on here. The new Dylan interview has other coded references to explore. The eight foot tall image of a 1966 LIFE magazine cover featuring jet fighters flying over Vietnam with added cryptic text by Dylan that is on the Gagosian website, but is seemingly not part of The Asia Series, also deserves additional scrutiny. 

I do appreciate The New York Times mentioning my 2010 essay for New Haven Review, which regards some of Dylan's methods, in their coverage of The Asia Series. My essay might add some context and background for those seeking something more constructive than the din of plagiarism accusations I see being played out in the media.

Bob Dylan and the Matter of TIME

In honor of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday the May 23, 2011 issue of Time has a two-page spread featuring a timeline of Dylan's life and career. It includes some ridiculous assertions, such as the claim that Dylan covered the LL Cool J hit "Mama Said Knock You Out." Dylan recited a verse from the song on an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour, hardly a cover. The most meager attempt at fact-checking would have revealed this.

The Time item does point out that Dylan dismissed the magazine during a 1965 interview with their reporter Horace Judson, as seen in the film Dont Look Back. The editors at Time missed a great opportunity to toot their own horn, by showing how Dylan has, in recent years, paid homage to the magazine by using various issues and articles as source material in his work.

In a portion of Dylan's memoir Chronicles: Volume One, where he devotes a couple of pages to painting a picture of the world from his early 60's Greenwich Village vantage point, he liberally uses elements from the March 31, 1961 issue of Time. Dylan clearly went through the issue and took pieces from article after article, recasting them it in all sorts of ways. I discussed this at length in a post on expectingrain.com back in 2009, check that out to see the full breakdown, as well as the spirited responses.

I'll present two of the examples here, both taken from the cover story of that issue.

Time, March 31, 1961, "The Anatomy of Angst":

For many Bomb worriers, it seems to be a true phobia, a kind of secular substitute for the Last Judgment, and a truly effective nuclear ban would undoubtedly deprive them of a highly comforting sense of doom.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 88:

Reputable psychiatrists were saying that some of these people who claimed to be so against nuclear testing are secular last judgment types — that if nuclear bombs are banned, it would deprive them of their highly comforting sense of doom.

Time, March 31, 1961, "The Anatomy of Angst":

This leads to a kind of compulsory freedom that encourages people not only to ignore their limitations but to defy them: the dominant myth is that the old can grow young, the indecisive can become leaders of men. The housewives can become glamour girls, the glamour girls can become actresses, the slow-witted can become intellectuals.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 90:

The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted — in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries — you can be an intellectual genius.

That gag about the lederhosen makes me smile every time I read it. Dylan returns to Time when he writes about Harry Belafonte in Chronicles: Volume One. His tribute to Belafonte is constructed almost entirely out of elements from a March 2, 1959 Time cover story.

Here are a few examples:

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

His appeal is remarkably independent of age or sex. In a recent concert in Pittsburgh, he packed the hall with steelworkers. symphony patrons, bobby-soxers and schoolchildren.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 68:

He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children — everybody.

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

Throughout he has clung to a certain tough quality that can flash out as easily as his boyish smile. Recently TV Director Don Medford tried to define the key to Belafonte's dramatic magnetism: "Behind him is this hard core of hostility. Like Brando, Jimmy Dean, Rod Steiger, he's loaded with it."

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 68:

Harry was an authentic tough guy, not unlike Brando or Rod Steiger. He was dramatic and intense on the screen, had a boyish smile and a hard-core hostility.

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

To protesting purists, Belafonte replies: "All folk songs are interpretations. Otherwise you might as well go back to the first time and say 'ugh.'"

Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 68 - 69:

The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry — who could have kicked the shit out of all of them — couldn't be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight.

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

He talks in analytically flavored prose about "Negro situations" and says: "In 1944, with three other Negro sailors and our dates, I was refused a table at the Copacabana. Nine years later I was back there as the headliner. How do you bridge that gap emotionally?"

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 69:

Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he'd be headlining the joint. You've got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally.

Dylan uses elements from Time in other places in Chronicles: Volume One, for instance a passage regarding seeing the Harlem Globetrotters-esque softball team The King and his Court while growing up in Hibbing shares very similar language with a 1963 Time item. One usage of material from Time sheds light on what is very likely one of Dylan's inspirations when it comes to using this assemblage method of writing. A careful look at Dylan's comments on artist Red Grooms reveals much.

Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 269 - 270:

There was a connection in Red's work to a lot of the folk songs I sang. It seemed to be on the same stage. What the folk songs were lyrically, Red's songs were visually—all the bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys—all the carnie vitality. Red was the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world. He incorporated every living thing into something and made it scream—everything side by side created equal—old tennis shoes, vending machines, alligators that crawled through sewers, dueling pistols, the Staten Island Ferry and Trinity Church, 42nd Street, profiles of skyscrapers. Brahman bulls, cowgirls, rodeo queens and Mickey Mouse heads, castle turrets and Mrs. O'Leary's cow, creeps and greasers and weirdos and grinning, bejeweled nude models, faces with melancholy looks, blurs of sorrow—everything hilarious but not jokey.

 That first bolded passage above is borrowed from a Time item on Grooms.

Time, January 19, 1976 "Art: Gorgeous Parody" by Robert Hughes:

It all seems to be there: the gauzy profile of skyscrapers seen from the Statue of Liberty, the brokers and bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys and carnival vitality.

The second bolded passage is grafted from two different sources. The first is from a slightly unflattering item on Grooms that ran in New York Magazine.

New York Magazine, June 28, 1976 “Grooms, Goya, and the Grotesque” by Thomas B. Hess, pp. 76-77:

Grooms leans hard on ethnic stereotypes — his Chinese cooks have slabby buck teeth, his slinky black pimp is poly-pro-prognathous. No one will object, of course, because creeps, greasers, weirdos, nudists, and other cretins aren't on the 57th Street art circuit, and, also, there's that general air of good clean American fun that captivates so many of Groom's assistants, promoters, and fans all over the world.

Notice how Hess uses the word "nudists" and Dylan substitutes the phrase "grinning, bejeweled nude models" in its place. This is a key element in the passage. Dylan seems to have used that as a pivot point to make a nod to José Clemente Orozco's 1934 mural Catharsis.

Painted Walls of Mexico from Prehistoric Times Until Today by Emily Edwards, p. 227:

Orozco's fresco, facing west, represents a colossal struggle. Against a background of mechanized war, two huge figures of men fight to the death above grinning, bejeweled, nude harlots.

Dylan is having a side conversation about Mexican murals and the pessimism of Orozco while appearing to write about Grooms. Dylan uses similar methods to incorporate a good number of hidden references to other visual artists that interest him, particularly Kandinsky and Rouault. Dylan seems to be embracing that notion of "everything side by side created equal" and is writing in a way that is analogous to the methods that Grooms uses while assembling his art.

In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan takes writing from Time, Jack London, Joe Eszterhas, Ernest Hemingway and dozens of others, from vulgarians to poets, and pieces them together in an attempt to create that carnie vitality. Like the outside talker at the sideshow Dylan can come off as friendly and engaging, while at the same time feeding his audience outrageous half-truths as well as downright falsehoods and illusions. He charms with his fakery and dares the protesting purist to call him out as a fraud, all the while speaking in a secret language and exhibiting a supreme level of showmanship. It takes tremendous skill and daring to walk that unseen tightrope, and there is nothing faked about that.

"I don't need Time magazine." Dylan famously said in 1965. He may not need the magazine, but he certainly does use it, and to gain a greater understanding of Dylan's work one does need to read Time magazine. Just don't expect to read about it in Time magazine.

Dylan Dossier: The Jack London File

Something may be noticed for the pure sake of noticing. There is no attempt to explain it at once, no attempt to give it an importance. The thing is just noticed. If it gives rise to an idea, then so much the better: if not, there is no attempt to wring an idea from it. Later on it might prove useful. But it is noted in its pure form, unaltered by considerations of importance or having to fit into a context. In this way the richness of an open consciousness embraces all that is offered without the need to explain or classify or construct at every instant. - Edward de Bono

I can conceive of no more laughable spectacle than that of a human standing up on his hind legs and yowling plagiarism. No man with a puny imagination can continue plagiarizing and make a success of it. No man with a vivid imagination, on the other hand, needs to plagiarize. - Jack London

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 13:
"Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships.”

"The Seed of McCoy" by Jack London:
“Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his burning ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he had had enough.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 21 (regarding Dave Van Ronk):
“He was gruff, a mass of bristling hair, don't give a damn attitude, a confident hunter.”

“Bâtard” by Jack London:
“He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair — to all appearances a full-blooded wolf.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 22:
“My breath froze in the air, but I didn't feel the cold.”

White Fang by Jack London:
“Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapor that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 26:
“Ray was like a character from out of some of the songs I'd been singing, someone who had seen life, done deeds and lived romances — had traipsed around, had a broad grasp of the country, its conditions.”

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
“They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances; but they did not know it.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“It was she who studied maps, and catechised miners, and hammered geography and locations into his hollow head, till everybody marveled at his broad grasp of the country and knowledge of its conditions.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 26:
“Ray was maybe ten years older than me-from Virginia he was like an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred - came from a long line of ancestry made up of bishops, generals, even a colonial governor.”

Call of the Wild by Jack London:
“Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 28:
“The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“Parker gasped, was within an ace of driving his fist into the face of his boorish visitor, but held himself awkwardly in check.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 28 - 29:
Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesers, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner.”

"Goliah" by Jack London:
“An heroic figure had been made out of Goliah. He was the man, or the demigod, rather, who had turned the planet over. The deeds of Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon were as the play of babes alongside his colossal achievements.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“But at last their mutual creation, a really dainty dinner, was completed.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p 29:
“Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with — rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“It was she who melted the stony heart and wrung credit from the rude barbarian who presided over the destiny of the P. C. Company; yet it was Edwin Bentham to whom the concession was ostensibly granted. It was she who dragged her baby up and down creeks, over benches and divides, and on a dozen wild stampedes; yet everybody remarked what an energetic fellow that Bentham was. It was she who studied maps, and catechised miners, and hammered geography and locations into his hollow head, till everybody marveled at his broad grasp of the country and knowledge of its conditions.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 35:
“It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.”

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
“An unbroken sea of frost, its wide expanse stretched away into the unknown east. The snowshoes were withdrawn from the lashings of the sleds. Axel Gunderson shook hands and stepped to the fore, his great webbed shoes sinking a fair half yard into the feathery surface and packing the snow so the dogs should not wallow. His wife fell in behind the last sled, betraying long practice in the art of handling the awkward footgear.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 35:
"A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though."

"The Master of Mystery" by Jack London:
"A certain rude rhythm characterized his frenzy, and when all were under its sway, swinging their bodies in accord with his and venting their cries in unison, he sat bolt upright, with arm outstretched and long, talon-like finger extended."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 43:
"There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgment, little affirmation, but sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence."

"Where The Trail Forks" by Jack London:
"He had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium of a bleak existence."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 48:
"Bobby and I would meet again sometime later at a folk festival. Right from the start, you could tell that Neuwirth had a taste for provocation and that nothing was going to restrict his freedom. He was in a mad revolt against something."

White Fang by Jack London:
"It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but Cherokee held on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around, trying to shake off the bulldog's body. It made him frantic, this clinging, dragging weight. It bound his movements, restricted his freedom. It was like the trap, and all his instinct resented it and revolted against it. It was a mad revolt."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 48:
"Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road, somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him. If there ever was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it. Neuwirth was a bulldog."

White Fang by Jack London:
"But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The bulldog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection. White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee's wounds increased. Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed. He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted. He continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled, he came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness to fight.

In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping his trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of anger, Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White Fang's throat. The bulldog missed by a hair's-breadth, and cries of praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the opposite direction.

The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling, leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the bulldog, with grim certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later he would accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle. In the meantime he accepted all the punishment the other could deal him. His tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders were slashed in a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding -- all from those lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 49:
"A couple of times I dropped a coin right into the played 'The Man That Got Away' by Judy Garland. The song always did something to me, not in any stupefying, tremendous kind of way."

"The White Silence" by Jack London:
"Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice."

(Later in Chronicles: Volume One material from this passage is used to describe Hank Williams.)
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 54:
"It was freezing winter with a snap and sparkle in the air, nights full of blue haze. It seemed like ages ago since I'd lay in the green grass and it smelled of true summer-glints of light dancing off the lakes and yellow butterflies on the black tarred roads. Walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan in the early hours, you'd sometimes see people sleeping in the back-seats of cars. I was lucky I had places to stay-even people who lived in New York sometimes didn't have one. There's a lot of things that I didn't have, didn't have too much of a concrete identity either. 'I'm a rambler-I'm a gambler. I'm a long way from home.' That pretty much summed it up."

"The Men of Forty-Mile" by Jack London:
"'Reason or no reason, it's the truth I'm tellin' ye. Last fall, a year gone, 'twas Sitka Charley and meself saw the sight, droppin' down the riffle ye'll remember below Fort Reliance. An' regular fall weather it was--the glint o' the sun on the golden larch an' the quakin' aspens; an' the glister of light on ivery ripple; an' beyand, the winter an' the blue haze of the North comin' down hand in hand. It's well ye know the same, with a fringe to the river an' the ice formin' thick in the eddies--an' a snap an' sparkle to the air, an' ye a- feelin' it through all yer blood, atakin' new lease of life with ivery suck of it. 'Tis then, me boy, the world grows small an' the wandtherlust lays ye by the heels."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 56:
"Ray had told me to read Faulkner. 'It's hard, what Faulkner does,' he said. 'It's hard putting deep feeling into words. It's easier to write Das Kapital.'”

Letters From Jack London: Containing an Unpublished Correspondence Between London and Sinclair Lewis, p. 78:
"Thinkers do not suffer from lack of expression; their thought is their expression. Feelers do; it is the hardest thing in the world to put feeling, and deep feeling, into words. From the standpoint of expression, it is easier to write a Das Capital (sic) in four volumes than a simple lyric of as many stanzas."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 58:
"Ray wasn't like that. He wasn't somebody who would leave footprints on the sands of time. He had blood in his eyes, the face of a man who could do no wrong — total lack of viciousness or wickedness or even sinfulness in his face. He seemed like a man who could conquer and command anytime he wished to."

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London:
"'And why do you think I have made this thing?' he demanded abruptly. 'Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?' He laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs. 'Not at all. To get it patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness, with all night in while other men do the work. That's my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed working it out.'

'The creative joy,' I murmured.

'I guess that's what it ought to be called. Which is another way of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast because it is yeast and crawls.'

I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate materialism, and went about making the bed. He continued copying lines and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task requiring the utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.

When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man—beautiful in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness, in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong. And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience. I incline to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face. Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle, and added to both his savagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yet possessed of the firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness of the male; the nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 63 (regarding Cisco Houston):
"He didn't need to say much—you knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 71:
"A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff."

White Fang by Jack London:
"Life had a thousand faces and White Fang found he must meet them all -- thus when he went to town, in to San Jose, running behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage stopped."

(A phrase from the sentence that appears before this in White Fang appears on page 252 of Chronicles: Volume One, noted below.)
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 92:
"He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn't sweat the small stuff, quoted the Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"We were speaking of this man you saw fit to marry. What manner of man was he? Wherein did he charm your soul? What potent virtues were his? True, he had a golden grip,--an almighty golden grip. He knew the odds. He was versed in cent per cent. He had a narrow wit and excellent judgment of the viler parts, whereby he transferred this man's money to his pockets, and that man's money, and the next man's. And the law smiled. In that it did not condemn, our Christian ethics approved. By social measure he was not a bad man. But by your measure, Karen, by mine, by ours of the rose garden, what was he?"
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 96:
"When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege."

"The White Silence" by Jack London:
"Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 97 (regarding Albert Grossman):
"Usually when he talked, his voice was loud, like the booming of war drums."

"The God of His Fathers" by Jack London:
"From the opposing camp came the booming of war-drums and the voices of the priests stirring the people to anger."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 104:
"The waitress at the lunch counter wore a close-fitting suede blouse. It outlined the well-rounded lines of her body. She had blue-black hair covered with a kerchief and piercing blue eyes, clear stenciled eyebrows."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"A close-fitting blouse of moose-skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded lines of her body, while a silken kerchief, gay of color and picturesquely draped, partly covered great masses of blue-black hair. But it was the face, cast belike in copper bronze, which caught and held Mrs. Sayther's fleeting glance. Eyes, piercing and black and large, with a traditionary hint of obliqueness, looked forth from under clear-stencilled, clean-arching brows."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 112:
"The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"Through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 112:
"A jackrabbit scampered past the scattered chips by the woodpile."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"Pierre pointed to the scattered chips by the woodpile."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 116:
"I really was never any more than what I was — a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London:
"And at once, as in an instant's leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. The gray mist drove by us like a rain."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 133:
"When he said to the crowd that I preferred isolation from the world, it was like he told them that I preferred being in an iron tomb with my food shoved in on a tray."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He was in an iron tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 166:
"The political world in the song is more of an underworld, not the world where men live, toil and die like men."

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
"And when he did sleep, his brain worked on, and for the nonce he, too, wandered through the white unknown, struggled with the dogs on endless trails, and saw men live, and toil, and die like men."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 167:
"I cast an embracing glance over the primordial landscape."

"In The Forests of the North" by Jack London:
"'Rum meeting place, though,' he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman's mournful notes."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 169:
"It's like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them."

"The Wisdom of the Trail" by Jack London:
"Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, expatriating himself, once and for all, from his own people."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 169:
"Yet to me, it's amazingly simple, no complications, everything pans out. As long as the things you see don't go by in a blur of light and shade, you're okay. Love, fear, hate, happiness all in unmistakable terms, a thousand and one subtle ramifications."

"In The Forests of the North" by Jack London:
"And then they are amazingly simple. No complexity about them, no thousand and one subtle ramifications to every single emotion they experience. They love, fear, hate, are angered, or made happy, in common, ordinary, and unmistakable terms."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 173:
"There's a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass. Something just breaks and gives no warning. Sometimes your dearest possessions."

White Fang by Jack London:
"The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened, and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched and waited. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the love-master's dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The strange god's foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.

Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the spring that landed him on the strange god's back. White Fang clung with his fore-paws to the man's shoulders, at the same time burying his fangs into the back of the man's neck. He clung on for a moment, long enough to drag the god over backward. Together they crashed to the floor. White Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was in again with the slashing fangs.

Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man's voice screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 189:
"The dichotomy of cutting this lyrically driven song with melodic changes, with a rockin' Cajun band, might be interesting ... but the only way to find out, is to find out. Once we started trying to capture it, the song seemed to get caught in a stranglehold. All the chugging rhythms began imprisoning the lyrics. This style seemed to be oblivious to their existence. Both Dan and I became plainly perplexed."

White Fang by Jack London:
"Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone; and even then they were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious of his existence."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He was plainly perplexed, and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding the two men intently."

White Fang by Jack London:
“Matt shrugged his shoulders. 'Got to take a gamble. Only way to find out is to find out.’"
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 190:
"We recorded it a lot, varying the tempos and even the keys, but it was like being cast into sudden hell."

"Jan, The Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five frozen years thawing into sudden hell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 190:
"I was wearing a blue flannel shirt and it was soaked through."

White Fang by Jack London:
"From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood."

(Other material from this passage shows up on page 216 of Chronicles: Volume One.)
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 191:
"Felt like I had turned a corner and was seeing the sight of a god's face."

White Fang by Jack London:
"Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god's face."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 193:
"Even with all the churches and temples and cemeteries, New Orleans doesn't have the psychic current of holy places. That's a cold, frozen fact. It takes you a while to figure that out. In a lot of places you have to change with the times."

"Jan, the Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"He looked yearningly at that portion of Jan's anatomy which joins the head and shoulders. 'Give it up,' he repeated sadly to Lawson. 'Throw the rope down. Gawd never intended this here country for livin' purposes, an' that's a cold frozen fact.'

Jan grinned triumphantly. 'I tank I go mit der tent und haf a smoke.'

'Ostensiblee y'r correct, Bill, me son,' spoke up Lawson; 'but y'r a dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact. Takes a sea farmer to learn you landsmen things. Ever hear of a pair of shears? Then clap y'r eyes to this.'"
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 193:
"As a vocalist, it was like trying to scale the slippery trunk of a tree.”

"At The Rainbow's End" by Jack London:
"'Oh, Donald, man, will ye no lend a hand?' he sobbed again, his hands bleeding from vain attempts to scale the slippery trunk."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 194:
“It had a certain definite awe about it and eventually, Danny and I saw eye to eye, went back and listened to Dopsie's version and used it.”

"Where the Trail Forks" by Jack London:
"So they stood in a certain definite awe and curiosity as to what his conduct would be when he moved to action."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 210:
"It didn't have mysteries lurking in its vast recesses, mysteries built when and by whom no man could tell."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"The cabin was one of the many mysteries which lurk in the vast recesses of the North. Built when and by whom no man could tell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 211:
"Danny's sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it's coming out of some mysterious, silent land."

"Gold Hunters of the North" by Jack London::
"But the North still whispered, and more insistently, and he could not rest till he went over Chilcoot, and down into the mysterious Silent Land."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 213:
"The song came to me complete, full in the eyes like I'd been traveling on the garden pathway of the sun and just found it."

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
"Nor did I find a maiden till one night coming back from the fishing. The sunlight was lying, so, low and full in the eyes, the wind free, and the kayaks racing with the white seas. Of a sudden the kayak of Unga came driving past me, and she looked upon me, so, with her black hair flying like a cloud of night and the spray wet on her cheek. As I say, the sunlight was full in the eyes, and I was a stripling; but somehow it was all clear, and I knew it to be the call of kind to kind. As she whipped ahead she looked back within the space of two strokes, -- looked as only the woman Unga could look, -- and again I knew it as the call of kind. The people shouted as we ripped past the lazy oomiaks and left them far behind. But she was quick at the paddle, and my heart was like the belly of a sail, and I did not gain. The wind freshened, the sea whitened, and, leaping like the seals on the windward breech, we roared down the golden pathway of the sun."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 214:
"It was frigid and burning, yearning - lonely and apart. Many hundreds of miles of pain went into it."

"The Gold Hunters of the North" by Jack London:
"'There are the continents,' he indicated; 'and up there near the polar cap is a country frigid and burning and lonely and apart, called Alaska..."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"...voices destined to string a trail of oaths along many a hundred miles of pain."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 215 -216:
"It's cut out from the abyss of blackness - visions of a maddened brain, a feeling of unreality - the heavy price of gold upon someone's head."

White Fang by Jack London:
"From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain."

White Fang by Jack London:
"A heavy price of gold was upon his head."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 216:
"Someone who loved life but cannot live, and it rankles his soul that others should be able to live."

"The Story of Jees Uck" by Jack London:
"He, who loved life, could not live, and it rankled his soul that others should be able to live."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 216:
"In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my 'I Walk the Line,' a song I'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master."

White Fang by Jack London:
"White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable spot. From the shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.

All this the two men saw in an instant. The next instant Weedon Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217 (regarding Johnny Cash):
"Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"Thling-Tinneh was trying to speak, but his people drowned his voice. Then Mackenzie strode forward. The Fox opened his mouth to a piercing yell, but so savagely did Mackenzie whirl upon him that he shrank back, his larynx all agurgle with suppressed sound. His discomfiture was greeted with roars of laughter, and served to soothe his fellows to a listening mood."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"Time and again he was forced to the edge of the fire or the deep snow, and time and again, with the foot tactics of the pugilist, he worked back to the center. Not a voice was lifted in encouragement, while his antagonist was heartened with applause, suggestions, and warnings. But his teeth only shut the tighter as the knives clashed together, and he thrust or eluded with a coolness born of conscious strength. At first he felt compassion for his enemy; but this fled before the primal instinct of life, which in turn gave way to the lust of slaughter. The ten thousand years of culture fell from him, and he was a cave-dweller, doing battle for his female."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"A few moments later they were swallowed up by the ghostly forest."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"'O my husband!' Zarinska's voice rang out, vibrant with danger."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"The Bear floundered out and came back full tilt."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 210:
"It didn't have mysteries lurking in its vast recesses, mysteries built when and by whom no man could tell."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"The cabin was one of the many mysteries which lurk in the vast recesses of the North. Built when and by whom no man could tell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217:
"Wind whipped in the open doorway and another kicking storm was rumbling earthward."

"Siwash" by Jack London:
"Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward. The wind whipped in at the open doorway, bulging out the sides of the tent till it swayed like a huge bladder at its guy ropes."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217:
"The light had gone out of the day. In the trees, a solitary bird warbling. We did it as we damn well pleased and there was nothing more to say. When the record was all added up, I hoped it would meet head on with the realities of life. I was going to thank him, but sometimes you can do it without opening your mouth, you can live it. "

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"Suddenly, without warning and without fading, the canvas was swept clean. There was no color in the sky. The light had gone out of the day."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"'Then do as you damn well please, we won't have nothing to say.'"

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"He must not say 'Thank you;' he must mean it without opening his mouth, and prove it by responding in kind."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 218:
"When we finished recording it felt like the studio could have gone up in a sheet of flame. It was so intense in there for the past couple of months or so. Lanois had created a haunting, not stumbling or halting album. He said he'd help me make a record and he didn't break his word. We went by circuitous ways but we got there."

Call of the Wild by Jack London:
"This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight."

White Fang by Jack London:
"But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking after secrecy -- that was the man who received no suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 220:
"He steered this record with deft turns and jerks, but he did it. He stood in the bell tower, scanning the alleys and rooftops."

"Siwash" by Jack London:
"Dick Humphries threw the bight of the sail twine over the point of the needle and drew it clear with a couple of deft turns and a jerk."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 220:
"My limited vision didn't permit me to see all around the thing."

"Siwash" by Jack London:
"He bore women too large a portion of his rough heart to mind them, as he said, when they were in the doldrums, or when their limited vision would not permit them to see all around a thing."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 251:
"I felt like I'd been cast into sudden hell."

"Jan, The Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five frozen years thawing into sudden hell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 252 (regarding a Ramblin' Jack Elliot record):
"I had nothing near the compelling poise of self that I heard on the record."

White Fang by Jack London:
"And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation was control, restraint - a poise of self that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel."

(This is the sentence before, "Life had a thousand faces and White Fang found he must meet them all...")
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 253:
"The road ahead had always been encumbered with shadowy forms that had to be dealt with in one way or another."

"Thanksgiving on Slav Creek" by Jack London:
"The trail ahead lighted up, and as far as they could see it was cumbered with shadowy forms, all toiling in the one direction."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 253 (regarding Joan Baez):
"A voice that drove out bad spirits."

"The God of His Fathers" by Jack London:
"The sparse aborigines still acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 255 (regarding Joan Baez):
"Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God . . . also was an exceptionally good instrumentalist"

"The God of His Fathers" by Jack London:
"But when I was come to that place, the priest stood in my way, and spoke soft words, and said a man in anger should go neither to the right nor left, but straight to God."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 255:
"Cleopatra living in an Italian palace."

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
"We'll buy an Italian palace, and you can play Cleopatra to your heart's content."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 257 - 258:
"However true that might have been, I, too, had the axe in my hands and needed to tear out of there, head off to where life promised something more - felt that my own voice and guitar would be equal to the situation."

"To The Man on Trail" by Jack London:
"More than one rough adventurer of the North felt his heartstrings draw closer, and experienced vague yearnings for the sunnier pastures of the Southland, where life promised something more than a barren struggle with cold and death."