For April Fool's Day 2012 I posted an essay that demonstrates how Bob Dylan incorporated an encounter with an artist who exists only as an April Fool's Day joke into his book Chronicles: Volume One. I also presented how this imaginary artist, Robyn Whitlaw, had in turn been reviewed by the imaginary art critic Flora Gruff.

Just barely in time for April Fool's Day 2013 comes the release of Bob Dylan's new book Revisionist Art: Thirty Works. My eyebrows rose when I saw that the book's description includes, "Art critic B. Clavery provides a history of Revisionist Art, from cave drawings, to Gutenberg, to Duchamp, Picasso, and Warhol. The book also features vivid commentaries on the work, (re)acquainting the reader with such colorful historical figures as the Depression-era politician Cameron Chambers, whose mustache became an icon in the gay underworld, and Gemma Burton, a San Francisco trial attorney who used all of her assets in the courtroom. According to these works, history is not quite what we think it is." The "about the author" section adds, "B. Clavery is the editor of Sluggo: A Magazine of the Transformative Arts."

A quick check for other work by this B. Clavery turns up nothing beyond the essay for Dylan's book. Sluggo: A Magazine of the Transformative Arts does not appear to exist beyond the reference in the description of the book. It seems that Dylan is using the device of the imaginary art critic. Perhaps he even is the imaginary art critic. The choice of Sluggo as the title of the magazine is an intriguing one. The most obvious Sluggo is the Ernie Bushmiller creation, the pal of Nancy. In his essay "...and Artists and Con Artists..." Kevin McDonough explores Bushmiller's take on fine art: "To Nancy and Sluggo, artists were always hoaxes, goateed fast-buck hucksters pawning child's play off as 'abstract,' 'modern,' and ultimately incomprehensible art. While gullible adults might fall for these flim-flam men and their wares, Nancy and Sluggo were always ready to laugh at the emperor's new clothes."
  
In 1988 Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik published a groundbreaking essay on Bushmiller titled "How to Read Nancy." In their conclusion they state, "What you may once have considered simple will reveal itself as a complex fabrication of the highest order." I wouldn't presume to write an essay titled "How to Read Bob Dylan," but I can show that one can take that notion from Newgarden and  Karasik and apply it to the work of Bob Dylan. Exploring the devices and techniques used by Dylan reveals that what critics have dismissed as simple and worthless in Dylan's art are actually elaborate constructions.

I've established previously that Dylan has read and employed techniques discussed in Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power. Law 3 is "Conceal Your Intentions." Greene breaks this law down into two sections. Part one is "Use decoyed objects of desire and red herrings to throw people off the scent" and part two is "Use smoke screens to disguise your actions."

Dylan uses material from this section of Greene’s book in Chronicles: Volume One.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 212:

The song was like looking at words in a mirror and checking out the reverse images. It's like you set up a thick smokescreen and then put the real action ten miles away.

The 48 Laws of Power, p. 27:

Selassie's way of allaying Balcha's fears — letting him bring his bodyguard to the banquet, giving him top billing there, making him feel in control  — created a thick smoke screen, concealing the real action three miles away.

One is able to observe Dylan's effective use of both the red herring and the smoke screen by taking a close look at the song "Jolene" from his 2009 album Together Through Life as well as his most recent interview with Rolling Stone.

"Jolene" is a song that Dylan clearly favors, as he has performed it well over one hundred times. It has not fared so well critically. Here's Sean Wilentz on the song in his book Bob Dylan in America:

Once more the simplest of the songs can contain layers that approach allusion, but only just. In her 1974 hit “Jolene,” Dolly Parton pleads with a raving beauty, “with flaming locks of auburn hair” and “eyes of emerald green,” begging her not to steal her man. Dylan's “Jolene” does not even attempt to match Parton's, which is one of the great performances in country-and-western music, but it is an interesting counterpart. In Dylan's version, a toss-off steady rocker with a nice guitar hook, Jolene's eyes are brown and Dylan sings as the king to her queen, while he packs a Saturday night special—a plain enough sex song, but lurking in the lyrics and the music are also hints of Robert Johnson's “32-20 Blues,” as well as Victoria Spivey's album recorded in early 1962, Three Kings and the Queen (on which a twenty-year-old Bob Dylan, no king, played harmonica in back of Big Joe Williams).

Wilentz, the would-be Dylan detective, is oblivious to the actual hints and illustrates, once again, how he fills the role of the tired beat cop who tells onlookers, "Nothing to see here folks, move along."

Clinton Heylin expresses a particularly dismissive view of "Jolene" in his book Still On The Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Vol. 2: 1974-2008:

For a ditty that could as easily have been called “Baby I Am The King” to invite comparison with Dolly Parton's consummate song of the same name suggests a certain chutzpah on the singer's part. In the past, one would have expected such bravado to generally have been warranted. But this is truly desperate stuff. Line after line of missing links, it is tuneless, hopeless, almost worthless too.

What is hopeless and almost worthless is his assessment. The red herring has taken him far down the wrong path as well.

The red herring is Dolly Parton's song of the same name. It is so powerful that Wilentz and Heylin are not able to see past it. Bill Flanagan asked Dylan about Parton's song, resulting in this exchange:

Flanagan: Any chance your Jolene is the same woman who got Dolly Parton so worked up?
Dylan: You mean that woman with the flaming locks of auburn hair? 
Flanagan: Yeah! Who's smile is like a breath of Spring. 
Dylan: Oh yeah, I remember her. 
Flanagan: Is it the same one?
Dylan: It's a different lady.

In this case Dylan is telling the truth - it is a different lady. The lady that he had in mind has a similar name, and she was the subject of a song that was a bigger pop hit than Parton's "Jolene." The song is "Rolene," a Top 40 hit in 1979 for composer Moon Martin. In this case the cover version by Willy DeVille's band Mink DeVille is the one to consider. A close look at the lyrics to Dylan’s "Jolene" reveals that it is comprised almost entirely of lines from songs found on the Mink DeVille albums Cabretta and Return To Magenta.

I first wrote about connections between Willy DeVille and Together Through Life back in 2009, before the album was released. At the time I pointed out that the song "This Dream of You" begins with, “How long can I stay in this nowhere café?” and how  this echoes the Doc Pomus/Willy DeVille composition "Just To Walk That Little Girl Home" and its opening line "It's closing time in this nowhere café." Dylan had mentioned Doc Pomus in that Flanagan interview, so it was natural to look at the Doc Pomus catalog.

Besides the song "Rolene" there are eight other Mink DeVille songs to consider. Dylan used a similar method of construction in the song "Tweeter and the Monkey Man," which is a pastiche of Bruce Springsteen song titles and themes. That one is obvious to even the most casual listener. In "Jolene" Dylan tweaks the formula by making the homage distinctly more difficult to recognize.

First verse of "Jolene":

Well you're comin' down High Street, walkin' in the sun
You make the dead man rise, and holler she's the one
Jolene, Jolene
Baby, I am the king and you're the queen

The connection in that first line is to the David Forman (aka Little Isidore) composition "'A' Train Lady." High Street is mentioned five time in the fade out of the Mink DeVille version: "Following you all the way to High Street/Yes, I followed you to High Street/And I wished you were my baby/All the way, all the way/All the way to High Street/All the way, all the way/All the way to High Street/All the way, all the way/All the way to High Street."

The second line in "Jolene" is the first of a pair of lines that originate in the song "Cadillac Walk." That song includes, "dead men raise and sigh." "Cadillac Walk" is another song that was written by Moon Martin. In "Tweeter and the Monkey Man" Dylan namechecks "Jersey Girl" - a song written by Tom Waits, but familiar through the version by Springsteen. By having two of his songs referenced one could consider Moon Martin to be the Tom Waits of "Jolene."

Not only is the repeated "Jolene, Jolene" an echo of "Rolene, Rolene" from the song "Rolene," but there is a distinctive guitar hook in the chorus of the Mink DeVille version that was likely the starting point for the guitar line that is played in the refrain of the Dylan song.

Second verse of "Jolene":

Well it's a long old highway, don't ever end
I've got a Saturday night special, I'm back again
I'll sleep by your door, lay my life on the line
You probably don't know, but I'm gonna make you mine

The Mink DeVille song "Steady Drivin' Man" includes both "You know that long old highway" and "She's got a Saturday night special."

The third line is built out of bits from the song "Just Your Friends": "You know that all of the time I've laid my heart on the line" and "I don't know why I want more but I will sleep by your door for the truth." The second part of the couplet is taken from the Mink DeVille recording of "Little Girl" (a cover of the Phil Spector/Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry composition "Little Boy," a hit for the Crystals). DeVille starts his version off with, “Little girl, you probably don't know it."  

Third verse of "Jolene":

I keep my hands in my pocket, I'm movin' along
People think they know, but they're all wrong
You're something nice, I'm gonna grab my dice
I can't say I haven't paid the price

The first line of the third verse is right out of the song "Desperate Days": "Put your hands in your pockets, you keep moving around." With the third line Dylan is back to "Cadillac Walk," reworking the line, "Ain't she something nice/Bones rattle my dice." Dylan rhymes the "dice" line with "I can't say I haven't paid the price," which is from the Mink DeVille song "Soul Twist": "No, I can't say that you haven't paid the price."

Final verse of "Jolene":

Well I found out the hard way, I've had my fill
You can't fight somebody with his back to a hill
Those big brown eyes, they set off a spark
When you hold me in your arms things don't look so dark

Dylan begins the final verse with more from the song "Soul Twist," the first line: "I found out the hard way." In Moon Martin's original recording of "Rolene" he sings about her thighs. Willy DeVille took some liberties and changed that line to be about Rolene's "big brown eyes."

Dylan finishes the final verse with, "When you hold me in your arms things don't look so dark" and that is straight out of the song "Guardian Angel": "When you hold me in your arms, things don't look so dark no more."

One of the few lines in "Jolene" that doesn't appear to come from a Mink DeVille recording is, "People think they know, but they're all wrong." One can apply that to Sean Wilentz's notion that "Jolene" is a plain and simple toss-off with "layers that approach allusion, but only just." He couldn't be more wrong, as the song is a complicated construction that is almost entirely allusion. Just because he fails to recognize the allusions he seems to think that they don't exist. What Clinton Heylin sees as, "Line after line of missing links" is anything but. The links to the first seven songs from Mink Deville's Return to Magenta, as well as two of the songs from Cabretta, are right there - if one can dismiss the red herring and get past the smoke screen.

When considering if there was evidence of Dylan showing any interest in the music of Willy DeVille during the time when the songs on Together Through Life would likely have been written I came across a telling anecdote in a 2011 interview with musician Paul James conducted by Lisa McDonald that ran in smalltowntoronto.com. Beyond his own career Paul James played with Bo Diddley regionally for decades and has shared the stage with Dylan (and Dylan with him) many times, going back to 1986.

Paul James did a stretch as the touring guitarist for Mink Deville and is featured prominently on the DVD Mink DeVille: Live at Montreux 1982, which was released in April of 2008. James also wrote and recorded a song about his tenure with Mink DeVille, a reggae tune about what you end up doing when your band leader is "kicking the gong around" called "Waiting For Willy."

In the interview Paul James talks about an encounter he had with Dylan in August of 2008: "I parked my van right in front of Dylan’s bus at Copps Coliseum, like I was told. And then these guys came and took me to my seat. I was then told, 'Right after the encore, we’ll come back and bring you to Bob. He wants to talk to you.' When I was taken to see Bob, the first thing he says to me is, 'Hey, I saw that video where you played with Mink DeVille. Willy is something else.' (Willy was still alive at this point). We talked about Mink DeVille and then Dylan said, 'You think you could play guitar for me?' I said, 'Yea!'"

On Mink DeVille: Live at Montreux 1982 Willy straps on an acoustic guitar and a harmonica rack for the song "Just Your Friends" and it would be difficult for anyone not to see the impact of Dylan in the performance. The idea of Dylan watching it is compelling, but even more interesting is the notion of Dylan perhaps watching DeVille's performance of the same song on the 2006 DVD Willy DeVille: Live in the Lowlands. As DeVille puts on the harmonica rack he tells the crowd, "To tell you the truth I hate this fucking thing, I really do. I can't stand this thing, it drives me goddamn nuts. But I don't have four hands so there's nothing I can do about it. But right now at these moments when I have to put this on I would like to kill Bob Dylan." 

The September 27, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone featured a contentious interview with Dylan that, when parsed closely, shows Dylan actually giving hints as to the hidden layers of "Jolene." In the interview Dylan talks about the walking blues and states, "I've been raised on that. The walking blues. 'Walking to New Orleans,' 'Cadillac Walk,' 'Hand Me Down My Walkin' Cane.' It's the only way I know. It comes natural."

In the midst of venting about "wussies and pussies" who complain about his borrowing, people he calls "evil motherfuckers," Dylan chooses to conceal the real action - unrecognized source material. Obviously Mink Deville's "Cadillac Walk" is right there for the careful reader to consider and possibly track back to "Jolene." In this case I can point out that I had already shown that I was aware of the origins of the song and had demonstrated this through a similar method - in the last paragraph of my 2012 April Fool's Day post I intentionally incorporated lines from the Mink DeVille's song "Soul Twist." I also wrote about the connection in a post that appears in cipher form. I did these things to serve as a marker in the event that Dylan might do anything that could be viewed as tipping his hand as to the origins of "Jolene." Dylan is using the interview as a game, something that I've demonstrated a number of times over the past few years. When encountering such elaborate game play one can choose to play along. 

Also worth considering are the two other walking songs that Dylan decided to mention. Dylan quotes "Hand Me Down My Walkin' Cane" in "Ain't Talkin'" from Modern Times: "Ain't talkin', just walkin'/Hand me down my walkin' cane." That leaves Fats Domino's "Walking To New Orleans." The song "Soon After Midnight" on Tempest is essentially the ghost of the Bobby Fuller Four song "A New Shade of Blue," but other songs haunt the recording as well. The loping rhythm and the way in which Dylan enunciates the line "A gal named Honey/Took my money" directly calls to mind Domino singing, "You use to be my honey/Till you spent all my money." People were hearing and making this connection before the Rolling Stone interview was published. For instance, in a discussion of "Soon After Midnight" on expectingrain.com someone known as tensteel commented, "I also hear Fats Domino loud and clear, and just a little Ricky Nelson, especially shades of Lonesome Town. As far as Fats, listen to how Bob sings 'muhhhnay,' for money. Totally Domino."

Dylan has presented three walking songs that play a role in Tempest, Together Through Life and Modern Times - his last three studio albums of new material in reverse chronological order. This pattern of behavior can be demonstrated again and again and again.

Dylan often will hide things in interviews in such an obscure way that only great attention to detail and rigorous digging will expose them. Occasionally he use the “in plain sight” approach and once in a while he will be quite straightforward.  While discussing quotation with John Elderfield in an interview that appears in The Asia Series catalog Dylan states, "Minstrels did it all the time. Weird takes on Shakespeare plays, stuff like that." That is as blunt and obvious as Dylan gets.

While looking into how minstrels approached Shakespeare I came across an essay by William J. Maher titled, "Ethiopian Skits and Sketches: Contents and Contexts of Blackface Minstrelsy, 1840- 1890" in the book Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Maher states, "The most frequently parodied Shakespeare plays were Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III." He devotes a fair amount of discussion to parodies of Othello, particularly George Griffin's Othello: a Burlesque from 1866. He mentions, "...the comedians viewed a wife's role as subservient to her husband, something Othello makes clear when he tells Brabantio, 'If for my wife — your daughter — you are looking, you'll find her in the kitchen busy cooking.'"

This passage jumped out at me initially because it was underlined by a previous owner of my copy of the book. I also couldn't help but recognize how similar it is to the first lines of the song "Po' Boy" from "Love and Theft": "Man comes to the door—I say, 'For whom are you looking?' He says, 'Your wife,' I say, 'She's busy in the kitchen cookin'.” Dylan also happens to mention Othello and Desdemona a little later on in the song. The full play, and other Shakespearean parodies, can be found in the book This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage. They are all written in dialect, so reading is slow going, but I think it is essential if one aims to gain a better grasp on some of the roots that Dylan went to while writing “Love and Theft.”

The radio documentary “Shakespeare in American Life” includes an episode by Richard Paul on the African-American experience with Shakespeare called “Shakespeare In Black and White.” It asks the question “Who ‘owns’ Shakespeare?” and Paul begins his piece by contrasting a straight reading of Othello with actors doing the very same lines from Othello: a Burlesque that Dylan uses in “Love and Theft.”

This is the second minstrel skit that I've identified in the lyrics of "Love and Theft" and this one I found because Dylan, in his own peculiar way, suggested very specific subject matter to study.

"Love and Theft" is a particularly rich and dense work, and even more than a decade after its release it still holds plenty that has yet to be considered and discussed. The 20^th anniversary edition of Eric Lott’s Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, with a new forward by Greil Marcus, is due in August. I imagine that Dylan might come up there, but I think the extent of Dylan’s use of minstrelsy material is just starting to be discovered.

In a discussion about quotation in the Rolling Stone interview Dylan throws down a challenge, "And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get."

The question that prompted this response would have been more appropriate in 2006 than in 2012. I would have liked to have least seen a follow up question that talked about how Dylan peppers his prose in Chronicles: Volume One with hundreds of little lifted items, including bits from over a dozen Hemingway short stories – not to play the “as far as Ernest Hemingway is concerned, we’ve all heard of him” card, but because the process involved in writing this way must be incredibly labor intensive and I would find a discussion of this process interesting.  

The do-it-yourself approach to using the work of Henry Timrod that Dylan challenged his critics to try was already taken up, years ago, by the combo Bobby Dee and the Folk Process. The band's name is clearly a reference to this passage from a 2006 New York Times article on Dylan's use of Timrod's work: “But some fans are bothered by the ethics of Mr. Dylan’s borrowing ways. 'Bob really is a thieving little swine,' wrote one poster on Dylan Pool), a chat room where Mr. Warmuth posted his findings. 'If it was anyone else we'd be stringing them up by their neck, but no, it’s Bobby Dee, and ‘the folk process.'"

That article ran on 9/14/2006 and the band's MySpace profile, at http://www.myspace.com/bobbydeeandthefolkprocess, shows "Member Since 9/16/2006." In late 2006 The Folk Process posted a recording of a song called "Huck's Tune" before Dylan's song with the same name was released on the soundtrack to the film Lucky You. On their MySpace page the band states, "While we are waiting for the 'Lucky You' version we thought that it would be fun to take a stab at our own 'Huck's Tune.' The lyrics are from the Blind Boy Grunt school of appropriation - see if you can track down some of the places where we nicked them!"

It doesn't take long for one to discover that the stolen lyrics are comprised almost solely of lines from Timrod poems. I don't know that I'd call the song much of an achievement, but as songwriting exercise in response to the methods of Bob Dylan, one that Dylan would explicitly challenge his critics to attempt years later, it is interesting. To see how far you can get was part of Dylan's challenge. The Folk Process doesn't seem to have made it that far, but they were richly rewarded in irony when their "Huck's Tune" was pulled from consideration in a Battle of the Dylan Cover Bands hosted by DylanRadio.com. Apparently the "The World's First Bob Dylan Radio Station" was not yet ready for "the world's only conceptual Bob Dylan cover band" - at least as far as that competition went, since their "Huck's Tune" is available for request on the station, alongside the actual Bob Dylan catalog.

I just received my copy of Revisionist Art: Thirty Works in hand and haven’t had the chance to give it more than the most cursory look. In the interview that appears in the catalog for The Asia Series Dylan brings up both camera obscura and methods that one might use when making a painting of the Last Supper. This caused me to wonder if Dylan had been reading and was referring to David Hockney’s 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. The use of optical aids, such as camera obscura, is the focus, and methods and processes used in Last Supper scenes by Dieric Bouts and Andrea del Castagno is one of the subjects discussed.

Hockney states the drive behind his project succinctly: "Like most painters, I imagine, when I look at paintings I am as interested in 'how' it was painted as 'what' it is saying or 'why' it was painted (these questions are, of course, related).” I can relate to that. I am far more interested in discussing the processes that Bob Dylan uses in his work than blathering about how it might speak to me. This focus on process is also an area that deserves greater attention, in that, as demonstrated, the current literature is severely lacking.

Hockney, camera obscura and the nature of portraiture are mentioned in B. Clavery’s essay for Revisionist Art: Thirty Works, titled “Step Inside the Hurricane.” Clavery tells us, “Revisionist art, at its center, lies not in the events but in the willful manipulation of the response to those events as triggered by the artist."

If one replaces “Revisionist art” with “April Fool’s Day” in that sentence it reads just as well, if not better. I think that makes the first of April the perfect day to sit down and take a close look at Clavery’s essay, as well as the wild annotations that appear in Revisionist Art: Thirty Works, keeping in mind the possible use of those red herrings and smoke screens as part of that willful manipulation of response.

Have a happy April Fool's Day.

I wanted to read Jon Friedman's new book Forget About Today: Bob Dylan's Genius for (Re)invention, Shunning the Naysayers, and Creating a Personal Revolution, which is essentially a self-help book using the life and career of Bob Dylan as a template, because I was intrigued by one of the chapter titles. His eighth chapter is titled "Marry a Mermaid" and I wanted to see what he was getting at there.

In the chapter Friedman writes:

Where others might ponder a certain challenge and carefully weigh the risks and rewards and calculate the probability of setback, Dylan doesn't even consider the possibility of failure. He doesn't take into account that there are boundaries or limitations to attaining success. It's a sign of Dylan being all in and not compromising himself. When we try to analyze Dylan's success, we can see, on one level, that it is more a factor of perspiration than inspiration. He throws himself completely into his various music, art, literary and film projects. He intends to go deep and, in the evocative phrase he invoked in his memoirs, "marry a mermaid." It starts with the notion that he is committing himself 100 percent to everything he does.

Later in the book Friedman states, "There is another component to this jigsaw puzzle that we call our life, and it is a very big piece. This involves having a personal code of behavior, which will guide you throughout your journey from here to there." He adds, "I point you to Dylan's code as a major reason for his remarkable legacy."

What I find intriguing about Friedman setting up Bob Dylan up as a Hemingwayesque code hero is that I believe that Dylan may have used the very phrase that Friedman found so evocative as a way to point out the difficulties in trying to live up to such a personal code, that Dylan could essentially be saying, "Don't follow me."  

Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One is a vast palimpsest, with the words of many other writers coming through the text, hundreds and hundreds of times. When you are aware of what the original source material is you find that the subtext often subverts the surface text or adds another meaning to it that you could not be aware of initially.

Dylan uses a significant amount of material from Ernest Hemingway in Chronicles: Volume One, particularly from the short stories featuring Nick Adams. Some writers picked up on Dylan's use of Hemingway early on. For instance, Tom Carson, in his 2004 review of Chronicles: Volume One for The New York Times writes about the list of books that Dylan says he read in his early days in New York City and then adds, "While Hemingway isn't on the list, Dylan clearly made up for that omission later on. Feeling confused by things 'too big to see all at once,' he reflects, 'You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.' In his battered-veteran phase -- the hell with it, I'm more famous than Papa now -- he borrows a Hemingway mantra outright: 'Long time ago, good; now, no good.'"

The mantra is from the Nick Adams story "Fathers and Sons." Carson also seems to have picked up on Dylan's echo of this passage from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro": "There wasn't time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right." A close look at Chronicles: Volume One reveals that Dylan borrows from Hemingway outright a startling number of times. To get a better understanding of the Bob Dylan that appears in Chronicles: Volume One it is important to take a look at how he uses the words of Hemingway.   

In the book Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration Philip Young writes:

It is pretty clear, then, that Nick Adams has much in common with Ernest Hemingway. This is not to say that he "is" Hemingway. He is, rather, a projection of certain kinds of problems Hemingway was deeply concerned to write about, and write out. Nick is a special kind of mask. But there are masks which do not disguise or conceal very much and some of them, like the theatrical masks of ancient Greece, actually serve to identify character and even to reveal it. These are odd distortions indeed in that they are really clarifications. By selection among the possibilities of personality, and by emphasis of some few of its features, they expose as well as hide, disclose as well as cover. Nick Adams is such a mask, for while he presents to the world a face that is not exactly Hemingway's, he also projects chiefly that one set of problems, revolving around the wound, that is the best aid in our recognition of Hemingway. Thus Nick is a simplification, and to that extent a distortion, of the actual complex personality, but is also a kind of revelation.

Dylan has taken Hemingway's mask and put it on himself. Howard L. Hannum begins his essay "'Scared sick looking at it': A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories" with "Nick Adams, like Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, or any other major character in American literature, is entitled to a life of his own, but Nick is seldom allowed such imaginative separation from Ernest Hemingway." Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby both show up in Dylan's recent work and much has been written about that. How Dylan wears the Nick Adams mask, how he separates it from the ties to Hemingway's biography, as well as how he uses it for both distortion and revelation, is also worth exploring.

Dylan intentionally disguises himself as Nick Adams in many different ways throughout the book. In a previous essay I pointed out how Dylan acts out a scene from "The Killers" with the mysterious artist Robyn Whitlaw. If you take a close look at the criminal record of Sun Pie you'll find that he seems to be, in part, Bugs from "The Battler." I could publish a laundry list of examples of Dylan using Hemingway, as I've previously done to demonstrate Dylan's use of Jack London, but it would distract from the discussion and some people still would not be convinced. I ran my list of Dylan/London comparisons past a guy from The Jack London Society and his response to me included, "It doesn't seem deliberate on Dylan's part, but it does seem possible that he just absorbed some of London's language and it re-emerged here." I find his point of view to be so preposterous that I won't embarrass him by using his name (he'll come around eventually). I suggest that the notion that Dylan could be unaware of his use of Hemingway is equally ridiculous.

I also suggest that Dylan carefully considered the components of a Hemingway code hero. A key component is a physical wound, and Dylan gives himself one. A section of Chronicles: Volume One begins with Dylan's hand becoming "ungodly injured in a freak accident." In the book Dylan is getting ready to revive his career and art, after being adrift for a decade, by applying some new approaches. The physical wound represents, as in so many Hemingway stories, the struggle to live up to the code. Dylan makes this plain in the following passage:

There were plenty of days coming when it would all come together. My destiny was shining silver in the sun. Life had lost its toxic effect. I had nothing more to bitch about ... then it hit me.

He goes on to write about being stopped in his tracks by the injury. He writes, "...something heavy had come against me." Dylan makes it clear that he is considering Nick Adams here. Hemingway's story "Big Two-Hearted River" ends with "There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp." For Nick Adams fishing the swamp is "a tragic adventure" that he is not quite willing to take just yet.

When Dylan writes about his destiny shining silver in the sun he is making another Hemingway fishing reference, pointing out that destiny can be as elusive as a marlin on the line. The passage that he is alluding to initially appeared in the short story "One Trip Across" and was later incorporated into To Have and Have Not:

He hit him pretty hard a couple of times more, and then the rod bent double and the reel commenced to screech and out he came, boom, in a long straight jump, shining silver in the sun and making a splash like throwing a horse off a cliff.

Dylan peppers his prose with much more Hemingway in that section, to make it obvious to the careful reader that the parallels are no coincidence. Dylan, in his Nick Adams guise, shows how he struggles to live up to the code, a struggle made manifest in the injury to his hand. The ways in which Nick Adams fails to live up to the code, his weaknesses and how he succumbs to temptation, are what makes the character so rich when compared to, say, Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, who remains steadfast to the code.

The evocative phrase that gave Jon Friedman his chapter title shows Dylan heaping praise on producer Daniel Lanois when viewed in the surface context. Dylan writes, "One thing about Lanois that I liked is that he didn't want to float on the surface. He didn't even want to swim. He wanted to jump in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid."

The subtext in that passage is about Nick Adams and his struggles with the code, and Hemingway's use of submergence to represent an avoidance of living up to the code. Dylan is referencing the Hemingway short story "Summer People." In story Nick Adams is spending an evening swimming in a lake with friends, who call him by the nickname "Wemedge." Hemingway notes, "He did not care anything about swimming, only to dive and be underwater." Nick Adams thinks, "It was funny how much fun it was to swim underwater and how little real fun there was in plain swimming."

After the swim this exchange occurs:

"What animal would you like to be, Odgar?" Nick said.
"J. P. Morgan," Odgar said.
"You're nice, Odgar," Kate said. Nick felt Odgar glow.
"I'd like to be Wemedge," Kate said.
"You could always be Mrs. Wemedge," Odgar said.
"There isn't going to be any Mrs. Wemedge," Nick said.
He tightened his back muscles. Kate had both her legs stretched out against his back as though she were resting them on a log in front of a fire.
"Don't be too sure," Odgar said.
"I'm awful sure," Nick said. "I'm going to marry a mermaid."
"She'd be Mrs. Wemedge," Kate said.
"No she wouldn't," Nick said. "I wouldn't let her."
"How would you stop her?"
"I'd stop her all right. Just let her try it."
"Mermaids don't marry," Kate said.
"That'd be all right with me," Nick said.

Nick's desire to marry a mermaid is an extension of his desire to stay submerged, to avoid adult responsibility. He goes on to betray Odgar and the code by sleeping with Kate. Hannum explores this theme:

Nick learned early the defense mechanism of submergence ("he would never die"  [70]). And he used it, after the Boulton incident and after Fossalta, and is using it again after the giant trout. On the threshold of adult life, he has not yet learned that submergence merely shelves problems, without solving them for him. Submergence has kept him in bondage to the past; the swamp would involve Nick in his future.

Kevin Fahey expands on this theme in his essay "Hero Without a Code: Hemingway's Nick Adams." Ironically, this essay is used as an example of how to properly cite your sources in the book The Bedford Researcher. Of course Dylan wasn't writing a term paper. Fahey writes:

The repetition of this theme throughout the story suggests that Nick dislikes swimming on the surface because it requires more discipline and endurance than swimming underwater. Underwater, Nick might also feel that he can temporarily "escape society's rules about sexual behavior" (Comley 70), which would require him to face his fear of commitment. Nick is "forever seeking a pristine boyhood paradise free from the responsibility of adult, heterosexual relationships" (Strychacz 67).

Friedman sets up Bob Dylan as a "self-help guru" and suggests that we should seek to marry a mermaid, because that is a life lesson that Dylan presents. That is a far too easy a reading, and I suggest that it is an incorrect one if you consider how Dylan is drawing upon Hemingway. I don't think that Friedman is doing any harm. In my interactions with Friedman he comes off as a perfectly nice fellow. It turns out that we share an alma mater and we both wrote about music for the college newspaper. And he sure likes the work of Bob Dylan. But I don't look to rock stars for life lessons, and I certainly don't presume to know anything about the life of Bob Dylan. I do think that you can learn much about writing and art by studying the writing and art of Bob Dylan. The Bob Dylan that is presented in Chronicles: Volume One, especially when he is wearing his Nick Adams mask, is complicated and troubled. He struggles. He does not seem to be a character that you would look to for answers.

Chronicles: Volume One is a very rich work, and proper attention to the study and interpretation of what Dylan does in the book has not been paid. I am confident that this will change over time. I saw that Rolling Stone published a list this week called The 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time and Chronicles: Volume One is on the top of the list. It belongs there. Their brief blurb includes two short quotes from the book:

Everybody knew this guy had a way with words. But it's safe to say that nobody expected his autobiography to be this intense. He rambles from one fragment of his life to another, with crazed characters and weird scenes in every chapter. It all hangs together, from his Minnesota boyhood (who knew Dylan started out as such a big wrestling fan?) to the "deserted orchards and dead grass" of his Eighties bottoming-out phase. He evokes his early folk-rogue days in New York, even though he hated being perceived as the voice of a generation: "I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper." So where's that Nobel Prize already?

My essay "The New Yorker and Bob Dylan the Cowboy Dandy" addresses what Dylan is most likely up to with that second quote. The "deserted orchards and dead grass" is yet another instance of Dylan using Hemingway. The five words that Rolling Stone chose to represent Dylan's way with prose resonate much deeper than they probably realized.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 146:

For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. My audience or future audience now would never be able to experience the newly plowed fields I was about to enter. There were many reasons for this, reasons for the whiskey to have gone out of the bottle.

"Fathers and Sons" by Ernest Hemingway:

His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted orchards and in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or hauling water, by grist mills, cider mills, and dams and always with open fires.

"Night Before Battle" by Ernest Hemingway:

The room was full of smoke and the game looked just as when we had left it except the ham was all gone off the table and the whisky all gone out of the bottle.

Beyond using lines from Hemingway Dylan also has his characters engage in odd, impressionistic recastings of pivotal scenes from Hemingway's short stories. Poet Stephen Scobie wrote an entire essay on one such passage without realizing the Hemingway connection.

"There is no code!" a very vocal critic of my writing on Dylan has asserted. This person has also suggested, "I think Warmuth is using his knowledge to push his own ideas." I don't know how to even begin to respond specifically to that second statement, but my general response is to embrace naysayers, not to shun them. I am tickled by the notion that someone would think that I dreamed up a theory and then went about searching for phrases that I could use to support my ideas. It is hard to imagine working that way. But on the subject of there being a code in Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, there is at least one, clearly: the Hemingway code.





 

"Well, I'm a genuine scoopologist, the name is Crow/Sitting up here, watching the show/In this one horse drive-through, forsaken, dried up piece of the world" - Marty Stuart, "The Observations of a Crow"


What struck me most about the tale of Jonah Lehrer and the fabricated Dylan quotes in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works was the cover-up story. He claimed that had done research at bobdylan.com headquarters, which doesn't exist, and that he had been given access to unreleased Bob Dylan interviews.

My writing also explores the creativity of Bob Dylan, and I have found myself in the opposite position. I've seen it suggested that I have the kind of access that Lehrer pretended to have. There's a daunting thread on the website expectingrain.com titled "The Work of Scott Warmuth on Dylan's Sources" that includes several hundred comments, including statements such as, "I've often half-wondered if he isn't somehow linked to Dylan's people, like Dylan is trying to get the word out about it himself. After having read most of Mr. Warmuth's works, I'm pretty convinced." and "...he may have access to Dylan's own notes or some other kind of documented way that shows the incorporations to be deliberate."

This week I wrote, "I am not the inside man" in an email to a writer for The New York Times who wanted to run some facts by me. His reply included, "I won't deny that it crossed my mind."

The methods of my Black Chamber do not involve access to Dylan's notes or links to Dylan's people. I'm not opposed to shenanigans - my previous post is a cipher after all - but to go down as the Charles Van Doren of Dylan studies would be lame.

I have no beef with Jonah Lehrer and schadenfreude is not my bag. I very much enjoyed his 2009 article "Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion" that ran in a puzzle-filled issue of Wired. Lehrer has an open invitation to join my Black Chamber. The only reason that I am mentioning this situation at all is that while the story broke I happened to be writing about another fake Bob Dylan quote and how it could play a role in an almost-invisible thread that runs through the creative works of Dylan, Smokey Robinson and Ben Harper.

Early in Chronicles: Volume One Dylan writes about delivering a bunch of "pure hokum" to the head of publicity at Columbia Records. When I worked in radio a constant flow of hokum-filled press releases crossed my desk. Ballyhoo is the first order of business in that racket.

Al Abrams is a master of this suspect genre. He had a plum gig as the head of PR for Motown during the company's salad days. A whopper he told about Dylan still reverberates. Abrams has told the tale a number of times, but he lays it out best in his 2011 book Hype & Soul: Behind the Scenes at Motown: "One morning I received a memo from Berry reminding me that Smokey Robinson is one of our nation's greatest songwriters and I should really do something in a hurry to promote him as such in the media because he wasn't getting all the recognition he really deserved." He continues, "I mentioned it to Al Aronowitz, a music writer who was also Dylan's biographer and very close friend. Al said that he had heard Dylan praise some of Smokey's lyrics as being poetical. I asked Al if he would let me get a quote from Dylan about Smokey. Al asked me what I had in mind and I suggested Smokey Robinson is America's Greatest Living Poet. Al thought about it for a minute and said, 'Why bother even telling Bob? That sounds just like something he'd say anyway. Go ahead and do it. If Bob sees it in print he'll think he said it. He's certainly never going to deny it.'"

Abrams confesses, "I will admit that I lived in fear every time I heard Dylan was doing a major interview and might say, 'What the fuck? I never said that.'"

That Bob Dylan called Smokey Robinson "America's greatest living poet" has been presented as fact for more than four decades. The quote turns up in quite a large pile of books, some by respected writers. Nelson George mentions it in Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound. In Fortunate Son Dave Marsh writes, "When Bob Dylan said that Robinson was America's greatest living poet, he was not talking about rhyme schemes and meter — but he knew what he was talking about." It turns out that it looks like he didn't know.

Browsing over books, do you locate anything noteworthy? At Goon Talk headquarters I have a shelf devoted to titles that I suspect that Bob Dylan has read and used material from. They are all dog-eared, marked up and full of notes. One book on that shelf includes some words from Smokey Robinson that Dylan snatched, and I wonder if that bogus quote crossed his mind when his magpie instinct struck.

I've written previously about Dylan's use of material from Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music. Dylan seems to be quite taken with Hirshey's prose, as he uses bits of it again and again and again. For example, in Chronicles: Volume One, in a paragraph about truth in songs, Dylan writes, "You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did."

In Nowhere to Run Hirshey writes this about Gertrude Sanders, a woman who worked for James Brown: "She has been wardrobe mistress since 1959, after brief gigs with the Isley Brothers, Odetta, Etta James and the Shirelles. In the beginning she stitched, pressed, packed, and drove."

In the book Hirshey interviews Smokey Robinson and he describes for her some of his experiences in the early days of the Miracles:

Ann Arbor, Flint, and Ypsilanti offered a rugged apprenticeship to a bunch of kids too young to order a beer. "We played everywhere, even the back of hay trucks, places where you had to stand on the bar and sing, in a room the size of this one. In fact, if you'll stand up, I'll show you what it was like."

He leaps from the sofa and pins me against a wall, so close I can count his eyelashes.

"See where I am? In your face, right? Can't breathe? Can't see over my shoulder? Now imagine. I'm skinny, don't weigh much more than you at that point, and everyone in the room is a head bigger. So I'm singing into some big dude's chest. And the guy behind him is screaming, 'Wait, I can't hear that little motherfucker sing his little motherfuckin' song.'"

Young America wasn't supposed to sound like that.

"Ten minutes later I'm ducking wine bottles and high-heeled shoes that could pierce your heart. Most of those gigs turned out one big riotous fight. We got out by the skin of our teeth. Money? Honey, nobody stuck around for that. Berry had this big old car and he'd have the thing started up outside the door with the windows rolled down. We'd fly in the windows, doors, any which way, and jet off."

Some of Dylan's best writing in Chronicles: Volume One involves an event that he says inspired the song "Dark Eyes" - and one of Smokey's poetic images from that interview appears in the passage. Dylan marks it with a dash:

I was staying at the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street and had come back after midnight, went through the lobby and headed upstairs. As I stepped out of the elevator, a call girl was coming towards me in the hallway—pale yellow hair wearing a fox coat—high heeled shoes that could pierce your heart. She had blue circles around her eyes, black eyeliner, dark eyes. She looked like she had been beaten up and was afraid that she'd get beat up again. In her hand, crimson purple wine in a glass. "I'm just dying for a drink," she said as she passed me in the hall. She had a beautifulness, but not for this kind of world. Poor wretch, doomed to walk this hallway for a thousand years.

Dylan also works a little bit of H.G. Wells into that paragraph, but I'll leave that for another time. It appears that Hirshey's passage about Flint was the flint that sparked Dylan's network of neurons.

Ben Harper included a song called "Why Must You Always Dress In Black" on his 2009 album White Lies For Dark Times. The third and fourth verses of the song merit inspection.

If you have to lie do it quickly and as thoroughly as you can
This morning I woke up slow, feeling like a shell of a man
"Don't blame me for us" you cried, oh, cut me some slack
And tell me why must you always dress in black

She wore high heels, the ones that could pierce your heart
Just 'cause you'll go down in history doesn't mean you're really all that smart
Like Robert E. Lee, you're at your best when under attack
Why must you always dress in black

One might try to slough off the similarities about the high heels that can pierce your heart as coincidence. It's no coincidence. Ben Harper's white lies include taking a few lines from Chronicles: Volume One and turning them into song lyrics. The line that starts Harper's third verse is the clincher. He has slightly reworked some advice that Dylan gives on page 150 of Chronicles: Volume One: ''If you have to lie, you should do it quickly and as well as you can.''

What's rich here is that Dylan snatched that bit about lying from Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Denunciation": "You have to lie very often in a war and when you have to lie you should do it quickly and as well as you can." Dylan uses more Hemingway on page 151 of Chronicles: Volume One and throughout the book.

I imagine that Ben Harper was trying to be Dylanesque through this process. That he unknowingly incorporated the words of Smokey Robinson and Ernest Hemingway into his lyrics via this method makes "Why Must You Always Dress In Black" wildly successful to my mind. Harper's mention of Robert E. Lee is the icing on the cake, considering Dylan's fascination with The Civil War. Bravo!

Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him – "Visions Of Johanna"

That they failed to mention that Dylan created an eight foot tall painting of a 1966 LIFE magazine cover with added cryptic text is a gross omission. Including a photo of that painting would have been the perfect final question mark to wrap up their overview of Dylan’s career.

Cisco brought all kinds of people together. There were union guys there—ex-union guys, labor organizers. Recently, there'd been some accounts in the national news of an AFL-CIO executive council meeting that had been held in Puerto Rico and it was pretty funny. It had been a weeklong affair, and the union bosses were photographed drinking mammoth rum drinks, visiting casinos and nightclubs—hanging around at hotel pools in flowing bathrobes, swimming the surf, wearing Hollywood-ish sunglasses—doing handstands on the diving board. It looked pretty decadent. They were supposedly there to discuss the march on Washington to dramatize the unemployment problem. Evidentially they didn't know they were being photographed.

These guys at Camilla's place weren't like that, though, they looked more like tugboat captains or baggy-pantsed outfielders or roustabouts. Mack Mackenzie had been an organizer on the Brooklyn waterfront. I met him and his wife, Eve, who was an ex-Martha Graham dancer. They lived on 28th Street. Later on, I'd be their houseguest, too ... sleep on their living room couch. Some people were there from the art world, too—people who knew and commented on what was going on in Amsterdam, Paris and Stockholm. 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. Years later Whitlaw would be arrested for breaking and entering and stealing. Her defense was that she was an artist and that the act was performance art and, incredulously, the charges against her were dropped.

The April Fool's day joke is there, you just can't see it yet. To illuminate the joke it helps to establish what comes before it. Dylan's description of the AFL-CIO meeting is built out of elements from an item titled "National Affairs: Duress in the Sun" that appeared in the March 2, 1959 issue of Time magazine. If you dig up the article you'll find "mammoth rum drinks" and "Hollywoodish sunglasses" and "handstands on the high board" and just about all the rest of it. The wonderfully odd "evidentially" does seem to be Dylan's. This is the same issue of Time with the cover story on Harry Belafonte that Dylan took the scissors and paste to when constructing his section on Belafonte in Chronicles: Volume One, as I pointed out in my post "Bob Dylan and the Matter of TIME" last year.

All the baggy-pants outfielders, doughboys in khaki, cancan girls now sedate, bathing beauties even more so, cowboys and cigar-store Indians, google-eyed Negroes, apple-cart urchins, lounge lizards and movie queens, cardsharps, clowns, crosseyed lamppost drunks, flying aces, motorboat captains, white hunters on safari and Negroid apes, fat men, chefs in chef's hats, Jewish usurers, XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comicbook cats dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars, midgets, ten-in-one freaks, railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swing bands, high society partygoers, racehorses and jockeys, toddancers, Indianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula skirts, sinewed Olympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs, all join in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pinball machines flashing on and off primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble.

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

Robyn Whitlaw and the use of the word “incredulously” are the keys here. Dylan’s odd word choice drew attention in early reviews of the book. Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "It is naive and direct; it is not cryptic and it is not smug. The flaws in the book are another guarantee of authenticity. Dylan misuses words -- 'incredulously' for 'incredibly,' for instance..." Dylan is not misusing the word – he is using it cryptically.

In 1984, against the backdrop of appropriation art's tremendous success, she was arrested for breaking and entering the house of a New York dealer who represented many of the leading appropriationists. During a pre-trial hearing Whitlaw maintained that if theft could be art - at least in the hands of appropriation artists - then her action, and those of thousands of other thieves, should likewise be judged by aesthetic, rather than penal, codes. Worried about negative publicity, the dealer dropped charges.

Rugoff claims that earlier in her career Whitlaw, "...scored a coup when one of her empty placards turned up in a 1972 Life magazine picture of an SDS rally." He mentions that Whitlaw's birthday is April 1, 1940 and points out that the only review that Whitlaw ever received in a mainstream publication was a mention in Artnews by critic Flora Gruff. Gruff gets a credit for a photo that accompanies another essay in Circus Americanus.

Robyn Whitlaw used her relative invisibility as a black woman to traverse and hide behind the noise of culture and politics through her In-Visibility Project (1973–78). During this time, Whitlaw exaggerated her own professional obscurity by sending simple invitations for a number of her own secret exhibitions after they had closed. Whereas in the 1970s many conceptual artists were using the exhibition invitation as a site for both their work and enhanced promotion, Whitlaw questioned the “publicness” of publicity and the self-aggrandizement of artists by distorting both temporality and the art establishment’s customary use of advertising procedures. A comment on the systemic neglect of non-white and women artists, Whitlaw’s project was based on her concept of the “secret artist” (an incorporation of secret agent behaviour and Watergate-era deception and secrecy). Realizing the role invisibility played in the manipulation of power, she used clandestine strategies to invade zones from which she was prohibited and revealed how such prohibitions were generated ideologically and reproduced. Using a system of authentication to certify the existence of her work and its pre-emptive dismissal, her project’s power lies in its absurdity, existing outside the market system’s logic and expectations.

This essay touches on Chronicles: Volume One and Dylan’s encounter with Whitlaw at the party, noting that, "Extracting surplus from the host and exploiting the hospitality on offer, Whitaw was at the dinner not only to procure sustenance parasitically, but also to interrupt the structure of affairs where manners govern behaviour, reversing the hierarchy of inviter/invited by making visible an unsaid and corrupt social contract." Their focus is little off; the attention on the parasitic appropriation needs to be on the fact that the big dinner that Dylan has Whitlaw eat is Hemingway's dinner.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.