Volume II, 04 August 2010 “You’ve been with thethe professorsprofessors AndAnd they’vethey’ve allall likedliked youryour looks”looks” so many people to thank. In this golden age when American popular culture is a worldwide culture, Bob Dylan is in many ways its fons et origo From Osaka, Japan to Oslo, Norway, from Rio de Janeiro to (its spring and source). “It’s an immense privilege to live at the the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio, from Istanbul to the Isle of same time as this genius,” states British literary critic and former Wight, Dylan has performed his unique distillation of American Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks. musical traditions. His music transcends time and place and On the eve of his August 16th concert date in Austin-a crosses cultural boundaries. Around the world and up and community which has adopted Dylan as one of its own-TODO down Highway 35, Dylan remains the most important artist Austin has invited three American scholars to reflect on Dylan’s alive today, “anywhere and in any field,” to quote England’s wide cultural impact. Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. One sure sign of Dylan’s influence is that all three scholars, a I had the honor of presenting the key to the City of Austin to noted University of Texas at Austin English professor and poet, Dylan on February 24, 2002, Bob Dylan Day. In our short visit, a UT MacArthur fellow who studies ancient Greek culture and Dylan expressed then to the mayor pro-tem and me how the human response, including song, to war and violence, and a Harvard professor who is the world’s foremost authority happy he was to have been made an honorary Texan by the on the Roman poet Virgil and the later influence of classical previous Governor. literature and culture, include Dylanology among their prime areas of interest. Welcome, home, Bob. David Gahr SONY/BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT Back on December 5, 2004, “60 Minutes’” Ed Bradley asked Bob And so it emerged that one of the other things Dylan can do, That of course is also Dylan in the final line of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the Dylan where a song like the 1965 masterpiece “It’s Alright, Ma good Jack of Hearts that he is, is steal. “Immature poets imitate,” final song of “Modern (get it?) Times,” what sounded at the time (I’m Only Bleeding)” came from. Dylan came across as genuinely wrote T. S. Eliot in 1920, thinking mostly of himself; “mature poets like a final album. This turns out to be one of more than 20 of puzzled as the rest of us. “I don’t know how I got to write those steal . The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling the Roman poet’s lines, spread across “Spirit On The Water,” songs,” he replied, seemingly at peace with the mystery of it all. “I which is unique, utterly different from that from which it is torn . “‘Workingman’s Blues #2,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break” and “Ain’t did it once,” he added, “and I can do other things now. But, I can’t . A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or Talkin’” (see http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/22i/ do that.” alien in language, or diverse in interest.” Thomas.pdf). There are none on “Thunder On The Mountain,” though there Dylan does give us a tell-tale sign: “I’ve been sittin’ “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde The sort of theft on “Lonesome Day Blues” makes the song down studyin’ the art of love” (Ovid also wrote the Ars Amatoria On Blonde” came out in the fourteen electrically charged, “thin timeless, universal, and literary, though Dylan’s cowboy band “Art of Love”). If Dylan can visit the childhood home of Neil wild mercury” musical months right before Dylan’s 25th birthday, and his menacing “I’m gonna tame the proud” keep it out of Young, why not a statue in Ovid’s place of exile? between March 1965 and May 1966. Once we heard them, the library stacks and on the streets. What might have seemed nothing was the same; everything else retreated to the shadows. a Vietnam era song — “My brother got killed in the war” — With Ovid, Dylan steals successfully, his settings much changed Dylan changed too, but as he said, he went on to do “other becomes through its intertexts a song for all time and for all wars: as Eliot wanted. Ovid is talking to the emperor: “My cause things.” is better: no-one can claim that I ever took up arms against Virgil’s and Twain’s civil wars, and the Chinese-Japanese War of you”; the singer of Workingman’s Blues #2’ is talking to a lover, Flashing forward past many of those things to three days before “Confessions” — not unlike how the absence of time and place mysterious and vague though she be: “No-one can ever claim the September 11, 2001 release of “Love and Theft,” we find helps make “Masters Of War” the greatest and most undying of all / That I took up arms against you.” Ovid also addressed his wife, Dylan talking to the Italian paper La Repubblica in Rome—the anti-war songs. back in Rome: “May the gods grant … / that I’m wrong in thinking place matters. “My songs are all singable,” he says at one point. This creative and allusive writing is not really new. One of Dylan’s you’ve forgotten me!” Dylan’s lover is back in time: “Tell me now, “They’re current. Something doesn’t have to just drop out of the am I wrong in thinking / That you have forgotten me?” air yesterday to be current.” How further back than yesterday very first original songs, “Bob Dylan’s Dream” did the same with becomes clear in another part of the exchange: “You’ve got the “Lord Franklin” (aka “Lady Franklin’s Lament”) mixing in other And hanging over it all is Ovid in exile, a backdrop that works for Golden Age, which I guess would be the Age of Homer.” He then traditional songs, maybe picked up at Izzy Young’s Folklore Dylan, off into northern exile himself in “Highlands” and “Thunder runs through the Silver, Bronze and present Iron Age, the Greco- Center soon after Dylan arrived in the Village. But “Love and On The Mountain,” and in inner exile from the very beginning Roman equivalents of Eden and the Fall, found in the Greek poet Theft” is different; it looks outside its own genre, to “authors of it all. He has shared that inner exile with those who have Hesiod, and in the Roman poet Virgil. The interviewer gets none remote in time, or alien in language.” sailed into it with him over the years, giving us words and songs of what is going on. Where was Dylan on June 1 of this year? Maybe between that matter across space and time, that remain “current.” In the famous December 3, 1965 San Francisco press conference the “Lonesome Day Blues” turned out to have a few lines from Virgil’s Istanbul (5/31) and Bucharest (6/2) he went to Constanta, poet is asked about his role. The response, “my role is to stay epic on empire, the “Aeneid,” the singer, like Aeneas, sparing Romania, to see a statue of the Roman poet Ovid, exiled there here as long as I can,” is deadly serious. That he has done that the defeated, teaching peace to the people, taming the proud. by the emperor Augustus in 8 CE, perhaps for seeing or hearing now for half a century has been a gift beyond belief. I wish I was Huck Finn is also there, along with the Japanese gangster novel, something he shouldn’t have. Here Ovid spent the rest of his in Dixie, in The Backyard, come August 4! “Confessions of a Yakuza.” The whole album, its very title stolen, days, “in the last outback, at the world’s end,” as he put it in Peter is now seen to be full of literary allusions and intertexts. Green’s translation of “Black Sea Letters.” 08 TODO Austin // Aug 2010 // TODOaustinonline.com A Classical Bard Brings It All Back Home By Tom Palaima “Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there / Everybody got (1986) composed ca. 1935 Aunt Molly Jackson need to be. Our American heroes, old and new, have to move, to move somewhere” -Bob Dylan, “Mississippi,” Love and Theft have to go, have to explore the unknown, face new realities, (2001) © 1997 by Special Rider Music “But me, I’m still on the road / Headin’ for another joint” dream new dreams, confront new and old problems, meet -Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue,” Blood on the Tracks (1975) strange faces, try to discover who and what and why they, and “I was young when I left home / But I been out a-ramblin’ ‘round © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn we, are. They are loners, by choice or by necessity, and they And I never wrote a letter to my home” -Bob Dylan, “I Was Young Music come to terms with their aloneness each and every day. Just When I Left Home,” performed in Bonnie Beecher’s Minneapolis close your eyes and listen in your mind to Dylan’s early hero apartment (December 1961) © 2005 by Special Rider Music “I wouldn’t change it, even if I could / You know what they say Hank Williams sing of the lonesome whippoorwill, time crawling man, it’s all good” -Bob Dylan, “It’s All Good,” Together Through by through too long a night, a tearfully disconsolate moon, a “I pity the poor immigrant / Who wishes he would’ve stayed Life (2009) weeping robin, and a lone falling star in a purple sky.