Daily Ramblings:
Round 2 ... 10/08/2004
All I have to say is that the abortion question at the end utterly summed up and framed the difference between these candidates. Dubya answered and you know exactly where he stands ... and the fact is that most ordinary Americans stand in that same place. Kerry waffled and blathered, "I respect where you're coming from," and between the lines said "I spit on where you're coming from," with his equivocating nonsense which ended up telling us not only will I use taxpayer money to fund abortions in America, but I will use it to fund abortions far and wide in the world. Oh, and by the way, I don't personally believe in it. Remember, I respect where you're coming from.
At this point, America, make your choice. Anyone who says that they are undecided - I'm sick of it. It's been laid out. The same differences in clarity, belief, and honesty that the answers to this question demonstrate exist on the other issues, in particular our war against the Islamofascists. You want to win, or you want to surrender by degrees? It's A or B.
So goes my 2 lousy cents.
...10/07/2004b
An especially fine piece on Chronicles I just read in the U.K. Telegraph (may require free registration). Weirdly, I can't find the reviewer's name. (Addendum: It's Neil McCormick - thanks to Nigel for that info)
The language is pure Dylan, encompassing the old-world formality of his early songs (apparently gleaned, in part, from spending time in the New York Public Library scanning microfilm of 19th-century newspapers); the dark, mystical undercurrents of the folk world from which his music sprang; the biblical flashes of fire and brimstone rhetoric all held together by the deadpan humour of hardboiled America, as if one of Raymond Chandler's private eyes were re-interpreting the Old Testament.
That's a great line. It closes:
In rock and roll terms, this book is like discovering the lost diaries of Shakespeare. It may be the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a 20th-century legend ever written.
No argument here.
--------------------------------------------------------
Someone call Pulitzer ... 10/07/2004
The reviews from the non-Dylan-obsessed critics are multiplying, and they are certainly skewing heavily positive, and with good reason. This book is so much more than yours truly expected. It works on levels that I didn't remotely anticipate. It's taking time to settle into me. Someone with as much Dylan-related baggage as I have is probably least qualified to provide any snap appreciation of this book. I'm beginning to realize that Dylan has created something here that stands aside from his own musical output. I don't have time to get to grips with it in my own words in anything other than a glib fashion right now, so I'll stop right there. Comments from anyone else who's read it are very welcome. My contacts deep within the book selling industry also indicate that it's selling at a feverish clip. So better not delay - if you don't have it, go out and get it now ...
...10/05/2004b
"My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater"
Bob Dylan, Chronicles, page 283
"There was no point arguing with Dave (Van Ronk), not intellectually anyway. I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble." (Tom Mix was a star of silent westerns. Barry Goldwater was of-course the iconic Republican who wrote "The Conscience Of A Conservative" and was a formative influence on Ronald Reagan.)
I wasn't going to grab little things out of the book and trumpet them mindlessly, but this one is just too much fun.
I'm bouncing between baseball and the VP debate tonight, so I have no coherent insight, though from what I've seen, Cheney is failing to be aggressive and expansive enough, but Edwards is coming across as shrill and unconvincing. Maybe it's best if the rest of America is sticking with baseball.
-------------------------
Shhhh!... 10/05/2004
I'm going to be reading in any of my spare time today, rather than posting. There's lots of stories in the press to accompany the release of Chronicles - and many of them are obviously going to include spoilers, so I've often been glancing at them and clicking away as fast as I can. However, for a story that includes a fresh telephone interview with Dylan, check out Edna Gundersen in USA Today. Not too much in the way of unheard tidbits from the book, which is a good thing for those who want to enjoy it first hand for themselves. (And there is a lot to enjoy, let me tell ya. It's a total blast ...)
Got it ... 10/04/2004d
I'm on page 55, and I'm taking it slow, and it is a pure and utter delight, and it's one more thing: a treasure. After Dylan's 40 year career of song, no one would have had any right to expect this of him. Imagine if there were a book like this by Stephen Foster, or Lorenz Hart? Or Jimmie Rodgers? Describing their inspirations, their lives, and the times that carried them? All three of those songwriters and American originals, now that I think of it, died in sad circumstances. Dylan has been given the gift of a kinder fate, it seems. And this book is a kind and unexpected gift, from him, to posterity.
-------------------------------------
Not Billy ... 10/04/2004c
A visitor to this site who has a more easy familiarity with the Bible than Right Wing Bob, has pointed out this fascinating passage in the interview with Newsweek. Dylan is talking to the reporter about growing up in northern Minnesota, and also about the differences between him as a young writer and him now. At one point he says:
"The difference between me now and then is that back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams."
Now open up the Book Of Joel, Chapter 2, verse 28:
"It shall come to pass afterward,
That I will pour my spirit upon all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy;
Your old men shall dream dreams,
And your young men shall see visions."I wonder, does Bob know when he does something like this? Is he deliberately referring to Scripture or does it just come out unbidden? In either case, pretty interesting ...
--------------------------
Et tu, ISIS ... 10/04/2004b
No official review of Chronicles, that I know of, has yet been published. No one who has read the entire book has as yet come out with any detailed description of it. However, the pre-publication spin continues. The theme - in case you haven't gathered it yet - is that nothing that Dylan says in it is going to be reliable. He has his own mysterious ulterior motives, and besides, he's such an incorrigible chameleon (nice parodox there) that whatever picture he presents will be just one more illusion. So, his own express statement that, "When you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted," is simply being shrugged off - even and especially by those who consider themselves great admirers of the man and his music.
Take this from the BBC today. The writer of the piece says, "So-called Dylanologists remain skeptical about whether the complete truth will finally emerge ... ." Well, complete truth, if you ask me, is setting the bar a little high, for anyone lacking in that handy attribute of omnipotence. But what about just allowing that Dylan's intention appears to be to tell the plain truth about particular events as he remembers them? The BBC talks to the editor of the Dylan fan magazine ISIS, and hears the following:
I think he's doing it for his own benefit ... Those who know Bob Dylan will be a little bit suspicious. I don't think it's going to be a completely heartfelt "tell-all" autobiography ... He has bent the truth right from the beginning , and what is truth and what is myth has been blurred - even in his own mind - with the passing of time.
Now I know that ISIS has been around a long time and has done a lot of great work, but what's the idea of characterizing an unread book in advance in this way, when everyone is either days or hours away from being able to actually read it? And isn't stating that Dylan himself has blurred truth and myth "in his own mind" going a bit far for someone who is neither Dylan's intimate friend nor his psychiatrist?
In fairness to the ISIS editor, I'm sure that the BBC reporter talked to him for some time and then used a few selected quotes. The agenda may be more the BBC's - I don't know.
However, I do know that all of this aspersion-casting on Dylan's intent smells to me like that political concept of "innoculation." By saying before the book comes out that you believe the writer is incapable of reliably telling the truth, you give yourself a way of later dismissing anything in the book that you find unpalatable. "Well, I never thought it was going to be the truth, you know."
Since the only thing that everyone has seen at this point is the Newsweek excerpt, I'd really like to know what part of that strikes anyone knowledgeable as being untrue? Isn't it just a more intimate angle on events that everyone knows happened? Isn't that what anyone would expect of a straightforward memoir?
Within hours, the book is going to be in this reader's hands, and many others, and all of this advance spin will be in the past. Still, it's sure been interesting to Right Wing Bob.
---------------------
... 10/04/2004
I've decided to collect posts relating to Dylan's new book here, at Chronicling Chronicles. However, any new posts will still appear on this page first.
"His version" of his life ... 10/03/2004
As if to underline what Right Wing Bob wrote yesterday, here's an example from the British Sunday Times of someone trying to delegitimize Dylan's memoirs before they've even been read. After summarizing some of the information that was published in the Newsweek excerpt (that Bob never wanted to be the voice of a generation, felt hunted by obsessive followers etc), the writer expresses his shock:
Holy cow. What will the 63-year-old prince of folk, whose anthems were adopted by the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, tell us next?
So, the writer ignores the fact that what Dylan says in the excerpt is perfectly consistent with his remarks in interviews for the better part of four decades, and instead wants us to believe that because particular groups "adopted" his "anthems," that this tells us some more accurate truth about Dylan - as if you draw your conclusions about a songwriter based on the character of the people who might choose to sing the songs. It's kind of like saying that Cole Porter must have been a big lover of spaghetti, meatballs, Jack Daniels and Ava Gardner, since his greatest interpreter, Sinatra, enjoyed all of those things. (Of-course Bob was demonstrably sympathetic to the civil rights movement, but the writer here is clearly using that example as a broad brush to try to say that Dylan enjoyed political activism generally, and saw himself as writing theme songs for varied causes.)
So the writer thinks that the question of the moment is: "... how much further Dylan is prepared to go in deconstructing himself." Note, not deconstructing his myth, which presumably would be the correct result of telling the straightforward truth, but deconstructing himself, ending up presumably with something other than the truth about himself (which this writer obviously has a better eye for).
He ends his piece with this lovely expression of dubiousness:
He has promised to set the record straight in a way that “no one could misinterpret”. But who has written the book — Bob Dylan or Robert Zimmerman?
He's almost perfectly echoing the idiot I quoted yesterday from Daily Kos, in enunciating both Bob's birth and legal names, as if this makes some point or other. Whatever that point may be sure escapes yours truly.
Aside from the parts I've quoted, this article is not particularly mean or stuffed with lies and distortions. However, the quoted parts basically bookend the piece and I believe are intended to leave the reader thinking that Dylan's forthcoming memoir is likely to be just one more "reinvention" in a long line of self-created myths and images. So, it is a pre-emptive attack on an unread book that the author (Dylan) has stated is just his attempt to tell the truth as he remembers it.
It's also more evidence that there is great nervousness out there in left-wing-Bob-Dylan-fan-world in advance of the publication of this book. While here at RightWingBob.com, we simply wait with eager and open minds for the gift that Dylan is providing for us - his fans - and for history.
"Bob Dylan Is The Nowhere Man" ... 10/02/2004
I expect there to be more of this - a lot more. In the popular left wing blog, Daily Kos, there is this posting, where it is stated that "Bob Dylan is a total fraud." In what is basically a reaction to the published excerpt from Chronicles and accompanying interview in Newsweek, the writer slams Dylan as "a maladjusted man," "acid fried dope freak," and further says "Bob Dylan is not Bob Dylan. He is not even Robert Zimmerman anymore."
Even the Newsweek reporter is consigned to hell, for not coming up with the appropriate questions to ask of a 63 year old giant of American song, namely, about "politics, 9/11, religion," and "Bush or Kerry or today's world of terror politics."
There are a couple of premises underlying this rant. One, that the writer is someone who has been deeply impressed by Dylan's songs in the past (or else why would he care a jot about the subject?), and two, that the writer has gotten the distinct feeling that his heretofore idol is not supplying the answers that he wants to hear - and that even if the Newsweek reporter had asked all of these specific political questions, this "fraud" Dylan would not have said the right thing - i.e. would not have condemned Bush and preached against the war we are currently fighting. I guess it comforts the ranter to dismiss him as some kind of burnt out shell of the real Bob Dylan - whoever that may be.
Whether the backlash to Dylan's straightforward self-expression in Chronicles (which this writer has still not obtained and read) will reach the level of the backlash against his open Christianity back in '79 and the early '80s, and whether it will have tangible effects (like a drop-off in concert attendance) is an open question at this point. I tend to think not - I think that Dylan is right in thinking that he has largely escaped the burden of his myth and people's expectations, and that his audience these days is a lot closer to accepting him for what he is, and is happy to hear whatever it is he brings to the stage each night. At least that's what I hope. But in spots like Daily Kos and elsewhere, I'm sure there will be a lot more ranting before it's all through.
... 10/01/2004b
Forget the debate post-mortems. Do yourself a favor and don't miss this (via Allah): The Human Shield Diaries
------------------------------
TV Talkin' ...10/01/2004
The keyword popping up this morning from the Kerry spinners and queued up C-Span callers is "nervous," as in "George Bush looked so nervous, it's kind of scary to think of him with his finger on the button." Do they really think that's going to fly? Bush's expression when Kerry was talking was peeved. This may not have been the wisest image to project from the focus group point-of-view - but it was just how he felt and he showed it. That, in the end, communicated honesty to the average voter.
Compare it with Al Gore's sighs during the first debate in 2000 - what bothered people was not merely that he was displaying displeasure, but rather that it was stagey, fey and exaggerated.
Bush's peev-ed-ness was more likely to make voters question what he was peeved about, and listen to his response to find out.
Again, regardless of what people are talking about in terms of "points," I'm certain that Bush made the more positive lasting impression in all this. Many of his supporters are being critical of him because they so want him to succeed and wish he'd said this or that - made one or other devastating point that they were waiting to hear. But these people are all voting for him anyway. Kerry needed to effect an earthquake in this debate, but instead was just reasonably successful in convincing people that he really is a committed globalist who will kow-tow to foreign governments, and that he will half-heartedly try to "succeed" with a "mistake" in Iraq.
What the hell does that amount to, exactly? I'd say a ceiling of about 220 Electoral College votes.
Original text copyright © 2004 by RightWingBob.com
Quotes from the works of others are linked to their source or are as otherwise attributed, and are used in accordance with Fair Use guidelines. Contact: rightwingbob(at)gmail.com
Serious Dylan Related Things:
Right Wing Bob On:
Who Am I And What Is This Site About?
More to come ...
Email: RightWingBob@)gmail.com
Powered by Bushmills