Daily Ramblings:
Honest With Me ... 10/26/2004
The NY Times Sunday Book Review of Chronicles
by Tom Carson really called out to be addressed,
although Right Wing Bob has
been trying to make ends meet this week - a
persistently futile effort. The review, to put it
mildly, is snide. Of-course an early and
very positive review of Dylan's book was also in the
NY Times, by Janet Maslin. It's been endlessly
recirculated; here it is in The Arizona Republic.
Though the Sunday book review
supplement has a certain cachet that the daily paper
doesn't, it's probably safe to say that a bad review
there doesn't necessarily sink a book. Just to get
that level of attention is probably welcome to most
publishers, if not writers. And in the case of Chronicles,
it's too late to shut the stable door - it's at
number 3 on the same NY Times' bestseller list, and
has been awarded positive if not rave reviews across
the English speaking world at this point.
However, it's interesting that the
ultimate and essential hit piece on Bob's memoir
should appear in the NY Times. There's a certain
serendipity here - considering their evil hit piece
this week on President Bush - the absurd
"missing explosives in Iraq" story. A
fairly to-the-point angle on that nonsense is here. (Bush is going to win, but big,
sez Right Wing Bob.)
So, as for Tom Carson and Chronicles:
it does not bode well for a serious book review in a
serious publication when it begins by saying that
Dylan's memoir fails to answer the question "So
what was up with the mustache, dude?" He expends
an entire paragraph on that unfunny inanity. From
there he goes on to state that he had not "given
a flying Wallenda about Dylan in years." In the
rest of the review, it must be noted, he then
presents himself as somehow deeply knowledgeable
about the essential facts of Dylan's make-up. The
essential fact - in fact - is that Bob is consumed
with "image tending." And he posits that
"constructing a notional, elusive but
compelling identity to suit the project at hand"
is central to Dylan's work and that this book is just
one more such identity. Here lies the fundamental
flaw in his review (other than his sheer laziness and
ignorance): he fails to see that there is a
consistent identity in the writer and performer we
know as Bob Dylan, and that many listeners can easily
follow the thread from his first recording to his most recent, and find no unresolvable
clashes or contradictions. Changes in musical,
lyrical or singing style do not amount to a disposal
and reinvention of the central actor - i.e. the
creator of the work. And for many of those self-same
listeners, Chronicles represents nothing
more than a straightforward (if also revelatory and
rambunctious) account of the various times and
experiences Dylan has chosen to write about. It isn't
some brand new Bob Dylan, refitted for 2004 - it's
the same Dylan we already knew through his music and
interviews. Those of us who were paying attention, at
least. He's just telling us stories we hadn't yet
heard.
From there onwards, it's really just a matter of
watching exactly how snide and low-to-the-ground
Carson can get. He presumes to tell us that "in
a provincial Middle American town like Eisenhower-era
Hibbing, Minn" (that is so NY Times), Dylan's
Jewishness must have made him a "square
peg," and in not regaling us with stories about
(I guess) alienation and anti-semitic attacks, Dylan
is selectively omitting crucial information. Well -
first of all - Dylan is not feigning to give us a
detailed account of everything he has experienced in
his life. It's 293 pages of fairly large type, after
all. Secondly, how does Carson know what was most
formative in Dylan's life in Hibbing? Why should we
believe that Tom Carson knows better about what is
was like to be a Zimmerman in Hibbing during that
time, and that Dylan is trying to pull the wool over
our eyes and leave out pivotal facts, in the name of
some kind of "image tending?"
Why indeed?
There are many things that Carson presumes to tell
us that he knows better than the writer of the book.
He sneers at the very idea that the 20 year old Bob
Dylan would have any affection for and real knowledge
of American history. How could Bob even dream of
seeing, as he writes in Chronicles, the
ghost of John Wilkes Booth in a Greenwich Village
tavern, fresh as he was from "Hibbing's superb
public schools?" The reference is sarcastic -
Tom Carson presumes to know that the young Robert
Zimmerman had no good history teachers - and that he
never saw an image of John Wilkes Booth in a textbook
- or that if he did it cannot have made any
impression on him. That's a helluva lot of presuming,
unless Tom Carson actually attended school with the
young Robert Zimmerman and his classmates in Hibbing,
Minnesota (in which case I apologize). Even then, he
has chosen to reject the idea that Bob may have had a
particular interest in these matters, and may even
have gathered his knowledge from other sources.
The theme, you see, is that Bob Dylan is lying.
And on and on. He glibly labels the U.S. Civil War
(which Dylan meditates on at some length in Chronicles),
as "the 19th century's ultimate Good/Bad
war," claiming that Dylan's intention is that we
are meant to recall "his own time's coming
storms." There is no such implication in the
book - Carson indeed provides no evidence of one. And
Carson's characterization of the Civil War in that
manner is nothing short of juvenile, tasteless and
ignorant. "The 19th century's ultimate Good/Bad
war." Just a bunch of cocksure ironic bullshit.
And that's just about what the entire review is.
The most sneakily insidious aspect of the whole thing
is that he pretends to actually be praising the book.
Dylan is lying, but doing it in such an entertaining
fashion that we can forgive him. It doesn't matter
whether we're reading truth or lies - nothing matters
except whether the reviewer believes that it meets a
certain standard of hipness or smartness or
timeliness. As he says, "conditional genius is
how pop culture works."
Well, Mr. Carson, you can hang your hat there if
you wish. It doesn't really do it for me. I don't
spend my short and precious time on this earth
deliberately listening to "conditional"
music, or reading "conditional" books and
marvelling at how appropriate to their moment they
are and how short their shelf-life will be, and
laughing off how dishonest they are. If that's how
you choose to approach the work of Bob Dylan,
including this book, then you're just focusing on the
breeze while the train is passing you by. And that's
a real doggone shame.
Writers And Critics ...11/21/2004 08:32:07
pm
Back to Bob for a minute. In the NY
Times last Sunday, the following letter to the editor
was published, in reaction to Tom Carson's review in
the Times of Dylan's Chronicles. I already
critiqued his review here for being the snide piece
of irony-worshipping garbage that I believe it to be,
and this letter to the editor from someone with
special knowledge just underlines the fact that
Carson's studied and insistent skepticism with regard
to Dylan's reminiscences is utterly misplaced.
Tom Carson's review of Bob
Dylan's ''Chronicles'' (Oct. 24) punctures a lot
of the mystique, but also reveals some basic
ignorance of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Having
spent the last two years editing the memoir of
Dylan's mentor Dave Van Ronk, I can assure Carson
that both Dylan's romantic primitivism and his
fascination with history were the common coin of
that scene. Dylan certainly would have known at
20 that the Café Bizarre ''used to be Aaron
Burr's livery stable'' -- that is the first thing
anyone who played the club remembers about it. Before
Dylan transformed the folk world into a mass of
self-involved singer-songwriters, it was
populated by amateur historians posing as what
Van Ronk liked to call ''neo-ethnics,'' and they
all treasured both their carefully honed hayseed
accents and their links to previous
self-mythologizers like Walt Whitman. Dylan's
memoir, quirky as it may be, gives a
straightforward sense of that time and place.
Elijah Wald
Cambridge, Mass.
Published: 11 - 14 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final
, Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 4
Thank you, Mr. Wald. And since the
book has now been out about 6 weeks, it's worth
pointing out that for anyone who believes it to be
purposely deceitful, they have a little problem with
a dog that doesn't bark. That is, there has been no
rush of contemporaneous figures - and people Dylan
mentions in his book - coming out and saying,
"Hey, that's not how it happened. I was there, I
know." Though it's likely that a few people are
miffed at their portrayal, or lack of one (Robbie
Robertson only gets mentioned for that dumb question
he asks on the car ride), no one seems to be
seriously questioning Dylan's veracity. Aside from
reviewers like Carson, that is - of which there have
been blessedly few ...
You are viewing an individual
item from RightWingBob.com - click here to view the
main page.