Love

Love is one of our most compelling subjects because it seems to be a form of insanity--a state having everything with attraction and resulting behaviors that contradict any claims of human beings being rational creatures at all times. It goes against the Libertarian ideal that our minds are knowable and that self-interests , our gut-instinct for survival and sustaining our emotional/economic/spiritual niche. Love , whether one takes a biochemical approach or gives credence to providential intervention, quite handily makes most of us act like crazy people.

It's a beautiful thing, of course and indeed, and spreading the love is a hippie and Christian delight, but one cannot spread a feeling of well-being at will. Love , like accidents, like disease, like natural disaster, merely happens. It is not something that can be predicted, calibrated, inventoried on a spread sheet. And when it does happen, when someone becomes so afflicted--yes, afflicted-- the energy isn't likely to lend itself to something that will be the stuff of friendly contagion.

What's wrong with being crazy in love, to love with crazy abandon? Nothing, so long as no one gets hurt, no one dies, everyone lives happily ever after. The fact of the matter, though, is that too many black eyes, broken ribs, shattered arms and fatal knife and gunshot wounds are the result of people who were crazy in love to the point of permanently off-the-hook obsession. The downside of love is that in its most intense form it is the escalation of self-centeredness, the belief that one's gratification excludes the needs or desires of all others, even the rights of the object of one's affection--and too often the things that threaten an afflicted individual's cherished relationship is met with violence. Not a good thing.Love hurts, love kills, love nurtures, love sustains. As with anything that can inspire or make you deranged, one will often wonder after the fire and intensity have gone, after one surveys the consequences of their mad pursuit, whether such an ordeal was worth it. But self-knowledge often avails us not at all; we would all do it again, in a heart beat, in a heart beat/

Looking for a Useful Past

Guys like Pynchon and Barthelme are analogous to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones; we owe them a debt, but their art is no longer a relevant response to what is actually happening now.
--from a discussion at Salon,com's Table Talk forum

Some one you owe a stylistic debt to be always relevant to your current situation; how you respond to the precise writing problem you’re facing demands that you conjure up inspiration to solve the cul-de-sac you’ve written your way into, but that inspiration rarely happens in a vacuum.You rummage through those you’ve read, writers who’ve given you an idea or two about composing together that can get across the subtlety your thinking (the evidence of which might be, damn it all, that you haven’t the light touch after all), and forge something useful from the parts. You can also decide to forgo the effort to learn a lesson from your mentors and strike out with a new take, braving the unknown where none of your influences apply, but there we are again, in the area Harold Bloom mapped out in The Anxiety of Influence; even the most strikingly original art one can create is original precisely because younger artists is determined not to write, sculpt, paint in anyway resembling the work of the greats who’ve come before them. The irony is that is one refers to the past for inspiration even if rejection is the result. The shadow of the past and the power it contains still commands and commends us to try harder to emerge into one’s own light. This is the reason that we acknowledge what we owe.

Pynchon is certainly relevant to the current situation, and we should consider his novel Mason & Dixon: an original take on the historical novel that skews the moldy texts of mythology and history in a fresh, "made new" manner. Pynchon, along with DeLillo with his tour-de -force Underworld, are both at the center of American writing, ironic, one supposes, since we are in a time when the current fashion is to insists on the resolute lack of center, or a knowable, defining presence under the surface of things, under the disguises of material.
Pynchon and DeLillo are relevant to a that search for coherence, the unifying set of references, that might connect the world that's been made with the universe it's been constructed in. Both authors are relevant because, truthfully, the honor the notion of the Search, the Quest for defining, that is literature at it's most compelling, the books that bring generations back to the shelves looking for the titles.

The late work has only gotten stronger, broader, and more concise with the kind of rigor, style and humor; ultimately, it takes to write a literature that brings a digitized culture into the next hundred years. The things of the world we grow up quickly vanish; the language we learned to express the needs of the self in relation to another is supplanted by another species of cant, unrecognizable as to what psychic wire it's supposed to resonate with. Both writers are intrigued with systems, hierarchies of meanings, colliding matrixes of name-giving authority that makes the explicated terrain, the perfect sphere of a democratic society, a tag-team wrestling match.
Underworld is a novel of about the search by different characters for what's keen about the past, what rituals or artifacts were displaced in the rush of technology and capital flow that de-centered the world, the neighborhoods the characters grew up in. Thus, the metaphor: obsessions with throwing the used up away with the waste disposal company, the search for the symbolically Idyllic in the quest for the allegedly important baseball (along with the person-to-person myth making that accompanies it), the nun in the South Bronx searching for the intrinsic worth of the small child she sees amid the bombed out tenements she toils in, and the artist Klara in the desert trying to redefine the past by converting abandoned bombers into art objects precisely in an area when only a few are able to appreciate the redefinition.

Mao ll is DeLillo at the height of his powers, and is his best effort that confronts the fact that media saturation becomes a simulacrum of an actual environment that changes the way history is not only recorded, but simultaneously made. Potent writing, one of whose characters is a reclusive Pynchon (or DeLillo) stand in whose absence of new work or public appearance has created a presence larger than literary reputation alone could manage: if we talk about the speed at which disparate events suddenly seem to converge and become linked through the slimmest of resemblances, this is the novel to start with. Its themes and its power are echoed largely in Wallace's work. Libra, about Lee Harvey Oswald, is splendid as well, but the real masterpiece is Underworld, a complex work, a sprawl, if you must, but one with command of the extended metaphor. I think, anyway.

In all instances of this novel, there is one ultimate failure of quest after another as the characters strive to engage the recent past in someway that gives the passage some inferred meaning, a hint of sense that reduces the perceptible anxiety that the characters are all aware that they are yet another day nearer death, and finally alone in the dark, a cipher with no God to go home to. Underworld is less about what is found on the search than the reasons for the search itself: the comedy and the tragedy comes with the realization that the characters never understand that the process is what gives them definition, not the goal they seek.

Both authors wonder what went wrong, and seek the language, the metaphors, that can describe the loss, and perhaps give us pause to make sense again of the eviscerated cosmology. That both writers have stressed a quest, of sorts, at the heart of their post modern fictions nails their relevance in place. The search ultimately collapses, as it usually does in credible fictional stretches, but the relevance is that the language of the writers, of their characters in situ gives us ways to think about ourselves: it furnishes us with an imaginative vocabulary that is revitalized beyond the easy-street defeatism that lurks behind the present vogue for unearned irony

notes on postmodernism and Fiction

Post modern fiction at best is by writers who have a faith beyond their own understanding that the novel will work to their creative convictions--DeLillo, Gaddis, Pynchon, Erikson, Vollmann, Didion and many, many others who've tweaked and commented upon the form their using in the execution of their work, have books that are red hot because they work as novels, first and foremost. The experiments end up in areas that are outside the middle class expectations of its audiences, the prose demonstrates a mastery of language that creates room for human response even as the writer--dead or alive--tries to imagine it's inability to step outside itself, out of it's prison house.

The term is central to many liberal arts and humanities programs, but its propagation results in bad criticism, the sort of pseudo-science that makes equivocation seem respectable. As theory, post modern thought is unsatisfying because it finally reveals cowardice in trying to uncover meaning in experience, or to try to enter into a debate what it is that makes the human experience worth thinking about.

It is this absenteeism on the political front that has enabled the Right to gain a high road in the area of values: our Republican opposition insist on talking about how we ought to live, while the Left, such as it is in the University departments, snort and insist that it's a more subtle, pervasive, insidious set of conditions that effect that The World. The Big Picture , Lyotard's "grand narrative", has a virtue as argument only if it has imagination to burn its concerns into the consciousness of the Culture it’s trying to enlighten. The blindered relativism and rudderless , entropy-grasping adherents of post-modern theory are producing an unreadable nonsense that no one who's worried about their schools, or their sewer systems , can respond to.

But post modernism, as style expressed in books, films, and theatre, will have a lasting mark on the landscape. If nothing else, the novels of Don DeLillo and Pynchon will stand for decades to come--their greatness is Faulknerian, Proustian-- as masterpieces of their time, as will others, no doubt. The judgment of History will separate out who will ultimately be with us, in some form, at the end of this century. Fred Jamieson has maintained that pomo is actually an extension of modernism's style: Eliot's style and concern with how cadences go together are hardly less radical than what the Beats, or the Language Poets have devised under their separate extreme energies, and Gertrude Stein, the mistress of Modernism if their was one, wrote in ways that are post-modern by the current lexicon.

But it has less to do with precursors foreshadowing a creative habit that would become coherent much later in the century: rather, it has more to do with a kind of continuity that postmodernists are loathe to admit, that the efforts of recent and younger artists are extensions of ideas that have found full expression in an earlier, perhaps more exiting time.

Much of post moderns' flashiest writers seem as they are trying to berserk themselves into genius: Harold Bloom is on point with his idea of the anxiety of influence.

Much of the sex and sizzle of recent work seems willfully, unnaturally expanded and encyclopedic: there's a worrisome dread under DF Wallace's work that refuses to stop trying top it's last page, an awareness that every sentence he writes is in competition with the history of Literature, in total. This insistence on being brilliance makes the work impossible to relish, savor. It bores with its marching bands and fireworks.

In his book City of Words, the late critic Tony Tanner maintained that reality in the 20th century had simply become too fantastic for fiction to simply be a slightly "exaggerated" replication of it: that realist project was indeed used up. Rather, the current novelist should cease trying to render a facsimile of actual experience, coded, as such, with a convenient moral and metaphysical argument behind it, and simply become more fantastic, fabulist, genre-leaping.

It was his notion that the novel, to really be anything at all, need to become 'word' structures, the titled city of words, and re introduce some things such as wonder and paradox, simply fantastic things, and to skillfully play with the archive of literary conventions to infuse their fantastic tales with a verve that he saw as lacking in the then current state of the novel. An interesting, ground breaking book on the rise of what's become known as the post-modern novel, and a succinct argument for the need.


One of the long standing praises sung in behalf of The Modern Age was the speed with which the affairs of the world were suddenly conducted, with the advent of air travel, the telegraph, radio, and eventually television. It was believed, as McLuhan did in his Musings in Understanding Media and, inevitably, The Medium is the Message, that this acceleration of real time and the shrinking of the world would produced comprehension and clarity of a reality that formerly with held it's secrets.

That is finally a large hope for what's considered to be one of Modernism's great aims--to produce art, literature, and technologies that transforms the way the world is experienced. Your experience with this obscure composer fulfils that promise, somewhat: you, and the thousands you speak of, shared the experience, did their research with the technology at their disposal, and finally wrote about it in the same few hours. A little more of the world's culture was known and shared at the same time, little different than the first live television broadcast , coast to coast, where thousands of Americans viewed the same scene at the same time. An quintessentially modern event.

The criticism that pushes forth post-modernism as a movement distinct from modernism certainly isn't lacking in moral force. It is the claim of the academic left that writes these tracts that the skeptical rigor they're applying to literature will aid, somehow, in the liberation of oppressed cultures, over turn falsifying ideologies, make absent cruel and crushing economic systems that extort, exfoliate, and waste, and enable us to experience a freedom that our current , binarily limited conceptions prevent us from achieving. There is certain righteousness to this cloudy, fence-sitting prose that reminds one of old catechisms. Scary.

For the force of post-modern writers, I'd say it's not the job of the writer to offer moral instruction to a reader, but rather to deal with the subject of being human in whatever contexts and conflicts that offers a narrative worth following. If morality is the author's intent, I say fine--Saul Bellow still brings me the uniform joy of writing superbly with his smug , Harold Bloomian classicism--but randomness, playfulness, and even amorality are welcome. What matters is whether the writer assumes his tasks with an idea of what he wants his art to accomplish at the end of it, of what sort of tone they want to leave resonating with the reader. De Lillo does this. So does Pynchon.

Art and Science

Written in response to an email where I was asked what I thought the distinctions between Science and The Arts were. An impossibly broad question to answer succinctly, but I did have a fine time distilling my generalities into three action-packed paragraphs.-tb
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The difference between science and the arts is that the sciences, the hard sciences, are predicated on facts, hard, verifiable data culled from methodical research , stated in the form of theories , ie. Scientific methodology provides as well a mechanism for verifying both the data and theory that gives them an articulate expression. If there facts are found that do not fit an proposed or an accepted theory, then the theory is changed, or junked altogether. Science, we can say, is very material, in it's subject matter. It deals with the physical world and the observed universe as it's originating source; even those speculations that suggest a metaphysical dimension, as often seems the case to layman in advanced physics, the suppositions are based on commonly vetted particulars.

The arts, as in literature, painting, sculpture, drama, film making, dance, have to do almost exclusively with the imagination; although the genres base their projects on experience and what is observed in the world around us, the emphasis isn't to add to the body of knowledge by developing explanations as to why things work the way they do, but rather to create, convey, communicate the subjective experience of the world however it might strike the individual artists. To coin a phrase, results may vary from artist to artist, but the philosophical premise of art making , in the broadest and most diffuse sense, would be to investigate the realm of appearances and what those perceptions seem to suggest on levels that, in themselves, aren't measurable. Scientific investigation , of course, requires imagination and a certain artfulness in the application of disciplines that uncover the real connections between substrates of existence, but facts and statements about facts remain the goal.

The further point is to produce advances in technology, based on more complete understandings of what wasn't as clear before; a further point is to discover things about the world that are useful. The arts, regardless of medium, cultural origin, or political-religious apologies, deal in major portion with the way the world seems, the aim , perhaps, to fulfill a human desire to feel at home in this existence. Beyond that, Oscar Wilde said better than anyone , in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey:

"All art is quite useless".

Talking miracle blues with Janet Shore

As with "In the Cafe" by Louise Gluck , "Last Words" by Janet Shore reads more like prose instead of what many prefer their poems to be. Fair enough, I'd add, although I rather like the notion of a poet using whatever device , tone or at their avail in order to get their ideas across in the most inspired form. "Inspired" is the operative word,seen in Gluck's monotonish drift. The theme, a description of a male friend of hers who ,from her recollections , has in various ways attempted to complete his inner life through a series of intense relationships with women, lacked rhythm, bounce or lyric turn .It read as though she lost interest.

"Last Words", though, works quite a bit better and makes me think of the shaggy dog story, a device . Shore disguises her direction , distracts us, intends to leave us in a bit of a pause after the poem is finished as we consider what we've heard. The sense of leading to one package of generic expectations continues from the reading Shore gives the poem in the audio provided by Slate; she reads it with the knowing pauses, the lingering over poignant details, recited at a pace where it's intended that we absorb the finely rendered details. I especially liked this part:

... I asked them
to please turn off the TV's live feed
to the empty hospital chapel, lens
focused on the altar and crucifix-
it seemed like the wrong God watching
over her, up there, near the ceiling.

On the visceral level this gets across the disconnection between an institution's attempt to comfort the suffering and the bereaved. Tellingly she provides an image where the narrator's alienation is magnified, the image of altar and crucifix, suggesting an intimate relationship with a comforting God, made more distant through an in-house video hook up, an alienation made more acute that the hospital broadcast the wrong Deity. There is room to assert, in a more rational moment, that God is God and that one ought not quibble over the iconography , but this isn't a particular sane moment for the narrator. It's not far afield to generalize that a number of us who've spent time visiting dying family and friends in hospitals recognize the atmosphere; everything seems strange, time is out of joint, nothing seems real. Nothing is a good fit for the moment you find yourself in , everything seems wrong. I particularly liked the way Shore condenses a cliche about God , as He is demoted from being a Lord in the Sky to a lowly spirit on a camera perch under unattractive ceiling tile.

Reading the poem shows another twist to this narrative, a tone that's matter of fact, succinct, with the images seeming more of a verbal short hand than a perfected distillation. It's someone telling you a tale of something that's already happened, a rapid, picturesque run through of a sequence of awful events. It takes on the swerve that makes you think of someone who starts pouring out their heart ot the first friend they find ; the lessening one's burden when they manage to make someone else ill at ease. We have a character trapped by her penchant to talk and talk some more, even in the attempt to give comfort.

And because hearing is the last
sense to go, the nice doctor spoke
to me in a separate room. He said
it's time to say good-bye.Next day,
he returned her to her nursing home
to die. Her nurses said just talk
to her; let her hear a familiar voice.
I jabbered to the body in the bed.
I kept repeating myself, as I'd done
on visits before, as if mirroring
her dementia. I rubbed her hand,
black as charcoal from the needles.
I talked the way a coach spurs on
a losing team.

She is approaching the end of her timeline, the clock is running out, and there is nothing to do but commit oneself to a monologue directed to the stricken woman, a constant chatter and prate that finds one revealing those things, trivial and dark, light and severe, to fill the air with words, to filibuster against the inevitable darkness. The speech is offered as if the patient could hear, could understand what was being said, appreciate the intimate details and habits of phrase from the woman who is sitting with her. The narrator's expectation, was that this was her chance to dump some of the excess baggage she'd been carrying around, compartmentalized as psychic wounds she'd allowed to scar over, knowing that the woman to whom she was confessing to, in a manner of speaking, would soon enough pass on, taking what was revealed with her. The end game was simple; she wanted to give the dying woman as sense that she wasn't alone in her dying moments

Suddenly she opened
her eyes, smiled her famous smile,
she knew me, and for the first time
in a year of babbling, she spoke
my name, then, in her clearest voice
said, "I love you. You look beautiful.
This is wonderful." I urged her
to sip water through a straw. Then
two cold cans of cranberry juice,
she was that thirsty. Her fingertips
pinked up like a newborn's.
I wanted the nurses to acknowledge
my miracle, to witness my devotion
although I'd been absent all spring.
They reset the clock, resumed her oxygen.
I was like God, I'd revived her. Now
I'd have to keep talking to keep her alive.

The Twilight Zone moment here, the irony that reminds you to be careful what you pray for , even if you don't really mean it, as we have the patient actually aware of what was being said to her over those days, with something crucial ignited within her spirit to raise from her coma , to open her eyes and declare her love for her bedside companion. She is thirsty, she drinks water, to cans of cranberry juice, she was that thirsty, she wants to live on with her new sense of animation. And the visitor, the comforter, the life-sustaining monologist, how does she feel? A little bit like God, perhaps, but as being all powerful; she rather suggests the Almighty's resentment . This would be a God who, as a bringer of miracles to this world , a Deity taken for granted for the forces he puts into motion for the benefit of human kind,comes to view his miracles as drudgery.

Maintaining the natural order is a thankless task. I think there's an undercurrent of resentment in the narrator's rushing cadences, the sort of thing that someone who feels their life hasn't turned out the way they dreamed waiting for the passing of a significant other so that a change of fortune might take place. One would busy themselves with doing the right things in a time of need--visiting the stricken, for example--say the the appropriately commemorative last words at a memorial service, and then walking into a vague new freedom.

Putting the period at the end of that sentence, though, is much delayed, as Shore's narrator finds herself feeling even more committed when the patient recovers and, apparently, thrives in revival. It echos a Beckett-scenario where there is much chatter and cold silence centered upon an immobility of spirit. There are never any last words, there is always something more to say, there is something else to pause in one's path to listen to, there is always an obligation one takes on less from need than from a larger dread of breaking with one's familiar ruts and routines.

Shore appreciates a nuance in miracles; they're not momentary divine interventions in our lives that do one blessed thing and then are finished, but rather a change in the direction of our lives that necessitates a change in our behavior. The found an interesting way to show us how even miracles can be another reason to complain. Some of us just can't live otherwise.

Wither Lady Gaga?

A brief piece appears in Slate this week that wonders how smart dance hit phenomenon Lady Gaga happens to be with her conspicuous cherry-picking of style points from previous avant garde trends, with some discussion of the specific debt she might owe to Madonna. The article's theme is that there is a constant recycling of cultural artifacts that , it seems, a few people manage to package and market into lucrative careers, but one might make note a sub theme that goes un-commented upon; the recycling of old feature story ideas.If one were to change names, references and dates, we'd have the same sort of article that appeared , a dozen a month, during the mid eighties and early nineties that attempted to parse Madonna. What Lady Gaga and Madonna both share is not only pretentiousness but a talent for recycling dated avant- garde gestures and an instinct of what they can get away with in a climate where even the recent past is forgotten. The basic difference between the two, it seems, is that Lady Gaga would really like to be taken seriously , as one can see in her continued references to Warhol, performance art, Bowie, the Bauhaus school.

Like the autodidatic Bowie, she appears to know a bit about experimental art and the like. What I get , though, is a regret and resentment of being born 50 years too late for the generation of edgy art she obviously admires; she wants to , it seems, to join the ranks of her heroes not only through her music and choreography but by trying to talk her way through the clubhouse door way.This Gaga entity might be contrived and a fake, but all this falls under the rubric of art, which deals in things that are created, made up, stitched together. In this sense, she is not dumb at all, and shows smart sources to pilfer from; she is, in fact, in a great tradition of western artists, low, middle and high on the culture scale, who made interesting careers piecing together things they've lifted from other their betters.

Lady Gaga might not be an intellectual, but she isn't stupid. She is smart.The question, really , is whether it's good art or not, a less simple task than condemning her outright. I find her a late comer to the game , and less interesting because I've survived the David Bowie and Madonna years, and have witnessed the bric-a-brac aesthetic of postmodernism bloom and wilt with the fashion season it was part of. I see her as a little girl in an attic trying on her grandmother's old clothes, adoring herself in a mirror as she imagines herself dressed for the day in a generation that isn't hers to claim.

Madonna's pretentiousness was several decibels turned down.

Not a raconteur, as is Bowie , she kept her declarations relatively spare and didn't dwell long on her extra-musical projects, such as the monumentally vacant product that was her book "Sex". She seems to have realized that she wasn't a public intellectual and didn't try to be anything of the sort.One might remember the Esquire magazine interview with her conducted by Norman Mailer . Mailer was ready to do for her image as he had done for Marylin Monroe, to put forth a case that Madonna, like Norma Jean, was a brilliant and profound artist on terms entirely her own. While Mailer's controversial biography on the actress resulted in fanciful if touchingly expressed speculation, Madonna seemed unwilling to follow Mailer's blustery lead. She gave terse answers, sticking to what she knew, the result being one of Mailer's sorrier moments during his late career.

Her energy and her wits brought her back to the music, a mix of obvious borrowings, re-fittings and conflations of compatible musical styles--disco, techno, rock-- and had the self-honesty that although it was arguable that was an artist with a capital "A", she was, as she remained on our radar , a confirmed A-List celebrity. She, like Bowie, appeared to have gotten over the urge to prove that they're still the ones who define what is current on the emerging scene and are content to work at their own pace, on terms they've written for themselves. Will Lady Gaga be so lucky?

Dylan joins the Canon?

Cambridge University Press,is coming out with booked titled The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan , the intent being, one supposes, that august institution wants to enshrine Dylan at last, accepting him into the Canon. No doubt I will purchase the volume and read closely what a generation of critics reared on Dylan's lyrics will have to say as they make their respective cases for him being a poet worthy of being placed alongside Milton and Eliot. I fear, though, that a good many of them will miss the point of what's been exciting about Dylan's work, that it is, after all, rock and roll. Rock and roll is always worth discussing at length , through as many different filters as possible, but one fears that too many critics, desiring to sound academic , ie, "legitimate" as they bring their learning to an analysis of the songwriter's work, will forget to achieve that state of accelerated insight one discovers in the best of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and instead convert their passion to tenure-seeking jargon.

The problem with a number of literary treatments with Dylan's work , I find, has the error of sticking too closely to Dylan's lyrics and attempting to align him with the supreme examples of our poetry. Although these articles are fancifully argued much of the time, Dylan winds up suffering, as there is, I believe , more that contrasts than favorably compares. His language, in itself, hasn't the stuff that sustains a reading that would seek a system of allegory and metaphor that approaches Blake. The lyrics are a bit flat in that sense, limited in dimension, mainly because the writing we consider is not poetry, a medium that can achieve verbal effects on an unlimited number of levels. Dylan's words are lyrics, and their effectiveness, their power lies in the music gives them life.

A straight reading of "Desolation Row" would give the feeling of some intriguing surrealism sadly constrained by a sing-song rhyme scheme. The song , though, changes everything, from the steadfast, aggressive strum of the acoustic guitar, Dylan's vocal performance (snarling, dead pan, phrases bitten off in reserved disgust), guitarist Mike Bloomfield's bittersweet improvisations and the careening harmonica solos add a power not attained by a close reading of the lyric sheet. Greil Marcus, who has been guilty of summary vagueness on the subject of Dylan's Greater Importance, is , nonetheless, superb when he confronts specific Dylan songs, convincingly getting across how the conflated traditions Dylan brought together--folk, blues, Tex Mex, rock and roll and Symbolist Poetry, produced something new, strange and transcendent. He could grasp at how these things worked together for their artistic power. I am afraid, though, that the Cambridge Companion could suffer from a surfeit of specializations that too often have little to do with edification. There are some writings on Dylan's work that are as exotic as the singer's most intangible imagery. An example, cited by the Boston Globe and on Ron Silliman's blog, suggests a turgid time awaits even the most faith Dylan partisan:

"Dylan's lyrics construct an author-reader relation posited on the model of an irresolvable enigma which is both the incitement to and the perpetual frustration of readerly desire."

One had reason to think that rock and roll lyrics were truly the poetry of the age, but hindsight reveals the hubris of youthful assumptions. Far, far too little of the work by even the best lyricists have approached the wealth of expression and style that page poets have managed, even up to the current day. Dylan is not Wallace Stevens, Tom Waits is not Blake, Leonard Cohen is not Shakespeare, Joni Mitchell is not Auden. What needs to be developed is a critical language that can discuss, at length, the work of these songwriters as songwriters who assimilated aesthetic values from poetry. Otherwise I think we're all missing the point and blowing so much smoke up each other's pant legs as we drone in platitudes about how rock lyrics are the poetry. It misses the mark entirely. Lyric writing for music is a distinct craft from than that of the tradition of the page poet. There are points, of course, where the traditions converge and perhaps borrow from one another, but not often enough to willy nilly refer to gifted songwriters as poets. The work that really needs to be done in this area is to expand how one discusses the art of songwriting. Dylan, Paul Simon, Mitchell, Costello, et al, are better referenced against the likes of Stephen Foster, The Gershwins, you name it. Dylan, I would say, has had a very minor effect on contemporary poetry--the revolutions we habitually talk about here in modern verse were well under way long before he even picked up a guitar. His real impact is on music, on songwriting, on rock and roll.It's is his profound influence on popular music that helped changed American culture, and it is in this area that his artistic legacy is based. At the end of the day, Dylan remains a musical artist, not a literary one.


It's not every attempt to place Dylan on a par with canonical poets without insight or mired in a nervously applied jargon. Some are superb pieces of critical thinking. Even Christopher Rick's unfairly mocked, high-level inspection of Dylan's work in his book Dylan's Vision of Sin at least speaks to the reader in comprehensible prose, which greatly mitigates the thin air he's attempting to take deep breaths in. Michael Gray's study, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan , brings a thoroughness to the subject matter, bring focus on a multitude of influences Dylan absorbed and used t create something new. Gray spends his time on the lyrics and performs some impressive maneuvers to make the lyricist a suitable companion for the page poets, but what makes Song and Dance Man especially powerful is the stress on how the music ratchets up the power of lyrics . He writes, in this book, like a Greil Marcus who doesn't get quickly distracted from completing an idea.

The cited sentence has none of that--it seems a foul odor emerging from a long sealed crypt.Dylan deserves better than the crypt, of course, and I'll pay my money to see how the folks at Cambridge did assembling the best thinking they could find on Dylan's hard-to-classify work. Until I buy and read the Dylan Campanion , of course, my question, to risk using a metaphor a third time too many, is whether the songwriter will be illuminated or embalmed.