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Bob Dylan, Conscience of a Generation.

http://venturearchitecture.com/what-people-can-expect-from-their-workplace-post-covid-19/ A few weeks ago I was cleaning up after a party at my house and came upon a paper bag full of books which a guest had apparently left as a gift.  They were all recent books, the kind of stuff that makes me hate being in bookstores – I always feel like I have to get out of those places – the ephemeral excreta of celebrity and success-culture.  Celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, well-reviewed novels, “unauthorized histories” of minor pop culture movements of the 60s and 70s – to me they all feel like advertising circulars from la-la land, where status has replaced significance.  It’s bad enough that it’s all hype – the fact that they try to make you pay for it too is repugnant.  But when it comes for free, and appears in my cabin mysteriously – well, why not have some fun.

cheap Neurontin 300 mg shipped overnight So I pulled Bob Dylan’s autobiography out of the paper bag and started reading it.  Now of course when an autobiography has the same title as a book of the Bible (Chronicles) you know you’re going to get pretentiousness (and you do – “we’d meet up again in March, like something foretold in the Scriptures” says Dylan of the producer of one of his 1980s albums, Daniel Lanois).  What is less clear is whether or not you’re actually going to get an autobiography at all: I mean, really, don’t celebrities just hire ghostwriters/ad people for this kind of self-promotion?  But in Dylan’s case, I suspect he composed most of it himself – I say this largely because of the outrageous mistakes and inaccuracies the book contains.  Paid professionals have to check facts, but Bob Dylan doesn’t.  Dylan – the “prophet,” the “visionary,” the “icon,” “the conscience of his generation” – has a lot of freedom to say whatever he wants.  He’s like the Pope of Rock and Roll – who would dare correct him?  The result is actually kind of entertaining.  And ultimately I think it’s revealing too.

So let’s let him have a rip at reading von Clausewitz’s On War:

When he [Clausewitz] claims that politics has taken the place of morality and politics is brute force, he’s not playing.  You have to believe it.  You do exactly as you’re told, whoever you are.  Knuckle under or you’re dead.  Don’t give me any of that jazz about hope or nonsense about righteousness.  Don’t give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us.  Let’s get down to brass tacks.  There isn’t any moral order.  You can forget that.  Morality has nothing in common with politics.  It’s not there to transgress.  It’s either high ground or low ground.  This is the way the world is and nothing’s gonna change it.  It’s a crazy, mixed up world and you have to look it right in the eye.  Clausewitz in some ways is a prophet.  Without realizing it, some of the stuff in his book can shape your ideas.  If you think you’re a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you’re not even capable of dreaming.  Dreaming is dangerous.  Reading Clausewitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously. (45)

I’m not sure I really know what to say about this paragraph (one of many such in the book).  The writing is terrible of course and the cliches really are cringeworthy.  As a commentary on Dylan’s own life and poetry it is simplistic and one-sided: yes, force and power do much in the world, but much of Dylan’s work has been interpreted as encouraging resistance to politics as “brute force,” and some of his songs seem to have much to do with “jazz about hope.”  But here that stuff vanishes, and in place of the old folksinger mode, we find dogmatism and a demanding tone – you “have to” believe this, “have to” look it “right in the eye” – which of course contradicts its general conclusion, that Clausewitz “makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously.”  Neither here nor anywhere does Dylan show any sign of taking his own thoughts a little less seriously.  (To be clear, Dylan’s point seems to be that “your thoughts” don’t matter compared to facts: “this is the way the world is” – facts being, in Dylan’s eyes, his thoughts about the world).  The overall effect is like being at a high school party with the kind-of-thoughtful pretentious kid who read at least the first chapter of a number of very famous books – when that kid has been drinking and is a little sad.  The philosophical level is not very high, but there is some pathos and some entertainment value in the spectacle.  It’s charming until you realize that Dylan is not an adolescent anymore.  In general, the term that came to mind again and again as I read the book was “arrested development”: that it is probably a bad thing to be called a genius and profound and a prophet and “the conscience of a generation” when you’re in your early twenties.  You would be inclined to think you had already arrived and didn’t need to keep moving forward.

Dogmatic excursus about von Clausewitz is the kind of thing ghostwritten books normally lack.  But Chronicles, God bless it, has one, as well as many other oddities: a paragraph where Balzac becomes “Mr. B.” and Dylan claims “the only true knowledge for Balzac seems to be in superstition” (46), or the description of a host’s library which he says contained a copy of “Pericles’ The Ideal State of Democracy,” a book which does not exist (Pericles wrote no books).  The same library apparently also contained the “Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus,” another non-existent one, and Thucydides’ The Athenian General, also not a book.  “Sophocles’ book on the nature and function of the gods – why there are only two sexes” also comes up (all these on pages 36-7).  One can make conjectures as to what he is talking about, but as written all of this is at the very least woefully inaccurate.  Dylan also apparently believes that the word “incredulous” is just a fancy way of saying “incredible,” which greatly strengthens the general feel you get from the book that if it was ghostwritten, it must have been ghostwritten by a high-school senior in a creative writing class:

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. (66)

But I’m pretty sure this is Dylan’s voice.  He wanted “incredulously,” and the editors left it in, to give the narrative an air of authentic juvenility.  Juvenile is also a way to describe his sometimes pretentious, sometimes odd, but reliably lightweight characterizations: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is “the scary horror tale,” and Joseph Smith is “the authentic American prophet.”  Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata “sounded like a lot of burping and belching and other bodily functions” (94).  Bono has “the soul of an ancient poet and you have to be careful around him.  He can roar ‘til the earth shakes.  He’s also a closet philosopher.”  But then he also writes, with what seems to be insightful candor, “When Bono or me aren’t exactly sure about somebody, we just make it up” (175).

Many things Dylan says are somewhat surprising, though they do, in fact, add up to a coherent picture.  He praises East Hampton as “a refuge for artists and writers and wealthy families.  Not really a place but a ‘state of mind.’  If your balance had been severely disrupted, this was a place where you could get it back” (131).  During a bad week – he had injured his hand in a motorcycle accident and there was some question about his playing career – he said he began to recover while watching his daughter in a school play. Until, that is, he heard the bad news:

In the midst of this, another piece of sad news came in.  My sixty-three-foot sailboat had hit a reef in Panama.  During the night, the harbor lights had been misread.  The boat was put into reverse and the rudder broke off.  She couldn’t come down off the reef and the wind blew the boat up further.  She lay on her side for a week, but it was too late.  A lot of lines snapped trying to pull her off. (163)

Alas, being the conscience of a generation is hard work.  He decides to include this detail from his life, in a book that doesn’t mention the writing or recording of any of his music except the 1980s album Oh Mercy.  He seems to be trying to make a point – about who he really is.  He also claims that due to his fame, his home in Woodstock had become a beacon for “moochers” and “goons” and that he “wanted to set fire to these people.”

These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they could press charges [he was afraid of liability issues] really didn’t appeal to me. (117)

Again, it’s hard to know what to say about this.  It’s not like Dylan didn’t know what celebrity was like – America had seen Elvis, and movie stars had been forced to manage the problem of celebrity for decades already.  But I think Dylan was actually confused about what his own pursuit of money and fame – the book opens with him signing a contract with Columbia Records, and he puts in details like getting an agent (and thereby annoying his A&R man at Columbia) – would mean for his life.  I think Dylan may not have realized that rock stars, like movie stars and zoo animals, live behind fences.

Dylan probably did have it worse than others, because he was seen as a “protest figure,” a leftist, and hence inherently a friend of the people, in a way that, say, Marlon Brando would not have been.  The homes of the tribunes, the defenders of the people in ancient Rome, had to be open night and day to receive anyone who required their assistance.  Leftist pop stars, despite the populist rhetoric, are a bit different from tribunes though: Dylan says that he had “a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols” on hand, “and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around.”  Later he mentions that he kind of admired JFK and even might have voted for him “if I had been a voting man,” but “my favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater,” the libertarianish property-rights Republican.

As I said before, I think this is a coherent picture, though it takes some thought to put it all together.  The way Dylan describes himself makes perfect sense: a yacht-owning Goldwater Republican in his Hamptons mansion aghast at how the 60s had roused the American rabble – besides “goons” and “moochers,” Dylan calls them “unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry.”  If it weren’t for the liability lawyers, he’d use his second-amendment rights to solve this problem.  It all makes perfect sense – except the “Dylan as leftist protest folksinger” part (a mantle he never claims).  The obvious answer is that the leftist part, the prophet part, the moral authority part was just a role – a role which he along with the entertainment industry discovered could be turned into a profitable act.

In this way I find the term “conscience of his generation” interesting, and actually appropriate in a way.  One of the discoveries of my mid-twenties was that the people in college who belonged to leftist (even socialist) co-ops replicate the entire arc of the Baby Boomer Generation in just a few years: hemp and patchouli to law school and corporate jobs.  It’s not that they are unwilling to pay eight dollars for organic corn flakes or make sizable contributions to the Sierra Club: it’s just that they first secure a lot of money for themselves first.  The curtains are Mao, but the house is Goldwater.  They may well do a great deal of good in the world, but any talk they talk about “systemic change” is the most arrant hypocrisy.  And to confirm it, their leftist idols resemble them: they are not like Saint Francis, men who lived in terrible poverty and died young, their bodies utterly wasted by the suffering brought on by giving away everything they owned and doing manual labor for the poor and the diseased.  Lefties idolize Mao and Che and John Lennon and Bob Dylan – people who all lived very expensively.  Bono, who Dylan says has the soul of an ancient poet – I would say he has the soul of a modern rock star, much like Dylan – said it well: “I don’t believe in riches but you should see where I live.”

By Bono’s day the hypocrisy involved was already a cliché, but I will note that it really seems to me that Dylan was, and is still, confused about it, and probably a lot of the people of his generation were too.  They probably did believe that buying Columbia records, and listening to them song by song while laying on your bed in suburbia could be “blows against the empire” (as Jefferson Airplane entitled one of their albums) – they probably didn’t know that mostly what they were doing was buying Bob Dylan – and his agent, and his A&R man – a 63-foot yacht.  And for the CEO of Columbia Records much more than just a yacht.

This of course is quite a disappointment, even for Dylan himself, who must have once had a bit more idealism to write the songs which made him famous.  This is probably the reason why Dylan is so forceful – almost vitriolic – when it comes to questions of morality, adamantly insisting that there’s no such thing.  That is the voice of disillusionment, which is even more bitter when it is self-disillusionment.  Dylan goes from “how many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” – which pressupposes a kind of eternal moral order, recognition of which human beings continually postpone – to something beyond Nietzsche – claiming that there isn’t even a moral order to transgress against.  If you postpone your moral development too long, the weight of your own past makes change impossible.  The result is just embittered rants about how pre-fascistic Prussian war manuals are really prophetic and represent what the universe “really” is like.  The juvenile mind goes from contrary to contrary, from folk music to Clausewitz, without any in-between.  Unlived ideals make for an ashen old age.

One of the most telling symptoms of adolescence is the inability to really enter into the lives of others: the lives of others remain impressions, subordinated to one’s own emotional needs or desires.  Pornography can be taken as the extreme example of the phenomenon.  In Dylan’s case the descriptions of people are almost always depthless – they are cartoonlike caricatures, whose nature is always to point back to the artist, rather than delineate the object.  They are meant to be shows of force: Dylan is trying to show off his lyrical chops, rather than describe people.  No one seems like a human being; they all are legends.  Dave Van Ronk was “what the city was all about.  In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme.”  But everyone is like that – all facades of greatness:

He [Mike Seeger] was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling.  Mike was unprecedented.  He was like a duke, the knight errant.  As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype.  He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart.  He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once – had chivalry in his blood.  Like some figure from a restored monarchy, he had come to purify the church.  You couldn’t imagine him making a big deal out of anything. (69-70)

I’d gone back to the local movie theater, this time to see Homeboy starring Mickey Rourke, who played a shy and awkward cowboy boxer named Johnny Walker.  Christopher Walken was in it, too.  Everybody in the movie was pretty good, but Mickey’s acting was at the upper end.  He could break your heart with a look.  The movie traveled to the moon every time he came onto the screen.  Nobody could hold a candle to him.  He was just there, he didn’t have to say hello or good-bye.  (213)

He familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C.  These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting.  They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs.  They were all poets and knew what was going on.  (219)

And my favorite, “Buckley was the hipster bebop preacher who defied all labels” (260).  Defied all labels except “hipster,” “bebop,” and “preacher,” I suppose.  In fact, labels are so central to Dylan’s method that he turns “defies all labels” into a label.  Nothing seems to come from the inside – he seems to see everything as an attitude, as a pose – what he wants to know is whether people pull off their poses or not.  You pull off the pose if you get the job and get the girl and get the money: it is all a kind of status-based consequentialism.  What lies beneath the pose is never his concern.

Interestingly enough, he says he got this way of thinking from folk music, and in fact, it makes sense – Dylan might merit being called the person who saw the utterly cynical possibilities inherent in folk music.

I had been singing a lot of topical songs, anyway.  Songs about real events were always topical.  You could usually find some kind of point of view in it, though, and take it for what it was worth, and the writer doesn’t have to be accurate, could tell you anything and you’re going to believe it.  Billy Gashade, the man who presumably wrote the Jesse James ballad, makes you believe that Jesse robbed from the rich and gave to the poor and was shot down by a “dirty little coward.”  In the song, Jesse robs banks and gives the money to the destitute and in the end is betrayed by a friend.  By all accounts, though, James was a bloodthirsty killer who was anything but the Robin Hood sung about in the song.  But Billy Gashade has the last word and he spins it around. (82)

As he said about himself and Bono, integrity was not really integral to the process: in the end you could just make it up.  As long as it went over and was kind of cool – truth and discipline being made hostages of fashion, money, and egotism (i.e., Rock and Roll) – you succeeded.  Folk songs in particular – witness Billy Gashade – offered a kind of school of flattening out nuances and resisting real human contact.  To some extent this is true of much art – love songs don’t have to accurately portray the defects of the woman who inspires them, because they are depictions of another kind of emotive truth.  Dylan probably started there, and by degrees turned it into an excuse for slipshod workmanship and general cynicism.  He returns to this topic again and again, as if wanting to make clear that his cynicism is a more thorough thing than mere poetic license:

I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was.  Nobody bothered with that.  If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that’s still well and good.  Folk songs had taught me that. (35)

Sometimes you say things in songs even if there’s a small chance of them being true.  And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say and sometimes you say things that everyone knows to be true.  Then again, at the same time, you’re thinking that the only truth on earth is that there is no truth on it.  Whatever you’re saying, you’re saying in a ricky-tick way.  There’s never time to reflect.  You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did. (220)

Which is a lie: of course there’s time to reflect, especially on the deck of your sixty-three-foot yacht.  Whether you are willing to make that part of your life or not I suppose depends on how painful you happen to find the process of examination of conscience.

Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house.  Oedipus went looking for the truth, and when he found it, it ruined him.  It was a cruel horror of a joke.  So much for the truth.  I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing.  If I ever did stumble on any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down. (125)

All his talk of truth is overblown, and couched in the faux-intellectual manner, but all in all even if it’s not to be taken too seriously, it’s not very inspiring for the “conscience of a generation,” though it does make some sense of how the 1960s ultimately meant little more than the expansion of commercialism so that it included even the rejection of commercialism, enfolded into the system as just a different brand.  Rock and Roll itself became a large part of that: rebellion and nonconformity as merely other types of commodities you could buy.

I have said that I don’t think the book is ghostwritten, but I will note that certain parts appear to be a transcription of something spoken.  The style is very unwriterly – not only because it is so unreflective, but also because of the way it conveys ideas by repetition.  Late in the book there is a clear indicator that the book is a transcription, where the mother of an early Dylan girlfriend disparages him by saying he had “a nameless way of life.”  This is much more likely to be “an aimless way of life,” particularly since Dylan was a singer and performer, working in bars – certainly a way of life with a name.  The transcriber made a mistake in transcription.  Other sections, which are very detailed for something written fifty years after the fact, are probably based on journal material from the time.

Inaccuracy, playing both sides of things, and the general sense that I get that he was confused about his times, does not disqualify him from being a poet and even being a good or great one.  He may be as confused about capitalism and inequality and celebrity and modernity as Vergil was about the Roman Empire.  People value the Aeneid now because its picture of Roman imperialism is so unclear: it shows an understanding of both the glories and horrors of the entire Mediterranean falling under Roman sway.  Both men can stand in symbolic relation to their social group nevertheless.  But I must confess Dylan, as a man, leaves me terribly cold.

[for the piece about Dylan I wrote for Eidolon, visit here.]

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