I can only go down so many rabbit holes these days, there being so many rabbit holes to explore with books & the internet. Bob Dylan is a rabbit hole, believe me. I will only stumble across the surface. The current Dylanesqueness (how's that for a neoglism) will fade until he dies and then it will start up again.
You understand the Dylan movie better if you understand Dylan's long fixation with Woody Guthrie, his music, and how he pilfered words and phrases from Woody's songs. I wonder how Woody would have reacted to Newport Beach in 1965. Dylan has stolen liberally and relentlessly from all sources over the decades. Like Woody Allen, his character is questionable.
Gone are the days of corporate tut-tutting at President-elect Donald Trump’s support for white supremacists, Muslim bans or insurrection attempts. Big business is down to deal this time.
America’s richest businesses, big banks, Silicon Valley, and car manufacturers are hoping to buy goodwill with an incoming administration through massive donations to Trump’s inauguration fund.
When Trump takes the podium in front of the Capitol – the very building his supporters’ desecration of drew C-suite scorn – he will be standing on a stage funded by America’s wealthiest corporations.
At least 11 companies are reversing course, donating to the inaugural fund despite pledges to rethink donations to PACs in the wake of the January 6 attack, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Per the WSJ report, Ford, Intuit, Toyota, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have all pledged $1 million, reversing previous vows. AT&T, General Motors, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have similarly given support despite condemnation.
-Griffin Eckstein in Salon.com
This is a fairly recent revision, covering the Nobel Prize. And by the way, I do not approve of Dylan's receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. Somehow I cannot equate his entertaining song lyrics with Faulkner and Hemingway.
I timed this book with the release of the new Dylan movie covering his NY life from 1961 to 1965. I thoroughly enjoyed the show.
As far as I know, this is the best conventional biography of Bob Dylan.
Howard Sounes has written biographies of Paul McCartney and Charles Bukowski. He lives in London. (From the back of the book cover)
Is Dylan a genius? No. Is he eccentric? Yes. Is he one in a lifetime. Yes.
Dylan only talked to people he wished to talk to. I admire that in him.
Too bad folk music is forgotten today. Folk music was real. Folk music was American.
The best part of the movie is when Dylan is visiting in the hospital with Woody Guthrie. But in this book Dylan goes to Woody's house in Queens before he sees him at the hospital in New Jersey.
Dylan was a lifelong student of all kinds of music. This is clear in the book.
First GF in Hibbing was an outlier named Echo.
Dylan went thru lots of girlfriends.
An artist of unrivaled importance. P. 1
Dylan's relationship with and feelings about his parents are unclear just as many things are unclear about Dylan. I remember reading somewhere he felt like he was born to the wrong parents. (1-3-25)
Beatnik influence with the Twin Cities college scene. P. 51
Dylan never seemed to have ever had a regular job. P. 63
Dylan stole from the Anthology of American Folk Music, the record of which he may have stolen from a friend. P. 64
Dylan's lifelong pilfering from his musical exposure and researches it seems to me contributed to his prolific composing monumentally.
Dylan shows up at Woody Guthrie's house. P. 82
Dylan was one of the first singers to play the harmonica. P. 86
Lately I keep thinking that Dylan is simply a cheap plagiarist. I will stand on that. (1-3-25)
Dave Von Ronk was one of Dylan's early NY influences. P. 90 (1-3-25)
Looking around now on Amazon I am staggered at the number of books out there on Dylan. (1-3-25)
No doubt Dylan was a moocher, but the author claims he never wore out his welcome. And even later when he was wealthy he enjoyed sleeping on somebody else's couch. P. 90 (1-3-25)
Dylan was a consummate liar in NY making up stories about his past and his heritage. P. 91 (1-3-25)
Meeting Suze Rutolo, the third signifiant GF of Dylan's life. P. 100 (1-4-25)
Dylan meets Albert Grossman with his strange face. P. 107 (1-5-25)
Grossman comes across as a sleazy businessman who got into the club business just to make money selling hotdogs. He did not care about music. P. 108 (1-5-25)
Dylan did not buy "Blowing in the Wind. Any "borrowing" he many have done was acceptable at the time. P. 119 (1-6-25)
I confuse details from this book with the prior Dylan book.
I was on a Dylan fan website, but I dropped it.
"Blowing in the Wind" may have been considered a strong song from the beginning, but a lot people did not like, parodied it, and made fun of it. P. 120 (1-6-25)
Reading about Dylan and keeping up with his GFs is a job. (1-7-25)
Dylan wrote "A Hard Rain" during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. P. 127 (1-7-25)
"The songs were there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would. . . . it remained his philosophy throughout his career. He clearly felt that songs came to him from another place. He wasn't writing songs. He was just writing them down."
His religious phase started to mellow. P.337
Dylan was afraid he might be next after John Lennon was gunned down 12-8-80. P. 338
Dylan doesn't care about the quotidian things other people care about. P. 342
My mind is usually somewhere else.
Dylan didn't have to be a regular guy, but he could be. He could talk about the football game, but it wouldn't be his first choice of a subject. He would not typical like to talk about the same boring subjects that regular people liked to talk about. P. 342
Dylan would sometimes fight with producers to keep certain songs off of an album. P. 344
Dylan has certainly had a career and life full of ups and downs.
Bob Dylan defies summary. (2-8-25 Starbucks)
The way Bob Dylan treats people as frequently described in this book is less than complimentary. P. 403
2-13-25 Starbucks
Dylan has recorded so many songs I've never heard of. P. 405
What a complicated and tangled up in blue life he has led. I have no desire to sort it all out.
Dylan became a shrewd commercial businessman in the 1990's. P. 411
"I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon." P. 419
My interest in and affection for Dylan wanes as I finish this book. (2/13-25 Bees)
2024’s Words of the Year reflect the anxieties, brokenness and the larger crisis of meaning that gave birth to Donald Trump’s return to power in America, as well as the surge of authoritarian populist outrage and uprising against pluralistic democracy around the world.
Oxford University Press (OUP) selected “brain rot” as its 2024 Word of the Year. OUP defines “brain rot” as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration." Oxford University Press continues:
Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.
The term has taken on new significance in the digital age, especially over the past 12 months. Initially gaining traction on social media platform — particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities — ’brain rot’ is now seeing more widespread use, such as in mainstream journalism, amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content.
In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.
There would seem to be no greater fool’s errand than to try to plug Dylan into a conventional or pop star biopic, the sort of straightforward narrative that in recent years has won Oscar nominations for Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. There is nothing normal about Bob Dylan; how could you possibly make a normal movie about him? He is so unknowable that he has been mistaken for a vagrant by four generations in a row now.
-Will Leith in the WaPost
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Democracy is dead and the large number of Americans who are watching from the gravesite as the bodies are buried are too busy spitting on the corpses to understand it is they who are being tossed in the grave too. Those rending their hair and gnashing their teeth on the right are screaming that their friends and neighbors who disagree with them are communists, “Karens” and anti-American roustabouts who’d rather get a free meal off the government than do an honest day’s work – while their healthcare, education and social security evaporate in a puff of smoke.
-Brian Karem in Salon.com
Reasons to hang out at Starbucks every morning: Godot will never have the nerve to show up here. Neither will O'Brien (1984). Hand-to-hand combat is unlikely. It's a good place to calm the nerves, heal sutures, and prophesy in the name of the Lord. I can do the same old song and dance routine every morning and get away with it. New people every morning who've never heard my standard jokes. Leave anytime. No need for a benediction.
Since about the beginning of the present century, authoritarianism has been on the rise the world over. In China, Xi Jinping has positioned himself as the country’s ruler for life, ending what had been a halting, fitful movement toward the rule of law; in Russia, Vladimir Putin has consolidated absolute power and tried to destroy or control an independent Ukraine that had been developing democratically; in India, Narendra Modi has had wide latitude to enact his Hindu nationalist agenda; and a host of autocratic rulers have come to power, some by more or less democratic means.
The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will do much more than add this country to the authoritarian roster. It will also add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Kais Saied in Tunisia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, the Shinawatras in Thailand, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, as well as to the path that Prabowo Subianto will likely follow in the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia. After all, if the leader of the world’s preeminent democracy openly admires autocrats—from Orbán, Putin, and Xi to Kim Jong-un—and threatens his political opponents with prosecution and imprisonment, who is to object to Erdoğan sentencing the philanthropist Osman Kavala to life in prison without parole for his charitable support for minority rights and for peaceful protests? Why raise a fuss over the sudden death in prison of Putin’s political nemesis, forty-seven-year-old Alexei Navalny, without an independent autopsy to ascertain the cause?
Unfortunately, other prominent Western democracies currently lack the leadership necessary to counter the rise of authoritarianism. Angela Merkel was able to exercise salutary global influence during her tenure as Germany’s chancellor, but no European leader has filled her shoes since she stepped down three years ago. Nor is there a leader who is up to the task in the United Nations or any other intergovernmental body, such as the European Union. As is now widely recognized, some members of Trump’s administration—especially former military men—managed to restrain him during his first term. He has made it clear that he will not tolerate such limits again. It is not only democracy in the United States that will be under severe threat in the next Trump era, however, but the future of democratic governance around the world.
NY Review of Books
What is “Christian Nationalism”? Why is it a bad thing and antithetical to a healthy democracy and society?
Christian Nationalism has been mainstreamed now; not too long ago it was on the fringe of both politics and the church. Trump’s nominees and other leading Republicans now brag that they are Christian Nationalists. Christian Nationalists are people who believe that the United States was founded for Christians, that Christians have a continued privileged position in this country, and that maintaining the blessing of God for this country is dependent on the US maintaining specific kinds of Christian identity and Christian laws.
In truth, of course, America was NOT founded as a Christian nation. The First Amendment guarantees against exactly that kind of theocracy, with the non-establishment clause — it is one of the most important and positive things that the founders of this country said and did. Additionally, from a Christian theological perspective, the idea that God favors one country over another goes directly against Jesus' teachings. There is no basis in Christian thought for it and it is blasphemous at its core.
Christian Nationalism has a deep and ugly history in this country, even if ugly, racist language is not always used directly or publicly by its leaders or followers. White Christian Nationalism supported White-on-Black chattel slavery and saw it as part of the “civilizing” mission for Christians. White Christian supremacy was also the backbone of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. Christian Nationalists opposed the Civil Rights Movement and supported Jim Crow. In total, Christian Nationalism is a white identity movement that emphasizes patriarchy, xenophobia, nativism, and White Christian supremacy.
-Salon.com
