Nobel Laureate to perform live July 18 of this year (2021)

[Mark Kohut]

"This song is "about President Kennedy" in the same way *Moby Dick* is
about a whale of a time."--Elvis Costello

To me it’s not nostalgic. I don’t think of “Murder Most Foul” as a
glorification of the past or some kind of send-off to a lost age. It speaks
to me in the moment. It always did, especially when I was writing the
lyrics out.
–> Bob Dylan (The New York Times – June 12, 2020)----
Sly Bob gives little hint as to WHEN he was "writing these lyrics
out"---why the "out"? ....copying from pages and other pages, as with *Like
a Rolling Stone?....*


There is, imo, everything to misread here with overliteralness. The
historically constant
reduction of an artist to some narrow projection of what one wants to
believe. Almost exactly like
finding the "woman' addressed in *Like a Rolling Stone *and proclaiming the
song is about her.
I suggest that not the slightest bit of understanding that an artist can
create an atmospheric but very real
world--see Swift, see Pynchon, See, for fuck's sake, Milton and Shakespeare
and DiLillo and scores of
others---is in evidence. The invisible Republic of America--as it has been
called and understood from Pynchon thru Roth and Dylan and others---, its
real life in emotion, desire and dreams.

Self-blinded literalness,--everyone their own Oedipus-- the will to
overlook so as to be stupid: "take me back to Tulsa, to the scene of the
crime" ---
yeah, what you say,  OBVIOUSLY, he says sarastically.

When a major song like this is released almost 60 years later than the
event that starts the song, after
so much attention has been given to the event, we have no way of knowing
what Dylan thinks--he gives no clues beyond
the song itself--about the actual perspectival reality of events in the
lyrics.
 "Once upon a time' begins* Like a Rolling Stone,* the only rock song ever
written that begins with this fairy tale framing
and, I say, he knows that is what almost all of his songs are. He has SAID
SO in effect. The deeper truths go much deeper than trivial paranoia which
Bobby evidently got over long before many.

I read the lyrics as much like *The Wasteland* or, say, *Hamlet,* of
course, an overt
symbolic frame of some kind. How about, the palace was fucked and he had to
act?

I read the "they' 'them' as akin to Pynchon's, as I say, all
*Wasteland-like* allusive and Golden Bough-like or even folk hero meanings.
WHERE BOBBY CONSTANTLY writes from as you can read in his ASCAP words (was
it that talk?) and even in his Nobel acceptance.
>From the song-and-dance man who brought some of the most surreally allusive
yet humanly insightful words and meaning to and thru the music of the
people,
you are insulting him, I suggest. Offhand, I offer the Camelot "king', the
Fisher King, destroyed by 'them' and the land infected
----Now, (to now) when Bob chose to release, finish and release,  during
the last years of the most evil "king' the USA
ever had. (I admit I know little about Pres Andrew Johnson or
Stonewall's Presidency)

The Guardian and the New Yorker and the NYT with writers who know more
about Dylan than anything you have gathered by coincidence and almost
everyone else who has heard the song are smarter than this reductivist
bullshit....which is why
they ignore the stupidity of this reading. But the land is full of pop
bullshit too, which this song even praises.

It even goes out to Joseph and Thomas: "play it for the one with the
telepathic mind".

I cannot wait to grow up to be so much smarter than all those lifelong
Dylan appreciators---and musical artists like Elvis Costello and Nick Cave
and Fiona Apple and Emma Swift [Blonde on the Tracks]--- so that I can feel
so superior to common sense and the simple but infinitely complex
resonances of words, all doubt ["there is no doubt that"--Joseph and Tom,
too often]  'buried deep beneath the waves of crazy sorrow"-- like memory
and fate. [early Eliot allusions. I am willing to believe Bob's
acquaintance Tom P might have got him reading Eliot, since Bob didn't
inevitably get that at the college he dropped out of. His first influential
poets were Rimbaud, of course,
and the Beats, esp his good friend Allen Ginsberg, who first nominated him
for that Nobel he finally got. I think I found, serendipitously, some
Ferlinghetti of *Coney Island of the Mind*
influence as I reread that in memory of his passing while teaching my
course.

FLASH: "painting the passports brown" is about the Deep state too.....

Yes, welcome back Joseph, although you were so much older then, I hoped you
would be younger than that now.
Also, read Bugliosi's book(s). All of it.





On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 4:06 AM Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
wrote:

>
> There is nothing to misread here: Dylan claims that JFK was murdered by
> a conspiracy.
>
> The Guardian and the NYT and the New Yorker in their reviews
> painstakingly avoided the Argentinosaurus in the song.*
>
> The silence is deafening. It's a conspiracy theory, you know. The CIA
> says so.
>
> Still, the lyrics are clumsy at best, and I do not find the song very
> profound.
>
>
> *"Songs build little rooms in time/ And housed within the song’s design/
> Is the ghost the host has left behind/ To greet and sweep the guest
> inside/ Stoke the fire and sing his lines"
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>