The crown-bound brows of the Bard of Hibbing (expanded)

Well I recall, in 1965, listening to the new album “Highway 61 Revisited” in my parents’ basement;  thinking:  This is the real deal.   Unlike much of the pop music my generation has enjoyed, this will last (thought I);  people would still be listening to it,  fifty years from now.

Then the decades went by, his career veered into less interesting avenues, and his voice lost much of its timbre and zing; I no longer followed his activities.

Yet lo -- Who would have predicted that, half a century from 1965, not only would people still be listening,  but the old codger would still be touring.  A lot.  Amazing.

And now the Nobel Prize.   Kind of out of left field, but one of the committee members made the valid point:  that, going back as far as Homer, poetry has been meant to be performed, even sung.  And this, in many different cultures.

The rustic troubadour, in a lyrical mood

So:  A tip of the stetson to you, old man.

~  [The genre now shifts  from memoir  to sotie] ~

It is not for us to add any groat’s-worth of comment to his abundantly documented biography.   Yet we do take comfort in having been, apparently, the only HRNS [highly-respected news site] to document Ibn-Guthrie’s  brilliant but little-known 1965 concert in Oslo:

“Desolation Row” --Norwegian version

[Footnote] I just checked the link for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Remarkably, it is still available -- most songs by the Prairie Skald  have been deleted or disabled on YouTube by the Copyright Police.   The Norwegian lyrics of this one  apparently protected it -- de minimis non curat Attila.   If this trend continues, by 2076, all Internet content will be in the Norwegian language.

~

Meanwhile, the snarky, fairly brainy site Boulevard Voltaire, is underwhelmed:

Nobel de littérature : aujourd’hui Bob Dylan, demain un « twittérateur »

http://www.bvoltaire.fr/mariedelarue/nobel-de-litterature-aujourdhui-bob-dylan-demain-un-twitterateur,288740

They offer a political décryptage for the Committee’s choice, which I leave to your perusal.  That the choice might be politically motivated is not out of the question:  certainly this year’s choice for the (always highly politicized) Peace Prize makes no sense at all aside from such a perspective.  (And it’s not the obvious one -- nothing to do with the FARC really.  But my keyboard is running out of pixels, so you’ll have to figure it out for yourselves.)

~

Back to the blind bard of the Achaeans.

Whatever might have been their origin in oral performance, some folks have felt that such hit ditties as “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” read pretty well on paper too.  Whereas Zimmerman’s lyrics, so displayed, are thin stuff.  He himself took them seriously as poetry; the lyrics were printed in full on the backs of his albums of circa 1965. 

I recall in the late ‘sixties, when (excellent) bootleg albums  were appearing (like the Basement Tapes), a book of poems came out, Tarantula.    Still very much a fan, I almost bought a copy, but, glancing at it first, was obliged to toss it aside.  (Lennon’s In his own Write was actually amusing by comparison.  Heck, I even enjoyed Ono’s Grapefruit -- now there’s a collecter’s item.)

It is no knock on his song-lyrics as lyrics  to say that they fail to impress on the printed page.   One of the finest lines of all time, from the world of popular music, goes:

Bom ba-bom bom,  ba-dang ba-dang dang,

ba-ding ba-dong ding   BLUE MOON.

No seriously, it’s great;  but you have to hear it, not read it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eMkH0s3Vpc

Okay, that said:  We could still defend the Committee’s decision on the grounds that it recognizes the oeuvre, not sub specie printed poetry, like that of the modern eye-poets, but as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the music no more abstractable from than lyrics  than flesh from bones, or “The Godfather” from its soundtrack.

In any event, the Nobel committee was not the first to consider pop lyrics an integral part of the poetic canon, next to T.S. Eliot  and all the rest.  For, the anthology of American poetry published in 2000 by the prestigious Library of America, includes ditties from Tin Pan Alley (Ira Gerschwin, Lorenz Hart) and Delta Blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson  et alia).   And indeed, as I near the end of reading through both volumes, it may be affirmed that those offerings, while hardly standouts, are at least entertaining and worth reading  -- an evaluation that I would deny to (alas) a great deal that made it into these volumes, and that from  celebrated pens.

[Update 26 March 2017]  A judicious and enjoyable survey of the state of affairs, by David Orr, may be savored here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/after-dylans-nobel-what-makes-a-poet-a-poet.html

 

Islandia delenda est !

This site was the first (and actually the last) to report  the all-out seaborne assault of the formidable Icelandic navy, against the freedom-loving people’s popular emirate of the liberationally-empowered populistical Islamic State of Azawad:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/04/breaking-news-iceland-declares-war-on.html

Swiftly, AQMI and Abu-Mitt ag-Romney formed a coalition to repel the onslaught:

And what of the enemies of the free and independent Caliphate of People’s Liberated Azawad, such as the blood-sucking Icelandic warmongers (whom Allah confound, and to whom the Azawadis refer to pejoratively, with an ethnic epithet, as  “Vikings”) ?

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/04/romney-aqim-to-join-forces-in-free.html

Yet now, in the face of the latest shameless provocation islandaise,

Des poussières volcaniques islandaises polluent le nord de la France

http://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/2014/09/25/01008-20140925ARTFIG00256-pollution-des-poussieres-du-volcan-islandais-au-dessus-de-la-france.php

Riemannistan can only call for:  War to the Knife !!

Iceland's merciless plutonic onslaught

“Desolation Row” -- Norwegian version

Bob Dylan’s legendary concert in Oslo,  15 October 1965, offered an early version of the classic ballad “Desolation Row” -- in Norwegian! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Note -- This is not a cover!  Even though he is singing in what is obviously a Scandinavian language, fans will still easily recognize the peculiar phrasing and inflections of the Midwest master.

This is the first time he is known to have sung in the heritage language of the Vikings (to whom Robert Zimmerman is related on his mother’s side) -- or indeed, in any Germanic language other than English.

Dylan in Oslo

Mor, gi meg solen!

So -- enjoy!

And note:  All proceeds from this concert, go towards the charity,   “Save the Gefillte Fish”.

You may also enjoy this version of “Desolation Row”, sung by Dylan in a concert at Gallaudet University  in American Sign Language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWq_sOMoq9w

As for his little-known Tel Aviv concert in Hebrew, we must leave this for another time;  but a (grainy) video can be viewed here:

            געפֿילטע פֿיש

[Note:  Hebrew is written from right to left, but read from left to right.  Or is it the other way around?  Anyhow, apologies if my text-editor mangled things during the copy-and-paste process.    Me I haven’t a clue -- those meaningless squiggles are Greek to me.]

~

I studied Old Norse at Berkeley (with Madison Beeler, a gentle old man;  he bequeathed me his complete Grimm’s Wörterbuch when he retired, though I proved unworthy as a bailee).  That sturdy Viking tongue has changed as little, in the past thousand years, as any language on earth.  Accordingly, I can more or less read modern Icelandic.

Norwegian is a different kettle of kippers, however.  Even so, though I am not expert here, it does appear to my unpracticed ear that Mr Dylan (or his Norwegian lyricist) has taken certain liberties with the text.   The whole thing seems to have come out rather a tergo, if you catch my drift.  For, with all due attention to the disparity between the eastern and the western dialects of Norway, the weakening of strong verbs over time, and the Bokmål/Nynorsk/Riksmål/Høgnorsk tetraglossia, what he seems to be singing is:

Paul is dead

dead dead dead

deader than deader than

deader than death itself --

done-for, doomed, down, deceased,
dousing the daisies,

displacing the dandelions,

departed in demise.

O save the gefillte,

the poor dear gefillte,

for pity’s sake:

Save the Gefillte Fish!

~

“Desolation Row” is an affecting song, in a hypnotic sort of way;  but it contains (among many gems) some of the worst lyrics that Dylan ever wrote:  which is to say, the worst that anyone ever wrote.   Couplets like

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood / with his memories in a trunk,

passed this way an hour ago / with his friend, some jealous monk.

tells you nothing of value, either about the father of Relativity, or the hero of the greenwood, or monasticism.    And the further observation, that the celebrated physicist “went off sniffing drainpipes, and reciting the alphabet”,  has little competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Award ™  (a contest actually unfair to Mr. Bulwer-Lytton, who never wrote anything as bad as that).

The Norwegian lyrics are in some ways preferable.

Even so, his delivery is (as ever, in the early/middle period) exquisite.  In the couplet above, the final word of each line  receives is articulated with an aspirated final -k, perfectly attuned to his sardonic mode.   This phonetic polemic power simply deserves a better excipient (classically, in “Positively 4^th Street”).

In the same song, he uses that same word-final plosive to good effect  in the better couplet

I received your letter yesterday,  about the time the doorknob b-broke-hh.

When you asked me how I was doing -- was that some kind of j-joke-hh.

Simply  bare on the page,  that may be  unimpressive;   but his delivery evokes, from that,
a poignancy
impossible to imagine,
unless you have   (suffering, clutching)
heard it.

~

Hmm.  This wonderful nice post has received remarkably few page-views.  Can it possibly be because people think I might just be having them on?   Or is it rather that it features tew few newd pixxx?  Well that is easily remedied!

Icelandic beauty Aurelia Delvaukisdottir

(Ah, nice.  The number of pageviews just doubled.

There’s a lesson in this …)

Dylan’s intonation in this song is by no means unrelievedly sardonic (and here I speak of the album version, as well as bootleg performances of the time, rather than the Norwegian, which instead is characterized by a certain je ne sais quelle mélancolie du nord -- those endless summer days, those long winter nights), but can be, where the lyrics warrant it, quite tender.

~

The above was mostly satire -- or rather, sotie:  having fun with something, not making fun of it.  All in fun;  no harm done.

Yet let us dig down another layer.

This is a strange and slippery business, these backwards soundtracks.   Very few recordings could be illuminated (let alone improved) by this.   Those that admit it, must be (hypothesis here) hypnotic to begin with.   That is, the delivery and the lyrics  must already proceed  from the land of dreams.  The reversal -- rerouting, from the Gates of Ivory, to the Gates of Horn.

We have previously highlighted the reversed version of “Rain” .  Here, the fit is perfect.   The original was already so “aturdido”, that the two are simply duals of each other.  With equal justice, you might say that the album recording  was a reversed version of this one.  (In mathematics, neither dual is privileged w.r.t. the other.)

~

And noch another layer, now:
wir möchten, in des Wiener Nervenarzt Gesellschaft,  etwas weiter hinunterwühlen.   
Of all unexpected things, that satirically-intended photograph above of Mlle. Aurélie Delvaux,  has sparked an insight.   It has to do with duality,  and reversal.

The fascination of that image  presents, upon further reflection, a puzzle.  And puzzles ask to be fiddled with, turned this way and that, and  if possible  taken apart.

For the normally constituted observer, the nates are devoid of interest;  the star of the show, apud virum -- the main course, so far -- hangs (or, circumstances being favorable, stands) in front.

Yet the homologous spot chez la femelle, seems to be somehow lacking something;  in certain stages of arrested development, the attention then swings wildly, to the rear.  The latter (dull flesh, of no procreative power) thus receives the cathexis that, by rights, should settle vorne. 

~

By the time  “Desolation Row” debuted, I was as much a Dylan fan, as the little teeny-tweeny girls (my future bride among them) were Beatles fans.   I had my acoustic guitar, and a harmonica in a holder;  much as, in 1956, I’d had a coonskin cap.  So when I say now that lines like “Einstein disguised” etc. are pretty random, versteht sich:  when the album came out, in 1965, I hearkened to it, every word, with the same intensity as Orphée listening to  “L’oiseau chante … avec ses doigts”.  And the lyrics of that song marked my own  for a time, for better or worse:  as, this poem,

            Mardi Gras

which sprang from the brow of “Desolation Row”, with lyrics like:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging;

they’re painting the passports brown.

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors;

the circus is in town.

~

Okay, all satire aside:  What is Desolation Row, exactly?  It is nothing so simple as an Unhappy Place.

Heard superficially, “Desolation Row” sounds like a bummer, a place you’d want to escape from if bad luck landed you there -- something like Cleveland.   But listen to the lyrics.

First, for those outside, it is a Strange Attractor:

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row

Next,  some people voluntarily go there -- indeed, “escape”:  not from it, but to it:

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row”

And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

And in the final stanza of the song -- one of his finest lyrics -- Dylan makes plain that, if you do not understand the meaning and the milieu of Desolation Row,  you are not on his wavelength, and attempts at communication are pointless:

Right now  -- I can’t - réad tóo góod --
Don’t send me no more - letters, -- no-o-o …

Not unless // you mail them from :

Deh-soh-la-tion -- Row.

Lyrically, this hearks back to that immortal ballad, Birmingham Jail:

Write me a let-ter / send it by mail,

send it in care  of / the Birmingham jail.

I well understand what Dylan is talking about in this song -- I sought to go there myself, back in the sixties, when I would suck-down a Camel while listening to “Visions of Johanna”.  Laus deo, that much is now behind me.

Desolation Row is like Hell as depicted by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (unloved, but clung-to by its miserable inhabitants), or like the neurosis of a patient whose epinosic gain precludes cure by analysis.

Anagogic jokes (re-upped)

Back in the late ‘70s, while Haj Ross was visiting Berkeley, he and George Lakoff and a couple of others put on an informal Friday-afternoon “Humor Workshop”.   These sessions I attended with pleasure, and initially with anticipation, wondering to what depths of analysis  these premier talents of linguistics would plumb.  As it turned out, mostly people just told jokes, laughed, and passed on to the next one.    About the first joke anyone told was this one:

            Q:  Why is a rat’s turd  tapered at both ends?

            A: So the rat’s asshole won’t snap shut.

After the chuckles died down, someone duly asked,  “Well, why is that funny?” 

Some puzzled looks, and half-hearted attempts at lucubration;  then, “Well, because it’s true.”

That was about as deep as exegesis was to go.

Stop me if you've heard this one

Still, they were good jokes, which yet I remember and continue to tell, after  lo  these many winters have struck these oak locks ashen.   Many were scatalogical;  yet as I sat there, as yet unbaptized   but created for a better world,  it struck me that a great many of the jokes had what we may term an anagogic moment -- something striving upwards and beyond the confines of our sorry japery.   If time permits and I am spared, I may share with you some examples and analysis.

~     ~     ~ 

Our colleague, friend, and spiritual advisor, Dr. Keith Massey, Webmaster and artistic director of this very site, has just posted a joke of his own, which he told me many years ago in response to my request for Lutheran Humor:  Sven and Ole, and the beast of burden.   It happens to feature the same humble orifice as in the joke above, whose lowly but essential labors  go largely unsung by scop or bard.

Listen to him tell it  as only a Norwegian can tell it.  A bit later this evening (again, if I am spared), when the G., in close cooperation with the T., has had time to complete its merciful work, cleansing the arterioles of the dust of human toil, I may return to the task  as one newly armed,  and explain what we may hear there -- what melody tolls behind the simple text.

~

There is a category of jokes that make fun of simpletons, usually from an identified town or rural area.   For Denmark (to remain in the Scandinavian sphere for now), the butt of such jokes is Aarhus.

Here is an Aarhus meta-joke:

At a convivial table, one present announces that he will now tell a joke about some simpletons from Aarhus.

Someone coughs and speaks up, albeit hesitantly.  “Please…bear in mind… that I myself am from Aarhus.”

The jokester waves a dismissive hand.  “That’s all right -- I’ll tell it slowly.”

Now, as our Wisconsin-Norwegian joke starts out, with the amiable but not overly intellectual pair of farmers Sven and Ole, it looks as though it may fall into this genre.  But matters take a surprising -- and Christian -- twist.

So:  Sven and Ole cannot agree on whether their faithful beast of burden is a donkey or a mule.  So, they go to the man they most respect:  Pastor Thorlitsen.  He renders a Solomonic decision that spares the feelings of both:  they are to call the animal by its Biblical name, the ass.

Now at this point -- all of us having been eight years old at some point -- we know perfectly well what is coming.   A pun, a dumb pun, involving buttocks.  How is this joke-in-progress going to manage to be any good at all, assuming you’re older than eight?

We are given a good long time to ponder this paradox, as the telling rather rambles on, shaggy-dog fashion.  Finally, the faithful farmers are digging a deep grave for their departed quadruped, longtime companion of their tilling toils.   A passer-by says, mockingly,  “What’re y’digging, a fox-hole?”

“Not according to Pastor Thorlitsen!” they reply.

And thus endeth the joke.  That was the punchline.

ROFL !!

Now, the strange and rather wondrous thing is that, for a second or two, I didn’t get it.   Despite having known roughly what was coming -- indeed, despite having heard this exact same joke some years before, told by this very same deipnosophist -- all I could think of was the goodness and wisdom of Pastor Thorlitsen. 

“Are you digging a fox-hole in fear of imaginary armies, here in the peaceful pastures of Wisconsin?” -- “Nay, for we put our whole trust in the Lord, as preached by Pastor Thorlitsen!”

“Is life a meaningless charade, our toil all for naught, with nothing that awaits us but the grave?”  -- “O nay and fie, we seek eternal life, guided by our shepherd, Pastor Thorlitsen!”

“And is that sad dead beast a mere sack of offal, soon to be forgotten by all but the worms?” -- “O nay, for ‘tis the very image and emblem of that same faithful mount, which bore our Lord into Jerusalem.   God bless this beast, God bless us men and animals all, and God bless Pastor Thorlitsen!”

For a couple of seconds, I was in a hazy state of grace.  But now mark:   What makes the joke finally, triumphantly, so wonderful, is that, by implication, Sven and Ole never do notice the pun.  Their hearts are filled with love, their minds with reverence, they are quite beyond the reach of such crude mockery.   And so the passer-by passes on  -- lo, we know him, for he is dusty, from walking up and down in the Earth;  yet here he finds no prey, among these simple Christians.  Thanks to Pastor Thorlitsen.

THANK U, Lord, 4 Pastor Thorlitsen !!

~

~   ~

For a story  of epiphany,

try this:

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

[Kindle] [Nook]

~   ~

~

 

[To be continued, D.V...]

Norwegian Heritage Minute

This month, as we are incessantly reminded by the media, is “Hispanic Heritage Month”.   My own workplace is no exception, sending out jolly little emails from top management, and organizing bubbly festivities.  The only problem is that, owing to special circumstances, this workplace -- although it employs tens of thousands of workers, and has been in existence for many decades -- numbers few Hispanics among its ranks.  (Far fewer than Blacks, for example.)  There are some among outside contractors that come in now and then to work on the gardens, during summer months, but those do not come inside the building.  

Nothing daunted, our management meets the difficulty (which is obvious to everyone) by proclaiming that the Hispanic contribution has been “crucial but hidden”.   This is a strategy, one notices,  recently adopted by feminoids (as I shall dub the P.C. media fellow-travelers who make a living “celebrating” this and that, while preserving intelligent feminists from any associated stain) when trumpeting the supposed role of women in whatever -- rocket science, lumberjacking, computer science, pro football, you name it:  they state that the role is “hidden”, implying that it is robust but suppressed.

~

It now strikes me that, just from among those I have personally known quite well, there are more fellow-workers -- and these, indeed, among the most outstanding -- of Norwegian heritage, than all the Hispanophone or Lusophone nations of the Americas put together.   It is only because I know them well personally that I even learned their ethnic background;  obviously, no one ever talks about it, let alone wears it on their sleeve or demands special treatment; for all I know, fifty percent of everyone I have ever met there is a Norwegian-American; the subject just never comes up.

Accordingly, after a major lobbying effort, the Director has finally authorized an unofficial

Norwegian Heritage Minute

This is to be observed silently and privately within the confines of your own corner of your assigned workpod,  outside of working hours, and not to exceed fifty-nine (59) seconds, otherwise it will be deducted from your paycheck.

Oleanna

“Little roasted piggies  rush around the city street

 inquiring so politely  if you’d like slice of ham to eat.”

 -- Norwegian folksong, “Oleanna”

A lovely remembrance from summer-camp days (whose music I have eulogized here).  It evokes, if not Eden, at least Schlaraffenland. 

Cockaigne / Pays de Cocagne

A corn-cum-cabaret version of the song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w87QhQ2gog

A musically more intricate version, by kids:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCDW9DoFbqY&feature=related

And yet that image, of the little pigs offering themselves to be ingested, which to a child is just “funny” and “silly”, is so much darker  in our fallen world.  Thus the paradigm case of Bernd Jürgen Brandes, who showed up at the door of Herr Meiwes, virtually (as in Breughel’s painting) with the knife already in him, to volunteer as an hors d’oeuvre…

The case is baffling.   Not so much criminal  -- indeed German law found itself in a pickle (hm, unfortunate choice of words) even to deal with it -- not so much merely criminal, as downright Satanic, and scarcely to be comprehended from any other angle.  (Particularly not the Darwinian:  Consult our essay here.)  

[Update 31 May 2012]  It's even worse than we thought:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/05/necrophilia-not-that-theres-anything.html

.

Breaking News: Iceland declares war on Azawad

In a canny move of triangulation, designed to distract the attention of the voters from the ongoing financial meltdown,  Iceland today declared war on the newly free and independent state of Azawad.   The reaction on Wall Street was favorable.  “You get the ‘moral equivalent of war’, so that the workers will get in line and drop their wage demands, but without the expense and bother of actually fighting.”

In a surprise development, the newly-founded free and independent Popular People’s Republic of Azawad, apparently having not got the memo to the effect that Western politicians need not mean what they say, took the declaration seriously, and announced the initiation of hostilities.  But in a comic mishap of the sort that history is filled with, owing to a typographical error, Azawad declared war on Ireland rather than Iceland.   (Professional historians will recall the amusing incident  in which the Neo-Cons, desiring to invade Iran,  accidentally invaded Iraq instead.)  That automatically triggered the Ireland - Scotland mutual defense treaty, which dates back to the Middle Ages (Concordia Eire - Caledonia);  this in turn dragged in the entire navy of the British Empire.

Feeling cornered and unfairly outnumbered, Azawad has accordingly launched wave upon wave of suicide bombers against all the major capitals of northern Europe.   The response of Europeans so far has been to panic and flee -- some of them, ironically, requesting asylum in Azawad, which has quickly become the #1 destination for opportunist exiles.

Icelandic warfleet  takes to the waves

Speaking through an interpreter in the Touareg dialect, newly-installed Azawadi Prime Minister Abu-Mitt ag Romney observed:  “We see this, not as a problem, but as an investment opportunity. In war-torn Iraq, Cheney and Halliburton demonstrated how easy it is for insiders to make out big-time; personally I shall be selling armaments to both sides:  Now that that upstart Victor Bout is off the playing-field, I shall have little competition. As for what Obama’s response might be, I condemn it in advance.”

Azawad’s Minister of Tourism le Docteur Justice (speaking in French) chimed in  in agreement:  “Ceci ne nuira à notre saison touristique en aucun degré.  Inscrivez-vous donc  chez  Tourisme Franco-Azawadi ®.   Simplement, il faut s’éloigner un peu  des régions en flammes.”