From The Times

April 18, 2009

Bob Dylan may dismiss himself as 'a song and dance man' but critics cite him as a major cultural force of our age

Alan Franks

Just like the singer himself, the debate about whether Bob Dylan is as good as John Keats never goes away for long. It's back again now, as he is. And while he tours the arenas of Britain and releases yet another album of his songs, Dylan-versus-Keats offers the strange diversion of literary critics bringing their classical intellects and professional vocabulary to bear on rock'n'roll. Because Dylan can be called, among many other things, a pop star, it has been easy for such scrutiny to be ridiculed as a case of sledgehammers and walnuts. But the years have proved the truth of one of his most banal observations; the times have indeed a-changed, and if you can bring yourself to accept that he is a poet, then he is now as highly regarded as any at work today in the English language. No one in the supposedly low arts has ever drawn more high-minded attention than Bob Dylan.

There is almost too much of it. More than a thousand books about the 67-year-old father of lit.rock have been published in English. About twice that number if you add the works in 27 other languages. There are many reasons: first, and most obviously, he has been turning out the songs for nearly half a century. These too probably number about a thousand. By any standards it is a mighty and varied body of work. His longevity means that people who spent - indeed whose parents spent - their teenage years listening to him are now established writers and critics themselves, and so setting the tone of the debate.

Even the critiquing of Bob Dylan has a tradition. For the British, there are several crucial players. They include Professor Christopher Ricks, now 75, whose long-contemplated book, Dylan's Visions of Sin, finally came out in 2003; and the late Wilfred Mellers, who was the University of York's first Professor of Music in the 1960s. Their colleagues may have been bemused at their interest in this cowboy-sounding waif. There was no getting round that voice, hence no possibility of engagement with what it was saying. But to the young audience who were enjoying the cleverness of his rebellion, here were credible allies. After all, Ricks was an Oxford professor. He was an authority on Milton, Tennyson, Keats and Eliot. When he expressed his approval for songs with such lines as “In the museum infinity goes up on trial”, or “Though I know that evening's empire has returned into sand”, he did so from a vantage point with a long perspective.

This did not mean that all the writing was good, or even readily comprehensible - as Mellers said of the singer's ballad origins: “In the world of the ‘poor white', the grand modal themes survive, but the line becomes harder, tighter, the rhythm more cabined and confined in the metres of hymnody ... The happiness is eupeptic, even if also a bit euphoric; for the shutting out of pain involves a wilful hardening of sensibility.”

Then there is Michael Gray, a former student of the renowned critic F.R.Leavis, and author of the compendious new Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and Clinton Heylin, whose analytical history of Dylan's songs, Revolution in the Air, is published next week. Gray is widely credited with a new kind of critical writing that takes account of the fact that while the lyrics of the songs may be poetic, and therefore inspected as poetry, they remain just one part of the genre.

The point is echoed by Ricks, who now teaches at Boston University and gives talks on Dylan. He says you have to bear in mind that there are three strands - the words, the music and, like it or not, the voice. “For that reason the business about whether Dylan is better than Keats seems perhaps idle ... what seems certain to me is that he does stand comparison with the very greatest poets.”

Even Ricks has no idea of the number of US universities running courses that offer Dylan studies. What is certain is that he is now officially recognised in academe as a great of American letters. Last year brought the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, with a collection of scholarly essays by contributors from Yale and other distinguished institutes. The Oxford Book of American Poetry carries the lyrics of Desolation Row, the long bleak song that Ricks once called Dylan's Waste Land. A high school textbook, The Norton Introduction to Literature, prints the lyrics of Mr Tambourine Man. Our own Poet Laureate Andrew Motion says Dylan is the most important artist working today, anywhere and in any field.

When it comes to what is being said and written about him, Dylan himself has always seemed to be somewhere between uninterested and disdainful. In an ongoing conversation with Bill Flanagan, currently being published on his website, Dylan recently said he finally felt ‘freed up', “I see that my audience now ... feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don't hang anybody up. Like if there's an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it's not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value.” In his Chronicles, however, he despairs at the Dylan freaks clambering over his roof while he and his first wife Sara are trying to raise their young family in upstate New York. One of the reasons he is reckoned fair game by his analysts is that he himself seems to be littering his own trails with cultural clues, whether he is noting that “No one ever sang the blues like Blind Willie McTell”, or invoking Verlaine and Rimbaud, or spotting “Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot/Fighting in the captain's tower”.

At the University of Illinois at Springfield, Professor of English Dr Bill Carpenter has started a summer course called “Bob Dylan's America”, which studies the relationship between the songs, their author, and “the different communities with which he has interacted”. Themes include civil rights activism, evangelical Christianity and the millennial generation. “There was such a huge shift in everything when he appeared,” Dr Carpenter says, “and you can still see its effects everywhere.”

He also says the young of today have discovered Dylan's work, whether through their own networks or their parents'/grandparents' shelves. This point is made by enthusiasts of all sorts. Reasons include the success of Chronicles; the 2005 Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home, in which he spoke eloquently about his life and influences; his emergence as a thoughtful and witty presenter on the Theme Time Radio Hour music shows; the sheer quality of his most recent records, one of which, Modern Times in 2006, made him the oldest artist to top the US album chart; the anticipation of the new album. “Raw-country love songs, sly wordplay ... seductive border-café feel,” says Rolling Stone. You don't need a PhD to join in. That's the fun thing about having a Pulitzer prize-winning world poet who is also enough of a good old-fashioned rock star to command a “Dress Like Bob Dylan” spread in The Sun. A degree of nerdishness helps. A Brooklyn fan called A.J. Weberman founded the critical approach known as garbology, which entailed going through the singer's rubbish bin for signs and clues.

Today the sifting can be conducted by search engine. New Dylan albums are routinely Googled to within an inch of their life. Some dogged Dylanologists detected similarities between the lyrics of Modern Times and the work of a little-known poet of the American Civil War, Henry Timrod. “More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours,” sings Dylan on When the Deal Goes Down. “A round of precious hours,” wrote Timrod, “Oh! Here, where in that summer noon I basked/ And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.”

He has always borrowed. The more purist of his detractors say that word should be put in quotation marks because he doesn't credit his lenders. According to old friends of the teenage Robert Zimmerman in his home town of Hibbing, Minnesota - where there is now a Bob Dylan museum - he also failed to return their LPs. But then it was his deep, early knowledge of the oral music tradition that made his own material so substantial. So what you had, and have, is a musician steeped in the folk song of Britain and Ireland, the blues and gospel of his own country, the rock that evolved from them, the narrative ballads of his hero Woody Guthrie, and much besides.

Beyond this there was, crucially, the non-musical influence of the Beat Poets of the 1960s, particularly the late Allen Ginsberg, whom he befriended, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, still writing at 90. There are dozens of Dylan's songs in which you hear the same verbal energy as in Ginsberg's 1956 poem Howl, or, for that matter, the imagery of Poe or the long, winding lines of Walt Whitman. There had been plenty of great songwriters before Dylan, none more so than Cole Porter. From him and his peers came sublime marriages of wit and passion - “the Tinpantithesis of Melody” - but there had never been popular music with stanzas of such literate complexity or wild flights of expressionism. That is where the great change came; that is what set the critics going and keeps them at it.

Just as there are good and bad singers, there are good and bad critics. Elizabeth Thompson, a former editor of Publishing News and the compiler of several books on Dylan, has her doubts about the value of the pursuit. “Some of the dissertations I've read are just badly written, and with poor scholarship,” she says. “The same rigour should be applied to this kind of research as any other.”

“All musicians need listeners more than they need critics,” Ricks says, “just as all playwrights need audiences more than they need theatre critics. Yet it's true that they [critics] can mediate usefully. For example, I'm grateful to Harold Hobson for writing about Samuel Beckett as he did.”

As many are to F.R.Leavis for writing about T.S. Eliot as he did. What would he (Leavis) have made of Bob Dylan and all his works? “Oh, I don't think he would have comprehended it,” says Michael Gray,” although, if he had been young when Dylan came through, then I think he would have recognised Dylan's strength, just as he had with Eliot.”

Anyone who values Leavis's critical principles must return to the text. The trouble is that with Dylan there isn't really a text, and what there is keeps altering. Round and round he goes on his never-ending tour, 100 gigs a year, each time tearing down the familiar shapes of the songs and throwing up strange new ones, deliberately missing the old notes by a mile. As has been said of him so often, the only constant thing about him is his shape-shifting. Protean is the expensive word. It makes the spectacle of Dylan-hunting faintly hilarious. It always has. The title of Todd Haynes 2007 film about him, I'm Not There, was right on the money. As one critic said with a laugh: “The trouble is, he isn't dead.”

So here's one critical certainty. If you think there will be a last word - epilogue, coda, postscript - on this professionally elusive subject, you're plain wrong.

[EDLIS Notes]

Here is a nice discussion of how Dylan has been addressed by academia and the publishing world in the past.

From The Sunday Times

September 12, 2004

Are university awards being cheapened by handouts to soap actors and pop stars, asks Judith O’Reilly

A degree these days costs three years of a student’s life and up to £20,000 by the time tuition fees and living costs are taken into account. For a fortunate few, however, there is a way round investing large amounts of time and money — appear in a reality TV show, manage a football club or tell a couple of funny jokes. Welcome to the world of the honorary degree.

Musicians were in particular favour at this year’s graduation ceremonies. St Andrews had the headline act, awarding Bob Dylan an honorary doctorate of music. The American rock icon, who has only ever accepted one other honorary degree, from Princeton, was seen to stifle yawns during the ceremony.

Bee Gees Robin and Barry Gibb also became doctors of music, sharing the award with their late brother, Maurice. They received their degree from the University of Manchester. Their musical careers began in the city before the family’s emigration to Australia.

Dylan and the Bee Gees join a growing band of popular musicians to be honoured in this way. The list encompasses some unlikely names. In 2002, for example, the University of Wolverhampton awarded honorary degrees to glam rockers Slade, whose creative approach to spelling was displayed on 1970s hits such as Mama Weer All Crazee Now and Gudbuy t’Jane.

For an academic institution, such populism would once have been unthinkable. Traditionally an honorary degree was a university’s way of marking excellence and achievement. Cambridge claims it only awards them to “members of the royal family, British subjects who are of conspicuous merit or have done good service to the state or to the university, and foreigners of distinction”. The roll call of those deemed sufficiently worthy by the university includes Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa and, this year, jazz musicians John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine.

The reason universities are willing to confer honours on celebrities is that both sides win. The university gets publicity by reaching out an academic hand of welcome to someone famous, while the personality gets to wear scarlet gowns with silk facings and soft black velvet bonnets — sometimes with a golden tassel.

Sometimes nobody is more surprised by the award than the recipients themselves. When the Bee Gees received their honorary degree, Barry Gibb commented: “People who do what we do don’t expect something like this.”

According to Mark Griffiths, professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent University, a famous personality can find an honorary degree immensely validating. “It can be a big boost to the person’s self-esteem to get a degree, particularly if they didn’t go to university. After all, people give to society in different ways. If somebody has made you laugh or made you feel good with a concert, why should they have less precedence that someone who designs a building, for instance?” The way the awards system works is that nominations from the university community are put before a committee of academics, who consider whether the nominees meet the criteria for their institution’s award. (The most famous rejection was of Margaret Thatcher, who was snubbed by Oxford academics while she was prime minister.) The nominee is then approached to see if he or she is willing to accept the honour.

The first occasion an honorary degree was awarded was in 1478 or 1479, to Lionel Woodville, dean of Exeter and brother-in-law of Edward IV. Oxford made him a doctor of canon law in a blatant bid to win the favour of a powerful man.

Universities may be interested in the power of publicity these days but they also seek to acknowledge their communities at the same time. One example of this trend is the honorary degree awarded by London Metropolitan University to Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. As Roderick Floud, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan, said: “Arsenal is very close to our north London campus and is very important to the community in which we work.”

Wenger is not football’s only honorary degree holder. This year Jack Charlton was honoured by the University of Leeds, and Italian football referee Pierluigi Collina by the University of Hull. Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson beat them both to it. He was awarded a degree jointly by Umist and Manchester Metropolitan in 1998.

Dr Tim Stibbs, secretary to the University of Manchester’s honorary degrees committee, defends the practice. “You don’t honour someone just because they are famous. There are many things we do in the local community to demonstrate we are not an ivory tower, and this would be one way of showing that.”

Writers are popular at graduation ceremonies. This year Joanne Rowling was honoured by the University of Edinburgh, while Bill Bryson was recognised by Durham University — which was only fair given the glowing comments about the city in his Notes from a Small Island.

Scriptwriter Andrew Davies, famous for adapting classics of English literature for television, was dubbed a doctor of letters by the University of Warwick. Davies also has degrees from Coventry, Cardiff, De Montfort and the Open University. He has now decided that his collection is all but complete. “It would be rude to turn them down, but I have enough now — except if University College London offered me one, because I was a student there.”

Davies’s son Bill spent three years working for a PhD in acoustics at Salford. He is less convinced about his father’s academic credentials.

“My son is quite sarcastic about it and says, ‘I had to work really hard for mine and they are just giving you them,’ Davies says. But he admits that “when you are at the ceremony you are also very aware that all the other poor buggers slogged their guts out for theirs.”

Davies’s five doctorates appear quite modest next to Sir David Attenborough’s tally, which is believed to be at least 19.

Universities are keen to capitalise on their local heroes, too. Warwick awarded an honorary doctorate to one of its graduates, Jennie Bond, the former royal correspondent for the BBC and star of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Liverpool John Moores honoured Cilla Black and actress Sue Johnston, star of Brookside and The Royle Family, with honorary fellowships.

For traditionalists, it has all gone a bit too far. Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham and himself holder of an honorary degree from Manchester, believes degrees should not just be a way of brightening up graduation ceremonies.

“The criterion these days is often that the honorary graduate is well known rather than they have made a distinctive contribution in their particular academic field,” Smithers says. “Now that particular public relations genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be stuffed back in. And that is all right — providing nobody takes it too seriously.”

 

[EDLIS Notes]

The Sunday Times broadens the subject to the advisability of the current crop of honorary degrees at universities.

By Natalie Finn

Thursday June 24, 2004 12:00 PM EDT

Bandphoto/UPPA/ZUMA

Until his abrupt departure, Bob Dylan looked more like a resting stone than a rolling stone on Wednesday, as he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Prince William's alma mater, Scotland's St. Andrew's University.

Dressed in a traditional, full-length graduation gown, Dylan, 63, sat heavy-lidded through an a cappella performance of "Blowin' in the Wind."

This was followed by opening remarks from English professor Neil Corcoran, an academic expert on Dylan's lyrics and editor of Do You, Mr. Jones?: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors.

"It goes without saying that his acceptance of our invitation deeply honors us," Corcoran said. "I feel incapable when I'm asked to say what Bob Dylan means to me in a few minutes. ... He keeps on keeping on."

The accredited Dylan fan went on to call the musician "one of the great writers of the drama of human relationship," noting such hits as "Lay, Lady, Lay" and "Tangled Up in Blue."

After hearing 20 minutes' worth of faculty members singing his praises, Dylan knelt down to accept a tap on the head from Chancellor Sir Kenneth Dover, making the degree official. The iconic musician bowed and took his seat without comment -- and soon after, slipped out through a side door.

A rep from the university press office had no comment on Dylan's reaction to the ceremony, saying it was a private affair.

Dylan has accepted only one other honorary degree before, from Princeton University in 1970. He was in Scotland to perform two concerts in Glasgow.

[EDLIS Notes]

So it takes four articles to get the full photo gallery of Dylan at St Andrews.

Last Updated: Wednesday, 23 June, 2004, 18:47 GMT 19:47 UK

Dylan receives honorary degree

Bob Dylan was made a Doctor of Music American folk-rock singer Bob Dylan has been awarded an honorary degree by Scotland's oldest university. The University of St Andrews made Bob Dylan a Doctor of Music at this year's summer graduation ceremony on Wednesday. Dylan has only ever accepted one other honorary degree - from Princeton University in 1970. A garden party which was planned for after the event had to be held in doors because of the bad weather. University principal, Dr Brian Lang, described Dylan as an "iconic figure for the 20th Century". Mr Lang added: "His songs, and in particular his lyrics, are still part of our consciousness. "We are very pleased to take this opportunity of honouring such a major artist."   The St Salvator's Chapel Choir performed its version of the Dylan classic, Blowin' in the Wind, before he stepped up to receive his degree. The singer-songwriter knelt on the stage before the university's chancellor, Sir Kenneth Dover, who performed the ceremony in Latin. Dylan was tapped on the head with the university's graduation cap, a late 17th Century doctor's birretum, which is thought to have been in use for the last 300 years.   Bob Dylan has only accepted one other honorary degree He turned and bowed after receiving his degree, to cheers and applause from the audience. Professor Neil Corcoran of the university's school of English said he was "deeply honoured" that Dylan had accepted the university's invitation. "For many of us Bob Dylan has been an extension of our consciousness and part of our growing up," he said. After the ceremony 23-year-old Jennifer Laurens, a graduate in social anthropology, said: "This is a very special day for St Andrews. "Considering that this is Bob Dylan's second degree and that he had agreed to travel to Scotland, it makes it an achievement for us all." Some Dylan fans were able to secure tickets for the event, while others waited outside in the rain in the hope of catching a glimpse of the star. Glasgow dates However, he left through a side door after the ceremony. Best known for classic hits such as Like a Rolling Stone and Mr Tambourine Man, the singer-songwriter is credited as being one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Fusing rock, country, folk and blues, Dylan's unique sound and political lyrical content made him a poetic spokesman for the 1960s generation. He remains as much an influence amongst current rock musicians as he was to the Beatles and the Stones in the sixties. The singer is currently on tour in Europe and, after receiving his honorary degree, will play the first of two nights in Glasgow.

[EDLIS Notes]

Here we have an image that is reminiscent of Dylan bowing before the Pope in the Vatican City.

Originally created 06/24/04

By Associated Press

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- Bob Dylan accepted an honorary doctor of music degree Wednesday from Scotland's oldest university. He was speechless, but a professor at the University of St. Andrews sang his praises.

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• Photos

 

 

"Many members of my generation can't separate a sense of our own identity from his music and lyrics," professor of English Neil Corcoran said in an awe-struck address.

Dylan's fusion of folk, blues, country, rock and poetry, Corcoran said, "moved everything on to a place it never expected to go and left the deepest imprint on human consciousness."

"His magnificent songs will last as long as song itself does," he added.

Founded in 1413, St. Andrews, northeast of Edinburgh, is Britain's third-oldest university and one of its most prestigious. Its current students include Prince William, second in line to the throne.

The university also awarded honorary degrees to Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam and Cheryll Tickle, one of Britain's leading biologists, along with degrees for 180 graduating students.

Dylan has accepted only one other honorary degree, from Princeton University in 1970.

[EDLIS Notes]

Another nice image of Dylan in his academic gown.

St. Andrews professor says singer defined a generation

David Cheskin  /  AP

Rock legend Bob Dylan waits on the stage of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, Wednesday, where he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Music from Sir Kenneth Dover, chancellor of the university, left. The American icon, whose hits include "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," has only ever accepted one other honorary degree, from Princeton University in 1970.

The Associated Press

updated 6/23/2004 5:30:59 PM ET 2004-06-23T21:30:59

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Bob Dylan’s lyrics have been taught in universities and debated at academic conferences. Not bad for a college dropout who railed, in “Tombstone Blues” against too much “useless and pointless knowledge.”

Well, the times they are a-changin’.

Dylan, dressed in a black academic gown, was awarded an honorary doctorate Wednesday by Scotland’s oldest university.

The University of St. Andrews said it was making Dylan, 63, an honorary Doctor of Music in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to musical and literary culture.”

“Many members of my generation can’t separate a sense of our own identity from his music and lyrics,” said professor of English Neil Corcoran in an awe-struck address.

Dylan’s fusion of folk, blues, country, rock and poetry, Corcoran said, “moved everything on to a place it never expected to go and left the deepest imprint on human consciousness.”

“His magnificent songs will last as long as song itself does,” he added.

Dylan, who received his doctorate alongside Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam and biologist Cheryll Tickle, arrived 50 minutes into the 90-minute ceremony and did not address the audience of 180 graduating students and their relatives. But his silent — and sometimes yawning — presence onstage brought a strong dose of star power to the university’s wood-paneled Younger Hall.

Dylan sat motionless and showed no reaction as a university choir performed a version of his early classic, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Founded in 1413, St. Andrews, northeast of Edinburgh, is Britain’s third-oldest university and one of its most prestigious. Its current students include Prince William, second in line to the throne.

Announcing the honorary degree earlier this month, university chancellor Brian Lang called Dylan “an iconic figure for the 20th century, particularly for those of us whose formative years were in the 1960s and ’70s.”

The university also cited Dylan’s long-standing interest in Scottish culture. Corcoran said Scottish folk songs and border ballads influenced his early work, while a later song, “Highlands,” is based on a poem by Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet.

The musician has many fans among postwar and baby boomer academics. Last month Christopher Ricks, author of the critical analysis “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” was elected Oxford University’s professor of poetry.

Corcoran said Dylan was “a supremely interesting and significant figure in modern culture.”

“I think he’s akin to Pablo Picasso in many ways — his staying power, his resilience, the metamorphoses of a very long career,” he told BBC radio.

Dylan, who is touring Britain, is due to play the first of two concerts in Glasgow on Wednesday night.

Dylan has accepted only one previous honorary degree, from Princeton in 1970 — a commencement ceremony memorable in part because of a noisy invasion of cicadas.

Dylan seems to have had mixed feelings about the event, which inspired the song “Day of the Locusts”:

“I put down my robe, picked up my diploma,
“Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive,
“Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota,
“Sure was glad to get out of there alive.”

[EDLIS Notes]

Of the many articles about Dylan receiving his honorary degree from St. Andrews, this one has the best photo. The Chancellor of the university is clearly enjoying himself immensely, while Dylan seems to be just hopin' he'll get out of there alive.

September 5, 2010

Dylan and the Intellectuals

Newscom

Bob Dylan, 1964

By Evan R. Goldstein

On a bright, hot day in 1970, Bob Dylan, clad in cap and gown, received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. Introduced as "the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America," Dylan cringed at the idea that his was the voice of a generation. He briefly considered walking off the dais. "Sure was glad to get out of there alive," he later crooned about the experience in the song "Day of the Locusts."

The pomp of a Princeton graduation ceremony may have left Dylan cold, but the feeling was not mutual. Indeed, few, if any, pop-culture figures have been as thoroughly embraced by intellectuals as Bob Dylan. His raspy snarl is ubiquitous in bookish circles. As the writer Alan Franks put it, "No one in the supposedly low arts has ever drawn more high-minded attention than Bob Dylan."

The first scholarly articles about Dylan began appearing in the late 1960s; the first book—Betsy Bowden's Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (Indiana University Press)—was published a decade later. (More than 1,000 books have reportedly been published on Dylan in English.) In 1998 devotees gathered at Stanford University for the first conference devoted to Dylan in the United States. And last year, Cambridge University Press published The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, placing the musician in the company of Baudelaire, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary giants. The Oxford Book of American Poetry, published in 2006, saw fit to include Dylan's song "Desolation Row."

Dylan's impact even extends into the realm of legal studies. According to an article published in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Dylan is the most-cited songwriter in both judicial opinions and law-journal articles. (The Beatles are a distant second.) Glancing at the bounty of scholarship on Dylan, the critic Richard Goldstein wryly cracked in The Nation: "Welcome to the Rolling Tenure Review."

Why are intellectuals so besotted with Dylan? It seems a good moment to ask. A boomlet of Dylan books will soon be upon us. In addition to the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz's new book, Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday), PublicAffairs will in October release a collection of essays from Greil Marcus—dean of Dylan critics—titled simply Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. Next year Yale University Press will publish two Dylan biographies: Bob Dylan, by Ron Rosenbaum, is part of the Jewish Lives series; Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, by David Yaffe, is part of the Icons of America series and will appear in May, in time for Dylan's 70th birthday. Yaffe, an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, says he isn't discouraged that his is not the only Dylan book in progress—indeed, not even the only one at Yale Press. He was consoled by the words of another Dylan chronicler—David Hajdu—who explained a truism about writing a book on Dylan: You can be sure that other Dylan books will come out right before and right after your own is published.

So why do so many professional thinkers spend their time thinking and writing about Dylan? I asked Christopher Ricks, who responded with incredulity: Why would intellectuals not be drawn to Dylan's work? After all, he says by e-mail, Dylan "has a Shakespearean width of appeal." Ricks is a professor of the humanities at Boston University, author of Dylan's Visions of Sin (Viking, 2003), and the man famous for turning his critical gaze from Keats and Tennyson to Dylan. Ricks's insistence that scholars' fixation on Dylan is natural, even inevitable, is echoed by Benjamin Hedin, editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader (W.W. Norton, 2004), who has observed, "The excited teenagers and college students who stayed up all night hoping to decipher 'Maggie's Farm' became professors, journalists, and other leaders of the educational hierarchy."

Dylan, in short, is familiar to the bulk of book-publishing academics, a point that Joshua Clover, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, picks up on in an e-mail: "It's not simply that Dylan's great, which he is, and historically pivotal. When scholars, out of revelation or anxiety, decide to attend to popular culture—decide to take a pass at being cool—they will gravitate to the culture for which they already have a vocabulary, and about which there is no potential embarrassment." There is, Clover adds, a cynical corollary to this argument: Academe exists to validate certain ideas, not least, Clover says, that "white men should be recognized as transcendently great in as many fields as possible." To celebrate Dylan is, for boomer intellectuals, to celebrate themselves; Dylan's story—wunderkind becomes confused seeker who reclaims his genius in middle age—is the story that boomers want to tell about their whole generation. "What boomer wouldn't go gaga for such a story?" Clover asks.

Other theories abound. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, a professor of English at Pomona College and editor of The Cambridge Companion (and occasional contributor to The Chronicle Review), explains Dylan's allure to scholars in terms of timing. "Dylan came to public prominence at precisely the moment that departments of English were seeking to break down traditional barriers between 'high' and 'low' culture." Dylan—steeped in the poetry and literature of his time—was an ideal candidate to fill the breach. He is a "crossover figure," says the Princeton University poet Paul Muldoon; Dylan is an attractive subject both to scholars uninterested in rock 'n' roll and to rock 'n' rollers uninterested in scholarship.

Morris Dickstein sees something else. Dickstein, a cultural historian who wrote about Dylan in his 1977 book, Gates of Eden (Basic Books), says in an e-mail: "Dylan himself is not an intellectual, but early on he cast himself as the kind of outlaw/rebel figure that has always fascinated intellectuals, who themselves often have bohemian inclinations yet usually lead much more staid lives."

There is no grand unified theory to explain Dylan's intellectual appeal. And to pose the question, suggests Greil Marcus, is to risk overthinking a phenomenon that is, at root, visceral. Marcus first saw Dylan perform in 1963; he wrote his first article about Dylan five years later, and he hasn't stopped. Marcus explains his fixation like this: "I don't think about it, I just do it, or rather can't help it."

[EDLIS Notes]

Here we have a discussion of Dylan's place in academia from The Chronicle of Higher Education, published in September 2010. Surely we can consider them the authorities about higher education, right?

Like a Stone That Keeps Rolling: Bob Dylan's 'Time Out of Mind' album has reminded everyone of his status in rock's pantheon.

These days, Bob Dylan is more than just a pop-music superstar--he's a star in the firmament of English literature

By Gina Arnold

AESTHETIC PURISTS will always tell you there's a difference between cooking and cuisine, between going to the movies and attending a film, between reading real literature and imbibing pulp fiction. As the century nears its end, however, such lines are beginning to blur. Nowadays, tony restaurants are just as likely to serve fried chicken as they are coq au vin, and The Terminator is hailed in French cinema circles as an existential masterpiece.

But nowhere are the lines between high and low art as blurry as they currently are in rock & roll. Even as experts acknowledge that "Be-Bop-a-Lula" may be as deep a rock lyric as any ever written, rock & roll music has drawn more than its fair share of intellectual discussion.

Indeed, ever since the '40s and '50s, when writers like Jack Kerouac and Colin MacInnes began using jazz and big-beat music as a metaphor for modern life, popular music has been a magnet for elitist interpretations. Both the folk movement of the '50s and the psychedelic-rock movement of the '60s were affiliated with the political Left and the intelligentsia. And even today, the annual Elvis conference held at Mississippi State University rivals similar scholarly gatherings about William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

No popular musician, however, has created such a wealth of learned discussions as Bob Dylan (who appears with Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison May 19 at the San Jose Arena). Dylan's lyrics--from "blowing in the wind" to "the times they are a-changin' "--have passed into the popular lexicon.

Amazon.com, the online bookseller, now lists more than 100 books with Bob Dylan in the title: these are all nonfiction works that analyze his lyrics or mythologize him as a man. Dylan has also been the subject of many novels, including Brian Morton's The Dylanist and the latest work by Scott Spencer, The Rich Man's Table. Spencer's novel is the tale of an unacknowledged son of a Bob Dylan-like character called "Luke Fairchild." (The plot is uncannily close to reports that surfaced this spring about various unknown Dylan offspring.)

MOST SO-CALLED Dylanists confine their research activities to taping and archiving the man's every performance, but there is another school of scholarly analysis that attempts to lift Bob Dylan out of the mire of mere rock stardom and make him into a 20th-century literary icon.

This practice--called "Dylanology"--exists in distinct opposition to conventional rock criticism, which actually works as a form of consumer guide, helping people to make informed choices about which of the 24,000 CDs released each year are worth listening to.

Dylanologists would deride such a commercial goal. Their intention is no less than to legitimize Dylan as a poet, and they seem to be succeeding.

Although Dylan's music is no more popular (or populist) than it ever was, as of this spring, Dylan enjoys his highest level of acclaim ever, having won both a Grammy for his 1997 record Time Out of Mind (Columbia) and the more prestigious annual Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll in The Village Voice.

Time Out of Mind is, most critics acknowledge, Dylan's best work since 1975's Blood on the Tracks; according to Soundscan, it has sold the most copies (690,000) of any Dylan title ever, except for his Greatest Hits collection. (Blood on the Tracks, his second most popular release, has sold a mere 449,000 copies--at least, since Soundscan began tracking such figures.)

But Time Out of Mind is not entirely what has revitalized his career. Dylan has, in fact, been releasing records and touring nonstop since 1988, with ever-diminishing interest surrounding his records and his once mythic celebrity stature. According to Paul Williams, author of three books on Dylan and editor of Crawdaddy, Dylan's resurgence in the world's consciousness is due to a death scare he had last summer.

After Dylan canceled some dates with Van Morrison due to a heart ailment, says Williams, "it kind of reminded people of his mortality. Newsweek ran a headline, 'Dylan Lives,' and a greatest-hits LP that came out in England went to No. 1. It was one of those 'You don't miss your water till the well runs dry' kind of things, and it made people pay more attention to Time Out of Mind when it was released soon after."

Another reason Dylan may be being treated with more seriousness lately is his 1997 performance at the Vatican in front of the pope. As ridiculous as such a performance sounds, it in fact gave Dylan just the type of real-world credence that rock stars long for.

WHATEVER THE REASON, respect for Dylan's achievements is currently at an all-time high. This spring, Stanford University held a Dylan conference that drew 400 people to listen to papers comparing his works to those of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats and Shakespeare. By any standard you care to name, the conference was a success, earning mentions in The New York Times and The Wall St. Journal.

Not all English scholars agree that Bob Dylan deserves a place in academia, but even those that don't are willing to take analysis of his work seriously. Betsy Bowden, professor of English at Rutgers University, may be the only person in America to owe her tenure to a work on Dylan. Her 1978 Ph.D. thesis at UC-Berkeley was later published as Performed Literature: Words and Music of Bob Dylan (Indiana University Press, 1982).

Bowden's book compares different performances of the same song and studies how such changes can affect interpretation of the numbers. Bowden points out that many forms of literature are not meant to be read on the page--drama, for example, and old-English poetry. Rock music, too, has nuances and phrasing that can vary from night to night.

Although Bowden, who is now a Chaucer specialist, got tenure thanks to Dylan's music, she considers the idea of teaching a whole course on his work "frankly appalling." She does, however, jam bits of Dylan into various special courses, including ones on "Folklore, Literature and Sexuality" and "The Literature of Travel," which ends with Highway 61 Revisited. "There's no reason I couldn't teach a whole course on him," she says wryly, "but the disadvantage would be that too many people would sign up. Think of all the papers I'd have to grade!"

Friend or Fo?: Critic Greil Marcus argues that Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature more than winner Dario Fo did.

INTERESTINGLY, most conventional rock critics decry the move to make Dylan into a literary icon. Author and former New York Times columnist Greil Marcus' most recent book, Invisible Republic, is a dense, imaginative and lyrically written take on the place of Dylan's Basement Tapes in American country music. Marcus, however, thinks Dylanology is a laughable development.

"I guess I have a really hidebound attitude as to what goes on at a university," Marcus says. "I think you should be studying stuff there that you can't encounter on your own. When else are you going to read Dickens?"

Crawdaddy's Williams takes a less severe stance on the topic. "It's pointless to look at Dylan as a page poet," he agrees. "I don't really think he should be treated academically, but [at the Stanford conference] some of the textual analysis was absolutely brilliant. Professor Christopher Ricks' parallels of [Dylan's lyrics] to Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' were clever and legitimate; he treated Dylan with awareness and sensitivity."

Williams--who read a paper at the Stanford conference on Dylan's attitude toward his audience--adds that although the conference was the first significant acknowledgment of Dylan as a literary figure in academic circles, the notion that Dylan be lifted out of the realm of pop "happened long ago. He's been that kind of icon for 30 years."

Williams is right: at this point, Dylan's place in history is not disputed. Certainly when he "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he changed the face of popular music forever. But does that justify his recent nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature?

Williams thinks so. "He deserves it," he says, "but what it all boils down to is 'What is literature?' It'd be fabulous for those people to have to include the performing arts."

Bowden, who actually wrote the academic recommendation of Dylan to the Nobel Prize committee, points out that Winston Churchill once won the same prize for oratory. Dylan, however, didn't make the top five. Greil Marcus, for one, thought he understood why at the time--"He doesn't write literature"--but when it turned out that the winner for 1997 was Italian radical playwright Dario Fo, Marcus says he reconsidered.

"Fo," says Marcus, "is far short of being a writer of great literature; he was being rewarded for shaking up the establishment. And on those grounds, Dylan should have won hands down."

[EDLIS Notes]

Go to the original website for this article to see the images of Dylan and Greil Marcus that they used with the article.

Culture: Academics and fans alike gather to study and analyze the works of the musical legend at a first-of-its-kind conference at Stanford.

January 21, 1998 | MICHAEL J. YBARRA | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The distinguished literary critic sat on stage in front of a nearly full auditorium, rocking back and forth in his chair. He has written books on Milton and Tennyson and edited T.S. Eliot's unpublished poetry. Boston University professor Christopher Ricks was educated at Oxford and has taught at Cambridge; he is in his mid-60s, nearly bald and wearing a tie and slacks. Yet he looked like nothing so much as a teenager alone in his bedroom as a scratchy recording began playing: first a harmonica riff, then a familiar nasal, almost atonal voice. "Tell me," Bob Dylan whined in "Not Yet Dark" from his recent "Time Out of Mind" album, "what you're going to do when you can't play God no more."

After the song finished, Ricks launched into a pyrotechnical scholarly decoding. You could almost hear the footnotes flying: Byronic half-rhymes, Tennysonian dark immanences, Shakespearean genius. Ricks raced through the canon, dexterously dropping quotes from the most revered English writers, mixing jokes, detailed technical analysis and pure glee before finally parsing out an allusion to Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" in the Dylan song.

"It is saturated in Keats' ode," he said. "Here is a great song that is based on a great poem. Each is half in love with easeful death--a good idea when you're in your mid-50s, making friends with the necessity of dying."

But Ricks came to praise Dylan, not to bury him, and he had plenty of company: His speech Saturday at Stanford University opened the first academic conference in the U.S. devoted to the bushy-haired songwriter and his legacy to Western civilization. Scholars from across the country spent the day exploring everything from Dylan's status as a poetic successor to Rimbaud and Kerouac to the political Weltanschauung of an artist who claims to have no politics.

And the 400-person audience, which paid as much as $14 a seat, ate it up, finishing quotes from lyrics as soon as the scholars started and wildly applauding even video snippets in which Dylan was barely identifiable and his singing, to put it charitably, was not at its strongest.

"It's impossible to study these things without having some rock 'n' roll in your soul," exclaimed one leathered hippie during one of the many spirited question and answer sessions when panel members and the audience argued over Dylan lyrics with the fervor of over-caffeinated Talmudic scholars.

Dylan, in case you've lived in a cave for the last half century, was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn., in 1941, dropped out of college, picked up a guitar and rewrote the history of popular music. Although he is not known for his enunciation (and some of his lyrics are baffling enough even when not mumbled), Dylan's words, poured forth in a flood of more than 40 albums, have seeped into the souls of more than one generation.

"Dylan, in word and music, has created an almost unlimited universe of art which has permeated the globe and, in fact, changed the history of the world," wrote one of his more modest admirers, professor Gordon Ball of Virginia Military Institute, a member of a committee that has been campaigning on Dylan's behalf for a Nobel Prize in literature. "In catalyzing whole generations of youths, his oeuvre has shown more than any other poets in this century the power of words to alter lives and destinies."

At the Kennedy Center Honors last month, Dylan, who received a lifetime achievement award, was described as "perhaps the single most compelling presence in American popular music and foremost songwriter of our time."

Still, the very fact of the Stanford conference itself was as contrary as a chain saw through a dictionary, as organizer Tino Markworth pointed out. Dylan has expressed little but disdain for academics, accusing them of supporting the existing order and obscuring truth.

"Those who don't play music over-intellectualize," Dylan told one interviewer. Another time, the songwriter declared: "Colleges are like old-age homes, except more people die in colleges than in old-age homes."

Academia, in turn, has been slow to embrace Dylan studies as an academic discipline. Conservative scholars turn up their noses at treating ill-groomed guitar players as the artistic equals of Tolstoy, while trendy, postmodern theorists are equally dismissive of the elitism implied by claims for Dylan's greatness and would rather spend their time studying the sexual and class themes of Madonna's oeuvre or deconstructing the power relationship and homoerotic latency of the skipper and the first mate in "Gilligan's Island." "Dylan scholars fall between the cracks," Markworth lamented.

Markworth, who is a graduate student in German studies and humanities at Stanford, discovered this himself last year when he tried to organized a class on Dylan but couldn't find any department to sponsor it and finally had to stage it as a continuing education offering. Still, Markworth was optimistic.

"I hope we can make his art a permanent part of the curriculum," he said.

[EDLIS Notes]

This is a nice review of the conference by The Los Angeles Times, though one can't help but wonder whether the writer slipped out the side door after listening to the keynote speech by Christopher Ricks.