Academic types deconstruct Dylan

James Sullivan, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle January 19, 1998 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Monday, January 19, 1998

The absentee subject would surely have been mortified. ``Bob Dylan has always had a problem with academia,'' said doctoral student Tino Markworth during the opening hour of Saturday's marathon deconstruction session, ``Bob Dylan: The 1998 International Conference,'' held in Stanford University's Kresge Auditorium. Markworth, organizer of the daylong symposium, delivered a paper titled ``Too Much Educated Rap?,'' noting Dylan's distaste for those who ``overintellectualize'' his music. Yet the majority of the program's speakers plunged gleefully into a world of theoretical jargon and highfalutin literary comparison. One reason for Dylan's aversion to ivory-tower analysis might be the 56-year-old rock rebel's lifelong habit of borrowing heavily from his literary heroes. Despite their intimate knowledge of Dylan's carefully crafted persona -- part Romantic, part Beat, part American folklore -- few scholars in attendance seemed to be bothered by it; as Beat Generation expert Stephen Ronan noted, the poet Lautreamont once proclaimed that ``plagiarism is absolutely necessary.''

DYLAN'S POETICS

``I for one am certain that Bob would be thrilled to hear or read Christopher's talk,'' declared author Paul Williams, referring to the wonderfully arcane keynote address on Dylan's poetics given by Boston University professor Christopher Ricks. [an error occurred while processing this directive] With his refined English accent, his white horseshoe of hair, and his endless trail of literary references -- Keats, Eliot, Tennyson, and Beckett were just some of the writers he name-checked in discussing the bleak new Dylan album ``Time Out of Mind'' -- Ricks is precisely the sort of pedant that would pucker Dylan's perpetually sour expression. Still, his enthusiasm for the bard's lifework was infectious. ``He's only the most amazing phenomenon in our lifetime,'' Ricks gushed, eliciting hearty applause.

While tweed-jacketed Boomers and turtlenecked grad-school types dominated an estimated turnout of 350, the ranks of the curious extended to some graying Peninsula socialites and a few local high schoolers. ``I've been listening to Dylan since I was, like, 3,'' said 15-year- old Deven Karvelas, who popped in and out of the auditorium throughout the day with his Palo Alto High buddy Nick Byler, auditioning air-guitar chords for each other during one break. Following Ricks' address, the program proceeded with three panels of three speakers each. The first, led by Markworth, dealt with Dylan in the abstract, including his politics (his self-proclaimed ``finger-pointin' songs'') and his spirituality (which resides, apparently, in the ``American transcendentalist tradition''). The second segment looked at Dylan's myriad influences, while the third assessed his actual body of work. Aldon Nielsen, literature and writing chair at Loyola Marymount University, offered one of the day's few mischievous views of Dylan's ascension into pop culture legend. Nielsen hopscotched deftly from the Supremes and the ``Blues Brothers'' movie to playwright Brendan Behan, critic-philosopher Jacques Derrida and Dylan's own impressionistic novel, ``Tarantula,'' suggesting that Dylan's appropriations of black American culture have been less than pure.

AN UNABASHED FAN

Williams, longtime editor of Crawdaddy and the author of two Dylan books, was the most unabashed fan, among a procession of otherwise cerebral observers. A few audience members were eager to poke fun at the self-appointed Dylan brain trust. ``It's impossible to study these people without having some rock 'n' roll in your soul,'' said one beatnik throwback during a question-and- answer session. Still, with Dylan's recent Kennedy Center honors and Nobel nomination for literature, the time may be as right as any to open the scholarly discourse on his legacy.

This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

[EDLIS Notes]

A review of the Stanford conference by the large San Francisco newspaper.