[EDLIS Notes]
One of our favorite Christopher Ricks quotes, from his Keynote Address to the 1998 Stanford International Conference on Bob Dyan.
"But we're not supposed to fall in love with him, are we.
We only think he is the most a - m a a a zing phenomenon in our lifetime!"
September 5, 2010
Dylan and the Intellectuals
Newscom
Bob Dylan, 1964
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.
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.
January 23, 1998
Bob Dylan and His Oeuvre Are Subjects of Stanford Conference
Bob Dylan had this to say about academe in a 1970 song: "Sure was glad to get out of there alive." Judging from the way academe has treated him, the lack of respect was mutual.
For years, Mr. Dylan has been ignored by academics. To them, he was just another singer-songwriter with a loyal following and a less-than-melodious voice. But now he's getting his due.
Scholars, students, and Dylan aficionados planned to gather at Stanford University last week for a one-day conference on
[EDLIS Notes]
Here we have a review from The Chronicle of Higher Education. It would be interesting to read their take on all this, but a subscription is required to read what they had to say. But they published another article on the broader subject of the study of Dylan more recently, which we will be featuring shortly.
ALL ALONG THE ivory TOWER____________
A recent Dylan symposium at Stanford proved that as rock fans, academics can babble with the most brain-dead metalheads.
BY MICHAEL BATTY | Among the rewards of listening to pop lyrics, getting them wrong ranks high. "A mosquito, my libido" (from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit") becomes "Mendocino, my burrito"; and in "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "the girl with colitis goes by." These goofs -- often abetted by the mewling, sloppy-drunk singer -- are called mondegreens. They remind us of popular music's frivolity and mercifully brief shelf life; sometimes they're even funny. But for all the public's adoration of garbled transmissions, academia seems to have done them one better. At a recent Bob Dylan symposium at Stanford's Kresge Auditorium, professors didn't just slur jingles, they slurred significance. Nowhere else, save perhaps the remotest fringes of a fan club, could Bob Dylan's nasalizing be given such soft-focus, generous scrutiny. (Not even at Wednesday's Grammys, which incongruously placed a score of black-clad young men and women behind the Old Master in an effort to demonstrate his continuing relevance.)
The symposium offered shaky pop culture theory and better praxis, the latter ably demonstrated by the $14.50 price of admission and the black and white photos of Dylan and other Village luminaries available in the lobby for $50 a pop. Ten or so presenters stroked pet theories down to the bone. Program titles like "Only a Pawn in Their Game: Bob Dylan and Politics," "The Sound of One Dog Barking: Bob Dylan and Religious Experience" and "A Long Way from Hibbing: Bob Dylan's Black Masque" promised to confuse fandom with acumen. Among the half-capacity audience, the fans were teeming, if not ubiquitous. One couple flipped through bloated chapbooks of Dylan lyrics, reading along and cuddling as songs were discussed. Elsewhere, ponytails and comb-overs were cast into stark relief by pink, reflecting scalps. Proceedings would be partisan -- boomer, by jingo -- though moderator Susan Dunn of the Stanford Humanities Department provided a brief tilt at the podium: "I'd like to ask that this be more than an exercise in nostalgia and canonization." Hear, hear -- and good luck.
The program's biggest academic name, Christopher Ricks ("Keats and Embarrassment"), a core curriculum professor at Boston University, made a case for classic mondegreens during "Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet," a treatise on Dylan's latest album, Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and how nice it is to rhyme. "What you gain on the hearing," Ricks said of Dylan's sage verse, "you lose on the sense." Examples followed: How "ode" could sound like "owed," "hear" like "here" and "cents" like "sense." (You might ask, So what? Good for you.) Ricks put such gravity into his reading of Dylan's catchy doggerel that you'd think you were hearing a King James edition of "The Cat in the Hat." "Can you tell me what you're waiting for/Señor," Ricks intoned. "Down the street the dogs are barking/And the day is getting dark." "Do room/Do room/Do room." Ricks played snippets from "Not Dark Yet," and the auditorium filled with a voice that has only grown more bizarre, more nasal, over time, to the point where it now seems to have left Dylan's nose altogether, dangling at its tip. But Ricks was right: Dylan can rhyme.
German studies Professor Tino Markworth provided an apt assessment of most other presentations in his own, "Too Much Educated Rap? Bob Dylan and Academia" -- though perhaps only by accident. "Society is a confused series of discourses determined by power structures," Markworth said, toeing the pomo party line and lamenting the "transmission of information that obscures Dylan." The speakers had an easy time talking about anything but Dylan in their attempts to lend him context. The Tupperware mattered, not the leftovers. Markworth himself, despite the initial illusory promise of one con for every pro, only ended up huffing air into the rubbery proposition of a Bob Dylan studies program.
Drama Professor Rush Rehm's "Only a Pawn in Their Game" was devoted in turn to bitching about the Gulf War and the genocide of the Native American and quoting Noam Chomsky. "I'm dealing with a debased subject," Rehm conceded. "Politics, not Bob Dylan." Rehm's passion for outrage was enviable (as was his shame at admitting that Dylan had sold the rights to "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to the Bank of Montreal), but his thesis elusive. "We've become suspicious of folk music," Rehm dubiously proposed at one point, "thanks to the celebration of Das Folk: the Nazis."
"Labels and categories have an important heuristic function," explained Religious Studies professor Mark Gonnerman, who went on to grace Dylan with four: prophetic, apocalyptic, biblical and transcendentalist. Why? To underscore the importance of skepticism in religion, quoting some more of those allegedly elliptical Dylan lyrics: "I only asked for something that I'm gonna understand." Me too.
English Professor Aldon Nielsen chanted lyrics by blues musician Leadbelly and spoke of "metaphoricity and vocal particularity" in "Blowin' in the Wind," by way of suggesting that Dylan, among others, wanted to sound black. Regarding Dylan's electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival -- mention of which seems obligatory in any Dylan scholar's deciphering of the obvious -- Nielsen said: "Dylan's blues were no longer attired in their racial workshirt." (Nielsen was good for these one-liners. My fave: "Uncle Remus was another pure product of American race dreams.")
Stepped forward Stephen Ronan, who never took off his sunglasses and went on for an hour or nine with "The Visionary Road: Rimbaud, Kerouac, Dylan," speaking mostly about the first two, and about the keen insight offered by fucked-up outsiders in general. Dylan apparently exhibited some during a road trip, toking weed from the dashboard and uttering platitudes like, "Time doesn't exist; it's an illusion -- the other side of Dali's clocks." Don't bogart that joint. From his podium, Ronan quoted his subjects with a repertoire of vocal impressions, like a misplaced and none-too-gifted Catskills comedian.
The grand prize for casting fog, however, went to the University of Victoria's Stephen Scobie, who delivered an audiovisual book report titled "Renaldo & Allen: Allen Ginsberg's Role in 'Renaldo & Clara,'" on a 292-minute cinematic indulgence directed by Dylan in 1978. "I'm afraid this paper does assume an audience that has had a chance to see 'Renaldo & Clara,'" Scobie said. Few, if any, had. (Dylan yanked it out of circulation after critics failed to recognize his cross-platform genius.) Scobie offered meticulous descriptions of various scenes and voice-overs featuring Ginsberg -- the best of which, for its almost folkloric invocation of the pretentious, left Ginsberg bare-assed and about to be horsewhipped by a negligee-sporting Anne Waldman. During a Q&A period, Scobie admitted that he had only seen one "barely watchable copy" of "Renaldo & Clara," whose ancestor, several bootlegged generations back, was taped directly off BBC during the film's sole telecast. Rarely does one have the chance to see so much energy put into the exaltation of bad art -- akin to deducing the shape of a priceless antique stencil from a doodle found by the urinal.
Listening to these scholars -- most of whom were males of boomer age -- I couldn't help but imagine them as kids, encamped decades ago in the pall of the TV, hapless as their critical faculties weltered and eroded in the bombardment. They had acquired little immunity to the broadcast, and it left them with no means to separate the fun from the profound. This might explain the monolithic importance some mid-lifers attribute to the trappings of their youth, and the present professors' desire to hand us ornate shoe boxes in which to hoard pop culture's trifles. These men were obviously well-versed theorists who had pursued their mark in earnest. So what.
Markworth defended the day's endless paving of Dylan: "Academic inquiry does not need to reside in an ivory tower." Though overstated (and suspiciously fretful about irrelevance), this is true: Anything public -- including pop culture -- should be fair game in academia. How, then, should professors approach this bohemian adenoid they love so much? By following the example of Maria Johnson (Southern Illinois University), who initiated her presentation with an admission: "I am not a Bob Dylan scholar." So much the better. Her paper, titled "Performed Literature: The Music of Bob Dylan," cited specific examples from Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" to illuminate song craft, even as she denounced the song's sexist refrains ("You fake just like a woman/But you break just like a little girl"). Johnson, a music professor, stuck with the concrete: chord movement, monosyllabic lyrical accents, changing dynamics, denigrating content. She was certainly less passionate than the others, but more cogent and more interesting. She could observe the song from enough of a distance to describe it, hairy harping warts and all. You didn't have to like Dylan to listen to Johnson. Her half hour elapsed like half an hour. Two presenters followed Johnson -- including one doctoral student whose point seemed to be that adding reverb to Dylan's recordings made them sound different -- but she outshone them and the rest.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with fandom -- it's endearing enough, even after several hours of labored analysis. And mondegreens are healthy enough as a pastime, if not as pedagogy. But professors who cloak the heroes of their youth in obfuscation are no different from the mullet-headed Black Sabbath fans who ardently hail Ozzy Osbourne as a genius, and "Vampire Lestat" groupies who insist that Anne Rice speaks to the ages. Groom your pets in private, where you can misapprehend their importance to the fullest. Exploring their anatomy in public becomes a charmless act of haruspication -- combing through bowels for want of magic.
SALON | Feb. 27, 1998Michael Batty is a San Francisco writer.
[EDLIS Notes]
This review gives the most detail about each presentation at the conference. As you see, it was not written by a Dylan fanatic.
But as Tino Markworth pointed out in his summary of the conference: "That Stanford University staged a conference about Bob Dylan at all -- that was the news -- and unfortunately not, how Dylan was framed and debated at the conference."
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.Academic types deconstruct Dylan
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.
Publication Date: Friday Jan 16, 1998
Jukebox poet
Stanford University hosts the country's first Bob Dylan conference, focusing on the man who "brought poetry to the jukebox"by Jim Harrington
Millions of music lovers have known it for decades. Now academia is beginning to catch on.
On Saturday, Stanford University will host a day-long Bob Dylan conference, exploring the work and cultural legacy of one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. This is the first such event to be held in the United States.
The conference organizers are Stanford faculty members Tino Markworth, a Whiting Fellow in the department of German studies, and Rush Rehm, associate professor of drama. That same duo was responsible for a recent Continuing Studies Class also focusing on Dylan's career. The class proved quite popular and, likewise, the conference has drawn much attention.
"I thought it was time to do it," Markworth said of focusing academic attention on Dylan's work. "I saw there were classes on Star Trek and Madonna and said, 'Why don't we do (a class) on something that has a real quality of work.' I mean, if we do popular culture, let's do some popular culture that is worthwhile."
Although never a mega-seller in comparison to the likes of Michael Jackson and U2, Dylan is certainly one of the most critically acclaimed and durable artists in popular music history. Since his self-titled Columbia Records debut in 1962, Dylan has released an impressive number of albums that easily rank as rock 'n' roll classics. Still, Dylan will likely always be remembered foremost for his individual songs. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (from 1973's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid"), "Blowin' in the Wind" (from 1962's "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"), "All Along the Watchtower" (from 1968's "John Wesley Harding") and, of course, "Like a Rolling Stone" (from "Highway 61 Revisited") are true pop anthems.
And that's just for starters.
"The most significant American rocker since Elvis, Bob Dylan ranks alongside the Beatles as a '60s cultural revolutionary, transforming the world not only musically, but politically and spiritually," reviewer Paul Evans wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide.
Discussions on Dylan more often than not center around his masterful lyrics. But, while Dylan's words factor heavily into the Stanford conference, the day-long event is certainly not limited to just that topic.
"The interesting thing about this conference is that we approach Bob Dylan from different disciplines," Markworth said. "This is really new. This hasn't been done before."
The organizers of the conference invited Dylan to attend, but he declined because he's playing a concert with Van Morrison this weekend in New York City.
Conference topics include:
Interpretations of Dylan's lyrics, presented by leading Dylan scholar Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University.
The political views expressed in Dylan's songs, analyzed by Rush Rehm, associate professor of drama at Stanford.
Allen Ginsberg's artistic involvement with Dylan, described by Stephan Scobie, professor of English at University of Victoria, Canada.
A comparison of Dylan's work to that of writers Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac, presented by Stephan Ronan, Berkeley-based writer and assistant producer of "The Jack Kerouac Collection."
The musical roots of Bob Dylan's songs, presented by Maria Johnson, lecturer of music at Southern Illinois University.
The radical swings in Dylan's popularity, including the positive reception of his recent album, "Time Out of Mind," discussed by Dylan specialist Paul Williams, author of the critically acclaimed book "Bob Dylan: Performing Artist."
Dylan's first public impression--that of a skinny young folksinger, back in the 1960s, strumming a guitar with a harmonica strapped around his neck--has been the most lasting. Yet, Markworth said, Dylan's artistic contributions are definitely not limited to that decade.
"Bob Dylan's work is not just '60s work," he said. "He put out really good works in the '70s, '80s and '90s."
To prove the point, Markworth brings up Dylan's current release, "Time Out of Mind," the artist's best-received disc in quite some time. The work topped many publications' and critics' best-of-1997 lists, including that of Rolling Stone Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Still, "Time Out of Mind" likely won't sell anywhere near as many copies as the Wallflower's "Bringing Down the Horse." The Wallflowers, led by Dylan's son Jakob, scored one of the biggest hits of the year, selling millions of copies, and outdistancing the sales figures posted by the elder singers' best albums.
But sales figures and Billboard chart rankings don't tell the whole story. The big sellers don't always turn out to be the ones that make a truly lasting impact (think Milli Vanilli from the late '80s).
"I would say that (Dylan) is the one that brought poetry to the jukebox," Markworth said.
People know this.
That's why Dylan was the one rock singer recently nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature and honored, alongside the likes of Charlton Heston, by the Kennedy Center. Conversely, that's also why we probably won't see a Spice Girls conference held at Stanford anytime in the near future.
What: Bob Dylan conference
When: 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 17
Where: Kresge Auditorium, Stanford University
How much: Tickets are $14 general public; $6 students
Information: Call 723-4317 or 725-ARTS
[EDLIS Notes]
Here we have the article about the conference that was published by the small weekly newspaper in Stanford's home town of Palo Alto.
Bob Dylan
The 1998 International Conference at Stanford University
January 17, 1998 Kresge Auditorium
In 1998 Stanford University sponsored the first international academic conference on Bob Dylan to be held in the United States. Approximately 400 people attended this event, organized by Tino Markworth with Rush Rehm.
PROGRAM
9-10 a.m.
Christopher Ricks (Core Curriculum, Boston University)
Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet
10 a.m.-noon Panel 1
Moderator: Joshua Landy (French & Italian, Stanford University)
Tino Markworth (German Studies, Stanford University)
Too Much Educated Rap? Bob Dylan and Academia
Rush Rehm (Drama, Stanford University)
Only a Pawn in Their Game: Bob Dylan and Politics
Mark Gonnerman (Religious Studies, Stanford University)
The Sound of One Dog Barking: Bob Dylan and Religious Experience
1-3 p.m. Panel 2
Moderator: Robert Harrison (French & Italian, Stanford University)
Aldon Nielsen (English, Loyola Marymount University)
A Long Way from Hibbing: Bob Dylan's Black Masque
Stephen Ronan (author, assist. producer of The Jack Kerouac Collection)
The Visionary Road: Rimbaud, Kerouac, Dylan
Stephen Scobie (English, University of Victoria)
Renaldo & Allen: Allen Ginsberg's Role in 'Renaldo & Clara'
3:30-5:30 p.m. Panel 3
Moderator: Susan Dunn (Humanities Center, Stanford University)
Maria Johnson (Music, Southern Illinois University)
Performed Literature: The Music of Bob Dylan
Lonny Chu (Music, Stanford University)
In the Studio: The Recording Styles and Techniques of Bob Dylan
Paul Williams (author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist)
Seeing the Real You at Last: Bob Dylan and His Audience
Sponsored by The Stanford Humanities Center
and Dean of Humanities & Sciences, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Department of Music, Department of English, Humanities Special Program, Department of Religious Studies, Department of French & Italian
Video tapes of the complete conference are available at the Stanford University Library.
Thanks to Ron Chester, Susan Dunn, Andy Hertzfeld, and Carol Langston.
MEDIA RESPONSE
It was 1998 and the academic culture wars were raging. On one side were the defenders of the faith, arguing that popular culture had no place in the university, that time was better spent familiarizing the students with the canonical works of high culture. On the other side were the devious postmodernists who tried to undermine the canon, leveling the field by making low or pop culture worthy of academic inquiry. While the high culture proponents argued that it was largely an aesthetic quality that made cultural artifacts part of the canon, the postmodernistas stated instead that aesthestic judgments were bogus anyway and the canon was rather an expression of power structures.
That Stanford University staged a conference about Bob Dylan at all – that was the news – and unfortunately not, how Dylan was framed and debated at the conference. Many saw it as a victory for this newfangled postmodernist or destructionist or whatever-it-is-called movement. For example Ron Rebholz, a perfectly nice professor from Stanford’s English Department, felt it necessary to take a public stand (San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 1998) – even before the conference took place – to show that not all Stanford had succumbed to this academic trend.
A closer look, however, would have revealed that this was not a case of postmodernitis at all. There was no applause from the postmodern side within academia, in fact. And that was not surprising. This was a conference about an artist who was old, and white, and male – certainly not a good poster child for this latest academic fashion. And he was chosen because of the aesthetic quality of his work, not because of his current popularity. (It was early 1998, Dylan was still largely seen as a burned-out has-been – his first album with new songs in seven years had been released only a few months earlier). And, last not least, the postmodernists’ ever-so annoying mantra of “race, class and gender” was missing from most of the talks.
But while methodically conservative, the conference tried to break new ground in two ways: first, by taking Dylan seriously as an artist, and second, by not limiting our academic engagement to Dylan the writer. Instead, as the program above shows, it was conceived to analyze his work from different angles, attempting a multi-disciplinary approach.
The academic culture wars are largely forgotten nowadays as is the debate surrounding the event. The conference did not immediately trigger a full-blown academic fascination with Bob Dylan as I had hoped but it certainly helped pave the way for the numerous Dylan conferences in the last decade. (On this topic see David Cohen: “Surge of scholarly interest in Bob Dylan” The Guardian, May 21, 2001, and Evan R. Goldstein: “Dylan and the Intellectuals” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2010).
A GUIDE TO MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE CONFERENCE
Unfortunately, most of the articles about the conference are no longer accessible free of charge on the Web. Here are a few links that worked as of June 1, 2011:
About organizing the conference:
About the conference:
About the debate surrounding the conference:
Bill Workman: “Conference on Bob Dylan at Stanford.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 1998
FULL LISTING OF COVERAGE
Media coverage following the announcement of the conference
“Bob Dylan subject of academic conference.” Associated Press, January 7, 1998
-. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 1998
“Si studia Bob Dylan all’università.” La Repubblica, January 9, 1998
Elaine Goodman: “Stanford conference looks at Bob Dylan. Academic event explores singer’s lyrics, music.” Palo Alto Daily News, January 8, 1998
Jim Harrington: “Jukebox poet. Stanford University hosts the country’s first Bob Dylan conference, focusing on the man who ‘brought poetry to the jukebox.’” Palo Alto Weekly, January 16, 1998
Greg Frost: “Stanford University To Host Bob Dylan Conference.” Reuters, January 8, 1998
Bill Workman: “Conference on Bob Dylan at Stanford.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 1998
January 12, 1998(Letter to the Editor)
Michelle Levander: “Knock, knock, knocking on academia’s door. Stanford to study Bob Dylan.” San Jose Mercury News, January 8, 1998
Paul Sterman: “Deconstructing Dylan.” San Mateo County Times and Oakland Tribune, January 15, 1998
Krista Glaser: “Dylan conference to be held on campus.” The Stanford Daily,
January 8, 1998
Brian Jones & Mark Bell: “I’m a Poet and I know it. Bob Dylan Conference and Controversy.” The Stanford Daily, January 15, 1998
“‘The answer, my friend’: An all-day Dylan conference.” Stanford Report, January 7, 1998
Wire services (AP/Reuters), January 8-9, 1998
Picked up by the following:
USA: Austin American Statesman, Cincinnati Enquirer, The Des Moines Register, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, The News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), St. Louis Dispatch, USA Today, and others
Switzerland: Neue Züricher Zeitung
Netherlands: NRC Handelsblad
Germany: Süddeutsche Zeitung
RADIO (only coverage including interviews is listed):
BBC London, Radio 5, with Marita Eager, January 8, 1998
KGO Radio, San Francisco, with Kevin Patcher (two interviews), January 9 and January 13, 1998
KFRC Radio, San Francisco, January 14, 1998
Voice of America, with Martin Seacrest, January 15, 1998
Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis, January 16, 1998
TV: CNN
INTERNET: Gil Kaufman: “Stanford University To Hold Dylan Seminar. Professors and graduate students to study, life, times and music of folk-rock poet.” Addicted to Noise, January 8, 1998
Media coverage of the conference itself
Karen Hunt: “Stanford program explores another side of Bob Dylan. Pop culture: Lecturers compare singer-songwriters to great poets.” Associated Press, San Jose Mercury News, January 18, 1998
Paul Van Slambrouck: “Teaching Dylan at Tennyson’s Expense? A recent conference on the songwriter has spurred debate over pop culture’s place in academia.” Christian Science Monitor, January 21, 1998
La Stampa (Turin, Italy), January 19, 1998:
“Il caso. Stanford, prestigiosi accademici a convegno: così ha influenzato la nostra cultura.”
Lorenzo Soria: “Dylan? Si studia all’università. L’establishment si inchina al suo fustigatore.”
Claudio Gorlier: “La ballata dell’astuto intellettuale.”
Michael J. Ybarra: “Tennyson, Milton and … Bob Dylan? 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.” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1998
Dean Goodman: “Academics Debate The Real Bob Dylan.” Reuters, January
18, 1998
Dean Goodman: “Dylan Fans Get Tangled Up In Academic Views.” Reuters, February 2, 1998
James Sullivan: “Answers Blowin’ in the Stanford Wind. Academic types deconstruct Dylan.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 1998
Lisa Krieger: “Times are a-changing: Academics debate Dylan.” San Francisco Examiner, January 18, 1998 (also Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 19, 1998)
J.S.: “Talkin’ Bob Dylan Academic Conference Blues.” San Francisco Weekly (Riff Raff), January 21, 1998
Ginny McGormick: “Doctorate in Dylan?” Stanford Magazine, March/April 1998
Wire services (AP/Reuters), January 18-20, 1998:
Picked up by The Baltimore Sun, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), The Daily News of Los Angeles, The Orange County Register, The Sacramento Bee, Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
RADIO (only coverage including interviews is listed):
German Public Broadcasting, with Ingrid Koelle, January 19, 1998:
Südwestfunk 2, Kultur am Abend; Deutschlandfunk, Kultur heute;
Bayern 5; Westdeutscher Rundfunk 3
-, Chicago, January, 18, 1998
JWay, Tokio, January, 18, 1998
KFOG, San Francisco, with Kim Wonderly
INTERNET
rec.music.dylan: Report from the Academy, January 18, 1998
Michael Batty: “All along the ivory tower. A recent Dylan symposium at Stanford proved that as rock fans, academics can babble with the most brain-dead metalheads.” Salon.com, January 1998
[EDLIS Notes]
Tino Markworth compiled this exhaustive summary of the Stanford conference. As you can see, it generated quite a lot of coverage in the media and this blog will be reporting on the after-effects of this ground-breaking event, with the many Dylan courses that are springing up all over the world. Markworth's vision for the study of Dylan in academia is truly coming to fruition.
January 07, 1998 | By Bill Workman, Chronicle Staff Writer
1998-01-07 04:00:00 PST STANFORD -- Scholarly admirers of folk-rock legend Bob Dylan will stage an academic conference at Stanford University to explore Dylan's legacy, not only for his work as an artist but also for his role in late 20th century culture.
"We think it's time Dylan be given his proper place in the academic canon," said Tino Markworth, a Stanford doctoral student in humanities and an organizer of the January 17 conference.
"A huge shadow has fallen over Dylan that views him just for his music, but this will be an attempt to break him out of that shadow," he said.
Stanford's Dylan gathering is billed as the first of its kind in the nation, although a similar conference was held in the early 1980s in Great Britain. It failed to develop any interest in establishing Dylan studies as a mainstream academic discipline.
Markworth said the nation's English professors have been especially reluctant to welcome Dylan into the ranks of writers worthy of critical literary analysis.
Stanford English professor Ron Rebholz is no exception. "It's outlandish," he said. "I may be an old fogy, but I just don't think the lyrics of Dylan are the stuff that warrants serious study."
The all-day conference at Stanford's Kresge Auditorium will feature a series of panels of Dylan experts from the United States and Canada, with academic backgrounds in religion, drama, music, literature and political science.
They plan to talk about the interpretation of the rebel rocker's lyrics and their influence on contemporary affairs; comparison of his poetry and other writings with the works of Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac; the literary links between Dylan and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; and the radical swings in Dylan's popularity since his emergence as a counterculture idol in the 1960s.
The announcement of the Stanford conference follows the lifetime achievement award given to Dylan last month by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where he sat with President Clinton and his family.
The citation for the award called Dylan "perhaps the single most compelling presence in American popular music and foremost songwriter of our time." Markworth said the Stanford conference has been in the works for several months. It was inspired by a well-received course on Dylan that drama professor Rush Rehm, another conference organizer, gave through the university's continuing studies program.
[EDLIS Notes]
Here we have Tino Markworth beating the drum for the Stanford conference he had organized. Looking back, we can now see that the conference did a lot to get Dylan "his proper place in the academic canon."
Old fogy Ron Rebholz has since then moved on to being a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Stanford, after teaching there since 1961. In academia that means he has retired, or at least no longer gets to decide what artist "warrants serious study."
The times they are a-changin', old boy!
