ART, EDUCATION, AND TRUTH, PART 2

CHRONICLES OF DYLAN

Less weighty than Margaret Garner is Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. One. I've been listening to the book on CD in the car for a couple of weeks. It's a complex book from a complex right-brain man, and I'm only touching on a couple of relatively minor points.

Dylan starts with his days in the New York City folk scene, where he discovered books, in the private library of friend Ray Gooch. He writes, "I was looking for the part of my education that I never got." But it's not enough that he discovered literature, art, history, etc.; he can't help complaining about popular culture while he's at it. He became a permanent part of my popular culture a few years later, of course.

In this way he's like every other kid who was bored in school and didn't pick up the strings teachers laid down for students to follow into the forest of The Best That Has Been Thought And Said. He was a poor student and didn't get a taste for learning till he was older. Just because popular culture is easier to get, and to get to, doesn't automatically mean it's worthless, yet everything else is also always available. Libraries are all over. Schools can only lay down a foundation. Truly educated people are, eventually, self-educated. But as "A Kid's Review" on Amazon.com says:

I thought that this book was ok, since I don't like to read. I love music (metal) but wanted to get to know who Bob Dylan is. This book told me the main details of Bob's career. I recommened [sic] this to people who love to read. For others, they might find this boring.

Or as Abraham Lincoln said, "For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like." Anyway, where are the books for kids who don't love to read? The system has failed them again. Maybe this kid will discover, 10 years or so down the road, that he likes to read and that his parents and his teachers are all ignorant Philistines.

As for his art, Dylan explains that he wanted to get down to real life as expressed in authentic old folk songs sung by "real hard-line folksingers", stuff about death and murder, floods, sinking ships, love, all the stories in old folk songs, "more true to life than life itself". This from a kid living in his head. As if we don't still have murder and disaster. "The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in." Everything is less complicated if you can reduce it to a song or a political opinion, though as we know, Dylan rightly sidestepped the political icon role. Nevertheless it was this yen for imagined "reality" that led him to tell people he rode a freight train to New York, instead of the actual '57 Impala he rode in on. Typical kid stuff, or as he called it, hophead talk.

He did know a man who was murdered in New York. A coffeehouse owner was killed by his landlord, an old man angry because the rent wasn't paid. Dylan happened on the body and the blood in the snow. This was not a murder of passion, or rather, of lust; not the murder of a working class hero; not the death of a young soldier; not a murder of a dark-skinned person by a light-skinned person. Just a common garden-variety murder. Maybe most murders are just that banal. The pettiness of most crime doesn't make for stirring art, but it is true life. I don't think Dylan wrote a song about this modern murder. Unless it was "Dear Landlord".

Dylan is a great poet, and he has grown up.

HOW BUSY ARE YOU?

Our Kentucky gentleman friend says he's "busier than a bricklayer in Baghdad".

STRAW MAN BITES STRAW DOG

Herb H. sent this on Dave DaBee's example of a bad mixed metaphor: "Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) makes certain his characters swing at every blame-America-first straw dog like they expect candy to come pouring out." Herb said:

What I think is that Megan Basham (never heard of her before) has confused "straw man" and "straw dog." They are not the same. I looked up "straw dog" and found it is a decidedly inferior proposal created for the purpose of making the real proposal look better when introduced later. A straw man, in the non-legal sense, is a made-up version of the opposition's argument, designed to be demolished easily ~ thus appearing to demolish the opponent's position. An entirely different concept.

Following the link, I found the movie review.... It only makes sense if the characters are attacking a straw man, not a straw dog.

Thanks, Herb. I never heard the term "straw dog" before. Haven't seen the movie, though.

THE BRITISH CORNER

British historian Paul Johnson, author of George Washington: The Founding Father, said in a radio interview that American English sounds more like 17th century British English than what is spoken in England today, and that Americans have been more conservative in this way than the English. What he didn't mention, though I heard this years ago, is that the accent changed in England after Queen Victoria married the German Prince Albert, who spoke English with a strong German accent. It became fashionable to try to sound like him, thus permanently altering upper-class English pronunciation.

Supposedly there's a similar explanation for why slacks are creased down the middle, front and back. A tailor pressed the king's (Edward VII?) pants sideways, instead of seam to seam, and persuaded him it was a new fashion, so everyone copied him.

SPELLBOUND

o Someone was reported to be "in straightened circumstances" "Straitened" was meant, though "straight" and "strait" come from the same root, although perhaps they came into the language at different times, with different roots and hence different branches.

Straight is given as an obsolete synonym for strait in www.yourdictionary.com: [OE. strei?t, properly p. p. of strecchen to stretch, AS. streht, p. p. of streccan to stretch, to extend. See Stretch.]

Strait, on the other hand, shows an Old French derivation: [OE. straight, streyt, streit, OF. estreit, estroit, F. ['e]troit, from L. strictus drawn together, close, tight, p.p. of stringere to draw tight.]

This still doesn't mean you can use straightened for straitened, though. There's a big difference between tight money and honest money.

o Yet another miscreant has been "praying on little girls", according to a new report. If only.

COREX

I know I misspelled "lightning" in the Mark Twain quote a couple of weeks ago.

Retreat: The Essence of Christian Mysticism

Bernadette Roberts

I am organizing a workshop with Bernadette Roberts, a remarkable Christian contemplative and author of three books:

The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center

The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey

What is Self? : A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness

This retreat, called The Essence of Christian Mysticism, will be held on the weekend of May 5-7, 2006, in Loveland, Ohio. For more information, go to Bernadette Roberts Retreat (www.keithops.us/brretreat.htm). The site may be updated from time to time.

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