On the cover of the poesy tome! Blurb plus!!

Yes, Virginia, there IS a book of poetry and poetry-criticism (mostly the latter) blurping like bitumen though the constricted pipelines of my brain, blurping, blorping toward publication. As I have joked elsewhere, a guaranteed worst-seller! Anyway, here's the back-cover blurp... er, blurb, unless the publisher thinks of something better:

Questions, questions, questions...

So does Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” actually MEAN anything? What about Jonathan Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift”? Why are the profligate professors flapping all over the map about THAT poem? And how does it happen that after four centuries the same damn professors STILL don’t have a clue about Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”? Okay, admittedly a clue or four about this part of the poem, or that little bit. But no general idea whatsoever about the poem as a whole. Nothing at all. Nada. Zilch. When will our theory-infested, jargon-ridden Blithering Class muster the brainpower to decipher it? Never? Or maybe when they read this brilliant book? Again, what’s the deal with all those ultra-weird Bob Dylan songs on the Basement Tapes?  Uh, let me guess, did Bobby plagiarize those hillbilly-flavored goofs from somewhere? What?—from Shakespeare?? Are you joshing me? Hillbilly Shakespeare??? Wait a minute, how much Shakespeare is in this book anyway? Quite a lot? Maybe 30% or more? Shakespeare... wow... seriously boring.  Worse than frigging high school! What?—and this book has some of Andersen’s own poetry too? There's poetry wafting in from nasty, redneck, tar-tarnished ALBERTA? From a cabbie??! LMFAO! C’mon, admit it, this is a really, really boring book, right? Total snooze-button, right?

Tedious answers inside!

     *     *     *

Ah yes, have some fairly definite ideas about the front-cover too, but your alleged critic will be coy about THAT. Hey, it'll be a bit cartoonish, with a teensy pic of John Lennon in one corner, saying, "...and for those of you who want to know why Old Flat-Top has feet down below his knees, that'll be answered inside too..."

Heh.  =]

"Is he crazy?"--a covert answer, and close but no cigar

    Clawing through the high stack of current newspapers, I randomly pull a September 14 Edmonton Sun--and accidentally stumble on a feature by Michael Platt of the Calgary Sun, headlined:

UNBEARABLE TRUTH COST FRANKLIN
PIONEER PROPER RECOGNITION

The editor in me cringes at the awkwardness of the double-stack (especially the split "Franklin pioneer" which is somewhat vague to begin with), but the story it tells (yes, online too) is a fascinating tale of dullards thinking inside the rut, until after a century and a half a sharp mind o'erleaps the mucky track and rolls to proper conclusions. I would headline it:

BRITAIN FINALLY RECOGNIZES RAE,
MALIGNED ARCTIC EXPLORER

John Rae in fact was the seaman who in 1854 discovered some remains of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, including evidence of cannibalism among the desperate Franklin crew before they perished; and also the final link of the Northwest Passage, the Rae Channel, which Amundsen used (with full credit to Rae) in his pioneering voyage through the Passage in 1903-4.
    All of which is interesting in itself, as are the literary heroics of Ken McGoogan in telling the whole tangled tale in a number of books (he also spoke at the laying of a ledger-stone to Rae in Westminster Abbey).
   But for me the punchline is the 150-year delay in recognition--a classic case of shoot-the-messenger. Because Rae had concluded and reported cannibalism, he was rendered persona non grata and shunned. No one likes to hear horrific things (unless the horror is safely contained in Hollywood claptrap).
    This verity strikes close to home, as it may help explain a curious puzzle in my Bob Dylan research. If, as I concluded in my investigation into Dylan's wholesale expropriation of Shakespeare for the Basement Tapes, Dylan has effectively solved the "Hamlet problem" which has dogged scholars for centuries, why did he plant the solution with extreme obscurity in his song "Crash on the Levee"? (aka "Down in the Flood"). Couldn't he just have, um, written a letter to the editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly or something?
    In theory, he could have. Except that would be obtuse and boring. And Dylan is dealing with (and is probably fully aware that he is dealing with) a double-horror: first, the appalling news that Prince Hamlet is not a tragic hero but a vicious schmuck, a prince who is not just "melancholy mad" (with the emphasis on the melancholy, please) but actually crazy. It is a helluva jolt when one discovers this, and it is notable that almost all the scholars pussy-footing around the fact--and there have been quite a few--tend to avoid the conclusion or gloss over the evidence supporting it--wherein the second horror, that our critic-psychologists "who prophesize with the pen" have been routinely diagnosing Lord Lunatic as merely... stressed-out? For 400+ years. Has our western brain-trust really been so dense and derelict for all these centuries??
    With the exception of a handful of critics, yes. And even these few approach and circle the question most gingerly, never quite uttering the unthinkable. Perhaps the most notable of these hesitants is T. S. Eliot, who wrote a famous-in-academe essay on Hamlet (my most recent rediscovery of it came in a criticism textbook) wherein he lists the numerous ways in which the play Just. Doesn't. Add. Up.
    Included is the perennial question of "what's bugging the Prince of Denmark?" (if you have the time and a weird sense of humor, check every scholarly explanation of why Hamlet kills Polonius, sight unseen). At the end of the essay Eliot tosses up his hands, supposing it is just Shakespeare being his usual sui generis self, breaking all the rules for tragedy, God knows why. But still basically composing a tragedy. Go figure.
    To give a modicum of credit, Eliot clearly had good intuitive suspicions, even if they never found footing. My own literary lion, H. L. Mencken also had a few stray remarks about Hamlet, if not an entire essay; in one of them he flatly calls Prince Hamlet a "sophomore" which may be the lowest estimation of Hammie's character I've ever encountered. Clearly he had suspicions too. Maybe the two had even read Voltaire, who entertained some of the earliest and most extensive hunches about Hamlet not being quite on the level. (In his memoir My Life As Author and Editor, Mencken describes a casual meeting with Eliot where the two discussed the technicalities of their respective magazines; we can only speculate what they might have accomplished if they had butted heads about Hamlet instead).
    In any case it is easy to imagine Bob Dylan sitting dismayed at his ugly discovery and mulling how to handle it (he mentions the Hamlet-problem glancingly in his book Tarantula) until finally deciding to deflect the rotten Dane into another of his opaque cryptogram-songs.
    Yep, who needs the headache of sorting out the details of Shakespeare's closet-satire, and answering the yowls of the dull academics?-- leave THAT noise to posterity. Most astute.
    And in another century or so Will and Bob, those two sly speakers of the unspeakable, may get rehabilitated enough to get ledger-stones in Westminster Abbey too.

    PS: The title of this post comes from an very sharp English professor, who asked "Is he crazy?" as the very first comment on teaching the play to us. She asked the question as intently as if it really mattered, and it does.

Who is the "Mighty Quinn"?

The following blog-post is, for the moment, ONLY an **extended intro** cum teaser. But the entire article WILL get plunked here, maybe two or three days after making a debut in dead-wood media, thereby generating some do-re-mi for both the papers and your beleaguered racketeer of writing. Stay tuned... can't believe this stretch-essay has incubated over five months... *sigh* ...
   May, nine months... *siiiiiiiigh*...    
   July, 11 months...    
   March, 2014 19 months...
My THIRD August: Okay, sneak preview (30%?) of this stinking, overlong yet way-too-short albatross... now (Aug. 29) SENT OUT... and waiting for editorial blessing (doubtful, given 6,300 words...) Yep, as journalism it went over like a uranium blimp...
    FOURTH August (2015): Wait for the book (not the movie, because there won't be one).

 
Suggested call-out from article (one of a bunch):
More astonishingly, (the Beatles') "Come Together" artfully and playfully recognizes two related Shakespeare sources that Dylan uses--can you spot them?



The Shakespeare in Bob Dylan's basement    
     -or-

Who is the Mighty Quinn anyway? (a rascal from Quebec??)

...and, um, why did Dylan perform a sex-change operation on him before slipping her across the border?


Now, when someone offers me a joke,
I just say no thanks,
I try to tell it like it is,
And keep away from pranks.
                          - Bob Dylan, "Going to Acapulco" 1967

Any attempt to render sense from the published lyrics to these (Dylan's 1967 Basement Tapes) songs just strikes me as against the whole spirit of the sessions.
                              -Clinton Heylin, Revolution in the Air

The why is plain as way to parish church:
He that a fool doth very wisely hit
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob...
                 - Shakespeare, As You Like It

He got the voice that speak in riddles...
              -John Fogerty, "Old Man Down the Road" 1985

Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.
                                   Joni Mitchell, 2010

The lights of my native land are glowing,
I wonder if they'll know me next time 'round.
                           -Bob Dylan, "Duquesne Whistle" 2012

You ain't never going to figure out what Bob's going to do next. Only God knows what's going on in his mind.
                 -Ronnie Hawkins OC, 2014

  Behold the sizzling 60s, now largely reduced to a dusty diorama of hippies, LSD and Woodstock (or in the April Walrus magazine, a rehash of the Port Huron Statement in dishwater-dull terms). But poke around the area, hotspots may surprise you.
    For starters, try a little-visited YouTube snippet of the Beatles in studio circa January 1969, messing briefly with Bob Dylan's "Please, Mrs. Henry"--just a minute-long audio-clip with a photo slapped on, but it features John strumming guitar and mock-rasping a bit of the chorus--"Please, Mrs. Henry! Mrs. Henry, please!"--a few people chatting around him, then George talking about "playing the tapes" (those famous long ago Dylan Basement Tapes) and almost-laughing, "The words!..."
    Ah yes, the words. Stuff like "I'm a thousand years old, I'm a generous bomb/ I'm T-boned and punctured, I've been known to be calm"--to quote the song's romping discombobulation (which the Beatles only toyed with, though "I Am the Walrus" approaches its zany spirit).
    What can possibly be said about those Bob Dylan lyrics? In fact two entire books have recently been devoted to the Tapes, one by senior rock-music critic, Greil Marcus, who wrote the liner-notes to the official Basement Tapes album finally released in 1975. His book The Old, Weird America wraps the songs in every tangent from "the great Harvard scholar" F. O. Matthiesson to Appalachian coal-mining history, but neither it nor Sid Griffin's Million Dollar Bash get very far into the screwball lyrics, whose mystery endures. A befuddled critic today might still echo George Harrison's speechless wonder at them. Or like Dylanologist Scott Heylin postulate they have no rational meaning. Or maybe they are "automatic writing" or "patched together out of scraps."
    The story behind the Basement Tapes is that Bob Dylan, after a July 1966 motorcycle accident and/or collapse from overwork and drugs, retreated to his home in upstate New York, and for much of 1967 recuperated by woodshedding with his 80%-Canadian back-up band from an arduous 1965-66 world tour, in the basement garage of their nearby West Saugerties house, dubbed Big Pink (and iconicized in 1968 when the band became the Band and released their first album Music from Big Pink).
    The Saugerties crew fixed up Big Pink's basement for sound-recording (another YouTube clip has Robbie Robertson recalling how this pioneer home-studio came about) and cellarside they recorded a staggering number of songs. The casual sessions (often attended by a dog named Hamlet) began with covers of old American folk tunes, and over time drifted to Dylan originals with a similarly antiquated "Americana" flavor, as well as stray tidbits from the Band, for a total of 100+ songs.
   Mostly it was done for the sheer joy of making music, although it is now credited with starting the roots-music and alt-country genres. But Dylan also had the idea of putting 14 of his songs onto a demo-tape and circulating copies for other artists to record. The Beatles, as noted, didn't bite. But another British band, Manfred Mann grabbed "Mighty Quinn" (aka "Quinn the Eskimo") from the tape and made a big hit of it (#1 in Britain).
    Which is where your Edmonton kibitzologist comes in--on Christmas 1967 at the age of 14, I received a tiny portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, and one of the songs it soon captured from the radio was "Mighty Quinn."
    Aside from being a catchy singalong song, two things stood out: first, its odd lyrics, e.g. "Let me do what I wanna do, I can't decide on my own"--huh? Actually, the end-lyric is "I can't decide 'em all" as research determined, but the correction clarifies nothing; the words remain as cryptic as the following line: "Just tell me where to put 'em, and I'll tell you who to call"--huh?? Again, the chorus of "You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn" to my young ears sounded like "You'll Nazi nothing."
   The second eyebrow-raiser was flipping through a purloined-from-dad Playboy magazine and seeing, amid more comely Hollywoodites, a photo of actor Anthony Quinn as an Eskimo with fur-edged hood in some film. Surely this was a clue, but what sort?? My Hardy Boys Detective Handbook hadn't prepared me for this at all.
   Despite being a junior music fanatic, at that age I was unaware of Dylan's authorship, and barely registered Dylan himself, despite digging his midsize hit "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" a year earlier (which also stumped me with its chorus of "But I would not feel so all alone/ Everybody must get stoned!")
    Succeeding years, however, especially college with its discovery of the tabloid Rolling Stone, planted Dylan firmly in my consciousness, up to the mandatory heavy contemplation of his lyrics. It was a jolt, for instance, when I read Joseph Conrad's Victory and realized Pedro in the novel matched "faithful slave Pedro" in Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" (albeit Conrad's Pedro lacks a "fantastic collection of stamps/ To win friends and influence his uncle"). And a bigger triumph deducing that the highway in "Highway 61 Revisited" neatly symbolizes faith.
    But Dylan wasn't my light on the road to Damascus; critic H. L. Mencken supplied that. Still, fate delivered plenty of Dylan epiphanies to tuck into my karma, from seeing him in concert in Nuremberg in 1978, to reading a Rolling Stone item about a costume-party where attendees came as something in a Dylan song (hugely successful, e.g. a partygoer who "dressed/ With 20 pounds of headlines stapled to his chest") to debating another aficionado as to which Dylan album was best--he chose Blonde on Blonde, I voted the Basement Tapes. On such questions reasonable fanatics may differ.
    But like many of the hypnotized, I fled Dylan after his late-70s leap to Christianity. My love of literature, however, eventually led (long story) to becoming an amateur Shakespeare shamus, mainly of his lesser-known play Troilus and Cressida. Which is how I happened to wake one morning in August 2012, a week after downloading the 1975 Basement Tapes, with a peculiar line from its "Crash on the Levee" serenading my groggy brain: "You can train on down to William's Point/ You can bust your feet, you can rock this joint"--and wondered, did this refer to William Shakespeare?
    A preposterous connection. And yet the song's minimal lyrics do seem to be a distorted echo of Prince Hamlet lashing out at his mother: "Mama, don't you make a sound"--and/or Ophelia: "If you go down in the flood, it's gonna be your own fault"--although the scrambled state of the words (bookish Dylan playing hillbilly-illiterate, it seems) keeps a clear verdict just out of reach. But really, what the heck is "It's king for king, queen for queen/ Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen" doing on an all-American levee? Eh?
   Furthermore, as any Bobphile knows, Ophelia has already had a surreal cameo as an "old maid" in 1965's "Desolation Row." And in Dylan'sTarantula (a stream-of-anything book also from the mid-60s) he taunts a middlebrow for getting good grades in easy literature, but not in Hamlet, indicating Dylan knows its status as a enigmatic "problem play" among the profs. Again, "Shakespeare he's in the alley/ With his pointed shoes and his bells" saunters through "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" in 1966, the same year Dylan, on the European leg of that grueling concert tour, visited Hamlet's Kronborg Castle, where as Howard Sounes notes in his Dylan-bio Down the Highway, "Bob was interested to learn all he could about the fabled Prince of Denmark." So, if every auteur from Goethe to Lincoln to Kurosawa has succumbed to Shakespeare-fascination, why not Dylan? And why not another go at Hamlet in 1967?
    But while glumly contemplating how short the song is (under two minutes) and the need for more evidential verses, I notice only one song on the Basement Tapes is shorter, the rousing opener "Odds and Ends" at a mere 1:48; a favorite song among favorites, but now idly rehearsing its lyrics in my head, it hits me like a wallop: Dylan berating a lady (again) sounds like Prince Troilus watching Lady Cressida in the climactic tent-scene in Troilus and Cressida.
    "I stand in awe and I shake my face/ You break your promise all over the place" (as the song starts) perfectly describes Troilus's initial shock, the idiosyncratic "shake my face" depicting his subsequent rage and hinting at you-know-who. And the couple did pledge love-vows to each other.
    Going to Dylan's official website to verify the "Odds and Ends" lyrics delivers a second, larger wallop: the revisionist Dylan, who often tweaks his poetry in perplexing ways, has changed the intro line--instead of awe and shaken face we get "I plan it all and I take my place." This is now CLEARLY the Troilus and Cressida tent-scene.
    For those unfamiliar with the play, Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's reconfiguration of the Trojan War tale, borrowing heavily from medieval sources (especially Chaucer) who added a love-story to the skeleton of Homer's Iliad. In Shakespeare's version, as the long war festers, on the Trojan side Lady Cressida's uncle Pandarus arranges a tryst between her and Prince Troilus, but the day after it is consummated Cressida is traded to the Greeks in exchange for a Trojan prisoner. In a hasty farewell, Troilus tells Cressida he will come to the Greek camp and surreptitiously visit her (the plan). When a group of Trojan warriors goes to the Greek camp to watch a single-combat, Troilus slips away to, nope, not have a romantic moment with her, but merely eavesdrop--"take my place" unseen in the tent where she stays. What he sees (as per Dylan) is Cressida flirting with her Greek guardian Diomedes. Cue the jealous fury.
    Atop these two play-echoes, I recollect a third, well-known hint of Shakespeare in the Basement Tapes song "Tears of Rage"--"What dear daughter 'neath the sun/ Would treat a father so?/ To wait upon him hand and foot/ Yet always answer 'no'"--this is widely seen as a reference to King Lear. With these three items staring at me, the question naturally arose: how much more Shakespeare might be in the Basement Tapes? Maybe every wacky Dylan song on the Tapes encapsulates a nugget of Shakespeare?
    The next step is familiar: just as I consult a Bible concordance to ferret out religious allusions in Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida is riddled with them), I now reach for a Shakespeare concordance (Google be praised!--there is one online!) to start looking for word-matches with Dylan. It is tedious slogging and 19 times out of 20 a searcher draws a blank, but slowly bits of Shakespeare begin to emerge. One of the first is the rocked "joint" from "Crash on the Levee"--it connects with (causes?) "the time is out of joint" in Hamlet. As the song contains zero indication what "joint" Dylan is singing about (let's not speculate in the marijuana direction) the word is added to our Hamlet hints, filed under wordplay, alongside a certain levy/levee pun.
    "Odds and Ends" yields even better links to Troilus and Cressida. Its chorus of "Odds and ends, odds and ends/ Lost time is not found again" resonates with the play's "Speech on Time," and more deeply with the "arrival scene" in which the traded Cressida is led to the Greek camp, where resident highbrow Ulysses proposes that the Greek princes greet her with each a kiss. Three princes, old Nestor, Achilles and Patroclus do so, Patroclus most suggestively, explicitly acting Paris embracing and kissing Helen, the very cause of the war. Next comes Menelaus, the cuckolded husband who began the mobilization of a thousand ships to get his Helen back:

Menelaus: I'll have my kiss, sir. Lady, by your leave.
Cressida: In kissing, do you render or receive?
Menelaus: Both take and give.
Cressida: I'll make my match to live,
The kiss you take is better than you give,
Therefore no kiss.
Menelaus: I'll give you boot, I'll give you three for one.
Cressida: You are an odd man; give even or give none.
Menelaus: An odd man, lady? Every man is odd.
Cressida: No, Paris is not, for you know 'tis true
That you are odd and he is even with you.
Menelaus: You fillip me o' the head.... (to ...Dylan's "You take your file and you bend my head" etc.)

   *    *     *
(main body of essay with another ton of detail) 

  *     *     *

 ...An appalling amount of stuff remains to be sorted out, e.g.the time jokes (hint: "quarter to three" in "Going to Acapulco" and its "soft gut" are both filched from Shakespeare's "Seven Ages"). Again, there's the status of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire" as a grab-bag of the Tragedies (e.g. "confiscate your lace" from Othello, "unpack" from Hamlet, "wheel's on fire" from King Lear and/or G. Wilson Knight's study of the Tragedies, The Wheel of Fire).

    Yet again, a half-essay must be written on Dylan deriving "I Shall Be Released" from Richard II (and how, as with "Odds and Ends" and Troilus and Cressida, his distillation proves Dylan a razor-sharp critic). Indeed, I would argue that in "Crash on the Levee" Dylan has, implicitly at the very least, solved the centuries-old mystery of Hamlet, perceiving that the play is no tragedy (as Voltaire also argued) and that Prince Hamlet is no tragic hero but a downright vicious schmuck--which is how Dylan plays him. Why else would Dylan caricature Hamlet blaming Ophelia for her own drowning? And then sneering, "You're going to have to find yourself another best friend somehow"--a downright spiteful, nay lunatic thing to say. Isn't it time we scholars stopped making excuses for the unhinged Prince of Denmark? (Voltaire notably didn't go quite so far; instead veering off into the notion that Shakespeare was a wild barbarian who ran amok over the rules of drama. The French satirist never quite caught Shakespeare's deadpan satire of nutbar Hamlet, as Dylan does)...
    *      *      *
(end-matter)

    *      *      *

That's it for now; still less than half the essay. As I said, the whole stinking mess will get dumped here after publication...

Oh yes, the no-longer-secret identity of Quinn, not that anyone cares... the evidence is more interesting than the mere fact in any case...
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17730345#post17730345 

Damn!--not sure WHY an end-jam of words is occuring on this blog-post (verbiage overload??) but doing a cut-and-paste to the Straight Dope page SHOULD be possible...
    (July 1, 2016, Quinn-page still there... all quiet... now an ancient, academic question, like the color of F. Scott Fitzgerald's undershorts...)

A Question for Robbie Robertson

So, if you are a devotee of the Basement Tapes, and are following my Dylan-Shakespeare thing (you are, right?--closely, minutely and obsessively, right?) perhaps this question may have occurred to you too: when Dylan on the "Crash on the Levee" sings:

"Swamp's gonna rise, no boat's gonna row,
You can train on down to William's Point..."

...is Robbie Robertson behind him aware that they are doing a Shakespeare mash-up? (or "surrealization" as I called it). Or is he just thinking, "Well, well, another screwball Dylan tune, pass the doob... man!... hee hee!"

One tantalizing bit of evidence on the Tapes album indicates Robertson is thinking SOMETHING about the screwiness, else why would he sing, on his own song "Yazoo Street Scandal":

"Sweet William said, with a drunken head,
If I had a boat, I'd help you float..."

Unless you argue that the entire album is just 100% surreal nonsense with an Americana flavor (a tenable thesis, I must admit, with a rueful chuckle) Robertson must be either a) aware that Dylan is reconfiguring Hamlet, or b) groping at Dylan's meaning and riffing around with it. Offhand I'd guess Robertson DOESN'T see the Hamlet connection, but I bet he is smart enough to be puzzling about incongruities like:

"King for king, queen for queen,
Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen..."

Yep.

         *         *         *         *

Sept 30 footnote: FINALLY scouted the lyrics online; here are two results:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/band/yazoostreetscandal.html

http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/band-lyrics/yazoo-street-scandal-lyrics.html

Man oh man oh man.

I know how altogether RIDICULOUS it is to even ATTEMPT an analysis of these wacky lyrics, but let's try to reduce the murk just a little. First comes determining just what the lyrics ARE. Note the disagreements between the two transcripts (e.g. I dibs "Eliza" rather than "Delilah") and, heck even where the two sources agree I'm inclined to raise question-flags. For example, is it really "widow"??--my ears have heard "winner" all these decades, and "winner" gives a nice Civil-War flavor to the nasty laugh at Cotton King. On the other hand, this is mighty intuitive, and anything but conclusive.

Now look at the line that BOTH obviously struggle to hear: "Think what you want/"Take once for all" respectively. After about 10 listens each to the Basement Tapes version and the Big Pink outtake (very similar) I'd say the actual line is "Cain't want the war" but I'll admit that the vocals are strained and I'm groping. Nor is the context much help.

     *       *       *
(just a little more to wrap up this inconclusive turkey...)

Part 2: Tying up 300 or so Dylan-Shakespeare loose ends...

There was some urgency in finishing that last post (actually, being an endless revisionist, like Mr. Dylan himself, I may tweak it a teensy bit yet). But after almost four days I wanted badly to "make it a wrap" of the basic argument. And tackle some of the bulking backlog here, like the "Glossy Magazines" autopsy.
   Alas, readers must be aware that the post leaves a lot of questions dangling, like--how far did Dylan go in tapping Shakespeare? Was it a one-play-per-song program in Dylan's mind? Were Band members in on the joke? (for it does strike me as a joker-thing to do, on one level a prank that his nemesis, Mr. Jones-Weberman would utterly fail to find when he emptied the trash). Again, are there some songs (besides the Band's) that were NOT "keyed" to Shakespeare? (at first glance "Going to Acapulco" and "Tiny Montgomery"--personal favorites by the way--do NOT seem to contain anything Shakespearean, but then again the Shakespeare-keyed songs are very low-key, and I haven't read every Shakespeare play, so who knows what a heavier scrutiny of the other songs might reveal).
   But in addition to this, I had questions of my own, some of them arising from my adventures as a student of Shakespeare, and finding that the Bard did a great number of sneaking "stealth allusions" that bear some resemblance to Dylan's covert operations. Is there then some sort of primal (or sophisticated) artistic method at work between the two word-slingers?...

(Aug 27) Again, the little hint of Othello at the end of the the last post really needs expansion, for it isn't as offhand or joke-y as I perhaps made it look. Being a Shakespeare semi-pro I know the The Wheel of Fire is a reputed book of Shakespeare criticism, and not unrelated to the Bob Dylan song. Check this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_Fire

Little wonder Dylan in the recent Rolling Stone is emphasizing Shakespeare so much. But the whole Shakespeare-in-Dylan thing is a HUGE row to hoe. It'd be easer if Dylan just came out and admitted his roots, but I suppose it might be futile to peevishly beg him "Let us not talk falsely now"..

(Sept. 2) On third thought, maybe let's just leave the dangling questions dangling for now. The big ones require too much reading and research (hey, Timon of Athens could parallel "Tiny Montgomery" maybe?--or Midsummer Night's Dream parallel "Million Dollar Bash"?), the small ones will resolve themselves in due course (e.g. "you can rock this joint" paralleling "the time is out of joint" in Hamlet/"Levee" which popped unannounced into my brain two days ago, but merely another smidgen in the evidence-heap and very little by itself).

And ultimately this whole mess of correlations, while fascinating, proves not much except that Dylan is a most playful lover of Shakespeare, and fails to stay away from pranks. I can almost hear Dylan responding with dry sarcasm, "Yeah, so I used some Shakespeare. So what?"

Unlike Alan J. Weberman, I find no program or agenda, artistic or political, in the sneaky source-usage. Unlike Shakespeare, Dylan does not employ stealth-allusions as a cohesive structure of meaning (unless you expand "structure of meaning" to include impressionistic goofs), which makes Shakespeare's coy references to the Bible, and to medieval mystery and morality plays far more important.

Ergo: back to the big Shakespeare job for the moment.

(Sept. 8-9) Easier said than done!--my brain just lingers on this, as you can tell from my Twitter feed. Yes, preliminary indications do link "You Ain't Going Nowhere" with The Winter's Tale. "Tomorrow's the day my bride's gonna come" sure seems to hint of Hermione's return, eh?

Aaaand, spent most of the 8th doing a quick scan of the entire play (jeez, really CAN'T afford all that time) to find matches with the official Dylan lyrics. Found LOTS:
-The blustery weather that starts the song matches the weather when baby Perdita is abandoned. (Act III scene iii)
-No frozen railings in Shakespeare, but the abandonment follows the scene (Act III scene ii) where Leontes finally (a bit late) stops railing about Hermione's alleged adultery, and repents. Who loves puns more? Bob or Will? I ask you!
-"Get your mind off wintertime..." Hope THAT needs no explanation...
-"I don't care how many letters they sent"--Leontes's refusal to believe the oracle's letter (same scene as when his railing finally freezes).
-"Pick up your money"--Autolycus pick-pocketing (IV, ii)
-"...a gun that shoots/ Tailgates and substitutes"--Leontes jealousy and rage at Polixenes for, um, tailgating his wife (allegedly) as a "substitute" husband.
-"Strap yourself to the tree with roots"--"The root of his opinion, which is rotten/ As ever oak or stone was sound." (II, iii, 88-9)
-"Genghis Khan/ He could not keep/ All his kings/ Supplied with sleep"--Hermione is daughter of the King of Russia. Add Polixenes and Leontes and that is three kings, possibly all subject to the great Khan in the romance-world of Shakespeare and/or the scramble-y brain of Dylan. A stretch? Maybe. But consider that The Winter's Tale starts with Polixenes proposing curious "sleepy drinks" (I, i, 14) to Leontes as a substitute for returning Leontes's extravagent hospitality (which Polixenes can't afford to equal). Consider also "It is required/ You do awake your faith" in the climactic scene where the "statue" of Hermione comes to life.
-"Oo-ee, ride me high" suggests both the  pastoral dancing, where the three peasant dancers "by their own report, sir, hath danced before the king; and not the worst of the three but jumps twelve foot and a half by th' squire" (IV, iv, 330-2)--but also the play's constant contrast between low-class and high-class society, innocent enough on the surface, although this critic has been trained to keep a sharp eye on Shakespeare's deadpan.

The alternative, I suppose is that Dylan is just conjuring up his song out of pure-poetic wackiness (and possibly chemical assistance) but I prefer a little method in Dylan's's madness. He is more educated than he lets on, and the coincidences seem a little to numerous to be mere accidents. Still, there are a few remaining lyrics that seem determinedly inexplicable. But only a few--despite all the music and instruments in the play I STILL haven't located a darn flute. Ditto an "easy chair" although that might just be a throne, eh?

Part 1: A Long Note on Bob Dylan, Shakespeare and References

The mark of of good poetry is that it sinks its hooks into your brain and refuses to let go.
   A few weeks ago I downloaded The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, and one morning, even before I had listened to more than a song or two, a curious couplet from one of the others, not heard for perhaps 20 years or more, popped unannounced into my mind:
            ...
            You can train on down to William's Point
            You can bust your feet, you can rock this joint...

It required a few seconds of thought before I pinpointed the song as "Crash on the Levee" but it was the "William's Point" that really grabbed my attention. William's Point??
   Well, maybe it's nothing; geographic references are frequent enough in popular music (and maybe more so in roots-y music). Think of "The Wabash Cannonball" or "Route 66" or "Green River." Or Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" (ever notice that it translates cleanly as "faith"?) Or "Yazoo Street Scandal" on the roots-y Basement Tapes itself.
   Perhaps it is just the long years snouting out sneaky references in Shakespeare, but something in me (a paranoid tendency, perhaps?) suggested that "William's Point" might actually be a reference to The Bard. Was I turning into Alan J. Weberman??
   But no, the idea isn't totally preposterous. Even Shakespeare himself turns nearly every usage of "will" into a personal pun, and wordplay is surely a prime tactic of Dylan and poets in general. Moreover, Dylan, like every literary spirit from Dryden and Goethe to Orwell and Firesign Theatre shows an abiding interest in Shakespeare. Note:

            Shakespeare he's in the alley, with his pointed shoes and his bells,
            Speaking to some French girl, who says she knows me well,
            And me, I'd send a message to find out if she's talked,
            But the Post Office has been stolen, and the mailbox is locked...

That's "Memphis Blues Again" from Blonde on Blonde, a mere year before the Basement Tapes were recorded.

Or how about this contemporaneous apostrophe to someone (a thin person?) from Tarantula:

(Sorry, still rummaging for the damn book, and its pointed reference to the formidable puzzle of Hamlet) (Aug. 18)... okay (Aug. 20) here it is in all its loopy glory, like the H. L. Mencken joke about poetry being maybe just "prose sawed into lengths" (ha ha--but maybe widen your computer window to not scrunch the lengths):

  i'm not saying that books are
  good or bad, but i dont think
  youve ever had the chance to find
  out for yourself what theyre all
  about--okay, so you used to get B's
  in the ivanhoe tests & A minuses
  in the silas marners .  .  . then you
  wonder why you flunked the hamlet
  exams--yeah well thats because one
  hoe & one lass do not make a spear--
  the same way two wrongs do not make
  a throng--now that youve been thru
  life, why dont you try again .  .  . you
  could start with a telephone book--
  wonder woman--or perhaps catcher in
  the rye--theyre all the same & everybody
  has their hats on backwards thru the
  stories            (1966; Penguin 1977, p70-1)

Whew!--SpellChuck doesn't like THAT! In any case, behind the potluck poetics (okaaaay,  SpellChuck, poetics IS a word, dammit) Dylan clearly recognizes that Hamlet is a problem-play, and a much-gnawed-upon bone of the scholars. In fact, I read somehere recently that Dylan in his heyday was a remarkably dedicated library-goer, and the literate quality of his poetry makes this fairly evident. I also recall reading Joseph Conrad's novel Victory back in the 70s and suddenly realizing, "Hey, this is the same Pedro as Dylan put in "Tombstone Blues"--albeit Conrad's Pedro doesn't have "a fantastic collection of stamps to win friends and influence his uncle."

But of course the acid test of any possible allusion is context. Unfortunately, "Crash on the Levee" is, at first listening, little more than a funky, drunken, semi-literate hillbilly harangue--like most of the Basement Tapes!--the singer remonstrating with his "mama" about some unspecified catastrophe that is splitting them up ("There's a crash on the levee, and mama you been refused." Again: "It's sugar for sugar, salt for salt/ If you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault").

   In short, lots of suggestive symbolism, but little in the way of a narrative thread or logical structure. It's as disjointed as anything in Dylan's uber-scrambled oeuvre. Still, something in the general oddness of "Swamp's gonna rise, no boats gonna row" suggests Ophelia's death to me. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but what the hell meaneth "It's king for king, queen for queen/ Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen"? Monarchs on a levee??? Huh?? But the non-sequitur could be a hint at the murderous succession of kings in Hamlet, and the supposed selfishness of Hamlet's mother the queen...

But as I'm mulling this, other Shakespearean items in the Basement Tapes occur to me. Most obviously "Tears of Rage" and its "What dear daughter 'neath the sun would treat her father so?/ To wait upon him hand and foot, yet always answer no." The suggestion of Cordelia and King Lear is so strong I almost knew the Google results before searching the names. But the overall drift of "Tears of Rage"?--note the general puzzlement of all concerned with yet another Dylan hodge-podge, and the analysts' freewheeling projection of various meanings onto the mess.

Cocking my head at the tenuous but almost tangible Hamlet connection in "Crash on the Levee" it registers that the song is almost the shortest on the Basement Tapes at a miniscule 2:04, and I glumly regret that Dylan didn't add another verse or two to this sketchy and skeletal "situation" (if you can call it that; more like a mere glimmer of a situation) so the song would make a little SENSE. Idly I note that only the rocking opener  "Odds and Ends" is shorter at a microscopic 1:47... "You promised you'd love me, but what do I see?/ Just you coming spilling juice over me..."
   Hm. Now I'm connecting Shakespeare again, thinking of Troilus and Cressida, Cressida's love vow, and Troilus's fury at the end, when he imagines he sees her break the promise. This faint but distinct parallel is like the parallel of  "Crash on the Levee" to Hamlet. And note the ODD way that "Odds and Ends" starts: "I stand in awe..... "
   Whoa...
   Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! (five bells, like on old news-wire teletypes, when the president is assassinated!)
   Okay, checking the exact lyrics via Google (back in the old not-so-hi-fi LP days I thought "Odds and Ends" began "I stand in the hall...") I hit a few bullseyes. For starters, Dylan has changed the lyrics slightly, in an altogether REVEALING way. YouTube gives both versions together; I cut+paste them:

I plan it all and I take my place (I stand in awe and I shake my face)
You break your promise all over the place
You promised to love me, but what do I see
Just you comin' and spillin' juice over me
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again

Now, you take your file and you bend my head
I never can remember anything that you said
You promised to love me, but what do I know
You're always spillin' juice on me like you got someplace to go
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again

Now, I've had enough, my box is clean
You know what I'm sayin' and you know what I mean
From now on you'd best get on someone else
While you're doin' it, keep that juice to yourself
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again.

Well the fingerprints of Troilus and Cressida are ALL OVER this! The oddity I was about to mention was "shake my face"--doing duty as half-a-hint of Shakespeare and a vivid description of Troilus's final rage. But the changed lyric (presumably by Dylan, since it graces his site) is almost better. "Take my place" is CLEARLY Troilus sneaking into place in the tent scene (V ii) to eavesdrop on Cressida and Diomedes, where Troilus first is awestruck at her seeming infidelity with her "guardian" Diomedes, and then infuriated at Diomedes and the Greeks, even to the point of wildly stabbing with his sword at the distant Greek tents ("I'll through and through you!")

Again, the "Odds and Ends" song-title, and the truly WEIRD bit about taking a file and bending his head remarkably echoes Cressida fending off Menelaus's attempt at a kiss in the smoochfest of the "arrival" scene (IV v):

Menelaus: I'll have my kiss, sir. Lady, by your leave.

Cressida: In kissing, do you render or receive?

Patroclus: Both take and give.

Cressida:                                  I'll make my match to live,

   The kiss you take is better than you give:

   Therefore no kiss.

Menelaus: I'll give you boot; I'll give you three for one.

Cressida: You are an odd man; give even or give none.

Menelaus: An odd man, lady? Every man is odd.

Cressida: No, Paris is not, for you know 'tis true
   That you are odd and he is even with you.

Menelaus: You fillip me o' the head.              (fillip: tap)

Cressida:                                         No, I'll be sworn.

Ulysses: It were no match, your nail against his horn...


Then there is "like you got somewhere to go" which also has a clear referent in the play... ah, let's save it.

[Sept. 9: Cressida: I have a kind of self resides with you/ But an unkind self, that itself will leave/ To be another's fool. I would be gone." (III, ii, 140-2)]

But the disappointing thing is that as far as Dylan parallels the play, he seems to take Troilus's position on Cressida's "infidelity" while my Twitter stance from the start has been to take "sluttish" Cressida's side, and view her forlorn flirt (yes forlorn--me and Melvyn Levental against all the acadummies and the world!) as constituting a very sly optical illusion perpetrated on the audience--law-students, possibly--by a sly Shakespeare, almost as a perception-test.

Ditto for taking Hamlet's point-of-view in "Crash on the Levee" where Dylan-Hamlet coldly rages at his "mama" (i.e. both Ophelia and his "incestuous" mother). As I've also said on Twitter (perhaps to the point of irritation) Prince Hamlet is "a vicious schmuck"--and as with Troilus, his stupid, hot-headed denunciation of his girlfriend supplies the incriminating act.

But that's another long story, and this post is growing carcinogenically super-sized already. Suffice it for here, there's a lot of Shakespeare in the Basement Tapes (hey, how about "Please Mrs. Henry" as a funky-surreal Americana distortion of Falstaff in the tavern with Prince Hal, reversing roles, Hal playing Hal's father ("Please Mrs. Henry, won't you take me to your dad?") Hey, just a theory...

And doesn't "Wheels On Fire" FEEL Shakespearean?--in an ominous, fate-made-visible sort of way? But I can't sense WHICH play is being referenced, unless it's Othello. Hey, YOU tell me what "I was going to confiscate your lace/ And tie it up in a sailor's knot" means! Nothing at all? Just a reefer-madness vision you say?

                                    -30-