March 12, 2008

Highway 61 Revisited

Mark Polizzotti

2007, paperback

6 cards and notes on back cover

Highway 61 Revisited is the type of 33 1/3 book that I love. It gets into the album, the history, the musician, the cover and more while shedding new light on Bob Dylan. Polizzotti's book about Andre Breton has been on my bookshelf for a long time since I picked it up years ago. After this book I look forward to reading his take on Breton. Polizzotti writes about Dylan as "the thinking person's rock star," and also quotes Joan Baez, "Some people are just no interested. But if you're interested, he goes way, way deep." I'm interested. Polizzotti also keys into the simple but profound workings of Dylan and songs with statements like "Every great song has one moment that stands out above the rest..."

Highlights from the cards

p. 5- opening line about gaze

"The outer photo is as much performance as the music inside"

-glowering rock stars

p. 6 "...he knows the music is good, the best he's ever made, but he doesn't expect you to recognize it and he's gearing up for a fight."

-baby stroller

p. 7- Sergei Eisenstein

"Music that still has the rare quality, after all this time, of making us hear what we want to hear."

p. 8- this record being "too good"

p. 9 "The album is a road map into new territory..."

-"As the thinking person's rock star..."

-"...it pushes one to confront is again and again..."

-Joan Baez, "Some people are just no interested. But if you're interested, he goes way, way deep."

p. 10 "...the supposed turn toward electric music was really a return"

-Dylan, "...I played all the folk songs with a rock 'n' roll attitude..."

p. 12 Dylan, "'Protest' is not my word." ... "amusement-park word"

-"...There are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all."

p. 13 "poetical" approach

"he not busy being born and then reborn, is busy dying"

p. 14 Harry Smith

-Greil Marcus

p. 16- Suze

Dylan to Nora Ephron in 1965, "Folk music is the only music where it isn't simple."

-vegetables and death

p. 17 and 18- painters including Red Grooms

p. 19- singing when he writes

-Al Kooper's organ playing

p. 20- Kant and Mallarme

p. 21- Freud

p. 23- Midwestern

p. 24 BD "I left where I'm from because there's nothing there."

p. 25 Bessie Smith

-flipping the record

p. 31- Greil Marcus misses...

-boredom and the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone"

-D.A. Pennebaker

p. 32- "rhythm thing on paper"

-interviews as theatrical performances

-ghost writing "Like a Rolling Stone"

p. 33 "Also rare for a chart-topping hit, the lyrics focused not on love but its opposite."

p. 35- discussion of who Miss Lonely is (makes a good case its not Edie Sedgewick who I was thinking it was)

p. 37- ultimately...

-any of the phonies

p. 38 "It's up to you to figure out who's who"

-language used in Like a Rolling Stone

p. 39- French Symbolists

-Rimbaud, "I is someone else"

p. 41- Tarantula

-"the sun is still yellow. some people would say it's chicken" from Tombstone Blues

p. 43- writing songs

p. 52- Al Kooper's organ story

p. 53- the result...

p. 55- promo copies

p. 62- did sound check at Newport

p. 63 "sellout jacket"

p. 65- "...the sound of the street..."

p. 70 Woody Guthrie

p. 71 "Woody made each word count. He painted with words."

p. 75- names famous and obscure

p. 85- magpie's nests

p. 89 his voice

p. 90 (voice) "...it exists on its own terms..."

p. 92 "Love Minus Zero"

p. 93 Chelsea Hotel

p. 94 "If he was really serious about her, she had to be unknown..."

p. 110 "...the man Dylan's listeners swore to themselves they'd never become, and with whom most eventually all grew all too familiar."

-Jones vs. Smith for rhyming

-songs on the album- "those addressed to someone...and those...that flash by like glimpses through a car's window as it speeds across this frantic carnival of a nation."

p.111 "Once we have walked into this room, it is not certain we will ever find our way out.

-"Thin Man" song he often performs live

-rhyme scheme

-"Every great song has a moment that stands out above the rest..."

p. 117 BD "My songs are just me talking to myself."

p. 128- Rimbaud's "My Bohemian Life"

p. 129 warning "stepping off the road can leave you very lost"

p. 130- Kooper playing a Hohner Pianet

130-131- Tom Thumb

p. 134- postcards, cultural memory

p. 135- circuses and carnivals and carny life

p. 144

February 16 - March 8

Wanderlust

A history of walking

Rebecca Solnit

2000, hardcover

54 cards

I read Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost at the suggestion of Claire. It was a wonderful meandering, thinking, reflecting book that merged intellectual ideas about solitude with punk rock and so much more. When I came across the title of this book, the R.E.M. song Wanderlust (followed by Pilgrimage and We Walk as I read the book) came to mind as well as the German word it is. The best discoveries often come from wandering or browsing and this book was all one could hope it to be. I have a list of many more books to read as a result. Solnit wonderfully merges art, architectural and intellectual history into her discussion while keeping in mind pop culture, experience, activism and reflection. I have only lived in a few where walking for most everything was possible and I hope to return to places like that again. I knew I hated treadmills and gyms but I thank Solnit allowing me to understand the roots of both and the greater cultural implications of both.

Highlights from the cards:

p. 4 "The history of walking is everyone's history... a desk is no place to think on a large scale."

p. 5 "...thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something that is closest to doing nothing is walking."

p. 6 "...it is both means and end"

p. 7 "Think of the ruin as a souvenir from the canceled end of the world."

p. 8 "It was a revelation to me, the way this act of walking...could articulate political meaning..."

-Thoreau's essay Walking

p. 9 "the sense of place that can only be gained on foot"

-people living "in a series of interiors...On foot everything stays connected."

p. 10- "It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value."

p. 10-11 erosion of public space

p. 11- "The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you."

p. 13- "When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back."

"Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains."

p. 20-21- Rousseau "Reveries of a Solitary Walker"

p. 23-25- Kierkegaard

p. 24- "Kierkegaard's great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them..."

p. 27 mentions George Orwell's statement "The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion."

p. 33- John Napier "Human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe."

"walking begins as delayed falling"

p. 55-57- The Peace Pilgrim

p. 58- "a pilgrimage makes an appeal while a march makes a demand."

"Nonviolence means that activists are asking their oppressors for change rather than forcing it."

p. 67-68- quote at the bottom of the page- "An active line on a a walk moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake." Paul Klee, Allegorizing Drawing

p. 68 "A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape..."

p. 69- moral of mazes

p. 70- Marianne Moore

-children's books

-"...sometimes the map is the territory."

p. 71- labyrinth- 1 route

p. 72- "Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to travel the route of the absent."

p. 88- ha ha ditch

p. 90- French gardens and English gardens

p. 95- guidebooks- what to see, some how to see

p. 96- picturesque- William Gilpin

p. 106- "The poem is also a kind of atlas of the making of a poet"

p. 119- William Hazlitt, 1821, On Going on a Journey, "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey, but I like to go by myself,"

-"solitude is better on a walk because 'you cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others.'"

p. 124- "You must be complex to want simplicity"

-Bedouins

p. 143- "What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history, though it often becomes visible as literature."

p. 149 "...the consequence of the theory that nature is supposed to make you happy is that those most desperately in search of happiness tend to show up there."

p. 158- when walking becomes marching

p. 160- rambling

-"walking is classless" (access to the land another issue)

p. 162- "Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning."

-"Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property."

p. 167- "Walking has become one of the forces that has made the modern world- often by serving as a counterprinciples to economics."

p. 171- "Cities have always offered anonymity, variety and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune teller's, only to know that one might."

-"A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination."

p. 174- Sierra Club dictum, "Take only photographs, leave only footprints."

p. 175- "Streets are the space left over between buildings."

p. 176- "the ideal city is organized around citizenship- around participation in public life."

-most American cities and towns organized around consumption and production

-"Walking is only the beginning of citizenship, but through it the citizen knows his or her city and fellow citizens and truly inhabits the city rather than a small privatized part thereof."

-"Walking the streets is what links up reading the map with living one's life."

-Jane Jacobs

-"To me, the magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."

p. 186- Patti Smith, when asked about how she prepares for performances, "I would roam the streets for a few hours."

p. 187- Virginia Woolf, "How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured."

p. 191- Alan Ginsburg

p. 192- Frank O'Hara, about whose work reveals as Solnit says "Cities are forever sprawling lists."

-David Wojnarowicz, Close to Knives, "He writes in a collage of memories, encounters, dreams, fantasies and outbursts..."

p. 197-198- Walter Benjamin- "...Paris taught me this art of straying." The Arcades Project

p. 199-200 the flaneur

p. 202 Proust

-Baudelaire- "The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else...Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality."

p. 204 Haussmann

p. 205- what upset people most was what he obliterated, which was "the mental map walkers carried with them and the geographical correlatives to their memories and associations"

p. 206- Benjamin on Louis Aragon's book, so exhilarating, "evenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down."

-Benjamin and Franz Hessel has worked on a translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

p. 210 "Parisian writers always gave the street addresses of their characters"

p. 211 Hannah Arendt "...so one inhabits a city by strolling thought it without aim or purpose"

p. 212- Guy DeBord- Psychogeography and Theory of Derive (drifting)

-Greil Marcus

p. 213 "map of your own thoughts, the physical town replaces by an imaginary city."

p. 213 De Certeau- "A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities."

-"frightening possibility...post pedestrian city...risks becoming a dead language"

p. 216 Joseph Beuys "Everyone an artist."

-"This is the highest ideal of democracy- that everyone can participate in making their own life and the life of the community- and the street is democracy's greatest arena."

p. 218- "But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public."

-"Paris is the great city of walkers. And it is the great city of revolution."

p. 229 and 230

p. 230- "A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illuminating the darkness of our old arrangements so that we will never see them quite the same way again."

-Reclaim the streets

p. 231 "Stop the car, Free the city"

p. 232- walking and courtship

p. 233-234 women and walking

-"women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport"

p. 249- 1970s census- majority of Americans suburban

p. 250- suburban home only a place of consumption

p. 251- suburb product of the Industrial Revolution

p. 255- "Political engagement may be one of the things suburbs have zoned out."

p. 260 "The body has ceased to be a utilitarian entity for many Americans, but it is still a recreational one."

-treadmill- "meant to rationalize prisoners' psyches"

p. 263- "The everyday acts of the farm had been reprised as empty gestures"

p. 264- treadmill most perverse- "simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared"

"disinclines people to participate in making that world habitable or to participate in it at all"

-the modern treadmill consumes power (originally could be used to power things)

p. 267 "The disembodiment of everyday life I have been tracing is a majority experience."

-Walking as art, 1960s

p. 269- Lucy Lippard- sculpture- Carol Andre, "My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road."

p. 270- Richard Long, artist from England, Line Made by Walking, 1967

p. 271- Long, "A walk expresses space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone and that is another space too."

p. 272- Stanley Brouwn

p. 278- Las Vegas- new outpost of pedestrian life

p. 278-279- quote at the bottom of the page- Ivan Illich, "The world has become inaccessible because we drive there."

p. 283- Michael Sorkin and theme parks

p. 286- Vegas reinventing the garden and the city

-privatization

-"But the world gets better at the same time it gets worse."

p. 289 Red Rocks

-fight for free space, fight for free time

"Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true crime titillations, and celebrity crises."

p. 291- "The constellation called walking has a history...but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still."

p. 288-291- bottom of the page- Yoko Ono, Map Piece, 1961

p. 284-287- bottom of the page- A.R. Ammons "A poem is a walk"

p. 325-326 Sources for Foot Quotings

January 26-27, 2008

Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
An explosion of vision and humor that forever changed pop music
By Greil Marcus
c. 2005, hardcover, Durham County Public Library

I admit my new found interest in Bob Dylan has been fueled by the mind-blowingly brilliant film I'm Not There. I'm particularly attracted to his resistance to labels and co-opting of the media interview (which reminded me of Warhol in a way I hadn't realized and track down more of Rimbaud's poems, though I love my New Directions edition of Illuminations for other reasons). Greil Marcus is a wonderful wandering writer and this is the perfect subject for his approach. A book about a song, a song that is book-like, and yet, so much more.

One footnote: I didn't realize that the original Like A Rolling Stone single was split between the two sides, 3 minutes to each side, with the hope that the dj would be so caught up in the song he would flip it over and play the second side. However even this seems to be part of the continuous elusiveness surrounding Dylan since a 6 minute single was eventually pressed (p. 145).

Digital recap of my notes and interests:
Page 47-48- interview with the Detroit station WDTM.
Page 70 interview on CCBC. On page 98 Marcus captures the essence of the song's mystery through his observation that you never hear the song the same way and therefore nostalgia cannot cling to the song. He then draws one's attention to the first drum shot that opens the song, causing me to get past my fascination with the organ and now become fascinated by that opening action.
On page 104 Marcus acutely writes about the song's ability to stay in the air and its lingering as it disappears.
Page 112- "There is nothing careful about the language" but even this seems to be undone by Marcus since on the page before he says "One line didn't necessarily pull the next one after it; sometimes a phrase fell back on the one coming up behind it."
Returning to page 112 Marcus discusses ways in which some of Dylan's phrases are found phrases, an element I find truly compelling and mind boggling, since this connects Dylan to an artist like Robert Rauschenberg in a way I had not seen.
On page 114 Marcus introduces the manner in which some of the words function like bombs, another bomb of his own in terms of ground shattering revelations about the song.
Page 115 describes Al Kooper's organ to a "waterway opening."
Page 117 "In a minute and a half, a verse and a chorus, more has already happened than in any other song the year had produced."
Page 118 discussion of the girl and the listener.
Page 119- what the song has demanded of you and why you want more.
Page 123- idea of the prophet and the burden of knowledge and Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
Page 125- story telling and time in songs and this song.
Page 126- the journey of the song.
Page 127- "Dylan may sing the verses; the chorus sings him."
Page 127- where the song leaves you.
Page 150- leaving the world in a different state, but not exactly changing the world, but the change. "This is more like drawing a line..." The song as an event. transformation. witnesses. telling the story to others.
Page 173- society.. "shibboleths and cliches" and society's language (amazing).
The last sentence on page 175.
Page 225- the song as event, only happening once.