Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize For Lit

Well, that was a surprise. Those Erisian Swedes! In the quantum universe next door, my main pick, Thomas Pynchon, won. Finally! He has not appeared in public to say anything. Of course. There are rumors he'll send Jon Stewart to Stockholm in his stead. (When Pynchon won the National Book Award in 1973, he sent zany Professor Irwin Corey to accept on his behalf.) Pynchon's publisher has given a very short press conference, saying Pynch has already given the award money away, to be divided up among Black Lives Matter, the 9/11 First Responders who still need medical relief, Doctors Without Borders, and John Perry Barlow, who, the press release reads, is a "member of the loyal opposition who needs it."

Since it was announced, I've caught myself thinking more and more about Dylan and my associated mental relationships to him. My mom had Dylan's LP Nashville Skyline playing when I was a a pre-teen. I remember looking at the cover and reading his name as "Bob dye-LAN." I loved my mom's Beatles records more than the Dylan. Hell, I loved her Carly Simon record, No Secrets, more than the Dylan, but maybe it's because Carly's braless look was jacking up the baud rate on my boy-organism.

                               believe it or not, this is really Dylan and not Cate Blanchett
                                             

Speaking of the Beatles, Dylan in 1964 was shocked to meet the lads and find out they hadn't tried weed. He turned them on, and there's a wonderfully drawn-out piece on this historical moment in George Case's book Out of Our Heads: Rock 'n' Roll Before the Drugs Wore Off.

A passage from Harry Shapiro's Waiting For the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music:

In 1964, Dylan refused a request from Ginsberg to lead a peace rally at Berkeley and earned the unbending enmity of singer Phil Ochs, who called him "LSD on stage." Dylan reported that Ochs was writing bullshit because politics were absurd and the world was unreal. Dylan took his personal drug-inspired research for freedom and escape through "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Highway 61 Revisited," to the ego-dissolution of "Like A Rolling Stone" and Blonde On Blonde. Nevertheless, claims that all references to "railways" and "tracks" and capitalised H's on lyric sheets demonstrate that Dylan was a heroin addict or that "Blowin In The Wind" was secretly a song about the wonders of cocaine are probably best led in the more extreme realms of Dylanology.

In the early sixties, sharing the experiences of marijuana and LSD between creative spirits had a missionary zeal about it. Rock writer Al Aronowitz turned both Ginsberg and Dylan on to marijuana; Dylan in turn introduced dope-smoking to the Beatles. They met him on their first tour of America. Dylan was "anti-chemical" at the time, probably due to a surfeit of amphetamine, and suggested that the Beatles try something more natural. Dylan rolled the first joint and passed it to Lennon, who, too scared to try, passed it on to Ringo. The episode ended with everyone rolling round the floor in hysterics. (pp.116-117)

Sociologists who made a study of the "Woodstock Generation" found that, of the 1000 respondents, 43% believed most of the music of the sixties could only be understood by someone who had undergone the marijuana and psychedelic drug experience. This study was done in 1977-78, and the majority said their first pot experience was in a college dorm, with either Dylan or Led Zeppelin playing in the background. (Let us take: people who went to Woodstock who were age 20-25: they were born between 1944 and 1949: the first Boomers.)

Which brings me to Dylan's 1965 Newport Folk Festival "outrage."

Dylan appeared there playing an electric guitar, and much of the audience was famously outraged. It's difficult to gauge, in reading multiple sources, the extent of the disapproval, but when I learned about this historical moment, I was deep into playing Black Sabbath, Rush, and Deep Purple guitar solos on my electric guitar. I had always noted any overt response between what a person thought about the acoustic guitar versus the electric. I now think Steve Waksman's book Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience is the finest explication of the social construction of acoustic vs. electric. I also think the fascinating aspect of timbre and its cultural and existential-phenomenal impact is worth delving into, if it's your kinda thing. Dylan's move to electric illuminated the extent of culture's hidden ideologies surrounding electric vs. acoustic, and maybe he deserves a Nobel for just this....

Oh, but the Nobel was for Dylan as literature. Right. I got off-topic. Oh, well...

I consider "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to be proto-Jewish rap from the sixties.

One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Jackson, wrote a bit on Dylan's Nobel HERE.

"Acid isn't for the groovy people. Acid is for the president and people like that. The groovy people don't need to take acid." - Dylan in 1967, found on p.24 of R.U. Sirius's Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs

A funny conversation about Dylan's win.

I like this passage from a June 1984 Rolling Stone interview. Kurt Loder had asked Dylan a question about starting out on guitar and Dylan gives the rundown from his first Sears Silvertone guitar to hearing Woody Guthrie. "And when I heard Woody Guthrie, that was it, it was all over."

Loder: What struck you about him?

Dylan: Well, I heard them old records, where he sings with Cisco Houston and Sonny [Terry] and Brownie [McGhee] and stuff like that, and then his own songs. And he really struck me as an independent character. But no one ever talked about him. So I went through all his records I could find and picked all that up by any means I could. And when I arrived in New York, I was mostly singin' his songs and folk songs. At that time I was runnin' into people who were playing the same kind of thing, but I was combining elements of Southern mountain music with bluegrass stuff, English ballad-stuff. I could hear a song once and know it. (found pp.424-425 of 20 Years of Rolling Stone: What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been)

Dylan led me back to Woody Guthrie. Point: Dylan.

Paul Krassner writes about a moment when Dylan was taking Hebrew lessons:

"When I asked why he was taking Hebrew lessons he said, 'I can't speak it.' Now I pointed an imaginary microphone at him and asked, 'So how do you feel about the six millions Jews who were killed in Nazi Germany?' His answer: 'I resented it.'" - Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut, first ed, p.182

Mercurial Dylan Nobel Prize winner. Folk hero, beatnik, hippie, iconoclast, non-joiner, born-again Xtian, Jew, proto-rapper, proto-punk, oracle for a generation, influence on my god Hendrix, altered history by getting the Beatles stoned, enigmatic forever. I love Pynchon, but I'm okay with Dylan winning it.

                               s'il vous plaît voir M. Bob Campbell à propos de plus psychédélisme
graphique

Gangster-Chic, Mafiazation and The State: Fugitive Notes

1.) Thrill-killer Charles Starkweather was finally captured on January 29, 1958. The poet Ed Sanders writes about it this way:

Starkweather caught: "It was Front Page time for another murd-punk

in the multi-century American fascination 

of come-and-get-me-copper!-ism

Jesse James, the Younger Brothers

Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone

the Cagney movies

and th' panem et circenses of Juvenal

now broadened to 

bread, circuses, and thrill-kill"

- pp.347-348, America: A History In Verse: Volume 2: 1940-1961

                                      Charles Starkweather, an American product.

                                      See Martin Sheen play his story in (a heavily-fictionalized)

                                      1973 film by Terence Malick, Badlands. 

[Ed Sanders is also one of the main scholars of the career of another notorious "murd-punk" named Charles: Manson. Manson was a protege of Ma Barker gang member Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. Learned his trade in prison. How does all this relate? I'm not sure. Let's see.]

2.) Poet and English professor and critic of United States foreign policy, Peter Dale Scott:

Virgil's rebuke of frenzy

of war and passion for gain

or Augustine what are states

when they lack justice

if not organized crime?

[...]

there was John Adams a nation

at height of power

never fails to lose

her Wisdom & Moderation...

-Minding the Darkness, p.188

-PDS cites The Aeneid 8.327; City of God 4.4; Adams: Diary and Autobiography

                        Frank Sinatra and friends Tommy "Fatso" Marson, Carlo Gambino,

                            and Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno. Businessmen, all.

3.) There's a famous short essay by Robert Warshow from 1948 called The Gangster As Tragic Hero. I found it in a collection of his essays, The Immediate Experience. Warshow was a New York Intellectual who died young, but I find some of his stuff fascinating. In the gangster essay, which I found a link to HERE, sorry about some professor or grad student's underlining, argues that the function of mass culture is to maintain public morale, which flies in the face of our immediate experience. "At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot." 

Warshow says we revel in the figure of the gangster (remember: this guy's writing 50 years before The Sopranos, and 25 years before Martin Scorsese hits the scene with Mean Streets) because the gangster rejects "Americanism." He gets his own way with street smarts, muscle, violence, and he lives it up big-time, before falling. He's required to fall, of course. The Metropolis we live in creates rather dull criminals; the City of our imaginations creates the Gangster-Hero, tragic figure. As TS Eliot noticed in Shakespeare, often the tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves dramatically, as if their identity is something outside themselves. Think of Edward G. Robinson at the end of Little Caesar: "Mother of mercy...is this the end of Rico?" (see clip at the end of this post)

For ourselves and our involvement with the celluloid image of the gangster, Warshow writes that "He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become." What? He explains that the gangster is "doomed because he's under the obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful." And we are obligated to "succeed" also, but on some Freudian - or socially repressed - level, all means to succeed are unlawful, because they involve aggression. The crime film, in which the gangster plays the anti-hero or even the protagonist, allows us to allay our anxieties. For a couple of hours?

"Envy of the criminal, which borders on a secret American nostalgia, lies - very logically - in the fact that crime is one area where individuality is taken for granted." - not sure if this quote if by the avant garde composer Harry Partch, or the author of the article, but found on p.85 of Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices

Or: Why are we so enamored of gangsters?

                                          Smedley Butler, US Marines for 33 years and very many 

                                          campaigns. Two-time Medal of Honor winner. At the end of 

                                          his life he confessed, after a life of military service to the State,

                                          that he was a "high class muscle man for Big Business, for 

                                          Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer,

                                          a gangster for capitalism." For some odd reason a major 

                                          motion picture has not been made about his story.

4.) Speaking of the criminals of our world and the gangsters of our...entertainments? I'm reminded of some lyrics from Woody Guthrie:

Yes, as through this world I've wandered

I've seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain-pen.

-"Pretty Boy Floyd"

5.) The Mafia is an organization of Sicilian intermarried families with neither a formal hierarchy nor written constitution, but a 250 year old (at least?) code of operations. Maybe their main code is omerta, or "keep your mouth shut!" They first immigrated to Unistat in the 1880s and formed the "Little Italy"s in our large cities on the East Coast. Using the Black Hand of terror, they made very little progress until Prohibition. I agree with those sociologists who assert racism and a failure of the larger society to assimilate the new Italians as the main reason the Mafia got out of hand in Unistat...on the other hand, the gangsters themselves were living by a code their fathers had lived by, and probably truly thought they were providing "what the people want": alcohol, drugs, sex, good times. 

Al Capone - "Scarface" - made multimillions on illegal alcohol sales due to Prohibition. Lots of blood was shed; many cops were corrupted, bought off. The latest arsenal from the last big war made its way into the heart of the big cities: machine guns. Child's play compared to what they have out there now, but a hail of bullets is what it is... When the 21st Amendment made it into the Constitution, acknowledging that Prohibition was a miserable failure, the Mafia in Unistat began to shrink. Then they took up the dope trade. We never learn? HERE's a link to a June 19, 2011 New York Times Op-Ed piece written by that drug fiend, former President of Unistat Jimmy Carter. The part that caught my eye - and is germane to this blogspew - is his use of the word "mafiazation" regarding the so-called "War on Drugs."

6.) Get a load of this:

"The Mafia, one of the most picturesquely villainous secret societies the world has ever known, exists no more. After holding absolute sway over Sicily for centuries, murdering, blackmailing, terrorizing...it has met its fate at the hands of the Fascist Government."

from the New York Times, March 4, 1928. Article titled, "The Mafia Dead, a New Sicily Born," by Arnaldo Cortesi, found on p.71 of The Experts Speak

I think Cortesi was right. The State as criminal gang can't stand the competition and wipes them out, or forces them underground. But they do come back.

Noam Chomsky's political writings are chock-full of arguments and copious citations that cover this topic: the State - in this case, mostly Unistat - as the Ultimate Gangsters. See the Peter Dale Scott section #2 above. States that lack justice: organized crime. That's Saint Augustine he's quoting. And John Adams...

A large number of books flesh out the following, but I'm going to start to wrap this one up with an extended quote from an interview Chomsky gave in 1988:

Other aspects of it were the CIA in one of its earliest efforts, controlling food supplies, controlling the police in Italy so as to buy the 1948 election and prevent the Left from winning it, probably the major CIA operation since 1948 for preventing democracy in Italy in terms of actual money. In France, it meant rebuilding the drug racket, which had been knocked off by the fascists. The fascists run a very tight ship; they don't like any competition. The fascist states, Germany and Japan, had pretty well destroyed the mob. The mafia had been wiped out, since they didn't like competitors. As the United States liberated Italy from the South, it reconstructed the mafia. It was after all necessary to break up the unions, because the unions were a threat. You can't allow people to be independent and free. In order to break up the unions, it was necessary to hire goons, guys who will go and break up strikes, beat people up and so on, and the natural place to look was the mob. So one of the first CIA operations was to reconstruct the Corsican Mafia in early 1946-47 and use them as strikebreakers and goon squads. But of course they didn't do it for nothing. They don't do it just because they like to break peoples' bones. You've got to offer them something. They offered them the drug racket. That's where the famous French connection comes from. Up until the early 1970s Marseille was the center of the international heroin racket. The reason was that it was reconstructed by the U.S. and the CIA as part of the effort to destroy the democratic forces in the post-war world and to reconstruct the old order.

-Language and Politics, pp.615-616

A 30 second clip from the 1930 gangster film Little Caesar. Eddie G is "Rico," the top mobster for awhile, then he gets knocked off. Note how he refers to himself, just before dying, as if his identity existed somehow apart from himself, much like many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters: