Found this on Reddit

I was browsing /r/literature on Reddit today and I found a thread on Bob Dylan as a poet. Thought you guys might like to see some outsiders opinions. People contribute some interesting insights.

http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1aoz25/what_does_rliterature_think_of_bob_dylan/

All that Jazz

I guess the Larkin poems got pinched, ultimately. Maybe that just won't do -- that is, maybe I'll have to put a couple more of them on the wall for us to contemplate for some moments before Monday's and/or Wednesday's main discussions. Thus, might I ask that you keep "For Sidney Bechet," "Reference Back," and "Aubade" somewhat freshly aligned in your mind's queue? Better yet, might some of you be inclined to make a few observations about one or more of them in this space in advance of next week's meetings? Do you see, for example, any similarities between "Reasons for Attendance" and "For Sidney Bechet"? At least one critic has noted that the latter can almost be read as a reworking of those two lines from the former that read: "It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well, / But not for me, nor I for them." And then the subtly powerful "Reference Back": with all of our focus on time and the (painful) operations of memory in this course, maybe this poem connects into some recognizable circuitry (strangely, I find myself thinking of Springsteen's "The River" as I consider this one). Anyway, I know you'll be plenty busy working with the Morrison novel, but it'd be great to gather some of your reactions to the poems here.

And what did you think of A Love Supreme?? Were you able to follow its development pretty well with the aid of the handout? Did you enjoy it? Can you assimilate it into any of our course contexts and discussions at this point? As I noted in class, jazz privileges rhythm rather than melody (unlike classical music, which puts melody at the top of the hierarchy), which was probably apparent from your experience of this piece. Melodies are present in A Love Supreme, but only briefly, at which point Coltrane (or the other soloists) take them out for a ride and stretch them harmonically. Coltrane, by the way, died at the youthful age of 40, in July of 1967. His health had been steadily deteriorating until he finally succumbed to liver cancer. The music of A Love Supreme seemed to help some make sense of his death: Wayne Shorter, for example, noted a fatalism in "the tone of the tenor [sax] on A Love Supreme. I think he knew he was sick -- it's as if he were seeing the light -- that grand light." So, two of the most influential figures in the history of jazz in the second half of the twentieth century -- Coltrane and Charlie Parker -- were both dead before their 41st birthdays.

You will find Morrison's Jazz to be a rather unconventional historical novel, one that seeks to capture the mood of Harlem in the 1920s but that ranges across time (mostly within the 1906-26 period, though) and suggests a kind of improvised narration (improvisation, at this point, becomes a key word & notion for us). The genius of A Love Supreme lies mostly in the imagination of Coltrane and in the improvised dynamics between the bandmates -- not in any written score. The same might be said of Jazz, which is going to demand your participation to bring it to life. It's a strange novel, in a sense, in that the very first paragraph will tell you the entire story of the novel -- and yet when you get to the very end of the novel it will all seem rather unfinished to you. So, be thinking of women's blues, of the oral tradition, of the spirit of improvisation, etc.

"Timely" Articles

Just dropping by to share a few articles with you that I chanced upon in recent days, and that weigh in nicely on our ongoing meditations/discussions this semester (and perhaps they'll even give you some ideas for your multigenre essays). The first, "The Quest for Permanent Novelty," deals with the way writers (from Keats to Orwell) struggle with time, those hallelujah moments, and the "fading of aesthetic freshness." Then there's "The Piccolo and the Pocket Grouse," which seeks a definition of music and wonders to what extent birdsong can be understood as music (and in which Emily Doolittle refers to zoomusicology as a term that accounts for the ways that animal sounds are and are not like music). Finally, more germane to our current inquiry, there's this informative review -- "Soundtrack to the Century" -- of David Schiff's book, The Ellington Century, in which Schiff uses Ellington's example to ponder if jazz is "as subtle, complex, and emotionally expressive as classical music."

Odds & Ends

Hi, everyone. I hope you had a nice weekend, and perhaps a fiddle-laced St. Patrick's Day. Just a quick note to let you know that I've just posted some new links in the "Elsewheres" section (to your right), including a running record of our semester's music ("LIT 376 Soundtrack") and the beginnings of a bibliography ("LIT 376 Bibliography") of critical (and creative) sources related to our inquiry this semester. The latter may be useful to you as we move into the second half of the semester and towards your multigenre essays, which may be enhanced to the extent they reflect your immersion in the scholarship and theory of our course material.

If you haven't seen them yet, there are recent blog posts from Jenna, Reed, and Kelsey just below. Check them out & leave a comment to keep the conversation going, if you are so inclined!

Finally, mindful of some of your music DNA references, maybe some of you will be interested in the following news from the music world: May will be a big month in that both The National and Patty Griffin will be dropping new records; the new record from Iron & Wine releases on April 16, and you can stream the song "Grace for Saints and Ramblers" at RollingStone.com. Are there any Alela Diane fans out there? If not, there should be! Her new record will be out this year, too, and she has released the song "The Way We Fall" to whet your appetite. Finally, some of you asked about Martin Sexton after we heard his track "Way I Am" in class some weeks ago: if you're curious, check out his "YouTube Wednesdays" site, where a new video is posted each week of one of his live performances. You'll get a sense for what a one-person dynamo he is on stage ... and, oh, that voice! "Glory Bound" is still one of his signature songs, so that might be one to sample, and I'd recommend "Black Sheep," too, but you can't go wrong with any of them.

Cheers!

Green Notes

LitMusicians: we need to assemble a class playlist for tomorrow, when we all become Irish, right?! So, I'll get things started: "Falling Slowly" by The Frames; "Devil's Dance Floor," by Flogging Molly; "Isn't it Amazing" by Hothouse Flowers; "World of Good" by The Saw Doctors; and "In a Little While" by U2. (It's a shame Hothouse Flowers never got the attention they deserved in the U.S.: great band, with at least two great albums; I guess the same applies to The Frames, although at least they got a bit of a boost from Glen Hansard's success with The Swell Season). Happy St. Patrick's Day! (and I think I've just decided that our featured movie this semester, which we'll watch after the break, will have to be The Commitments!)

Scoring The Waste Land

Greetings, all! I promised, I think, to create a thread to open up discussion of The Waste Land, since we were barely able to get started on it this past Wednesday; I'm hoping a good many of you might be inclined to drop by this space before Monday's class and make an observation, raise a question, etc., about this poem's relationship to music and our class inquiry. Eliot himself called it "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling," and I.A. Richards referred to it as a "music of ideas." Regarding the latter characterization, what is the music and what are the ideas? What observations might we be inclined to make about the intersection of poetry and musical form here (especially on the heels of our encounter with both The Waves and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)? I'll offer this one thought: we might not be inclined to think sonata form is relevant to this fractured and fragmented modernist work, but nevertheless there does seem to be the presence of an exposition in Part 1 ("The Burial of the Dead") in which the basic themes -- sterility, dryness, death, uncertain rebirth -- get introduced. That might beg the question of whether we can then speak of there being development and recapitulation sections. Anyway, if we get started here we can be that much more efficient when we meet on Monday. We'll start with Eliot, then move to the scheduled jazz poems; because we have some extra time available to us on Wednesday, too, either before or after we listen to A Love Supreme, the jazz poems might be able to be spread across two class sessions. Have a nice weekend!

Music. Ballet. Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

With the notion of ballet that we were talking about today, I thought I would share one of my favorite multi-genre videos...sculpture, ballet, music. Enjoy, and thanks for class today. 

Riffing on Guitars

OK, well, the battle lines are drawn. Kundera: "Stereotyped harmonies, banal melodies, and rhythms all the more insistent the more monotonous they are -- that is what remains of music, that is music's eternity....That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being's inherent stupidity....The history of music is perishable, but the idiocy of guitars is eternal. Music nowadays has returned to its primeval state." Hornby (from Songbook): "I discovered sometime during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and the rock riff is nutritionally essential -- especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day....If I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I'd choose Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker," from Led Zeppelin II. I'm not sure that me going "DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG" would enlighten him especially, but I'd feel that I'd done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks....So much of what you consume when you get older is about accommodation: I have kids, and neighbors, and a partner who could quite happily never hear another blues-metal riff or block-rockin' beat in her life; I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgment....In learning to do that, however, things get lost, too, and one of the things that got lost ... was Jimmy Page. The noise he makes is not who I am anymore, but it's still a noise worth listening to; it's also a reminder that the attempt to grow up smart comes at a cost." This he said/he said reminds us, perhaps, of a conversation about the intellectualization of music begun with our recent encounter with Adorno. Where do you fall?!

By the way, in case you end up wanting to refer to it, here's that passage I read from Kundera's The Art of the Novel in which he discusses the word-based, variation-based approach he seeks in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (and which validates our discussion of Schoenberg as a musical model for this novel): "A theme is an essential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg's "tone-row." In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the "row" goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence. The novel is built on those few categories the way a house is built on its pillars."

Circles

I wanted to post something about circles that  I found in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. We were talking about Mikhail Bakhtin in class--and his emphasis on the dialogic and circles. I think this quote applies to music and literature...the cycles it goes through as it leads us through emotional processes: 

"That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles." 

(page 92, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) 

Poetry or music?

Class, whats your opinion on the following lines? Is this poetry or music lyrics? Were these to be lyrics, would you say that they stand on their own or require music? Would you rip them apart in a workshop?


Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.
Choose they croon the Ancient Ones
The time has come again
Choose now, they croon
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake
Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances.

Prose in Music

Ever since beginning the discussion of whether Bob Dylan's music can be classified as "poetry," I have been wrestling with another idea in my mind. It has become more common in pop music videos for artists to have some sort of spoken yet artistic "prologue" before their songs begin in their videos. My favorite example that I can think of at the moment is Lana Del Rey's introduction to her music video, "Ride," and another example that I give hesitantly is Rhianna's introduction to her single "We Found Love." These are not part of their recorded songs, however, I have been wondering if these beautifully crafted introductions could be classified as music, or literature? Maybe the beauty in this lies in my confusion of what to call them, and their capabilities to serve as both?

Waving Goodbye

It is always tough to leave Woolf behind, and especially in this case given that her novel and her concerns are a landmark in so many ways for the pursuits of this course. They are like that fin rising out of “the waste of waters” for Bernard, the vision that momentarily and partially lends flashes of ecstatic meaning and coherence. I’ve always admired Kundera's work, but somehow I can’t help but feel we don’t do him any favors by reading him next to Woolf: there’s a thinness and near inconsequentiality to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting coming as it does on the heels of The Waves. But maybe that’s just me. It’s just that when you give yourself over to Woolf’s fiction, you can experience such an extension and amplification of your being in the world; aesthetically, too, a novel like The Waves is experienced as if it were a painting or a piece of music: you tend to feel it with your whole body.

In any event, I hope the novel offered various degrees of rewards to you. I hope, too, that the Beethoven string quartet seemed, even if in somewhat opaque ways, an enriching and intriguing complement to your reading. The most accessible intersection may be in the emotions of the music: that is, the mixture of sorrow and lament with defiance and heroism in the music seems particularly germane to the tenor of The Waves, and especially to Bernard's summing up in the final section.

Maybe some of you -- especially those who didn't get to weigh in as much during our class conversations -- would still care to reflect and comment in this space. And how about, simply, some examples of memorable lines, similes, or generally stunning writing? For example, in one of my favorites, consider that figurative "sauntering down the avenue" of Neville and Bernard, the extended analogy describing their conversations and confluent minds: “There we talked; sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs under the trees, the trees that hung with fruit, which we have trodden so often together, so that now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round certain plays and poems, certain favorites of ours — the turf is trodden bare by our incessant unmethodical pacing” (272). Or the type of line that induces self-reflection, such as when Bernard recalls “being in love for the first time” and notes “I made a phrase — a poem about a wood-pigeon — a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything” (241). What have served as "sudden transparencies" in your lives? Along the same lines, and with only slightly different vocabulary, Bernard realizes that he and his five friends “all had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead.” After noting that “some people go to priests; others to poetry,” Bernard reaffirms “I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken” (266).

And this, finally, is what this novel ultimately seems to be about: finding something to shore against our ruins (as we look ahead to Eliot), something to at least create the illusion that things might be unbroken. Thus the consolation Bernard finds in realizing “what a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us!” (233). They’ll get up the next morning and open the shop, Tuesday will follow Monday, etc. For a while, Bernard’s wife, family, and domestic routines do the trick, causing him to think that “what was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose.” But then that oh-so-fateful appendage: “or so it seems” (262).

And then (here I realize I'm nearly repeating a comment I made in class) there's that line that could nearly apply to anything we’ve read (and will read) this semester: “It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams” (274). This is developing as a course about hauntings. From the younger selves of the narrator of “Tintern Abbey,” to Keats’s dead brother who permeates the two odes we read, to Michael Furey and the vast hosts of the dead, to the Abyssinian maid in "Kubla Khan," to Mary and the speaker's memories in Springsteen's "The River," to Dylan's speaker yearning after Mr. Tambourine Man, to the spectral spirits waiting for us in The Waste Land, to the incomprehensible loss of Percival – the living dead return to nourish, to challenge, to force self-reckonings, to console.

Regarding musical language and identity: what friends, what family members – what notes – do you need in your life for balance, for completion, for proper orchestration? Consider Bernard in this two-page sequence, when we understand that he’s both a musical note in a fugue AND a composer and arranger: “To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self … With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness … Yet they drum me alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of solitude — to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me” (116-7). And then, sentences later, it’s Bernard as composer: “I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination” (117).

Art like this is a great challenge, but we're rewarded amply if we give ourselves over to it. Reading this novel reminds me of Neville's description of reading a challenging poem: "To read this poem one must have myriad eyes.... One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror.... One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so ... let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry" (198-9). In any event, I hope your nets revealed generous hauls.