Also:
Club owner Paula Kelley later described Dylan at the time “as a really scrawny, shabby kid … the only person I’ve ever seen with green teeth. Singing in-between sets for nothing than going out and saying he’d sang at the Club 47.”Dylan doesn't even mention Harvard, Cambridge, or Club 47 in his memoir "Chronicles: Volume I." (Still waiting on Volume II. Maybe that "Volume I" subtitle was some kind of joke.)
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I did a word search in "Chronicles." Cambridge and Club 47 appear zero times, but the word "Harvard" appears twice. In case you're checking my work. I count those 2 times as not a mention of Harvard, because neither is about Dylan himself being in the area.
One is in a discussion of meeting the poet Archibald MacLeish at his home in Conway, Massachusetts. Dylan drops in the fact that MacLeish had gone to Harvard.
The other is in a description of biking through Thibodaux, Louisiana: "On the bike again we cruised along Pecan Street, then over by St. Joseph’s Church, which is modeled after one in Paris or Rome. Inside there’s supposed to be the actual severed arm of an early Christian martyr. Nichols State University, the poor man’s Harvard, is just up the street. On St. Patrick’s Street we rode past the palatial grand homes and big plantation houses, deep porched and with many windows. There’s an antebellum courthouse that stands next to clapboard halls. Ancient oak trees and decrepit shacks side by side. It felt good to be off by ourselves."
Hey, this is really good. I keep reading:
"It was early afternoon and we’d been going for a while. Dust was blowing, my mouth was dry and my nose was clogged. Feeling hungry, we stopped into Chester’s Cypress Inn on Route 20 near Morgan City, a fried chicken, fish and frog legs joint. I was beginning to get weary. The waitress came over to the table and said, “How about eating?” I looked at the menu, then I looked at my wife. The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. Me or anybody else. She’s always had her own built-in happiness. I valued her opinion and I trusted her. “You order,” I said. Next thing I know, fried catfish, okra and Mississippi mud pie came to the table. The kitchen was next door in another building. Both the catfish and the pie were on cardboard plates, but I wasn’t nearly as hungry as I thought I was— just ate the onion rings."
In there, amongst all the detritus, is the hidden confession that he didn't feel responsible for making his wife happy.
I like the "frog legs joint" part, because I was just mocking Donald Trump and Mitt Romney for eating frog legs — on the theory that frog legs were the epitome of elitist, nonAmerican food.
I don't know, the French Canadians you see grubbing around in the drainage ditches, or walking down the road by the swamp on a rainy night, white plastic bucket in hand, don't seem all that "elitist." But I tried some a couple months ago, and I would rather eat bluegill, or horned pout, or even black bass.
Froggy Went a-Courtin'
One of the less dignified part-time jobs I had in high school was at the croquet club where they'd pay me minimum wage to wipe down the mallets and shine up the balls.
" … a little spastic gnome."
Mocking the Disabled! The Horror! Someone fetch my smelling salts!
I had in high school was at the croquet club where they'd pay me minimum wage to wipe down the mallets and shine up the balls.
Oh Jesus....
That's a dust bunny of an article. It's makes it seem like Dylan was obscure in 1964-65. That's not how I remember it. I was certainly not cutting edge anything, but I was well aware of Dylan. I loved the unpackaged black groups, the ones who might steal your stereo during a gig at your fraternity. Someone in Hank Ballard's outfit actually did that to us. But Dylan was on the radar. He was cool with his motorcycle, and Triumph t-shirt and luscious non-standarely beautiful girlfriends.
'frog gigging' was a well known past time of the locals when i spent some time in Tennessee dont know how/when it got it's elitist tag... maybe similar to eating snails?.. on another subject, dylan's writing in chronicles is pretty good... recently read an excerpt from Robbie Robertson's new book in RStone and it was really on the high school term paper level.. but the man can write some good songs... a lot of folks actually loved dylan's ragamuffin persona, presumably very charming and appealing to women.. i have the feeling he kind of lived his life as some kind of performance art..
Spastic gnomes with green teeth - perfect description of kids from the 60s.
Ann Althouse said...
I like the "frog legs joint" part, because I was just mocking Donald Trump and Mitt Romney for eating frog legs — on the theory that frog legs were the epitome of elitist, nonAmerican food.
12/10/16, 6:17 AM
But Ann,
How does it feel?
Free to a good home:
Sales opportunity - spastic, little, green toothed garden gnomes. Built in speakers, Dylan CDs extra.
I don't think it fair to judge any human being on the basis of their croquet playing ability, We are all so much more than our croquet playing ability.
The Nobel Award ceremony is now online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZmrygK3F0
The Literature award ceremony starts at 56 minutes, with the reasons for giving the prize to Dylan. At 1:03 Patti Smith sings "Hard rain's gonna" fall. She breaks down halfway through because of nerves, apologizes, starts again and finishes strong.
Frog legs are not just a Southern thing. During World War II, my father went to Lasalle High School in Rhode Island, and one of the priests would give him and other boys a nickel each for all the frogs they could catch in a nearby swamp. The priest fried them up and ate them himself, but the boys didn't complain: a nickel was a lot of money in those days. I don't know whether the priest was foreign-born: Lasalle, who founded the Christian Brothers, was French, so quite possibly.
I should say the priest fried up the legs of the frogs, and I suspect American boys may not have wanted to eat slimy amphibians, no matter how prepared.
When does he get the $870,000 check from the Nobel Prize?
When does he get the $870,000 check from the Nobel Prize?
In the Nobel Award ceremony, Patti Smith botched the Dylan song with the famous words “I'll know my song well before I start singing.” It's been that kind of year.
"Outside of a gated home in Malibu, Calif., owned, according to local tax records, by Robert Dylan, a self-described security guard offered cryptically, 'What you’re looking for doesn’t exist here anymore.'" New York Times
Horace Engdahl, a member of the Nobel Committee, called Mr. Dylan “a singer worthy of a place beside the Greek bards, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.
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