"The first three chapters celebrate... a wallowing country tune, an angular new wave spasm, and a song my grandparents played in the living room when the Grangers came over for bridge."

"But of the sixty-six selections, thirty were released between 1947, when Dylan was six years old, and 1962, when his first album appeared, shortly before his twenty-first birthday. This strange body of music includes Italian restaurant staples like Sinatra’s 'Strangers in the Night,' gunslinger melodramas like 'El Paso' by Marty Robbins, Vegas gruel by Dean Martin, and the Yale 'Whiffenpoof Song' as sung by Bing Crosby, Fred Waring, and the Glee Club. There’s a way to see this canon as the genome that shaped Dylan’s gift, the mundus that greeted the bonneted infans at his planetary awakening. In another light they are the musical reef that he dynamited, utterly obliterated, using only his voice, his attitude, and his harmonica. There’s a name for the place that both nurtures and imprisons us, the place we simultaneously pine for and detest: home...."

Writes Dan Chiasson in "Road Maps for the Soul/The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another" (NYRB).

Nice pen-and-ink drawing of Dylan — by Yann Kebbi — at the link.

I've blogged plenty about TPOMS, but I couldn't help blogging one more, stunned as I was by the phrase "the mundus that greeted the bonneted infans at his planetary awakening."

Sometimes when you like something you read, it's because you're thinking, yeah, that's the way I write. Other times you like it precisely because it's so crushingly obvious that you'd never even dream of writing anything like that.

"'Teaching,' for figures of her calibre, is often a word that means giving scripted lectures and then fleeing into the wings, or charging mega-dollars for a sun-drenched guru experience at a resort."

"Glück is a classroom teacher, at home in a small group, around a table. Dozens of great books, winners of awards, were shaped by her vigilant editing in the classroom, which often continues in her apartment and garden in Cambridge. This is part of why so many people seemed to feel that their own lives had somehow been recognized by the announcement of the Nobel. When I was growing up in Vermont, a few mountains over from her, Glück’s work was everywhere; she still feels to me like a seventies figure, something in the key of Joni Mitchell, because of all the bookshelves and coffee tables of that era where her books were found. She was 'our' poet. Now I think of all the waiters and cheesemongers and cabbies and neighborhood people in Cambridge who know her, and think of her as 'their' poet.... When I told her how a friend was courting his new, young wife by reading aloud poems from her book 'The Wild Iris,' she laughed and said something like 'that book is very useful for people who prefer to view their carnal needs in spiritual terms.'"

Writes Dan Chiasson, in "How Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate, Became Our Poet For decades, she has taught us the contours of our own inner lives" (The New Yorker).

The way Chiasson talks about the 70s, I thought he should be approximately my age, but he was born in 1971, 20 years after me, so "something in the key of Joni Mitchell" doesn't mean that period of young adulthood that I lived through, but — perhaps — that place out there where other people had the advantage of adulthood. I'm thinking the way he feels about 1970s Joni Mitchel — ladies of the canyon? — is about how I felt about beatniks... 

"Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other's wives....

Which reminds me — here, you can buy "Wild Iris," if you'd like to view your carnal needs in spiritual terms.