"What was poetry? That’s the question John Koethe asked in 'Beyond Belief,' his 2022 collection of verse."

"He was speaking about how poems come and go but none seem to make an impression. Lucy Sante framed this somewhat differently when she asked, 'Was "Howl" the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song?'"

Writes Dwight Garner in the first paragraph of a NYT review of a new poetry book... which I, tellingly, failed to become interested in. The first sentence of the last paragraph of the review is: "This is a young person’s book." Well, then. Who was "Howl" for?

"The great thing about 'Dont Look Back' is he is an asshole in that movie and there’s no effort to hide it."

"It’s endlessly delightful to me, even as I can acknowledge that I would have probably hated being around this guy if I were in that hotel room when he is screaming about who threw the glass."

Says Ian Grant, quoted in "What Do Dylanologists Think of ‘A Complete Unknown’? The writer Lucy Sante and the podcast host Ian Grant, both Bob Dylan experts, dissect the director James Mangold’s biopic starring Timothée Chalamet" (NYT).

And Lucy Sante responds that in the film "all about him hunching his shoulders and ignoring everybody to the left and to the right. That kind of works.... [but] you don’t get Dylan’s wit. The kind of conversation he was capable of having... you don’t get much of the sense of that mind."

Here's the "Dont Look Back" scene with the interrogation about the glass (and I'm just noticing for the first time that the movie title doesn't have an apostrophe):

"Maleness did not appeal to me at all, with its acrid musk, its stubble, its needful dangling genitalia, its oafishness and clumsiness, its sense of mission and conquest, its resemblance to the aspects of myself I most despised."

Writes Lucy Sante, formerly Luc Sante, quoted in "How Lucy Sante Became the Person She Feared/In her memoir of transitioning in her sixties, the writer assesses the cost of suppressing her identity for decades" (The New Yorker).

Also: "I created a male persona that was saturnine, cerebral, a bit remote, a bit owlish, possibly ‘quirky,’ coming close to asexual despite my best intentions."

The article is by Emily Witt, who says:

200 journalists and writers release an open letter to the NYT to raise "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

Hell Gate reports.

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Hell Gate has an interview with Jo Livingstone, "an award-winning critic and writer who helped organize the open letter."

Here's the open letter. I'll highlight what I think are important parts:

Timothy Leary "had no interest in politics. He called student activists 'young men with menopausal minds' and suggested that LSD could stand for 'Let the State Disintegrate.'"

"But by 1968, his slogans were so poised between derangement and Madison Avenue that they could pass for visionary; 'Everyone should start their own nation,' he uttered, just days after Martin Luther King's assassination. It was awfully hard to tell charlatans from prophets at the time, and besides, the denatured, anti-intellectual language that dominated discourse then (and is still with us, in a New Age guise) had been rolling off Leary's tongue since before he had ingested a single microgram of lysergic acid: people engaged in emotional 'games'; all the world's bad stuff was a 'system'; the state of being clued-in was 'consciousness,' and so on.... [60's culture had] its gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-fund benefits and sometimes dubious appeals to conscience, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand.... In part because of Leary, however, ideals and delusions were encouraged to interbreed, their living progeny being avid consumerism and toothless dissent."

Wrote Luc Sante in 2006, reviewing a biography of Timothy Leary. I blogged that at the time and stumbled across it today. I was struck by how much some of it spoke of what young people today are doing.

And who remembered Leary as the source of calling all the world's bad stuff was a "system"? Today, we hear about — and are pressured to assert belief in — "systemic racism." How much is that like the old hippie horror at "the system"? I know I was against it... but what was it?!

"Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

Luc Sante reviews Robert Greenfield's new biography of Timothy Leary:

He was initially known as an expert on personality assessment, but, while on a sojourn in Mexico the following year, he was introduced to psilocybin mushrooms, and the experience was so transformative that psychedelics promptly became the central force in his life, his research and his teaching....

It wasn't long before any pretense to scientific detachment fell away and controlled experiments were chucked in favor of missionary zeal and contempt for all mundane exigencies. Chaotic tripping parties ensued, involving students, under "spiritual" or "philosophical" pretexts.

Teachers involving their students in spiritual exercises? Now, that is outrageous. But he lost his position as a Harvard professor soon enough.

[T]he psychedelic caravan picked up the Hitchcock siblings, Peggy, Billy and Tommy, heirs to the Mellon fortune, and through them acquired the use of a fabulous rambling house and huge estate in Millbrook, N.Y. This became the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes.... It was also at Millbrook that Leary, [Richard] Alpert and Ralph Metzner wrote "The Psychedelic Experience" (1964), which contained the injunction to "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream," appropriated two years later by John Lennon for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the last song on "Revolver."...

[H]e had no interest in politics. He called student activists "young men with menopausal minds" and suggested that LSD could stand for "Let the State Disintegrate." But by 1968, his slogans were so poised between derangement and Madison Avenue that they could pass for visionary; "Everyone should start their own nation," he uttered, just days after Martin Luther King's assassination. It was awfully hard to tell charlatans from prophets at the time, and besides, the denatured, anti-intellectual language that dominated discourse then (and is still with us, in a New Age guise) had been rolling off Leary's tongue since before he had ingested a single microgram of lysergic acid: people engaged in emotional "games"; all the world's bad stuff was a "system"; the state of being clued-in was "consciousness," and so on.

Oh, that's painful to read! We Baby Boomers were steeped in this stuff -- whether we took LSD or not. I think it had much more impact than the SDS material that also soddened my generation.

Read the whole review. The plot of Leary's life is convoluted. At one point, he's in Algiers, in the care of Eldridge Cleaver. ("It was a new experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played that role myself.") But it's this that makes me want to read the book:

[T]he book provides a crash course in several aspects of 60's culture: its often gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-fund benefits and sometimes dubious appeals to conscience, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand. That still leaves many meritorious elements largely outside Leary's sphere: civil rights, the antiwar movement, music and art, the impulse toward communitarianism, to name a few. In part because of Leary, however, ideals and delusions were encouraged to interbreed, their living progeny being avid consumerism and toothless dissent.

Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream....

Dylanology.

A roomful of Bob Dylan fans talk about Bob Dylan at the top level of "Dylan geekiness."

One theme running through the evening was Mr. Dylan's aversion to pleasing. The panelists agreed that in the 1980's, in particular, the singer seemed bent on distancing himself from fans, musicians, even his own music. Mr. Hultkrans compared him to Kafka - hiding his best work in drawers.

There was also the question of whether Mr. Dylan is in decline. The writer Luc Sante, who had been a scheduled panelist, apparently held that the period of 1965 to 1967 was the high-water mark, but Mr. Lethem disagreed. "I see" his genius "arising, with equal uncanniness, however fugitive," he said. "There are songs and performances that are as much of the part of the Godhead now as ever."

I agree with Luc Sante. The albums in those years -- "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Blonde On Blonde" -- are the ones I really care about. They seem to be the essence of Dylan, the reason Dylan matters so much. But why? When I read the words to the songs on later albums, many of them seem just as good. I note that it was on the album after "Blonde On Blonde" that Dylan stopped singing in that distinctive voice, that voice we all want to use when we do our Dylan imitations. It seemed like such a ridiculous way to sing.

(Remember the video of the making of "We Are the World," when Dylan didn't know how to sing his lines, and Stevie Wonder sang them for him, using the mid-60s Dylan singing style?)

But there was something mystical about that crazy way to sing that we all lost when Dylan came back after his motorcycle accident with "John Wesley Harding."

The world has never been the same.

UPDATE: Interestingly -- I'm just noticing this -- my ex-husband Richard Cohen was up and blogging about Bob Dylan before I was. His is a dream, analyzed, about Dylan. I'm a little unnerved that Richard ends his post:

A weird phenomenon that often happens when I dream: waking up, I realize that the whole dream was a code for the title of a song or a line for a song. In this case, “All I really want to do is baby be friends with you.”

The weird thing about that is that most of the time I was writing this post, I was planning on titling it with a line from "All I Really Want To Do." I started writing my post because of the line in the article, "One theme running through the evening was Mr. Dylan's aversion to pleasing," which I thought would go well with the song line "I don't want to satisfy you." When I finally got around to searching for "satisfy" on bobdylan.com, where was that line I remembered? I saw I was only imagining it. There are two other "-ify" words-- "simplify" and "classify" -- but not "satisfy." Was there some other line about refusing to please that I could substitute? No. That's just not the way the words of the song go at all. It's good not to be simplified and classified. Why did I transform that into something that would be bad to be denied: you do want to be satisfied. Still, in some way, refusing to please is the unspoken theme of the song. Dylan is saying don't expect me to be your conventional boyfriend -- "I don't want to meet your kin." I will define a new male-female relationship, and it's not all the things you come to me believing you want.

So I ended up thinking about that song a lot this morning -- and damned if my ex-husband isn't mulling it over too. That's just eerie! And weirdly, his "realization" that that song fits that dream seems off, at least if we're to believe his analysis of the dream. But "I ain't lookin' to compete with you" and "I ain't lookin' to... Analyze you." So I'll end this already excessively revealing update right here. Or should I add a Dylan quote? "Nothing is revealed."