"You’re not actually finished until you do read poetry on the weekends for fun."

Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."

All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:

Welcome to the Church of Bob, Timmy. 🙏🏻🎶❤️
pic.twitter.com/g7N7S9DfBk

— Melanie Young 🔧 (@FreewheelinMY) December 18, 2024

What poetry does Bob read?

"In his influential book 'Imagined Communities,' Benedict Anderson argues that shared reading—newspapers, pamphlets, novels—made modern European nations possible."

"Frenchmen were people who shared news and stories in French; English people came together through the Illustrated London News, the books of Dickens, the cult of Shakespeare. By the time Jack Kirby left Marvel, in 1970, and Lee stepped down as editor-in-chief, in 1972, they and their colleagues had founded a kind of miniature nation: followers versed in a language of secret identities, geographies, and histories, eager for news that only they understood, and ready to forge a next generation.... Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why...."

I'm reading "How Comic Books Became Classics/By publishing Marvel comics like Black Panther, X-Men, and The Avengers, Penguin Classics is pushing the literary canon into new, contested territory" (The New Yorker).

"Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Grateful Dead?"

That's the top-rated comment on this Reddit post:

 

I liked this comment, which reminds me I've got to get around to finishing "The Philosophy of Modern Song":

"I genuinely wake up most mornings convinced I look great. I feel thin, fit, good looking and ready to take on the day."

"And untrue though this may be, I see no flaws, imagined or otherwise, to ruin the mood. If that counts as 'reverse body dysmorphia,' then that might be what I’ve got. I look pretty much the same as I did 20 years ago, sometimes even better as I spent most of my 30s either pregnant, covered in baby sick and/or sleep deprived to the point of madness.... Among my friends who are not lucky enough to suffer from reverse body dysmorphia I see two main tendencies: one is to surrender unconditionally, abandoning their former sense of style, gaining weight, wearing 'comfortable' clothes and relegating frivolities such as nail varnish and heels to a dim and distant past. The other is to panic and go for radical solutions that fool nobody, such as facelifts, often resulting in them looking like rather unsettling versions of Madonna.... Should this reverse dysmorphia become a disorder all of its own?... [W]hy on earth shouldn’t you be the best version of yourself and own that glorious self-image until they drag you out kicking and screaming?... As the poet T.S. Eliot summed up: 'Humankind cannot bear too much reality.'"

Writes Helena Frith Powell (at her own website).

I found that because — go to the link to see — it contains the phrase "body eumorphia," an unusual phrase that I'd arrived at independently after stumbling into the New York Post headline, "Sam Smith on finally having the 'opposite' of body dysmorphia: ' look fabulous.'"

"Even as Trump tries to paint Joe Biden as gaga, he is doing something truly gaga: He is running the government that is responding to the worst pandemic in a century..."

"... at the same time he is the leader of the resistance to his own government, urging people and states to open up whenever they see fit, recommending Clorox injections, stifling Dr. Fauci, refusing to wear the mask. The fact is that Donald Trump has been wearing a mask for a long time, like Eleanor Rigby 'wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.' He studied larger-than-life titans like George Steinbrenner and Lee Iacocca and invented a swaggering character called Donald Trump with a career marked by evasions, deceptions and disguises. The young builder was intent, as T.S. Eliot wrote, to take the time 'to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.'"

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Covid Dreams, Trump Nightmares/Of masks, unmasking and dropping our professional masks for our medical ones" (NYT).

Okay. So... The Beatles...



"Eleanor Rigby" calls on us to feel empathy for "all the lonely people," but Dowd invokes it to sneer at a man.

Who does not wear a mask — a face that we keep in the jar by the door? How sad it is! Where's the love? But to Dowd, because it's Trump, we are called to hate, not love. A man has a persona as he faces the world, but who is he really? Because it's Trump, that isn't a call to empathy, but a basis for shunning and contempt and disgust — the kind of feeling that made Hillary say "basket of deplorables." The basket, the jar... the dehumanizing.

Here's a better "jar" song to suit the Dowdian mood...



The jar is under the bed...

And let's get the rest of the T.S. Eliot quote. It's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Please carefully read the entire poem and contemplate the extent to which Trump is anything like Prufrock, but let me expedite the process by quoting Wikipedia:

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.

Well, that does not sound like Trump at all!  Unattained carnal love? It sounds like a list of things Trump doesn't feel — "weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay." If anything, it's what he makes other people feel. It's one hell of a mask, if what we're seeing is merely a mask and the real Trump is all Prufrocky.

More likely Dowd is just playing around with the nifty bits and pieces that float by in her highly fluid consciousness. Thanks for the quotes, Maureen. They were very bloggy. The Beatles and T.S. Eliot...

...fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them, and fishermen hold flowers.

"HOOHA may appear in the dictionary with the definition that you see in the clue..."

"... but I can tell you that is not how that 'word' exists in most people's minds in 2019. I wanted HOOPLA and honestly considered the possibility that I'd have to cram two letters into one box somewhere in there."

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword, which clued "hooha" as "Big to-do."

Anyway... my dictionary, the unlinkable OED, defines "hooha" with one meaning only, "A commotion, a rumpus, a row." Historical examples include:

1931 Punch 14 Oct. 402/1 The devil of a hoo-ha in the papers about increasing the demand for English-grown corn....
1944 ‘N. Shute’ Pastoral ix. 206 There's a bit of a hoo-hah on about your tea-party....
1971 Country Life 27 May 1328/2 Some of these lovely irises may..be grown..successfully without much hoo-ha.

Then there's the unique usage by T.S. Eliot (in Sweeney Agonistes (1932)): "When you're alone in the middle of the night and you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright/When you're alone in the middle of the bed and you wake like someone hit you on the head/You've had a cream of a nightmare dream and you've got the hoo-ha's coming to you . . . And perhaps you're alive/And perhaps you're dead Hoo ha ha Hoo ha ha Hoo Hoo Hoo."

Now, you might think Urban Dictionary would confirm your belief — what I'm assuming is your belief — that the primary meaning of "hooha" is female genitalia.

But no! It's: "Diddy Kong's Down-Throw + Up-Air combo in Super Smash Brothers 4. When Diddy Kong throws his opponent down everyone will yell "HOO". It is then followed by a loud 'HA' once he connects with the Up-Air. It was made to annoy the person playing against the Diddy Kong, thus making them extra salty."

"While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press..."

"... of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services. Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of 'Trump Incorporated' attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets.... Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him."

Deep insight from the former CIA director John Brennan in "John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash/That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him." (NYT).

We were amused by the repeated use of the word "hogwash." Presumably, he's just backing off from the less fit to print "bullshit."

You may be interested to know that the first recorded use of "hogwash" in the figurative sense (as opposed to the literal stuff fed to hogs) was from Mark Twain:

1870 ‘M. Twain’ in Galaxy June 862/2 I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is ‘hogwash’.

Twain wasn't inventing the usage but reporting on it. Apparently, it came from California.

It's just a way to say "nonsense." The use of the word "bullshit" for nonsense only goes back to 1915, from Wyndom Lewis (writing to Ezra Pound). Apparently, "Bullshit" was a T.S. Eliot poem that never got published though it was an excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry (click image to enlarge and read and gain deep insight):

ADDED: Or did Eliot publish "Bullshit"? I'm seeing "The Triumph of Bullshit" and especially enjoyed the second verse:

Ladies, who find my intentions ridiculous
Awkward, insipid and horribly gauche
Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous
Dull as the heart of an unbaked brioche
Floundering versicles freely versiculous
Often attenuate, frequently crass
Attempts at emotion that turn isiculous,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Nice rhymes — horribly gauche with unbaked brioche and that whole ridiculous meticulous versiculous isiculous string.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade quotes the NYT byline for Brennan — "Mr. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017" — and says:

Coincidentally, immediately after his boss, Mr. Obama, gained more... "flexibility".

Harvard classics professor who teaches a course on Bob Dylan gets vindication from Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize.

The NYT has an article on Richard F. Thomas, "who has been gently teased by colleagues for teaching a freshman seminar about Bob Dylan."

Mr. Thomas uses the course, simply called “Bob Dylan,” to put the artist in context of not just popular culture of the last half-century, but the tradition of classical poets like Virgil and Homer....

There’s a stanza that goes: “I’m gonna spare the defeated — I’m gonna speak to the crowd/… I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered/I’m gonna tame the proud.” That’s pretty much a direct quote of lines spoken in the “Aeneid” by the ghost of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, who he sees in the underworld, and who basically says to him: “Other people will make sculpture. Your art, your job as a Roman, is to ‘spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.’”...

[H]e’s like Virgil or Ovid: someone who came late enough in the tradition and has enough tradition behind him — T. S. Eliot wrote about this — that he can control it and also be part of it, recreating and refreshing it.I don’t see any difference between a poet like Catullus or Virgil and Bob Dylan. I think they are doing the same things. It has to do with control of language, connecting of lyrics and melodies. That’s what makes it timeless....

I like that Thomas has never met Bob Dylan and doesn't see much need or even value to talking to him: "Whatever I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Dylan is very careful at controlling what he gets asked."

I agree. We were talking about something like that yesterday, and I was saying I didn't have any kind of feeling of wanting to know Bob Dylan personally. The Bob Dylan that matters to me comes through the art. That's the direct experience. No reason to want to go around that to get somewhere else when you're already here.

Well, I really like Professor Thomas and his Virgil-and-Ovid comparisons. I'm not going to criticize him. But seeing this article made me think the Nobel Prize is going to motivate and justify a lot of other teachers to build courses around Bob Dylan, to speak about him in lofty tones, and to impose him on the young. I'm picturing a lot of aging, self-indulgent professors devising their Bob Dylan courses....

You’ve been with the professors/And they’ve all liked your looks/With great lawyers you have/Discussed lepers and crooks/You’ve been through all of/F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books...

... and thinking that's not what Bob Dylan means.

ADDED: Here's Thomas's article "The Classical Dylan." Excerpt:

Like Dylan, Virgil was accused of plagiarism. There is an anecdote in Suetonius’ Life of Virgil 46 on the poet’s response to the critics’ charge of plagiarizing Homer: “Why don’t they try the same thefts? They’ll find out it’s easier to snatch Hercules’ club from him than a single line from Homer.” Dylan successfully stole three from Virgil, embracing T. S. Eliot’s maxim “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Poems that are layered with intertexts reveal depths of meaning through our recognition of those texts as we import other contexts that work together with new images, metaphors, and other poetic or musical effects. That is true of Virgil, Dante, Milton, and as we saw, it was true of “Lonesome Day Blues” and much else on Love and Theft. This way of writing indeed seems to be particularly a feature of the mature Dylan, starting with Time Out Of Mind. In his December 5th, 2004, 60 Minutes interview he says of “It’s Alright, Ma,” “I don’t know how I got to write those songs.” When asked if he can still write like that he replies that he cannot: “I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”

I do understand how some literalists look at the word "Literature" and say that it denotes material that is to be read.

Here's what the Online Etymology Dictionary says:

In English originally "book learning" (in which sense it replaced Old English boccræft); the meaning "activity of a writer, the profession of a literary writer" is first attested 1779 in Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets;" that of "literary productions as a whole, body of writings from a period or people" is first recorded 1812.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. [Ezra Pound, "ABC of Reading"]

Meaning "the whole of the writing on a particular subject" is by 1860; sense of "printed matter generally" is from 1895....

Oh, hang on. I have a point I'm making. But I have Dylanmind and I must disrupt my literature — such as it is — to do my Dylan imitation. You're reading, but imagine hearing it:

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 — "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

Ezra Pound never won. Nor did Ezra Pound really fight with T.S. Eliot in the captain's tower, whatever that is. Back when "Desolation Row" came out, it was 1965, and we would have assumed that something called "the captain's tower" was a phallus, but people don't talk like that anymore. And why didn't Sigmund Freud win the Nobel Prize in Literature? That was some kick-ass literature he wrote. It came out in book form, and people read those books.



That's Ezra. Man, look at him. He looks like Bob Dylan.

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

Oh, Ezra. There are winners and losers, and he's a big time loser. But he said — see above — "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." He didn't say, it's got to be read. He said it is language, the best of language. That would include words written to be heard, not read, if only the words were good enough. But he had terrible political judgment.

Yet you are the literalist perhaps, and politics has no part in your assessment of the meaning of words. Literature is stuff that you read, and Bob Dylan's songs are designed to be heard mixed up with sounds from musical instruments, sounds that are not words at all.

But the Nobel Committee is not a committee on precision in language, and it controls the scope of the meaning of its prize. It doesn't have to give the prize to the person who most closely embodies the meaning of the name of the prize. And anyway, the committee is operating in Swedish. If you're so hot to be literal, start speaking Swedish.

Chunk.

"Chunk" is the word of the day here... for no other reason than that it's come up on its own twice: "invented something called the 'Cha-Chunker'" and "pegs in their hubs that can 'take chunks out of' the granite ledge." It's a funny word, isn't it? One thinks of "blowing chunks" or the "Goonies" boy Chunk or — if you're really old — "What a chunk o' chocolate":



The word "chunk" somehow devolved from "chuck" — the squarish cut of meat — and "chuck," like "cluck," is the English speaker's reproduction of the sound a chicken makes.

"Chunk" is a notably American word. Here are some of the quotes collected by the (unlinkable) OED:

1856   E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. i. 15   A chunk of frozen walrus-beef....
1833   J. Hall Legends of West 50   If a man got into a chunk of a fight with his neighbour, a lawyer would clear him for half a dozen muskrat skins....
a1860   New York in Slices, Theatre (Bartl.),   Now and then a small chunk of sentiment or patriotism or philanthropy is thrown in....
1894   Congress. Rec. 13 July 7445/1   Just one moment, my friend. You are a lawyer... Yes, a chunk of a lawyer.
1907   Chicago Tribune 8 May 7 (advt.)    It's really ridiculous the way we've knocked chunks off these Spring overcoat prices.
1923   P. G. Wodehouse Inimitable Jeeves xiii. 148   Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit.
1957   T. S. Eliot On Poetry & Poets 49   Crabbe is a poet who has to be read in large chunks, if at all.

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

"But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

From a BBC piece, published Friday, with the insipid title: "Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot: 20 of His Most Life-Affirming Quotes."

You know what's not "life-affirming"?

Speaking of pants...

... do you remember what men were doing with their pants 3 years ago? No? Where is our cultural memory?

Remedial reading:

Judging by the number of bared ankles appearing on the streets this summer, the rolled cuff look of 2009 appears to have become the rolled cuff epidemic of 2010....

Tragic photos at the link, which is to the NYT, where no one prods you to remember all the way back to 1920 and T.S. Eliot ("I grow old … I grow old …").

"You have to channel Johnny Depp for that moment and ask yourself, ‘How would Johnny Depp roll up the bottom of his pants?’"

That was 2010... when you had to think about Johnny Depp to figure out how to wear your pants. 

"The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing."

The Waste Land... I think of T.S. Eliot's poem, which was published in 1922. Coincidentally, "The Great Gatsby" — the source of the sentence quoted above — is a story that takes place in 1922. F. Scott Fitzgerald began planning "The Great Gatsby" in 1922, and the book was published in 1925. I'm forced to think this sentence is a shout-out to Eliot.

Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

"After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm..."

"... in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

The "Animal Farm" rejection letter, written by T.S. Eliot.

How is Jayson Blair's girlfriend like Presidential candidate John Kerry? They both spontaneously launch into quoting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The info on the girlfriend comes from the great public service feature, "Slate reads the prevaricator's book so you don't have to." The info on John Kerry comes from last Sunday's Maureen Dowd swoon, my aversion to which appears here. Here's the Prufrock part:

But there was Mr. Kerry flying from Boston to New Orleans on Friday, sipping tea for his hoarse throat and reeling off T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"There are so many great lines in it," he said. " `Do I dare to eat a peach?' `Should I wear my trousers rolled?' `Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells."

Well, why not have a big Prufrock revival?

Here's a nice website with the text of the poem tricked up with links (quite a few of them dead though), to miscellaneous things, like the Seurat painting below, for "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare."

Feel free to pick through the Prufrock quotes and find phrases from which to construct wisecracks about Jayson Blair and John Kerry. There are plenty of juicy ones, though you won't find "Should I wear my trousers rolled?"--one of the "great lines" Kerry "reeled off." It's:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.