A FAN’S NOTES

Seeing the Real You at Last

In the dead of winter a good friend and fellow Bob Dylan fan gave me a book called ‘Why Bob Dylan Matters’ for my birthday. Its author is Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard man, a Professor of the Classics. The premise of the modest tome is that Dylan since the release of “Love and Theft” (the album title really matters in this instance) has been liberally lifting lines and imagery originally penned by the poets of antiquity. The Nobel laureate (and former high school Latin clubber) has been borrowing from the works of Homer, Virgil, Ovid et al.

However, in the insular kingdom of ivory towers, this is not plagiarism; it is instead a process known as intertextualization wherein the light-fingered writer brazenly builds upon words which came before thereby altering their contexts, whereas the plagiarist attempts to conceal sources in order to assume authorship. If you don’t care to think twice about intertextualization, it’s all right.

Last week my friend and I attended a lecture by Professor Thomas on the University of Alberta campus, ‘Bob Dylan and the Classics.’ The idea of an academic talk on His Bobness amused me. After 45 years of listening to Dylan, reading interviews and books, going to concerts and watching documentary films, movies or promotional videos, it had come down to this. Educated chatter. It was equally strange for me to once again haunt the hallowed halls of higher learning.

My introduction to His Bobness, Dylan 101, commenced in 1974 when I bought Before the Flood, the double live set featuring the Band. It was current then and I knew all the songs. Of course, they sounded nothing like the Greatest Hits versions I was familiar with. First lesson absorbed. By virtue of a simple twist of fate, ’74 was an opportune time for a 14-year-old to dive into Dylan because Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes and Desire soon followed.

The evening at the U of A began snippily enough. The head of the English Department lamented that the event had to be staged in a room in the Faculty of Business because doesn’t it just get all the funding? After her introduction, things became awkward for Professor Thomas. From the lectern he asked the 60 or 70 students and teachers present if anyone had read his book. I waved my copy at him. Great, at least one copy sold in Edmonton. Had anyone heard Tempest, Dylan’s latest album of original material from 2012? I raised my hand, lonely as a cloud. Okay, had anyone seen ‘Masked and Anonymous,’ Dylan’s last foray into acting? Oh dear, just me. Surely everyone had listened to Dylan’s requisite Nobel lecture set to a tinkling piano and in which he cited ‘The Odyssey’ as a major influence on his art? Merely me again. Right, what about Dylan’s book ‘Chronicles,’ who’d read it? My friend and I reluctantly raised our hands, the two of us alone in the lecture hall.

The distinguished and erudite visitor left his final question unspoken: Just what the fuck are you all doing here, exactly? I thought it worth posing aloud, very Dylanesque. His Bobness has been asking his audience, all of us together through life in modern times, that same question in one song after another, in his words or another’s since 1962.