Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate

Bob Dylan has won the nobel prize for literature. This is surprisingly moving to me - fills me with more delight than I could have imagined. There will be complaints (that one isn't stupid, just a complaint that Dylan is a musician, not a writer; or something), but I don't care. Dylan's art is made of words, and words are literature, and that's enough for me.

I wrote about him recently so I won't go into depth again. The relevant part of that essay might be this paragraph - Bob the writer:

Leave it then. Let's get to the good stuff. Because there is no denying his genius: as a writer at least, though he is not slouch as a songwriter, and though he is not what you would call a singer - he is most definitely a voice. But it is the words that make him what he is. I sometimes come across people who doubt the Bob - who try to show he wasn't so good after all - they are incorrect. They might complain about some aspect of his writing - the obscurity and obliqueness of some of his songs - but they complain about those things by ignoring the songs that are nothing like that: that get to the point and fast. What's obscure about Hurricane or the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll? But plain or obscure, conventional or experimental - he was always sharp, dazzling, surprising and careful. The words make him what he is, the words and how he uses them. It's there in those piles of words, lines, images in the early songs - in the clear, direct statement of songs like the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll - in the meandering narratives of 70s songs, from Desire or Blood on the Tracks. He uses words to make music - the way they clash and throng, jammed together out of time, their mysterious pauses and transitions, repetitions, all the poetic tricks he uses - rhymes and internal rhymes and alliterations and assonance - While preachers preach of evil fates/Teachers teach that knowledge waits... lay slain by a cane... (or those three tables, also in ...Hattie Carroll...) - they all add up. However they read on the page, he always wrote these words to be sung - or performed, anyway - they are rhythmic and propulsive, ragged (usually), fitted to his voice. It's as if the words were a musical instrument.

For the full appreciation, I would recommend Edroso - he's far more eloquent... But for me - this makes perfect sense. Song writers deserve to be honored as writers once in a while. It is good to have people appreciate words across different media. As for Dylan himself: I like him, though he is probably not my favorite songwriter, even considered purely as a writer. I always liked Lou Reed more; I have my own little pantheon of heroes - Richard Thompson, David Thomas, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey - and in more conventional styes, Mick Jagger (And Keith Richards, whatever their division of duties is), and, maybe most of all, Smokey Robinson. But those are my preferences, undoubtedly idiosyncratic in places - and Dylan has the advantage over all of them in terms of the length and breadth of his career, his influence, both on the world and other writers/singers/musicians. He did indeed strike out in new directions as a "pop" songwriter - the others followed. Most of them (the ones I named) explicitly following Dylan. So - you bet he deserves this prize.

And so? some music, huh? A beautiful video for Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.



Something about the roots - where he comes from, where he took it - and, you know.. Dylan on TV, singing Man of Constant Sorrow:



And - influence: Richie Havens covering All Alongthe Watchtower:



And deeper influence, I guess - a school of rock band covering the Minutemen's Bob Dylan Wrote the Propaganda Songs":

Easter, 1916

100 years ago today elements of Irish Republicans rose against the English, demanding independence. They seized the Dublin General Post Office, and a few other business, and held out a few days against the British army sent to out them down. It was not a very effective rising, nor a popular one, but the British - in the very depths of the Great War at the time - were in no mood to fool around, and set about executing the leaders without much ceremony. And that made the rising far more popular among the Irish, and, you could say, ultimately successful. The dead became martyrs; the living were more dedicated to their purpose, and would continue on, striving for an independent Ireland, that would come.

Abd Yeats, the poet, would brood on the rising, and the deaths, and would write about them. And get, I would have to say, the essence of revolution - its appeal; its folly; its ways of corrupting its adherents - too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart - but a stone that transforms the world, as well, perhaps. A terrible beauty is born.

Easter, 1916

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Armistice Day, With Robert Graves

Today is Armistice Day, a holiday established to mark the end of the Great War, the War to End All Wars. We shouldn't forget the most important message of this day: Never Again. It's a message the world has failed utterly to understand. We Americans, who for a time seemed to keep it in mind, except when we were attacked, have forgotten it, fighting a number of wars for no purpose and to no good end. Vietnam and the Second Iraq war were particularly disastrous - killing thousands, causing immense domestic strife and harm, having ongoing repercussions. (Though oddly, 40 years along, Vietnam's legacy isn't quite so bad - we get along with them now. We had the decency to lose, I suppose, and somehow were able to get past that loss, and move toward decent relations with Southeast Asia. Though that just tends to indicate that the war was a waste - we would have ended up friends anyway, maybe. When you look at the devastation that war brought - to Vietnam, to Cambodia - and the amount of harm it did to us, the ways it stranded Johnson's political achievements, delivering the country to Nixon and evil - it is a horrible thing.) And Iraq? we're back to talking about boots on the ground in the Middle East - insanity... Though here - blaming George Bush and co. is well justified - they took bad things and made them far worse - but in so many ways, the ongoing strife in the middle east is just a reminder that 11/11/18 was just a ceasefire in one theater of the Great War. The war didn't really stop in the middle east - it kept going, the results of the war warping and twisting around each other, and forming new conflicts, which go on to this day.

Ugh.

It's important, then, to remember that today is a sad day - a day of mourning for the men sacrificed in war, for what war did to them. A day of atonement for all the young men we have killed (all us countries.)

So - from one who was there, Robert Graves. First, an arty video set to the poem, The Assault Heroic:



And then - getting to the point in a hurry: the Dead Boche:



And text: The Assault Heroic:

Down in the mud I lay,
Tired out by my long day
Of five damned days and nights,
Five sleepless days and nights, ...
Dream-snatched, and set me where
The dungeon of Despair
Looms over Desolate Sea,
Frowning and threatening me
With aspect high and steep—
A most malignant keep.
My foes that lay within
Shouted and made a din,
Hooted and grinned and cried:
"Today we've killed your pride;
Today your ardour ends.
We've murdered all your friends;
We've undermined by stealth
Your happiness and your health.
We've taken away your hope;
Now you may droop and mope
To misery and to Death."
But with my spear of Faith,
Stout as an oaken rafter,
With my round shield of laughter,
With my sharp, tongue-like sword
That speaks a bitter word,
I stood beneath the wall
And there defied them all.
The stones they cast I caught
And alchemized with thought
Into such lumps of gold
As dreaming misers hold.
The boiling oil they threw
Fell in a shower of dew,
Refreshing me; the spears
Flew harmless by my ears,
Struck quivering in the sod;
There, like the prophet's rod,
Put leaves out, took firm root,
And bore me instant fruit.
My foes were all astounded,
Dumbstricken and confounded,
Gaping in a long row;
They dared not thrust nor throw.
Thus, then, I climbed a steep
Buttress and won the keep,
And laughed and proudly blew
My horn, "Stand to! Stand to!
Wake up, sir! Here's a new
Attack! Stand to! Stand to!"

A Dead Boche:

TO you who'd read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I'll say (you've heard it said before)
"War's Hell!" and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

Armistice Day

We are getting close to the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I - next year... It is, I think, the defining moment in modern history - even WWII plays as a kind of sequel - bigger, more horrible, though also, maybe, more "successful" in remaking the world in a slightly better form. In some places. Kinda, sorta… I imagine, next year, I will try to follow along with it, as I have been doing with the Civil War's 150th anniversary - it is, I think, to modern Europe what the Civil War is to the United States.

And now - on this day, again, we should remember the end of the first one: the bad war - the war to end all wars, that spawned a dozen more wars. We should remember, and think about what war is.

I will turn it over to Wilfred Owen. Here, first, his most famous poem - Dulce et Decorum Est (here, with annotations):



And here is Kenneth Branagh reading Anthem for Doomed Youth:



the texts:

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

and:

Anthem for Doomed Youth
BY WILFRED OWEN

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Armistice Day Poem

As of this February, with the death of Florence Green, there are no more surviving veterans from the Great War. Still - I think it is best to honor the general in the particular - and honor all veterans by remembering the end of this war. It's a good date for it - WWI is more or less impossible to see as anything but disaster - no one wanted it, no one benefited by it - and nothing was resolved by it, its ending spawning another, bigger war between worse governments, 20 years along. No one is tempted to romanticize it, and forget that the fundamental fact of war is that it is hell.

I will turn to Ezra Pound, to provide additional commentary on the war - this from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, written just after the war...

IV.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case . . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor". .

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

The Master and Such

The Master arrives, like all the PT Anderson films before it, on waves of hype and praise and some complaint - I suppose I could review it, but the world abounds in reviews, and I have other things on the mind, so I think I will just make a list of things that caught my attention...

1) My first impression of the film is of how perfect Joaquin Phoenix looks for 1950 USA. That lean, hard body, skinny, strong, but with no definition - I look at old pictures of my father and uncles in the 40s and 50s and they look exactly like that. It goes a long way toward selling the character. Freddy looks right. Now, his behavior, his movements, ways of standing, and so on, are mannered, sometimes to the extreme - though I doubt they are as extreme as they look to 2012's eyes - but his body, face (and hair, clothes, and so on) are uncanny. He looks like 1950 come to life.

2) I saw two films last weekend, The Master and For Ellen. I liked For Ellen - a carefully observed character study, a quiet acting tour de force for Paul Dano - a nice little film, though that's all. (It's enough, of course, though perhaps underwhelming against the competition. Like all those perfectly acceptable little indie films in the spring that disappeared on contact with Moonrise Kingdom.) But reading through the reviews, I find For Ellen described as "poetic" - probably more than once. And this is something that bothers me.

I am taking a class on poetry just now, Modern Poetry at that, so it is in my head. I've written about it here before - I have theories, which I confess are a bit idiosyncratic. I think, for example, that film resembles poetry more than any other written form - I think its basic structure, the compilation of shots, as discreet units, arranged in a sequence, and building meaning out of their sequence, their arrangement, and out of a host of connections from shot to shot, sequence to sequence - is a process that is much closer to poetry than to prose. Film is poetic by its nature. But I think its poetry lies in its construction - poetry itself is defined, I think, by the heightened language - and by the structures patterns of language. By line breaks I am tempted to say.... And if a poem itself can be more poetic by being more explicit about its ambition, and its derangement of language, then so can a film, by highlighting its construction, its derangement of images. And so - how is The Master not poetic?

Why do people call For Ellen "poetic" but not The Master? I suppose it's obvious - it's the slow pace; it's those long the long held closeups of faces, of people alone, mostly Dano alone, thinking, waiting, holding the screen. It's the inserted symbolic shots - the sky, trees, the roads, motels, and so on. Those are the things that signify poetry in films. The Terence Malick stuff, I suppose. The lyricism, the contemplation.

But there's a lot more to poetry than lyricism. We are reading Ezra Pound just now in that class, and soon will be reading T. S. Eliot, and when you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or the Wasteland, or you read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - what do they have to do with films like For Ellen? And how are they not almost perfect prefigurations of a film like The Master? Look at what it is - a film that follows a man, his passage through life, through a period of time - but impressionistically, discontinuously. It is large and sprawling, but so is Whitman - so are Pound and Eliot - Milton, Dante. And look at how it works - dense, allusive, built around patterns, rhymes and rhythms, condensed to hard, specific images, arranged to play off the images around them. How is it not poetic?

As it clips along, Freddy on a beach, Freddy at sea, Freddy insane, Freddy trying to work in a store, Freddy fucking a store model, after half poisoning her with his concoction of photography chemicals and whatnot), Freddy fighting with a complacent bourgeois, Freddy among the migrant workers, Freddy running across a field, Freddy on the waterfront - the scenes come, without connective tissue to the last, a device you will find, I say, in Pound and company, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, to name a name. Not just as ellipse - but with even sequential moments (as Freddy's fight with the workers, and flight from them across the field), the scenes can be constructed as if they were completely unconnected. And it continues, and like poetry, it builds patterns across scenes - runs multiple patterns: as simple as the way Jonny Greenwood's music seems to run separately from the scenes - layered over them rather than sculpted to match them. It's in the ways individual images can overpower the flow of images - Freddy running across a field; Freddy trashing a jail cell - or just Freddy's way of standing, walking, the way he seems placed against the grain of every scene he's in. It shifts tone, between scenes, within scenes. It repeats images - moments, images, memories? or just the way an alcoholics' life falls into dreadful repetition - though the film never announces anything like that, anything like a clear meaning to the images it gives you.

3) I love it without loving it. I am in awe of it, without feeling the overpowering sense of its rightness I feel, for example, with Moonrise Kingdom. Is P.T. Anderson the equal of Wes Anderson as a filmmaker? He might be, to tell the truth - but Wes is more to my tastes. But - it's hard to ignore the coincidence of the names (I can ignore the coincidence of the two Paul Andersons, however) - but it really comes down to the fact that they have separated themselves from the other (American) filmmakers of their generation. No others match them - some may get there (Kelly Riechardt? Ira Sachs? etc.) - but none have yet. But the two Andersons have, I say, lifted themselves into the ranks of their forebears - Scorsese, Lynch, The Coens. They are in the ranks of the best world wide, the filmmakers whose works I wait for years between - Costa, Denis, Kurosawa, Apitchipong, older filmmakers like Hou and Kiarostami. I don't think it's an unjustified comparison. It took me a while to get there with PT (while I was with Wes from the go) - but this and There Will Be Blood seem to me to deliver what they promise, and what he has been promising - utter mastery of the medium, put in service of stories that show you things in the world you might miss. So yes: I can't say I have taken the measure of this film, not by a half, but I think I can say it is a great one.

A Requiem for those We Love

Memorial Day, like Veteran's Day, has changed focus over the years- it began as Decoration Day, a memorial for the Union dead after the Civil War, and only later was extended to the more general remembrance it has today. I am, I suppose, a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to holidays, and always like to go back to the source - though the broader remembrance is also a good thing.

In that spirit - both of going to the source and extending it - here is a link to Paul Hindemith's setting of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom'd" - the poem written to commemorate Lincoln's death; the musical piece commissioned on the occasion of Roosevelt's death - both, of course, dating from the end of long wars.

Here is the opening - and the playlist, containing videos of the whole piece.

Some Things to Love in Old Movies

Jacqueline Lynch and the Self-Styled Siren have started something that should be a meme: Ten Things They Love About Old Movies. It is a rich vein: rather too rich - I did not set out to post 38 pictures, but how can you choose just one of the hats in 42nd Street? how can you have too many pictures of Warren William, anywhere? Once you get started, you know... Here, then, are 10 things I love about old movies - illustrated to a fault...

1. Hats



2. Credit sequences using footage of the actors.




3. Warren William!






4. Rear projection, painted backdrops, and models.





5. Tinting.





6. Trains - and movies named after trains.





7. Telephones.





8. Hard bitten reporters



9. Hotels, hotel rooms, hotel dicks, room service...






10. Ocean Liners and freighters...





Etc....

An Aside on Film and Poetry

I'm in another posting slump. There might be reasons. I have been taking a class - a poetry class, for pure edification. It keeps me busy, it's been draining off whatever energy I might be putting into blogging.

I suppose I could get around that by blogging about the class - or about ideas the class inspires. I could write about poems that work "cinematically" - often hundreds of years before the invention of cinema. I suppose that's an old game - spotting things in novels or poems or Shakespeare or such that anticipate techniques we think of as cinematic. It's probably a silly game - the point is probably that things happen in the world, and have always happened in much the same way - in space and time, and we experience them and remember them, and try to put them into other forms - words or pictures or stories - and the forms we put them in will resemble one another. (I think I am quoting someone here: is it Manny Farber? or Jean Mitry? someone I have read in the last few months, who wrote about "cinematic" techniques that predate cinema.... Mitry I think...) Anyway - it's not too useful, probably - but it's fun - and might be useful. "Cinematic" techniques are techniques that use space and time as their basic building blocks. Poets and novelists and obviously painters always used space and time as building blocks - so analogies are inevitable.

Take Shelley's Ozymandias: there's a poem that's almost a camera ready script. Scenes and shots are all laid out: the poet meets a traveler from an ancient land, who starts to tell of what he's seen. As he does, the poem almost cross fades (across an ellipse) to shots of the ruined statue of Ozymandias in the desert. We are give a series of shots - as analytically edited as a Russian: "legs of stone... shattered visage... lip and sneer..." - described like a series of shots, edited together - though you could do it as a track past the pieces, though still fairly close... with maybe superimposed ghosts of the old days, the artist's hands carving the scowling face.... then in - cut or track in, to the inscription:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

And then - what I would call a shock cut, to a long, long shot of the site: "Nothing beside remains." says the poem - and describes the scene in its full context - the desert sands, "boundless and bare" - with what amounts to a zoom out or pan away from the statue to the empty sands - "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

It's a thing of beauty. I suppose treating it like a film doesn't really add much - that might be the point, though. Poets, novelists, playwrights, painters manipulate space, time, combine images, vary their position relative to their imagery, to create their effects - you have to pay attention to how they treat space, when they do manipulate it. It's more or less a given with film - the way manipulation of words is a given in poetry, manipulation of stories and characters are in novels or plays - but novels and films manipulate words, poems manipulate characters - cross media techniques are a valuable device for any and all....

Anyway - it's all very interesting. One thing this class has done is emphasize the value of close reading - I notice that the techniques of close reading are pretty consistent across all art forms. The specifics vary, as one looks at different elements that go into making a poem or a panting or a film - but the general principals remains. Repetition - patterns of repetition and variation, parallels, series, related pieces: all the sound effects of poetry (rhyme, alliteration and assonance, meter), semantic patterns, patterns of imagery... in films: manipulation of space is primary; repetition of patterns of things on the screen, editing, how images connect... I might get ambitious and pursue some of this - it occurs to me that all films are in fact more poetry than prose: there is a reliance of the detail of the shots and sequences of shots in film that seems more like the pressure poems put on words and lines and sentences, than like the way prose uses those things. But if I start down that road I may never get to stop.