#36 THE NOBLE LAUREATE

Nobel Literature Prize laureate, Bob Dylan, wrote this as a selfie send-up in 'I shall be free.No.10) on one of his early albums. In an interview he later said he knew he was a poet from the time he wrote "jeez, I can't find my knees", after a hallucinogenic experience.  Considerable foresight, then, and the habit of modestly denying that he deserved major honours - but still accepting them as he did with the Congressional Medal of Honour from Obama.

Whatever the public may think of this Nobel Prize, fellow poets and lyricists have known for 50 years that he deserves this. An exaggeration? As Max Bygraves used to say, "I wanna tell you a stor-ee".  In 1966 I had a girlfriend with a flat just off the King's Road, Chelsea (see FESS, The girl in the car park). One time I visited her she beckoned me quickly into the kitchen, to explain to me that the bedroom was occupied by a couple who were 'having an affair'. I got the picture and passed the time hymning the praises of Dylan's new album "Blonde on Blonde" which I had just bought. I said that if it didn't have electric music behind it, it would be considered poetry, and very good poetry in some songs. I also had to move around the living room, raising my voice so she could hear, and avoid the fluffy grey kitten whose fur made me sneeze, coincidentally named 'Dylan'.

Much later she told me that one member of the couple was a very famous British poet, who wouldn't want to be named even now, and he had told her not only that he heard my thesis and agreed with it totally, but that many of his friends and colleagues in the poetry world "would give their right arms to have Dylan's supply of imagery - something that can't be taught or learned".  I've pasted in a sample: it's a narrative, a cry of anger, of passion, of aggression and contrition, and of love and hate. Above all it contains some powerfully graphic images and symbols which compare with any in the English Literature I have read.  As my Jewish grandmother would have said, "By poets he's a poet". My case rests.


"Idiot Wind"

Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quick, when they will I can only guess
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can't help it if I'm lucky.

People see me all the time and they just can't remember how to act
Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts
Even you, yesterday, you had to ask me where it was at
I couldn't believe after all these years, you didn't know me better than that
Sweet lady.

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads heading south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe

I ran into the fortune-teller who said beware of lightning that might strike
I haven't known peace and quiet, for so long I can't remember what it's like
There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pouring out of a boxcar door
You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the war
After losing every battle.

I woke up on the roadside daydreaming about the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are making me see stars
You hurt the ones that you love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes
Blood on your saddle.

Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart
You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn't enough to change my heart
Now everything's a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What's good is bad what's bad is good, you'll find out when you reach the top
You're on the bottom.I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed your eyes don't look
into mine
The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone faced while the
building burned
I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees while the
springtime turned
Slowly into autumn.

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to Capitol
Idiot wind. blowing every time you move you teeth
You're an idiot babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

I can't feel you anymore, I can't even touch the books you've read
Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishing I was somebody else instead
Down the highway, down the tracks down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars hounded by your memory
And all your raging glory.

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I'm finally free
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me
You'll never know the hurt I suffered, nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know the same about you your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry.

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots babe
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.

It's good; good that he's got the recognition, good that a few million more young people will be curious enough to listen to his words, and good that a generation who grew up with him and made him, were moved and stirred and even politicised by him - that they can share in his satisfaction and somehow stop from feeling they have to apologise for listening to this music from another age. He is unique and I cannot think of a single other writer/performer who has got even to close to his power and influence. Arise, Sir Bob.

Yet he remains (as Churchill said of Russia) 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. His obsessive privacy, partly born of the early Dylanologists' excavations of his rubbish bins to provide clues to his life, has been maintained throughout his career. His ability to 'repel boarders', whether fans or paps is legendary: when a fan found himself in a lift with his idol, he ventured to say "Well, you don't know me, but I know you..." Dylan cut him short: "Yeah, let's keep it that way". The curt, acid or playful replies to interviewers are well-known: he can appear arrogant, rude or cruel, and this can seem a contradiction in someone who so determinedly sought fame in the first place. But it is also contradictory to his softer, self-effacing side: Dave Stewart tells the story of how Dylan came to visit him in his house/studio in Crouch End, but got the address wrong. Dylan wound up spending 4 hours with a little old lady in another house altogether, feeding him endless tea and biscuits, who hadn't a clue who he was. But he didn't want to tell her that he hadn't come to see her, she had been so pleased with the company.

He also has a talent for self-mockery, recognising that his harsh, nasal voice, though appreciated by his fans, probably stood in the way of a much wider popularity.

In the end Dylan has been recognised for his lyricism, and he did, almost single-handedly, rescue the popular music lyric from its preoccupation with teenage romance. But it is the whole musical package which has sold over 100 million of his albums, with The Band and The Byrds inspired by him to create folk-rock and influence countless subsequent 'mainstream' bands from Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, to the Eagles. Not bad for a little Jewish folkie fella from Hibbing, Minnesota.

It was inevitable that Dylan left folk-music or at least took it in new directions, before becoming a kind of rock star. Folk music is by its very nature conservative, retrospective and traditional. Dylan was an innovator and of course a poet; and while his protest songs were entirely sincere and massively influential, the poetry could not be bounded solely by political issues: Picasso did not just paint Guernica. And yet, even in the protest period, the poetry was there, in the service of the issue. This is The 'Lonesome Ballad of Hattie Carroll' a song he wrote about the killing of a Southern black hotel worker, by a contemptuous white gentleman with a blow from his cane:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gathering
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears

William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes, on bail was out walking
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears

Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel

To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level

And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded

And that even the nobles get properly handled

Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em

And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom

Stared at the person who killed for no reason

Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'

And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished

And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance

William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence

Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Bury the rag deep in your face

For now's the time for your tears

In fact the poetry I think is enhanced by the music and the rasp of his voice.

At the end of his acoustic/folk period came a song which flourished in both acoustic and electric modes, and was perhaps the first Dylan song to be appreciated by a mass audience, as poetry. This is an electric version that he played at the Concert for Bangla Desh in 1971 at Madison Square Garden, organised by George Harrison.

“I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.”

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” 

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours"    (Talking World War III Blues, 1962, about dreaming of surviving a  nuclear war))

True Confessions time: I was a devoted Dylan fan from 1962 - 82ish, happily following him through his changes through folk/protest/folk rock/rock. But in the early 80s he started to lose his way and sought guidance from Judaism and Christianity, which alienated me, despite my having a foot in both camps. It seemed like a betrayal of so much that he had stood for, and it 'tainted' his lyrics which had formerly owed nothing to organised religion. I felt disloyal but I knew this was not a direction I could follow. It also affected his music which to me became tired and somewhat formulaic. The person who I had managed to see live 4 times in 1978 was no longer the same person. This why it feels slightly strange for him to receive the reward now rather than 30 years ago before - and he admitted this himself in a recent interview - the quality declined and his heart was not in it to the same extent.
But I am extremely happy that the work has now been recognised for what it is - and for what so many people recognised it as. I doubt very much that the later work has contributed to the rationale for this award, so for me at least, it goes into Room 101. So I'm a Dylan fogey- who knew?

(already chosen for my humanist funeral playlist, even though that's at least 20 years off).


Dylan at his best, a poem for my generation, so much more resonant than Wordsworth:

'I wandered lonely as a cloud Like a Rolling Stone'

#35 THE MIDDLE CLASS DILEMMA: WORK OR PAY

Here’s the middle class dilemma: houses and flats need maintenance, redecoration, fixing things in emergencies, or more creative change/remodelling. Do you go for DIY or PSE, which my friend Robin Catto calls Jewish DIY (he would know):  earn more money and Pay Somebody Else? From very early on I chose DIY which is the masculine equivalent of dressing out of charity shops. With uncanny foresight I anticipated that as an academic I would never have money so I’d better learn to do it all myself.

My father didn’t have a lot of knowledge to pass on, nor was his skill-set extensive. His thing was Polyfilla, a material in which he became a virtuoso: had there been a Chair in Higher Filling Studies in a British University he would have been the stand-out candidate. If he had not been quite so optimistic in extending the range of its uses, he would not have learned the hard way that it cannot be used for roofing or mending sanitary ware.

He did give me a load of parana pine that he found in the basement of his shop, which I converted into several sets of bookshelves for me and my friends: this only involved sawing and screwing so it hardly merited the term carpentry. I became bored with this when I realised I had done enough to re-house the British Library. Then a larger challenge popped up. My girlfriend bemoaned the lack of a working area for preparing her teaching materials for her new job. I thought “I can do that”, and proceeded to build her a desk, in secret, in my landlord’s basement workshop. Pride comes before a fall (or in this case, before 32 mortice and tenon joints). These are where a tenon (euphemistically called ‘the male’) fits snugly into the coy ‘female’ slot to join two pieces of wood.  I had all the zeal of a new convert: my carpentry was to be pure, essential woodwork. No screws, bolts, nails and metalwork. Just wood on wood, the happy marriage of precision cutting and friction, that would hold everything rock solid and secure. Yeah, right. 

Having painstakingly cut and chiseled all those joints over many months, I found that the essential ‘goodness of fit’, had eluded me at least 25 times: the structure was as rigid as a cereal packet collapsed for the recycling truck. Using slightly more metalwork than the Angel of the North I finally secured the structure. The girlfriend’s birthday and two Christmases had passed and the suspicion that I was having a tryst with someone in the basement had grown. But hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day - but it was built rather quicker than the desk. It was, in the end, rather magnificent, and very much appreciated.  Note to self: don’t ever, ever do anything like that ever again. I said ever. However I did have a letter of appreciation from British Steel in recognition of the noticeable rise in their share price over the period.

Soon my portfolio of building skills portfolio diversified. Decorating was the next step, and my landlord and lady sat tolerantly by while I painted the doors of their elegant Georgian house bright AA yellow. And this was not the worst decorative crime I committed: I later painted a bedroom a rich maroon, all over, and while the colour was not strictly accurate it gave the room a slightly visceral overtone.

The woodwork continued and it was that part of a job which I relished most. I grew to love wood and everything about it. It is solid and strong but workable; it looks great, from its basic colour to its contours of grain; it smells great when put to the saw; and when you let the sawdust accumulate in the workshop, it drifts like desert sand into great creamy dunes. Screw up your eyes and you can see an old biplane tracing its peaks and valleys, its shadow following a few yards behind, in perfect mimicry.

As time went by my collection of tools grew. You start off buying cheap because you are on a student budget, and you buy everything cheap. Gradually you start to buy more expensive ones, even proper professional stuff, because it’s easy to rationalise (‘do the job better’ ‘last longer’ ‘good investment’) and because this kind of purchase has begun to be a treat, a real thrill: a little bit sad, but true. A beautiful new spirit level can raise the spirits, no question. And by their power tools shall ye know them: the fledgling DIY person starts off with Black and Decker, later graduates to Bosch (feeling slightly superior), the Sainsbury of power tools but he can only cut it amongst professionals if he’s packing Makita or DeWalt. I don't know if it's still true but in the 70s an ex-Black & Decker rep told me that their electric drill motors were wound to last only 16 hours, so little does the average DIY man actually use it.

So many different projects over the years it’s hard to remember them all. I’ve built or re-built 3 kitchens for myself and a couple for other people. There were periods of unemployment or austerity when I did it for extra income. Friends kindly commissioned me, like J&M who wanted a wooden kitchen, rather than IKEA flatpack chic. And there were restoration jobs which were interesting but not very profitable because they invariably required much more work than I’d estimated for, and then it’s hard to ask for more money, particularly from friends. During that period I took out a 50s fireplace and put in a restored Victorian one for an ex-girlfriend in Dalston. I remarked to her that the charred bricks at the back looked fragile and I should put another course in front of them. “No, no”, she said, fearing a bigger bill. I thought she was wrong. When she returned later that evening I took her round the side of the house and shone a torch upwards: protruding from the side of the house by about 9 inches was a long knitting needle I’d pushed through the mortar between the bricks: the wall was less than one charred brick thick, and half the house could have come down with an injudicious blow. So building work, skills and knowledge are not trivial matters: the more I acquired the more I assumed a further identity as a real builder, rather proudly, and wondered what on earth my students would have thought of the Professor moonlighting as a chippy.

In 2005 I bought an Edwardian house in NW London, as a family house: the family was short-lived but my younger daughter and I remain there today.  It was one of those houses which seems to be in reasonable repair, such that a good deal of redecoration can be postponed and spread over a longer period. Wrong.  Within days it became clear that the plumbing and electrics had to be completely renewed, which of course knocks on to redecoration, plus bathroom and kitchen to be replaced. In the event I did everything except the electrics, which involved a lot of skill acquisition e.g. replumbing the entire house, with no knowledge or experience, just a 10-week evening class in Stanmore. Looking back it seems a little crazy, but it was a good kind of craziness because the job got done, at a fraction of the professional rate, and I got real satisfaction out of having conquered another peak, and become fluent in plumbspeak. Plumbing is fairly easy, and fun, but you do have to concentrate. I was feeling immensely pleased at having completed the pipework on a bathroom, having connected hot and cold supply and waste to basin, bidet and wc, and decided to quit while I was head and go home – it was 8.30pm, Saturday night. As I walked down the hall to the front door, a drop of cold-water hit me on the back of the neck – from the hall light-fitting. I went cold. Back upstairs, take up floorboards, to find I had expertly driven a screw through the middle of the soft copper cold water supply pipe, through having guessed where the pipe was rather than measure it. There’s nothing like that irrevocable feeling of depression, frustration, annoyance, tedium at having to repeat, and the conviction that your IQ is probably less than your shoe-size. There is an adage in the building trade:  “Look 3 times, measure twice, cut once”: probably a good Rule for Life.

As a rule of thumb, DIY costs about 30% of PSE. It can make you feel like a Master of the Universe when it turns out well, and a dumb schmuck when it doesn’t – who still has to get someone in to put things right. You should try it, it’s the only way to learn. I have a cabin full of good tools, which I’ll lend – if you collect and return. Trial and error is the only way to learn. If at first you don’t succeed you may do on the fourth attempt. Beyond that, your tool of choice is probably the telephone.

A DIY tip: have you ever drilled a hole in the wall, which is too big for the screw/Rawlplug you are using? Pack out the hole tightly with matchsticks, or better, cocktail sticks, broken off where they reach the surface. (Before plastics, builders would make their own Rawlplugs out of bits of wood). Voilà: the perfect fitting wooden plug will take the screw and keep it rigid, strongly enough to hold up the whole house (so far….).

So, the apple really doesn't fall very far from the tree.....

Hallowe'en

Hallowe’en provides so many reasons for dispatch to the Room of Shame that it is surprising it hasn’t hasn’t gone there voluntarily, after leaving a note. It’s fake, a fabricated non-event created by the Americans to colour in their cultural history by people who can only trace their lineage back to last Thursday, unless you count Native Americans which the white folks have obstinately failed to do for the last 400 years or so. The person who discovers a real link to a Native American festival in the autumn is going to clean up, authenticity being as rare and valuable commodity as green and blue striped gold ore; as such will be abolished as Satanic by President Trump.

But for us it’s just another cheap, flashy American import, gleefully seized upon by toy manufacturers and market traders, and even major supermarkets.  Dentists love Hallowe’en, it's their pension fund; national sugar consumption levels peak in late October through this excuse to consume unlimited amounts of sweets, and tooth decay comes close behind. So as well as putting up with marauding gangs of kids hammering on the doors of Seniors and squinting through the venetian blinds (to check you’re really out), we have to lay in supplies of cheap sweets to buy them off, bringing a major spike in dental cares, childhood obesity and diabetes. What’s not to like? Don’t give me that rubbish about ‘a healthy alternative’. Having produced carrot sticks one year, a ten year-old, clearly surfing a sugar-rush, told me to “stick them up your…….(don’t know what the rhyming slang for this is, but respectfully suggest ‘Whitehall farce’).

It’s all about social pressure and fashion. I am a curmudgeon about this, I own it – and hopefully a spoilsport, too. I’m all for people enjoying weird, meaningless fantasy lives, celebrating ancient rites, dressing up and having a good time – that’s what I go to football for –  please just do it at home with consenting adults, not through my letterbox. Capiche?

I'm getting really sick of these facile and exaggerated comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler. In some respects it's very unfair on Der Führer. For all his monstrous, murderous, depraved, sick behaviour, he was quite a cultured man, appreciated and wrote books, loved music (maybe a little heavy on the Wagner), painted and was very nice to children, animals and women. Trump has none of these redeeming features, and we now discover is a serial groper who uses his power and wealth to abuse women. We may have suspected it, we may have heard rumours, but we didn't expect to hear it confirmed from the stallion's mouth. Possibly Hillary may be a little circumspect about condemning such men - as well she might. But she can leave it to Trump to dig himself further into the hole with every subsequent statement. But if the Trump train hits the buffers it would be a shame if it happened because of this. Yes, this behaviour confirms him as truly loathsome, but it doesn't portray the full horror of such a bigoted, ignorant, braggart being so close to the leadership of the West. And don't tell me he wouldn't have been as evil as Hitler, seriously, because he is clearly cruel, unscrupulous, hysterical, impulsive, dishonest, megalomaniac and incredibly stupid, which in my book makes him capable of practically any excess. He is, to use a technical term from Psychiatry, completely out to lunch, and in power he would endanger the planet.

Please watch this: it's an extraordinary flamenco/jazz, blues fusion. A lot of people think of flamenco as a Costa tourist thing, just guitars and dancing, and strictly Spanish. But in this you can here the clear roots in North Africa and some Middle Eastern influences. As for the dancing, it is spectacular and makes me wonder whether 70 is too late to learn. After all, it's pretty much what I do already: stand on the same spot and move your feet a bit...

This was sent to me from Aix: thank you FC, for finally introducing a bit of class and culture into the blog, at long last.

"Les Footballeurs" by Nicolas de Staël, a French abstract painter of Russian origin. The referee is clearly kicking the red-shirted  (Arsenal? Liverpool? Man U) figure up the arse for behaviour typical of these teams, a kind of retributive justice which could be more effective than our namby-pamby coloured cards and verbal wrist-slapping. Or you might prefer some more traditional Fine art:

S.J.Perelman: American humorist and member of the Algonquin Round Table

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.

I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.