Here is an interesting review of a book on Bob Dylan that tries to make his Jewishness the center of his art.
Some bits:
I’m not exaggerating the cult-like devotion of those whom I’ve come to call “the Bobolators” (after Shakespeare’s “Bardolators”). Although there are many brilliant commentators who are able to separate the wheat from the chaff, there are others for whom there is no chaff, those for whom his every word and line in every lyric, no matter how casual or trivial, seems to be a burning bush of signification that speaks with numinous authority in a blaze of encrypted poetry.
...
Perhaps the biggest stretch of the book is Rogovoy’s rationalization of Dylan’s Jesus period. Talk about taking the Christ out of Christmas. Consider when he comes to what he calls “Dylan’s most direct statement of Christian belief,” on the album Slow Train Coming. “The official published lyric of ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’ has him singing, ‘There’s a Man upon a cross and He’s been crucified / Do You have any idea why or for who He died?’”
“But,” Rogovoy tells us, as if he has discovered a loophole, “on the recording Dylan actually sings, ‘There’s a man on the cross and he’s been crucified for you / Believe in his power that’s all you gotta do.” Either way it’s a pretty straightforward declaration that the crucifixion is the path to salvation. But wait! Rogovoy seeks to obfuscate Dylan’s rare if unappealing didacticism: “The line seems tacked on to the end of the song; nothing that comes before prepares a listener for this statement of faith; there is no case being made that leads up to this as the logical (or illogical) conclusion; it’s practically a non sequitur as it appears in the song.”
You can almost see him sweat. But it’s simply not true that nothing prepares the listener or that it’s a non sequitur. It’s more like a culmination that Rogovoy can’t abide. He denies Dylan the right, misguided or not, to be the person he was then, because it challenges the ironclad rigidity of Rogovoy’s thesis. This transparent sophistry (“tacked on” could be another person’s “triumphant conclusion”) allows Rogovoy to avoid confonting Dylan’s soul-searching.
7 comments:
The quotation from my book in the review is taken out of context, and it is not true that my book "tries to make [Bob Dylan's] Jewishness the center of his art." I make that very clear in the introduction.
I would hope that people would actually read the book itself, "Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet," before drawing conclusions upon the wall -- or the home page, as the case may be.
Thanks,
Seth Rogovoy
Well, thanks for posting here. Of course, all I have to go on is the review. I do hope to read the book.
"Of course, all I have to go on is the review."
Actually you can buy the book or get it from your library. Commenting and pontificating on a review of a book is just useless and pointless knowledge.
I have read the book, I enjoyed it very much. It expanded my thinking of dylan's music and religion. It made me go back and relisten to the "religious period albums" with a new ear.
Of course, I can Steve. But I was really simply pointing out the review which was interesting all by itself. I plan to read the book.
And also my one sentence hardly qualifies as "pontificating".
Hmm, we all do take Mr. Zimmerman quite seriously , don't we?
:)
Rogovoy's own synopsis of the same review from his dylanprophet blog:
those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology … owe Rogovoy a great debt” – Ron Rosenbaum
February 23rd, 2010
In “Bob Dylan: Messiah or Escape Artist?,” his review of BOB DYLAN: Prophet Mystic Poet, in the premiere issue of the new Jewish Review of Books, critic Ron Rosenbaum - a columnist for Slate and the author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars, who is working on a book on Bob Dylan for Yale University Press – hails Seth Rogovoy’s “exemplary research” and says that “...those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology … owe Rogovoy a great debt for persuasively tracking so many Dylan words, lines, and allusions to Biblical sources we might not have noticed.”
Rosenbaum goes on to say that “Rogovoy’s source-hunting is so relentless, one can only bow to his ingenuity as he pins just about every Dylan line you can think of, like a dead butterfly, to its biblical source box. I was particularly impressed by the wealth of allusions to the Davidic stories he finds.”
He hails the book’s “…deepening of the detailed picture now emerging of Dylan’s Jewish upbringing. Rogovoy shows that the Zimmermans were at ‘the center of Jewish life in Hibbing,’ and that young Robert’s bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel.”
"I still have the scars which the Son could not heal." - Not Dark Yet
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal -Not Dark Yet
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