–On our bookshelves, I have over a dozen books I’ve read by and about Bob Dylan.–

What if you are a great enthusiast (as I am) of Michelangelo, Turner, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, and then you begin reading a compilation of learned essays founded upon the comprehensive archives in a university and you find that what you think you know is but an inkling?

(Cropped front cover.)

Such is my current experience in reading The World of Bob Dylan edited by Sean Latham, the director of Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa. (Dylan’s papers are now at the same location as those of Woody Guthrie.) The book consists of over two dozen essays by professors and other authorities on the life, influences, and essence of Dylan. Latham’s introduction begins:

Is there any writer or performer more haunting

—and more haunted—

than Bob Dylan?

Of the over 300 pages, I’ve just completed a part. And I’m overwhelmed. The first chapter, “The Biographies” by Andrew Muir begins:

Biographies can be curiously unfulfilling publications.

This is due partly to the ultimate unknowability of another person,

and partly to the motivations and circumstances

that bring these life-stories into being.

I’ve finished “The Blues” chapter by Greil Marcus–I hadn’t expected in it the depth and intensity I encountered:

In the blues, words first came from a common store of phrases,

couplets, curses, blessings, jokes, greetings and goodbyes

that passed anonymously….

As a modernist art, the blues is kin to

Cubism, Dada, Finnegans Wake (1939)….

Marcus describes the blues song, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” and describes how Dylan renders it and why he does it this way:

As Dylan sings, his voice is scraped and braying,

frantic, enraged, immediate, noisy….

At the end of the blues chapter, Marcus describes Dylan singing “Lovesick”:

You can hear the song come into its own body:

the voice searching its way through the sound the song

has called up from the band, the words like weights

the singer has been forced to bear,

the guitarist’s notes fracturing as they twist into the air,

the pieces trying to find their way back to the chord they came from,

and never quite making it,

speaking that language of suspense.

I’ve read chapter 9, “Rock Music” by Ira Wells. At the bottom of the first page, Wells startles the reader (and will ultimately go on to explain):

The story of Dylan”plugging in” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival

has seared its way into the American cultural imgaination:

it’s the Bob Dylan story known by those who

don’t know anything about Bob Dylan.

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(Cropped back cover)

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Amazon Customer Review

Allison5.0 out of 5 stars MARVELOUS BOOK! Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2021 Verified Purchase This is the most interesting, informative, entertaining, and fascinating book I can ever remember reading. Don’t tell Hemingway, Mailer, and David Byrne that I said this.
(Allison Morgan Bergmann—the foregoing Customer Review is by my husband, Eugene B. Bergmann, for whom I bought this book—he is a published author who has been reading widely and constantly for well over 70 years. P. S. He is a Dylan enthusiast.)

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