Like a rolling ode: academic conference weighs up Bob Dylan's poetic licence
by Steven Morris, guardian.co.uk
May 24th 2011
Twenty-year-old Natasha Tabani had queued for three hours to make sure of
her place in lecture theatre three of Bristol University's English
department.
She wasn't displaying such keenness at the prospect of a fine exposition of
a Shakespeare play or an inspiring talk on the Victorian novelists that
might help improve her next English literature essay. This event was all
about a gnarled singer-songwriter who had reached his 70th birthday.
"I just love Bob Dylan. I've come hoping to learn more about him. I want to
be able to get more out of his words and music, to compare my idea of him
with other people's," said Tabani. Her favourite Dylan song, Visions of
Johanna, appeared on Blonde on Blonde a quarter of a century before she was
born. "What he sang then still sounds as relevant now to me. That song is
almost eight minutes long but it never seems enough. It's just beautiful."
The Seven Ages of Dylan, as the conference was called, was an attempt to
bring together Britain's most eminent scholars on the music star who was
born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, on 24 May 1941.
As the delegates (mostly, to be fair, middle-aged music fans in soft shoes
rather than youthful students like Tabini) packed into the underground
lecture at Bristol, devotees around the world were celebrating Dylan's
three-score-and-10. In Shillong, in north-east India, for example, fans
flocked to gigs organised by Lou Majaw (often dubbed the country's Dylan).
He, perhaps optimistically, called for the state government to declare 24
May Bob Dylan Day. Thousands of other "Bobcats" gathered in Lahore, Nepal,
Moscow, Brazil, Melbourne and Cape Town.
In the mining town of Hibbing in Minnesota, where he was raised, organisers
were putting the finishing touches to their annual festival, Dylan Days. New
for 2011, is "an authentic rock 'n' roll hop" featuring music popular at the
time Dylan graduated from Hibbing high school in 1959, and the first "Dylan
Days symposium" will reunite members of Dylan's school band, The Golden
Chords, for a discussion.
Back in Bristol, one of the first thorny subjects to be tackled was whether
Dylan could really be considered a fine poet.Danny Karlin, Winterstoke
professor of English at Bristol and a leading expert on Robert Browning,
argued he could not. If his words were published as poems rather than songs,
"nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice", Karlin claimed. He said
Dylan should be viewed as a bard whose work needed to be heard rather than
read.
Nevertheless, some speakers analysed particular Dylan songs as they would
have done a Browning poem. Dressed all in black, Aidan Day, professor of
English at Dundee, examined Man in the Long Black Coat and compared the
central character with Satan in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell.
David Punter, a professor of English at Bristol, spoke on Visions of Johanna
and Mr Tambourine Man, admitting at one point: "I feel an idiot reading out
Dylan."
The talk continued outside over lunch and tea. Coco Creme, 20, admitted she
was here partly to find out why her parents made so much fuss over Dylan.
"He was always playing in the background when I grew up. I want to find out
why,"
Stephen Jordan, of the faculty of music at Oxford University, tried to
explain, saying he believed Dylan's music had provided the soundtrack to
everything from the Cuban missile crisis to the New Orleans floods. "There
are maybe 60 people sitting around here. Probably there are 60 different
visions of every Dylan song and all of them valid. He is part of our lives,
our culture," he said.
Original Page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk//music/2011/may/24/bob-dylan-birthday-conference-br
istol/print?mobile-redirect=false
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