I’d love to see who actually enrols.
https://roundtable.org/live-courses/music/the-poetry-of-bob-dylan-the-american-shakespeare
Fancy doing some study – Dylan the American Shakespeare
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a.k.a. How to rip one last piece of enjoyment anyone may still have had out of the subject.
I like Dylan over and above any other artist ever. But not for the words especially. The music, the melodies, the voice (in almost all its stages), the history. And I love how certain words and lines jump out at me and I think ‘Oh nice one’, often different on each listen. But the idea of studying those words as a whole? *Shudder*.
I imagine the man himself would be slightly embarrassed but also highly amused by such a course.
This. These academics who insist on viewing Dylan as a poet completely fail to understand that the power of his work comes through the combination of words with music and his own delivery of them. That’s why he can write lyrics that on the page can be slipshod and embarrassing but absolutely work in performance. Dylan is a terrible poet but at his best, a genius songwriter and performer.
“To be or not to be? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”.
I saw ‘Girl From the North Country’ for a second time last night. Six years ago I saw it on stage and was unimpressed, but on screen, with close ups of the considerable cast, it was a far more rewarding experience. I guess I’m a child of the cinema rather than the theatre.
Highly lauded though she was, I found the Shirley Henderson character difficult to warm to on stage, and rather one-dimensional, but her American equivalent was far more nuanced.
Apparently there is a film version with Olivia Colman on the way. Dylan’s people must be delighted as an attempt to do a similar thing with his back catalogue about twenty years ago was a disaster.
An appealing course for those music-loving graduates of a certain age who became addicted to an academic mindset.
They study everything to bits, because they can’t help it.