Okay, so I made, for me, anyway, what I would consider one of the ultimate “yearning” and longing Bob Dylan mixes – a set list – that perhaps could be or should be for the almost broken-hearted. Not quite totally devastated, but perhaps there is a ray of light? So all of the songs on the list speak to some yearning, of which there are many Dylan songs (although I left off what I would consider some of the more obvious ones, like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” because in this case, I wouldn’t say that applies…). One could take any mix of Dylan’s songs and create a set-list for practically any emotion. As I’ve probably noted before, for every time in my life, for every emotion, there is a Dylan song that is applicable and he is, in this way, like the village shaman, speaking for us, saying those things that we cannot find the words for. Even as a poet, I can’t always find the words – so Dylan is the better poet (big news, right?) But really, there is a Dylan song for every frame of mind, because he is, after all, like the rest of us, wholly human and has felt the range of emotion and is simply better at expressing it than the rest of us, or in my view, better than any other musician or poet or writer. Hence, the Pulitzer applies and it’s about bloody time, no?  It’s interesting to me though: I recently read that Dylan feels that publishing is a more “dignified” business than the music industry. So that got me thinking, always a dangerous thing, and so here we go…

Granted, I’ve never worked in the music business, and I imagine it is sordid enough, but who is to say that publishing isn’t? One only need look to the largest conglomerate like Bertelsmann and know their background as printers of Nazi documents – hardly dignified. Maybe Bob knows that – or maybe not. If not, I’m here to let him know; presumptuous, yes, but it’s important information and I remember trying to break that story years ago before it hit the New York Times, but my editor at Le Tribune Mondiale was nervous about running it because of liability issues when I had clearly done my research and even spoken with Bertelsmann representatives about the issue.

I started in this industry when I was fifteen – at one of the largest magazine publishers in the world and it wasn’t exactly a paean to morality. But then, I imagine music wasn’t much better, especially at that time, in the mid-80s when everybody and their brother was doing coke in the bathroom at Palladium or Area or Limelight etc. It was just par for the course to run into your editor in the bathroom and catch him or her doing lines off of a very chic mirror with a little paper envelope slipped from the proverbial Prada or Chanel handbag. So that didn’t strike me as particularly dignified – but I was fifteen, what did I know, and I had no business being in clubs anyway, but hey, it was Manhattan and I worked at a big magazine and had my white Vespa and my long black hair (dyed then blue-black, a phase, of course), but I admit, I was new to the states and probably the ultimate Eurofag. Inevitable. One hates to be pigeonholed, we all know Dylan agrees with that – definitions suck. We take each thing as it is, but that’s hard for people to do. You have to fit neatly into their social register and so I was labeled the “gamine”, the “It girl”, the “eurofag” of the moment, and etc. It was rather like being, I imagine, Edie Sedgwick. In totally over your head, head swirling, wearing great clothes, moving among the famous people – artists, models, actors, photographers, etc. and being too young to really handle any of it.

Things changed in time, but did they really? Publishing is as backstabbing as the next business. It was, during the time of Maxwell Perkins, perhaps, a real “gentleman’s” business, but all of that changed, and you had, and still have, big name editors who were doing drugs, having three-martini lunches, hiring their kid or their neighbor’s kid for a job, etc. and it was and remains to a large extent, thoroughly incestuous.  To this day, a lot of pure “dreck” is published simply because someone knows someone and it’s just a degree of separation thing. That or you’re a name and whether you can write or not becomes irrelevant. I’ve seen very many good books fall by the wayside, not through lack of talent on the authors part, but simply because they were considered “not commercial enough” or my favorite euphemism, “too European” a label that I, and my board of directors at Lumen (a small press I founded and ran for years) never understood. Did Saul Bellow understand what “too European” meant? No – he didn’t. It meant, and why not just say this, that the book wasn’t right for that editor. How many books are set abroad, not in this country – classics – think James Joyce, and they aren’t “too European”.

By contrast, take Marguerite Duras’s book, The Lover, which made the rounds with editors numerous times before some brave editor took it on and it became a real hit and was followed up by a film of the same name. Same with Betty Blue. So it takes a brave editor to rise above the fray, to be “dignified”, but there is little that is dignified about the wheeling and dealing that goes on between agents and publishers. It’s a cut-throat business to a large extent. Just like music, there are “groupies” – young girls, even boys, at publishing houses, who’ll fall for the Editorial Director or Senior Acquisitions Editor (the sexiest title in publishing) simply because of their perceived (or actual) “power”.  So in this way, both industries have groupies – no question. With publishing, there comes a certain air of celebrity. That doesn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone really.

Bob was clearly lucky, but then, he’s Bob Dylan – of course he was treated well. Of course he was treated with respect. Hell, I treated all of my authors respect and they weren’t Bob Dylan, but that was me and that was Lumen and we weren’t Random House. So maybe that was it. I’m not suggesting that there are not moral editors, because there are many and there are many moral and perfectly respectable publishers, but is it really so different from the music industry? Certainly the steps are the same – we find talent, a lot of it depends on luck and timing and the editor, we take that talent and we shape and market and sell and even, to some extent, the blurbs we get on the back-ad of the book all go into creating an “image”, and we create a product that we then sell to major chains and small independents.

Is Barnes and Noble more “ethical” than say, Columbia Records? I would wager not. As one author noted, Books today, Jason Epstein noted, have the “shelf-life of yogurt”. BD won’t experience that because he is the product. It’s not his books that are the product in the final account, but he is the brand – and that’s great. I doubt his book will end up on the remainder table because there will always be a loyal following who want Dylan books (same is true for books on Lewis Carroll – the public appetite never ceases and we gobble them up).  Hell, with Lumen, I was the brand. Just as series editors become known for their taste, so it is initially the books, but then it becomes about the editor who him or herself takes on the celebrity and they become the definition or the brand of the house.

Many have accused Dylan of selling out because of his Cadillac ad (good car to drive after a war) or his Victoria’s Secret commercial, or even his iPod commercial. Yet we still listen to Bob on our iPod’s right? For me, by far, the number of Bob song’s outnumber any other artist on my iPod so he seemed the perfect choice and he seems to fit with the whole “Apple” “think different” brand, because he did think differently and does, always has.  As to the Cadillac, well, I just explained that above and no, I don’t see it as a sell-out. For Victoria’s Secret, “Love Sick” was just the perfect song. I’m not a big Victoria’s Secret fan (because I think their product isn’t well made and I’m a total snob and would rather buy my lingerie in Paris, I admit, so there you have it – I’ve “outed” myself before you jump all over me for this, I freely admit that I don’t want a product that doesn’t last. Why shouldn’t I buy hand-made lace, if I can get it? but that’s not the point anyway). Why shouldn’t Bob do Victoria’s Secret?  

It is almost as if Dylan has transcended himself, which I imagine would be hard. He has become a product, and we can’t get enough of it, or him. But are we buying him when we buy baseball hats at concerts? T-shirts, okay, that’s been forever, and posters too (God knows I have one from the 60s that I have framed and I adore it and found it in Paris for something absurd like five euro because the guy didn’t know what he had… lucky me). But we’re buying into “product” not Bob when we buy these things. That’s okay. Just acknowledge it.

Dylan obviously doesn’t mind and is aware of it – though I would wager on some level it would or must bother him just as it would bother me if people were to buy product and not my words, but that could be just me. I’d rather they buy my language, what I have to say, than a tea-cup with my image on it or a baseball hat with my name and logo on it. Sure, it would be great, and I’d endorse products that I believe in and have endorsed books I believe in, so maybe I’m just part of that “machinery”. But at a certain point, you wonder where you leave off and the brand begins…

Lewis Carroll, who Bob seems to like given the name of his tour which referenced Carroll’s “Looking Glass mirror” and his song Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, to say nothing of his songs in general which are in many ways very Carrollian with a sort of Surrealistic feeling to them, and the Surrealists were big fans and highly influenced by Carroll (as was Henry Miller, James Joyce, and countless other writers). But Carroll, still the most widely quoted author in the world (yup) every year besides the Bible and Shakespeare (who run on a par), Carroll sells his Alice books because, like Dylan’s work, they have a timelessness to them and are as relevant now as they were over a hundred years ago. I think the same will be true of Bob’s music – I think it will be relevant a hundred years from now. I think it has a lasting quality. But like Carroll, he has become an industry unto himself, a business.

You can buy anything Carroll – tea towels, tea sets, mugs, hats, t-shirts, numerous film adaptations (the best of which is Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland, with music by Ravi Shankar, the worst of which is the Disneyfied version which bears no resemblance to Carroll’s original work.)  At least “I’m Not There” resembles Dylan’s life, though I think if you’ve seen Eat the Document and Don’t Look Back you get a lot more of the “in-jokes” of the film. It may not be necessary to have seen the documentaries to enjoy the film, but to really get a lot of the minor references, which are quite funny, it does help to know the documentaries very well.

Like anything, the more you know about Bob’s life and music, the better you “get” the film. That’s just commonsense and I think anyone who truly knows Dylan in this way, who knows likely far too much and owns every bootleg, etc etc. gets more from the film than someone who is still learning Dylan, for lack of a better way of putting it. So the same is true of Carroll films – the more you know about Carroll, the more you’ll get out of a film, like Miller’s film. If you don’t know about Carroll, you think Alice in Wonderland is all light and sweet, which it certainly is not…(I just finished a small primer on Carroll for the average reader who doesn’t know a lot about Carroll but wants to know more; a good way of delving deeper, just as we read books about Dylan to delve and learn more – so it is with Carroll and my forthcoming book and that of other members of the new school of Carroll thought. The myth gives way to the man.)

But Dylan is the myth and the man, and to many, The Man. I wonder, does he want all of those titles? Does he enjoying being this contemporary mythical figure, or does he simply want to be Bob Dylan? Like Carroll, he changed his name too – our Bobby Zimmerman – who we claim. Like Van Ronk said, “Everybody wanted a piece of Bobby.”  I don’t see that much has changed in that regard. I wonder, does Bobby want a piece of us? I would say Yes. He seems to give and give and give, touring, putting out records, and giving… To me, this seems an act of great generosity.

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