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| "Another Way of Seeing" |
Hello Ed Newman,
Amazon has new recommendations for you based on your browsing history.
Usually they are on point, though on occasion they will include one of my own books in the list for some reason. This morning's list featured eight new books about one of our favorite topics, most released within the past year.
What interests me is how many different ways people have written about the Nobel Prize winner. Each author must have an angle that differentiates him or her from all the other Bob books. As for the readers of Dylan, most are looking for new ideas and insights, not rehashed material from the already substantial inventory. Here are the titles Amazon suggested for me, plus one more that I know a few people are looking forward to this fall.
Dylan by Schatzberg
This is the guy who did the photo shoot from which the Blonde On Blonde cover germinated. The book includes key Dylan interviews, a new one with the author and lots more.
Might make a good companion to Daniel Kramer's year of documenting Dylan during those iconic Sixties. (cf. the two images in this blog post about the current exhibit in Duluth featuring a portion of the Bill Pagel Archives, "Which One is the Real Bob Dylan.")
Bob Dylan's Poetics: How the Songs Work
The author Timothy Hampton teaches lit at UC-Berkeley, another college prof who finds studying Dylan to be Prof-itable. (That is, worthwhile studying and writing about.)
A Voice From On High: The Prophetic Oracles Of Bob Dylan
As the title suggests, this book takes a deeper look at the spiritual heart of many Dylan songs. To say that author Phil Mason goes to great lengths to bring light to this facet of Dylan's work is an understatement. At 700 pages it appears to be a pretty thorough undertaking. One of the contributors to the book was Scott Marshall, author of Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life.
Bittersweet: Love Songs Of Bob Dylan
This book by Donna George, released last August, is about the romantic side of Bob Dylan. Many of his muses are well known. The idea of a woman's take on Bob's love songs is intriguing.
Decoding Dylan: Making Sense of the Songs That Changed Modern Culture
Here's yet another book that interests me, only because I'm into the decoding as well, even though there are some extremely vocal critics of this kind of thing. Jim Curtis sees many of the songs as "collages, ingeniously combining themes and images from American popular culture and European high culture." There's still a sense in which even when you can't understand a Dylan song, you can still "get it."
Bob Dylan in Hell: Songs in Dialogue with Dante – part I
The title makes me think of Sir Christopher Ricks' Bob Dylan's Visions of Sin. The author Luca Crossi proposes that the themes in Dylan's lyrics emanate from the same depths as Dante's Inferno, and that Dante--himself a poet--is just as relevant today as when he penned his famous work. This, too, looks like a book worth exploring.
May Your Song Always Be Sung
This book by Joel-Isaiah McIntyre has 98 pages and that University press look for a cover, but one of my favorite early reads was similarly unpretentious and a rewarding read.
Bob Dylan: His Life in Pictures
Harry Shapiro's book has 256 pages and over 300 images. I think we get the picture.
This book, by Louis Kemp, has been long awaited by many. Louis met Bob at Herzl Camp when Louis was 11 and the Zimmerman kid was 12. Louis says even then Bob said he was going to be famous some day, "And I believed him."
Having been writing about Dylan and his "encounter" with Buddy Holly at the Duluth Armory I often wondered who Dylan went to that concert with, since I couldn't imagine him going by himself. Sure enough, that night is a chapter in this book.
Oh, and for what it's worth, Louis Kemp was an instrumental player in the Rolling Thunder Revue traveling caravan. No, he didn't play an instrument. He was producer... a factoid that dovetails nicely with the upcoming release of Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder film in less than two weeks.
The book should be out in early September.
BONUS TRACK
A Rolling Thunder Revue Soundtrack
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