Throwback Thursday: Titanic Reflections

“I think that he bought a ticket on the Titanic.” ~Moneyball

Last night I began watching A Night To Remember, the 1958 drama about the sinking of the Titanic. It brought to mind a variety of memories. Our friend Robert, a "street person" who lived in the Seaway Hotel here, had something of a fixation with regard to this tragedy. He'd watched this film many times. The film's power half lay in the fact that this event really happened, the invincible ship striking an iceberg and sinking on its maiden voyage. As I watched I was impressed at how quickly the characters were sketched, the story told. 

Bob Dylan's song about the Titanic centers around characters in the 1997 James Cameron film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. One theme of this story is hubris. In Greek tragedy, hubris is excessive arrogance or "defiance of the gods leading to nemesis." Dylan's telling of this story appears on the ninth track of his album Tempest. (You can read the lyrics here.)

When the Reaper’s task had ended Sixteen hundred had gone to rest The good, the bad, the rich, the poor

The loveliest and the best.

Here's what I wrote about the Titanic in 2012

It’s interesting how much the sinking of the Titanic has been woven into the fabric of our culture. Here I am watching Moneyball and one of the former baseball scouts who used to be on the payroll for Oakland is sniping at General Manager Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) for his new approach to the game of baseball. (the quote above.) It’s a perfect segue into a revisiting of Bob Dylan’s latest release Tempest.

The title song is a 45 verse recounting of the demise of the Titanic on her maiden voyage to New York. But this is not Dylan’s first reference to the 1912 tragedy in the North Atlantic. Many decades earlier he made an obscure reference to this same incident in his song Desolation Row, Highway 61 Revisited's capstone.

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting 
“Which Side Are You On?

Desolation Row is another of those lengthy classics Mr. Dylan shot up into the stratosphere of the Sixties, but the Titanic reference is little more than that here, a reference. This time around, on Tempest, it's a fourteen minute exposition.

Just out of curiosity I decided to Google the phrase Nero's Neptune to see what popped up. And guess what? It's another cool Dylan site that I'd been previously unaware of. Or rather, it's a site by a musician consciously influenced by Dylan. Though not a comprehensive site, for the Dylan fan it's worth exploring.

Here's a quote from that site pertaining to Dylan's influence:

Bob showed that lyrics are important, about equally important, as the music. That songwriting and poetic imagery can make you.

That certainly has to be a central piece of insight in understanding the longevity and pervasiveness of Dylan's influence.

For the record, Nero was a Roman emperor who persecuted the early Christian church. Neptune was the Roman name for the god of the sea. (The Greek name was Poseidon.) Another of the songs on Tempest is called Early Roman Kings. Another thematic echo? And here's another, from Slow Train Coming:

Sheiks walking around like kings, 
wearing fancy jewels and nose rings. 
Deciding America's future from Amsterdam and to Paris 

Early Roman kings? The Titanic sails at dawn. Apocalypse now.

Billy Bean purportedly said, "It's hard not to be romantic about baseball." The same can probably be said about the Titanic. In a more macabre manner, however.

* * * 

Related Links
In 2021 I wrote the following blog post:
Titanic: A Metaphor for Our Times
Schedule for 2022 Duluth Dylan Fest 

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Nothing But Trouble

Trouble in the city, trouble in the farm
You got your rabbit's foot, you got your good-luck charm
But they can't help you none when there's trouble.
Trouble, trouble, trouble
Nothing but trouble.
--Bob Dylan

The images here are from old Detective magazines courtesy Claude Angele Boni & sent to me from France, the first one being Diamond Joe, who's featured in a song on Good As I Been To You (1992)

Diamond Joe

This is a story about LANDRU, a famous French killer.
He used to invite rich women for dinner, poison them,
then burn them in a big furnace. He did it for a long time
before they caught him.

One of the 20th century's most famous spies.

Al Capone had an international reputation.

Sing Sing Prison

DIAMOND JOE  

Now There's a man you'll hear about
Most anywhere you go,
And his holdings are in Texas
And his name is Diamond Joe.

 And he carries all his money
In a diamond-studded jar.
He never took much trouble
With the process of the law.

FULL LYRICS to this traditional ballad HERE.

* * * 

Regarding Trouble, my favorite line in the song, 

as born out by these Detective stories:

Go all the way to the other side of the world, you’ll find trouble there
Revolution even ain’t no solution for trouble

* * * 

Keep on keepin' on, friends.

Titanic: A Metaphor for Our Times?

"When you got nothing you got nothing to lose."
--Leonardo DiCaprio in his opening scene.

"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose." --Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

* * * *

The actual Titanic. (National Archives)

Last night I watched James Cameron's Titanic, the 1997 film spectacle starring Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack) and Kate Winslet (Rose). When it was over, an interesting thought emerged regarding this historic event. Yes, it was a story about wealth and privilege in contrast to the common folk in steerage. Yes, it was a love story. Yes, it was a remarkable achievement in special effects and cinematic story telling. 

But at the core of it, it was something still bigger. It was a story about competing narratives. Let me explain. 

Preceding their collision with the iceberg there was really only one narrative: the imagined reality of the Titanic's invincibility. Everyone on that ship full expected to arrive in New York City in a few days. This ship represented one of the greatest achievements of human engineering and thereby a symbol of man's greatness. 

On another level the ship itself could be a metaphor for planet earth, and its passengers a microcosm of the human race. "Nothing can stop us now," seems to be the narrative. Look at us. Look at what we have created. Note how they treat each other--though the rich can't see it, the have nots are conscious of it every minute. 

BUT SOMETHING HAPPENS

1912 painting by Willy Stower

The iceberg rips into their reality and shreds it. During the next few hours the narrative that everyone on board had previously accepted must now be exchanged for a new narrative. Celebration--being part of this great first event--must be replaced with a new story: "We could die out here and be just another accident statistic."

The way various characters respond is revealing. Some understood immediately the desperate straits they were in. Others rebelled against it. Some accepted it. Some denied that it was really happening. There were a few who were immediately aware that there was a shortage of lifeboats, that a tragedy had been set in motion. Rose was one of the few who recognized this.

"Something's happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

In 2020 a different kind of iceberg hit the human race. The causes and implications are still as yet uncertain. Efforts have been made to craft a narrative, but the narratives are competing. How much of what's happening is orchestrated? How much unnecessary suffering has been caused by the law of unintended consequences? 

* * * *

BACK TO THE MOVIE 

This event took place in 1912. Rose is part of high society and her mom or fiancee have purchased some fabulous "modern art" while in Europe. One of the paintings is Picasso's Le Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is completely absurd because it sill hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

For several years after Picasso painted it the painting remained in his studio facing the wall. It was radical. Le Demoiselles was first displayed in 1916, four years after the Titanic had sunk. 

This interest in art ties directly to one of the other themes in the film, the discovery of a drawing instead of a diamond in the vault, an artist's rendering of a young nude woman wearing the diamond that these fortune hunters had been in search of for three years.

* * * *

Leo DiCaprio plays the role of a young artist who has been polishing his craft in Paris. He and a friend obtain their tickets by means of a poker game. Leo's first line in the film is a quote from Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," a song that begins with a drumstick snap on the edge of a snare drum, kicking off his classic Highway 61 Revisited, centerpiece of a trio of 60's albums that formed the foundation of his career. 

Dylan has been occasionally accused of plagiarism. In this case, it was the other way around. The screenwriter borrowed from Bob, an amusing twist for sure.

In the film Jack is from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and knows how cold water can be. He tells Kate that he used to go ice fishing. He shares how he fell through thin ice once and water that cold is like being hit with a thousand knives all over your body. "You can't breath. You can't think." This is just one of many examples of foreshadowing in storytelling. Several examples can be found in this film.

If you haven't seen it in a while -- I'd not watched it since first seeing it two decades ago -- you might be surprised at its power. Kudos to James Cameron, and everyone else involved in this transcendent tale.

FOR MORE
Here is an informative Wikipedia entry on the Sinking of the Titanic.

What Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot May Have Been Fighting About in Dylan's Desolation Row

"Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower..." ~Bob Dylan, Desolation Row

What were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting about in the captain's tower? In order to understand this, it will be helpful to give a brief introduction to Ezra Pound, a major twentieth century poet who came to a disturbing end.

The trigger event for this introduction to Pound was a story earlier this week in The Daily Beast titled The Letter That Changed the Course of Modern Fiction. The article cites the power of serendipity to change literary history, citing a  letter from Ezra Pound to the undiscovered, unrecognized James Joyce. Joyce had been unable to find a publisher for his short story collection known today as Dubliners. The article goes on to show how Pound, through serialization, helped gain an audience for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and ultimately laid the groundwork for the reverberations set in motion by Joyce's Ulysses.

The high praise for Pound doesn't end with James Joyce, however. Ted Gioia writes:

“Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known,” Hemingway later remarked. “He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble.” By Hemingway’s estimate, Pound devoted only around one-fifth of his time on his own writing, focusing the rest of his energy on advancing the careers of others.

So what were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting about then? The Beast gives no hints regarding the rest of the story. Wikipedia offers a more complete picture.

Ezra Pound was an American who had gone overseas and played a central role in literary circles in London and Paris. His influence brought numerous significant writers to the attention of a wider public including Hemingway himself, Robert Frost, Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Wikipedia cites Hemingway as stating, "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide'.

At this point, Pound appears to be a truly heroic character. What came next significantly stained his reputation.

World War I, the Great War as it was called, not only scarred the countrysides of Europe, it left open wounds in the souls of men. Pound was one of these so wounded. It is normal to ask "why" questions when something so momentous and disruptive happens, and Pound was no exception. The conclusion he came to was that international capitalism was the root cause of this horror. Having lost faith in England, he moved to Italy where he embraced Fascism and threw his support behind Mussolini and Hitler.

During World War II he wrote and recorded radio broadcasts against England and the Allies, possibly hundreds of ten minute pro-Axis propaganda pieces. When the war came to a close, Pound was arrested, turned over to authorities to be tried for treason. At one point he purportedly compared Hitler to Saint Joan of Arc and stated that Mussolini was simply "an imperfect character who lost his head."

Pound was placed in a six by six cell in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center where, according to Wikipedia, he was placed in one of the camp's "death cells", a series of six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cages lit up all night by floodlights. He was left for three weeks in isolation in the heat, denied exercise, eyes inflamed by dust, no bed, no belt, no shoelaces, and no communication with the guards, except for the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to break down under the strain. Richard Sieburth writes that he recorded it in Canto 80, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me."

Now check out this last segment preceding the summing up in Dylan's Desolation Row. Every aspect of it is about waters. Neptune, god of the sea, the doomed Titanic, symbol of man's glory, calypso, mermaids, and the Odyssey form the frame containing this conflict between Pound and Eliot.

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

The arc of Eliot's life began in a fashion similar to Pound's for he, too, was an American who went abroad. Like Pound he was a social critic and major poet. A keen observer of the times, Eliot had been a protege of Bertrand Russell, the brilliant mathematician, activist and notorious atheist. But in seeing the futility of Russell's line of thinking, he turned to another path and became a Christian.

This world is broken, no matter which system one adopts, Eliot's decision seems to say. Dylan repeats this message over and over through the years. How we respond to this reality -- the Fall in Biblical terms, the opening of Pandora's Box in mythological terms -- is part of what defines us. Eliot went on to win a Nobel Prize. Pound  avoided prison for treason by being declared insane.

Dylan himself avoided being called the leader of a movement, a spokesperson for a generation, or an answer for everyone. He sensed such posturing is a setup for a fall. This did not stop him from asking questions, or raising them and asking them of his listeners.

Ultimately the question still stands: Which side are you on?

That Titanic Tempest

“I think that he bought a ticket on the Titanic.” ~Moneyball

It’s interesting how much the sinking of the Titanic has been woven into the fabric of our culture. Here I am watching Moneyball and one of the former baseball scouts who used to be on the payroll for Oakland is sniping at General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) for his new approach to the game of baseball. (the quote above.) It’s a perfect segue into a revisiting of Bob Dylan’s latest release Tempest.

The title song is a 45 verse recounting of the sinking of demise of the Titanic on her maiden voyage to New York. But this is not Dylan’s first reference to the 1912 tragedy in the North Atlantic. Many decades earlier there’s an obscure reference to this same incident in his song Desolation Row, Highway 61 Revisited's capstone.

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting 
“Which Side Are You On?

Desolation Row is another of those lengthy classics Mr. Dylan shot up into the stratosphere of the Sixties, but the Titanic reference is little more than that here, a reference. This time around, on Tempest, it's a fourteen minute exposition.

Just out of curiosity I decided to Google the phrase Nero's Neptune to see what popped up. And guess what? It's another cool Dylan site that I'd been previously unaware of.Or rather, it's a site by a musician consciously influenced by Dylan. Though not a comprehensive site, for the Dylan fan it's worth exploring.

Here's a quote from that site pertaining to Dylan's influence:

Bob showed that lyrics are important, about equally important, as the music. That songwriting and poetic imagery can make you.

That certainly has to be a central piece of insight in understanding the longevity and pervasiveness of Dylan's influence.

For the record, Nero was a Roman emperor who persecuted the early Christian church. Neptune was the Roman name for the god of the sea. (The Greek name was Poseidon.) Another of the songs on Tempest is called Early Roman Kings. Another thematic echo? And here's another, from Slow Train Coming:

Sheiks walking around like kings, 
wearing fancy jewels and nose rings. 
Deciding America's future from Amsterdam and to Paris 

Early Roman kings? The Titanic sails at dawn. Apocalypse now.

For what it's worth, Nero's Neptune is an entertaining diversion. Check it out.

Billy Beane purportedly said, "It's hard not to be romantic about baseball." The same can probably be said about the Titanic. In a more macabre manner, however.