Chronicles

Here's one of what I'm sure will be a great many reviews of Bob Dylan's Chronicles.

My advice is don't read too many reviews, or you'll end up feeling like it's been read for you and you don't need to read it. Just remember, all these journalists are Mr Jones, and you are not.

I will buy the book, but I am holding off for now. The withheld purchase is the only true eloquence left. I'm going to wait for the silence, for the chattering classes to move on to something else.

On this subject, though I was always vaguely intrigued by the Beach Boys' legendary lost album Smile, I've always felt that, as with so many things, it was built up way too much by journalists with a particular axe to grind (their own) and that it could never be as fantastic as all that. True artists, as Steve Jobs once said, ship. They deliver. However imperfect, they deliver. The logic opposite to that, natch, is (in DeLillo's words) that the withheld work of art is the only true eloquence left.

Or, to put it in a really perverse way, a true artist supplies the same commitment to not shipping as s/he does to shipping. You either do it and put it out, or you don't. If you're not going to release it, don't release it. Just don't. Ever. That way it can live large in the imagination, and the critics will never get to pick over its bones. If J D Salinger suddenly pops up with 25 previously unpublished novels/collections, just kill me now. The existence of bootlegs is important. Bootlegs give the fans some wriggle room, some ability to imagine what might have been, which is a pleasure, a good. Bootlegs, as a matter of fact, are essential in establishing the status of the artist. What decent musician or writer does not have a vast catalogue of unreleased material? Clue: it should remain unreleased.

So I will not be buying Smile, just as I did not wish to see/hear the Velvet Underground reunion. And, in a way, the Caramac KitKat is like this. Best to imagine the glory that might have been.