Chronicles
I finally started reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles Volume I last night. I've had it a while, but I wanted to wait until the initial media interest died down.
I've only read the first part, about his arrival in New York and early experiences in the coffee houses. It's so well-written, like a cross between Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. It seems completely natural, lucid, almost conversational, except without the hesitancy of actual conversation.
It tells me just as much as I want to know, too. It's allusive without being cryptic, and he's filling you in on the bit you didn't know about, the brief moment in time when he was on the cusp of fame. It's a section that for someone else might involve years of struggle, but with a talent like Dylan's, it was clearly only a short time before he got his Gaslight gig and came to the attention of John Hammond.
His narrative skills are deceptively brilliant. He starts, really, at the end of this initial "unknown in New York" stage, talking about meeting his song publisher. Then he drifts back to his amazement at being signed by the legendary Hammond, then back again to his arrival in New York, only then moving forward, mentioning the Cafe Wa? and the Folklore Centre.
There's always a sense that he wants to leave space around a subject. He'll approach it from angles, getting to the edge of a definition, and then he moves away and comes at it again. There's a natural ebb and flow to it. This is especially evident with his character sketches. He's allowing you to make you own mind up about somebody, without ever being so crass as to say something definitive. This is right, I think, because otherwise he'd be like one of those people who has to explain why the joke is funny.
Anyway, it seems like a pretty skimpy book, to quote Holden Caulfield, but at the same time is so agreeable, like a meal with lots of different flavours and textures, that to read one or two pages at a time is satisfying.
I've only read the first part, about his arrival in New York and early experiences in the coffee houses. It's so well-written, like a cross between Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. It seems completely natural, lucid, almost conversational, except without the hesitancy of actual conversation.
It tells me just as much as I want to know, too. It's allusive without being cryptic, and he's filling you in on the bit you didn't know about, the brief moment in time when he was on the cusp of fame. It's a section that for someone else might involve years of struggle, but with a talent like Dylan's, it was clearly only a short time before he got his Gaslight gig and came to the attention of John Hammond.
His narrative skills are deceptively brilliant. He starts, really, at the end of this initial "unknown in New York" stage, talking about meeting his song publisher. Then he drifts back to his amazement at being signed by the legendary Hammond, then back again to his arrival in New York, only then moving forward, mentioning the Cafe Wa? and the Folklore Centre.
There's always a sense that he wants to leave space around a subject. He'll approach it from angles, getting to the edge of a definition, and then he moves away and comes at it again. There's a natural ebb and flow to it. This is especially evident with his character sketches. He's allowing you to make you own mind up about somebody, without ever being so crass as to say something definitive. This is right, I think, because otherwise he'd be like one of those people who has to explain why the joke is funny.
Anyway, it seems like a pretty skimpy book, to quote Holden Caulfield, but at the same time is so agreeable, like a meal with lots of different flavours and textures, that to read one or two pages at a time is satisfying.
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
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