Bob Dylan (42 page)

Dissolving into mystery as soon as it seems clear, the story will be there as long as any in Dylan’s signature
Highway 61 Revisited,
from 1965; this could be a verse from it. But the heart of
“Love and Theft
”—the window Dylan’s new music itself opens up in time—is in that final “care,” dropping off its line like a body falling out of a window, with the same thud. A whole world of rejection, of nothingness, of the humor shared by dead men walking because the graveyard is full—a whole way of being in the world, and a whole way of talking about it, opens up out of that single word, out of the way it’s thrown away, and what it throws away with it. As Raymond Chandler had his detective Philip Marlowe say in 1953 in
The Long Goodbye,
in the same voice: “It all depends on where you sit and what your private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care.” Then Marlowe went out and solved the case.

4 September 2001

 

1) Great Pop Moments (That Should Have Happened Even if They Didn’t Division): Valerie Mass, People column (Denver
Post,
Aug. 6). “Elton John spilled the beans about his former liquor-soaked, drugged-out life in an interview with
The London Mirror
. . . John said he met Bob Dylan and George Harrison at a party he was hosting in Los Angeles but was unable to talk any sense to them. ‘I’d had quite a few martinis and [God] knows how much cocaine. So I started babbling on about how [Dylan] had to come up to my room and try on my clothes . . .’”

 

2) Bob Dylan: “Summer Days,” from
“Love and Theft”
(Columbia). Speaking of trying on new clothes—four years ago, Dylan’s celebrated
Time Out of Mind
mapped a country of abandoned roads and emptied cities, and nothing like what’s happening here could have happened there. “
Waaaal
”—in this song, “Well” is always “Waaaal,” “Yes” is always “Yaaaaaaassss,” pure minstrel diction, as befits an album seemingly named for Eric Lott’s 1993 study
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
—“Waaaaal, I’m standing on a table, I’m proposing a toast to the King,” the singer shouts from inside a roadhouse where a western swing band is running a jitterbug beat as if it’s twirling a rope. On the dance floor women are flipping in the air and couples snap back at each other like towels in a locker room. The singer high-steps his way across the room, Stetson topping his Nudie suit. How much proof do you want that the night can’t go wrong? “Why don’t you break my heart one more time,” he says happily to the woman at his side, “just for good luck?” He stretches out the last word as if he can’t bear to give it up.

25 October 2001

“Where is the building? Did it fall down? Where is it?”

—Joe Disordo,
on the collapse of Two World Trade Center,
New York Times,
16 September 2001

Looking down they could see the last convulsions: The lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane . . .

“The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations—and that the lights of New York had gone out.

—Ayn Rand,
Atlas Shrugged,
1957

 

Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.

I say “I” even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon—
we
bombed it, in the sense that Weatherman organized and claimed it . . . Some details cannot be told. Some friends and comrades have been in prison for decades; others, including Bernadine, spent months and months locked up for refusing to talk or give handwriting samples to federal grand juries. Consequences are real for people, and that’s part of this story, too. But the government was dead wrong, and we were right. In our conflict we don’t talk; we don’t tell. We never confess.

When activists were paraded before grand juries, asked to name names, to humiliate themselves and to participate in destroying the movement, most refused and went to jail without saying a word. Outside they told the press, I didn’t do it, but I dug it. I recall John Brown’s strategy over a century ago—he shot all the members of the grand jury investigating his activities in Kansas.

—Bill Ayers,
Fugitive Days,
September 2001

 

“You don’t know where she is?” I asked again. He shrugged again, and I said, “OK.” I let the automatic dangle from my hand as I waited for the sound of a jet making its final approach over the motel. “Last chance,” I said before the noise was too loud for him to hear. He shrugged again. “You know I’m not going to kill you, don’t you?” I said. He shook his head, but his eyes smiled. He might be a piece of shit but Jackson had some balls on him. Either that or he was more frightened of his business associates than he was of me. That was a real mistake on his part. When the landing jet swept over the motel, I leaned down and pumped two rounds into his right foot.

“You didn’t have to shoot him twice,” Trahearne said.

“Once to get his attention,” I said, “and once to let him know I was serious.”

—James Crumley,
The Last Good Kiss,
1978

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale, they may not reach the level of many others—for example, Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.

—Noam Chomsky,
13 September 2001

 

Over the years since the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, the [American] public has become tolerably familiar with the idea that there are Middle Easterners of various shades and stripes who do not like them . . . With cell phones still beeping
piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to invite such awful hatred.

—Christopher Hitchens,
The Guardian
(London),

13 September 2001

 

What we saw on Tuesday, terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us what we probably deserve . . . The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”

—Rev. Jerry Falwell,
700 Club, 13 September 2001

 

Responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.

—Salman Rushdie,
“In Good Faith,” 1990

The water was rising, got up in my bed
Lord, the water was rolling, got up to my bed
I thought I would take a trip, Lord, out on the days I slept.

—Charley Patton,
“High Water Everywhere Part II,” 1929

 

I was stranded in Chicago until late last night. On the runway in Newark on Monday at 8 A.M.—that was OK by one day; on the runway at O’Hare on Tuesday at 8.30—that wasn’t so great. The airport shut down, and we were left to make our way into a chaotic Chicago of semi-evacuation. After three days and five plane reservations cancelled, I finally found a car and drove home. Eight hundred miles of flags, licenses from everywhere and bumper stickers like MY PRESIDENT IS CHARLTON HESTON and HOW’S MY DRIVING /
DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT. With my finger on the pulse of the nation, I pulled in about 10 P.M.

—Hal Foster,
Princeton, New Jersey, e-mail, 15 September 2001

 

For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theatres, men looked about to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the Chief! . . . Every moment one felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep.

—Sinclair Lewis,
It Can’t Happen Here,
1935

 

Gloom and sadness and bereavement just hang in the air. My local firemen were killed, and the whole area is plastered with missing-people flyers: someone’s little daughter who had accompanied her mother to work, endless husbands and wives and daughters and sons and best friends; destroyed people.

—Emily Marcus,
Charles Street and Greenwich Avenue,

Manhattan, e-mail, 15 September 2001

 

High water rising, rising night and day
All the gold and silver being stolen away
Big Joe Turner looked east and west from the dark rooms of his mind
He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there

—Bob Dylan,
“High Water (For Charley Patton),” September 2001

The ship? Great God, where is the ship?

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick,
1851