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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

"By the testimony of Dylan?s mentor Dave Van Ronk, it was a paperback copy of modern French verse, heavy with underlining..."

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"... which a fresh-from-Minnesota Dylan took down from Van Ronk?s bookshelf, on Macdougal Street, in 1960?that provided the impetus for that poet?s own stream of imagery. Rimbaud?s 'A Season In Hell' gave the idea that poetry should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself. (Dylan?s great songs from 'Blonde on Blonde'?'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' and 'Visions of Johanna'?are straight applications of Rimbaud?s symbolist methods to popular music.)... Rimbaud is the exemplar of the mad youth, the poete maudit, that runs right to Kurt Cobain, and also the model of the mysterious disappearance, which touches legends as different as those of Ambrose Bierce and Jack Black. (Not the actor Jack Black, but the California vagabond whose memoir has the best title in American literature, 'You Can?t Win,' and who disappeared, in New York, in the nineteen-thirties.)"

From "The Very French Fight Over Reuniting Rimbaud and Verlaine in the Pantheon" by Adam Gopnik (in The New Yorker).

If you're trying to remember the Bob Dylan song with Verlaine and Rimbaud, it's: "Situations have ended sad/Relationships have all been bad/Mine?ve been like Verlaine?s and Rimbaud/But there?s no way I can compare/All those scenes to this affair/Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go."

Are you looking for incoherent stories of extreme experience, evoked with subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself? Yeah, me neither. And yet, I do still read the newspaper.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 29, 2020 (boomark / email).