THREE OF MY NOTES ON BOB DYLAN, ALLEN GINSBERG AND LIONEL TRILLING FROM SEAN WILENTZ’S BOOK ON DYLAN’

From Sean Wilentz on Dylan’s links to the beats, especially Ginsberg. I agree with Trilling’s criticism of the “absolutism” of this version of Romanticism. And I agree with his criticism of this Romanticist conception of artistic genius but say “if only because” is too narrowing. 

In 1945, Ginsberg touted Rimbaud to Trilling as a prophet, “unaffected by moral compunction, by allegiance to the confused standards of a declining age.” Trilling duly read up on Rimbaud and reported that he found in the poet’s rejection of conventional social values “an absolutism which is foreign to my nature, and which I combat.” The idea that artistic genius arose out of derangement of the senses was, to Trilling, a dismal legacy of what he called the Romantic movement’s solipsistic, hedonist conceit that mental disturbance and aberration were sources of spiritual health and illumination “if only because they controvert the ways of respectable society.”

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 Here’s Wilentz on part of Ginsberg’s response to Dylan, which response is arguably self-diminishing. 

After all, isn’t there a tension between valourizing “individual lived experience” and then dedicating oneself to “poeticizing” it “‘through the conscious mind’”?

“In direct contrast, Ginsberg and the Beats developed an aesthetic that renounced intellectual abstractions and poeticized individual lived experience—what Ginsberg described in 1948, in a letter to Trilling, as “‘the shadowy and heterogeneous experience of life through the conscious mind.‘“

——————-

For all their differences, Ginsberg and Trilling admired Whitman. But here too a difference. Ginsberg venerated him and often followed his open, expansive style. Trilling professorially admiringly noted Whitman’s revolutionary poetic strengths but criticized him too. 

Via AI:

“Lionel Trilling’s view of Walt Whitman’s technical skill as a poet reflects a balanced acknowledgment of Whitman’s innovation alongside an awareness of its potential limitations. Trilling recognized Whitman as a groundbreaking figure in American poetry for his rejection of conventional poetic forms, particularly rhyme and meter, and his embrace of free verse. This stylistic liberation, according to Trilling, was essential to expressing Whitman’s expansive vision of democracy and individuality.

However, Trilling was also critical of the unevenness that could arise from Whitman’s free verse technique. He noted that Whitman’s reliance on repetition, cataloging, and sweeping declarations could sometimes lead to rhetorical overindulgence or a lack of subtlety. For Trilling, Whitman’s strength lay in the originality and energy of his poetic voice, but this energy occasionally came at the expense of precision and technical refinement.

Ultimately, Trilling appreciated Whitman’s technical choices as aligned with his thematic goals, even if they were not always polished in a traditional sense. He saw Whitman’s innovations as crucial to his revolutionary impact, both in poetry and in articulating a uniquely American literary ethos.”

WAS PETE SEEGER’S AND ALAN LOMAX’S ANGER AT DLYAN GOING ELECTRIC DUE TO A PERCEIVED SETBACK TO BRINGING COMMUNISM IN AMERICA

 Via Grok,

The extent to which political hostility towards Bob Dylan's electric performance at Newport was informed by communists and communist sympathizers like Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax feeling "betrayed" in their efforts to promote communism in America is a nuanced topic. Here's an analysis based on the information available:

Pete Seeger was indeed a known communist sympathizer, having been a member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 1940s. His involvement in folk music was partly driven by a belief in using music as a tool for social and political change, aligning with communist ideals of collective action and social justice.

Alan Lomax, while not as overtly political in his public persona as Seeger, was deeply involved in documenting and promoting folk music, which during the folk revival had strong links to leftist and progressive politics, including communism. His efforts in recording and preserving folk music often highlighted songs with social commentary and protest themes.

The term "betrayal" in this context might be too strong or direct. However, there's a sense that Dylan's move away from the folk music scene, which was seen as a vehicle for political messaging, was interpreted by some as him distancing himself from the political causes he was previously associated with. This was especially poignant given Dylan's earlier songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," which resonated with civil rights and anti-war movements.

The sentiment that Dylan's shift to electric music hurt the broader political movement, including communist sympathies, is more about the perceived loss of a cultural ambassador for progressive causes rather than a direct setback to communism in America. Various analyses suggest that the reaction was more about Dylan not aligning with the political expectations set by his earlier work than about him explicitly undermining communist efforts.

There was indeed a political dimension where Dylan's actions were seen by some as not supporting the left-wing politics that figures like Seeger advocated. However, these sentiments are not universally agreed upon and are part of a broader narrative where Dylan's personal political stance was seen as ambiguous or shifting.

To the extent it existed, hostility was more about Dylan's perceived abandonment of the folk movement's political ethos rather than a direct impact on the promotion of communism. 

The folk music scene was a melting pot of various leftist ideologies, where communism was just one aspect. The "betrayal" felt by Seeger and others was more aligned with Dylan moving away from the use of music for explicit political activism, rather than specifically harming the spread of communism.

The the motivations and reactions of individuals like Seeger and Lomax were complex and multifaceted, not solely driven by their political ideologies but also by their artistic commitments and expectations from Dylan as a figure within the folk music community.

WHY DYLAN WENT ELECTRIC: WAS IT FOR ART OR POLITICS? IT WAS ART!

Via Grok,

The rupture associated with Bob Dylan's transition from acoustic to electric music at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was a complex event influenced by multiple factors, with both the act of going electric and Dylan's perceived shift away from political activism playing significant roles:

Dylan's decision to perform with electric instruments was initially controversial because it was seen by many in the folk community as a deviation from the purity and authenticity associated with acoustic folk music. This act represented a broader cultural shift from folk to rock, which was not just about the music but also about the perceived commercialization and dilution of the folk movement's ideals. The reaction at Newport was mixed, with some audience members cheering while others booed, highlighting a divide between those who saw this as artistic evolution and those who felt it was a betrayal of folk music's roots.

The rupture associated with Bob Dylan's transition from acoustic to electric music at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was a complex event influenced by multiple factors, with both the act of going electric and Dylan's perceived shift away from political activism playing significant roles:

Dylan's decision to perform with electric instruments was initially controversial because it was seen by many in the folk community as a deviation from the purity and authenticity associated with acoustic folk music. This act represented a broader cultural shift from folk to rock, which was not just about the music but also about the perceived commercialization and dilution of the folk movement's ideals. 

The reaction at Newport was mixed, with some audience members cheering while others booed, highlighting a divide between those who saw this as artistic evolution and those who felt it was a betrayal of folk music's roots.

Beyond the musical style, Dylan's move was also interpreted as a distancing from the political ideologies associated with some folk musicians, including those with Communist sympathies. The folk scene in the 1960s, particularly in places like Greenwich Village, was intertwined with leftist political activism. Dylan's shift in focus from protest songs to more personal and abstract lyrics was seen by some as an explicit or implicit rejection of these political commitments. This is evidenced by comments from contemporaries like Irwin Silber, who expressed concern not just with the electricity but with Dylan's move away from his earlier political themes. 

 Dylan's motivations for going electric were multifaceted. He was known for his resistance to being pigeonholed into one genre or role, particularly that of the "protest singer." His decision to go electric was partly about artistic freedom and exploration, aligning with his personal growth as an artist rather than strictly political statements or rejections. However, the timing and manner of his shift, coupled with his earlier association with protest music, led to interpretations that he was turning away from the political engagement expected by some in the folk community.

While going electric was the visible and immediate catalyst for the rupture, it was deeply intertwined with Dylan's broader rejection of being defined by his earlier political roles, which some saw as synonymous with Communist or leftist politics. This narrative reflects not only Dylan's personal artistic journey but also the changing landscape of music and politics in the 1960s.

In Elijah Wald's book, "Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties," the emphasis is more on the cultural and musical implications of Bob Dylan going electric rather than it being a repudiation of the acoustic folk tradition or a rejection of Communist politics. Wald explores the event at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 as a moment that symbolized a shift in music culture, highlighting the tension between folk purists and the emerging rock music scene. He provides context by detailing the history of the Newport Folk Festival, the folk revival movement, and Dylan's relationship with Pete Seeger, who was a significant figure in folk music with strong leftist leanings.

Wald discusses how Dylan's electric performance was less about rejecting politics and more about artistic evolution and personal expression. He notes that Dylan's move to electric music was seen by some as a departure from the "duty" to protest in the folk genre's traditional style, but this was not framed as a direct rejection of Communist politics or progressivism. Instead, it's presented as Dylan's response to the changing musical landscape and his desire to explore new sounds, which inadvertently caused a rift among folk purists who valued the political message as much as the music itself.

Therefore, while the book touches on political elements, particularly through the lens of Seeger's influence, the primary focus is on the musical and cultural impact of Dylan's decision to "go electric." Wald's narrative suggests that this moment was pivotal not just for Dylan but for the broader music industry, marking a significant shift in how music was perceived and consumed.

A Reading of Wallace Stevens’ Poem A Postcard From the Volcano

 A Postcard from the Volcano

WALLACE STEVENS

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once   

As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes   

Made sharp air sharper by their smell   

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones   

We left much more, left what still is   

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow   

Above the shuttered mansion-house,   

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion's look   

And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,   

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems   

As if he that lived there left behind   

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,   

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

—————————-

The speaker starts by talking about how, by saying, we’re but impermanent, leaving little behind. He sees future children, unaware of the fullness of our lives, will come across only bits of us in our remaining "bones" and "look of things". 

He notes the sad tension between how we actively and fully we once lived—"quick as foxes on the hill," sensitive to the sharp smells of autumn—and the skeletal remaining bits of us.

Seen from another angle, there’s a sad tension between the children getting the world we shaped but being unaware of the fullness and depth of our lives.

After “At what we saw”, the speaker shifts from his sad contemplation of the future and turns his attention to what’s immediately around him, and which grounds his contemplation. 

Doesn’t the imagery of spring clouds blowing over a “shuttered mansion-house”—a complex image of what once grandly domestically was and is now an apparent, cordoned off, useless relic —-replicate these tensions such that what he perceives in what he sees surrounding him is the “windy sky” crying “out a literate despair”? 

The speaker’s taking in of the surroundings becomes his expressed perception of them infused with, informed by, his expressed interpretation or them, namely the poem.

The speaker still in the present begins to iterate, not reiterate, his central theme by dealing with the continuing image of the shuttered  mansion. That it is, in the present, “shuttered” suggests that the speaker’s contemplation of how future children will see remnants of the past has roots in what he and his generation, “we, think of remnants they themselves have encountered. 

So, in some positive contrast to the discontinuity between past and present, there are in fact some continuities. The mansion has become part of “what *we* said of it”. And children to come “Will speak our speech and never know…” Unbeknownst to them, the children will be perpetuating a generation’s long idea or narrative of what the mansion is.

In that continuity within what is discontinuous is the poetic redemption of “A dirty house in a gutted world…” For the “tatter of shadows” are “peaked to white” and “are smeared with  the gold of the opulent sun.” 

The mix of ugliness, “smeared”, with the poetically beautiful, “gold of the opulent sun”, suggests how the creative imagination is part of that continuity, and how the shabby real and opulence of creative imagination are inextricable. 

The mansion is more than just dirtily and shabbily useless even as it is and is shuttered in a “gutted world”. By such imagination it is inspirited, in unknown continuation of what the speaker and his friends, “we, had imagined of it:

“Will say of the mansion that it seems   

As if he that lived there left behind   

A spirit storming in blank walls,”

From literate despair to the opulent sun’s gold is a thematic movement from literate despair to poetic possibility.

ON RICHARD DAWKINS, THE GOD HOLE AND TRANS: A NOTE TO FRIENDS

 To my friends:

Two points before posting this:

1, I am here for all my words more interested in Dawkins’ refutation of the God hole than his decrying the phenomenon of trans.

2, But insofar as he decries, I don’t think his criticism of the concept of gender in what are commonly understood as real cases of gender dysphoria stands up. 

Via him, as I read him, there is no psychological reality in those cases. He subsumes those cases to cases where sex gender disaccord is the result of fraught but transient emotional imbalance igniting desperation in seeking a solution. 

I’m familiar with a real case, A’s, who is in the midst of fully transitioning—to be clear, boy to girl, and save for the underlying biology of sex—with a view to having surgery when she’s soon past majority. It began with her when she was 4/5/6 and never once waned. Life for her without what she’s going through would have been intolerable with suicide within contemplation. 

Now at 17, she’s thriving as best as I can judge, top student, life guard, takes part in dramatics and athletics, and is happily, busily social.

So I like West Virginia’s approach to this issue as I understand it. Starting with puberty blockers. Rather than an outright ban of them, which some jurisdictions have introduced, such as in America, Europe and in Alberta, it provides for a really rigorous schedule of counselling and psychological testing to separate the real cases like A’s from the others.

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From Richard Dawkins:

In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days.

Of course I’m a cultural Christian. Always have been. Packed off to Anglican schools, I was confirmed when too young to know better. Large chunks of the English Hymnal were imprinted in my long-term memory, and duly pop out when I’m fooling around with my electronic clarinet. I know my way around the Bible, at least well enough to take an allusion when I encounter one. I love mediaeval cathedrals. I’ve never met a parson, of either sex, that I didn’t like. But none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.

An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. 

Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:

“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . . By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”

And here’s Debbie Hayton on The Spectator’s website, writing (mostly reasonably) about a recent episode in which Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker and I resigned from the Honorary Board of an atheist organisation that’s been taken over by the trans cult:

“An atheistic organisation worth its salt would oppose these movements in the same way that it opposes established religion, so Coyne, Pinker and Dawkins are right to walk away. But maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.”

And from the comments following her article:

“Why is Richard Dawkins surprised that people who reject Christianity have rejected its moral values also? Those values have stood us in good stead for two thousand years.”

Christianity provides reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Therefore Christianity provides the only reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Some syllogism!

The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. 

Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”. 

The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.

Far from playing into the hands of these preachers, my colleagues and I are opposed to all faith creeds, all non-evidence-based belief systems. This includes traditional supernatural religions, but it also includes younger faith systems such as that in which a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man) by fiat. 

Or by legal decision (you could as well legally repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion machines).

How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.