The Best American Poetry

The Bob Dylan Mask (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

There are those artists who never have an unuttered thought. They feel compelled to reveal their most intimate feelings, their nastiest habits, and the messiest clutter of their personal lives. The caution light in their brain has gone out.

And then there's Bob Dylan. He hid behind an adopted name and contradictory, phony biographies until some of his real past was discovered. His brilliant songs seem simultaneously confessional and mysteries beyond our reach, meaning they fail to let us see him. His interviews are notorious jousts with journalists as he reveals, hints at, hides, lies, and attacks. Here he is, having just turned sixty-nine, and we know all about him except that part that is significant and revelatory.

When he was very young discovering what it meant to be a songwriter and singer and charting his future, Bob Dylan created a persona, a character, someone unlettered and untutored with a reflexive, natural grasp of language and a jukebox for a mind. He developed a singing voice that growled. He play-acted at being Woody Guthrie. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, well-off middle class Jewish kid from, of all places, Hibbing, Minnesota. No, he was Bob Dylan, a man of the people who sprang spontaneously from nowhere, a traveling troubadour for the downtrodden.

The persona was very useful to him in many ways as he began his career. He could in his new identity feel part of the folk. Bob Dylan was a hobo, a rambler and a gambler, someone who knew hard times. Of course, Robert Zimmerman had no experience with such a life. But Bob Dylan, well he was different.

The Dylan who couldn't put two grammatically correct sentences together, who seemed on unfriendly terms with proper English, fooled some people who thought he was a simple rustic. That perception gave him an advantage over those who misjudged him.

His Bob Dylan mask allowed him to gauge people according to how they reacted to him as someone (seemingly) poor and uneducated. Later he could use the mask in anger to assert that people didn't understand him. The mask was a useful device to keep people at a distance.

The folk audiences he originally played for desperately sought authenticity. They wanted a young Woody Guthrie, an heir to Pete Seeger. And here was this young rebel whose vague origins and odd behavior and ever-present song allowed them to fill him in as they wished. They pictured the person they wanted behind the mask without ever being allowed to look at who was really there.

Dylan's persona let him keep the most precious part of himself private, behind the front of a kid on the run, abandoned by parents and society, someone who blew in with the wind. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, college dropout. He was Bob Dylan, master folksinger, the man who knew, like Woody, that guitars don't lie, who knew words placed just right could lead people over pain, who burned with a fiery drive to sing truth to power.

Dylan's keeping part of himself permanently private has, to understate, worked for him. It's hard to imagine that he will change. Of course, his ongoing march toward an ever-closer eternity may cause some re-thinking. Does he want to be understood or does he want to go out a mystery?

For now, the Bob Dylan mask remains firmly in place.

Bob Dylan and Israel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

It is possible to select carefully chosen materials from Bob Dylan's life and songs to reflect your own beliefs. So it is with some hesitation that I describe Dylan's relationship with Israel. I will present all the material, sparse as it is.

In May 1971 Dylan and his then wife Sara went to Israel without their children in hopes of escaping the media frenzy in America, having a bit of a second honeymoon, and exploring Jewish roots, a subject Dylan became increasingly interested in after his father's death on June 5, 1968. On May 24th, Dylan's 30th birthday, a photographer got a shot of him praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem while wearing a kippah, the traditional Jewish head covering.The photo ended any possible privacy. At some point in late May or early June, the Dylans visited Givat Haim, a kibbutz, to explore the possibility of staying there for a while. Eve Brandstein, a member of the kibbutz, told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin that Dylan wanted to stay in a guest house but not work on the kibbutz. The kibbutz members did not want to accept his conditions for living there and were scared their home would be a magnet for the curious.

From April 11th to May 17th 1983 Dylan spent 19 recording sessions producing his album Infidels. On April 19th he sang six versions of a new song, "Neighborhood Bully," and on May 17th, at the very last session recording the very last song, he did another take of the song, which, to me at least, indicates he wanted to get it right. "Neighborhood Bully" is a sarcastic, unvarnished full-throated defense of Israel. The Israelis, ironically called the bully of the neighborhood, have "got no place to escape to, no place to run." They are "criticized and condemned for being alive." There's no subtlety here, no nuanced view of Middle Eastern history. The persecuted Jews are in the right and are simply defending their lives. Dylan invokes the Jewish people's tragic history as a way of defending Israel:

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.

The album wasn't released until November 1, 1983, but in September that year Jesse Dylan, Bob's then seventeen year old son, had a late bar mitzvah in Israel, and his father flew over for the event. He was again photographed wearing Jewish religious items.

Dylan played his first concerts in Israel on September 5th and 7th 1987. (Probably by coincidence, his very next concert was in Basle, Switzerland, the site of the First Zionist Congress in 1897). Dylan played three concerts in Israel on June 17th, 19th, and 20th in 1993. Symbolically or not, he ended the latter two concerts with "It Ain't Me Babe," about a relationship in which he rejects the expectations placed upon him.

Those are the principal facts. There may be much more we do not know. Additionally, there was a persistent rumor that Dylan would be playing in Israel next month, but if he is the concert is not listed on his official website. He will be in the area around his 69th birthday. He's giving a concert in Greece on May 29th and Turkey on May 31st.

If Dylan seems conflicted about Jewish religious beliefs, he connects emotionally to a Jewish history punctuated by persecution. He grasps the longing for a Jewish homeland. Dylan's silence about Israel may reflect some ambivalence. Or he may just wish to keep his views private. It is significant that there are no negative songs about Israel, no comments hostile to the Zionist enterprise, no initial embrace and later abandonment of the Jewish people's heroic return to national history.

Dylan will be 70 in 2011. It's a symbolic year for him, a biblical lifespan, a time of profound reflection. Perhaps it will be a good moment to pause in his never-ending tour.

I wonder what he will find as he examines himself at 70. I wonder if after all his wandering, his endless searches, his constant need for shedding skins and acquiring identities, he finally needs a place to land, a place connected to his understanding of God, a place where history and geography can't be separated, a place where outcasts have found a haven, a place where his ancestors originated. I wonder if Israel will turn out to be his direction home.

Busy Being Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

One of the charms and one of the dangers of listening to Bob Dylan is that you begin to substitute his language for your own. Sometimes an image is so startling that you attach it to your own perception of the world. Certain songs are chains of such images, as in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" or "Mr. Tambourine Man." Sometimes one of his cries from the heart serves as a perfect expression of our own anguish. Think of "Oh, Mama, can this really be the end/to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again."

For whatever reason, my mind tends to retain Dylan's aphorisms. He compresses what had been either an intuitively understood but unarticulated truth in the listener's mind or a novel observation into memorable, poetic language often containing alliteration and rhyme.

Dylan's aphorisms evolved. They started out as fierce statements about the political world, as in "For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled." This aphorism is a warning, a species of "finger-pointing," as Dylan called his protest songs. These aphorisms were aimed at altering the world. Dylan later created aphorisms aimed at transforming the individual, both Dylan himself and his listeners.

Sometimes the aphorisms Dylan produced were like proverbs or maxims, a type of wisdom literature. "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you" is an uncompromising call for an independent spirit, a warning that if you see your path you've got to be willing to follow it alone. It's a cruel maxim, in part, calling people who don't go the way you do the "dead." But the cruelty is meant to provide the listener with emotional backbone, a determination to escape from the territory of the normal.

Dylan provides life lessons in these aphorisms. "Take what you have gathered from coincidence" teaches that events appearing as accidental can form a pattern. Dylan calls for self-awareness followed by self-examination followed by self-construction. Without a pattern there is anarchy in our lives; we simply step from one experience to the next without absorbing appropriate lessons.

Many of Dylan's most memorable aphorisms included an irony in them. Often these provided life lessons as well, such as "He not busy being born is busy dying." This is vintage Dylan, imploring us to keep moving forward, to try constant re-creation, not to back off from the novel because it's frightening. It is a call for courage to test ourselves against life's limits. It is a call to drive through when our mind signals caution.

Consider another lesson: "To live outside the law you must be honest." This is a call for morality. Some people are moral, Dylan asserts, because they are scared of breaking the law. Rather, we should realize that whatever standards we live by we must be good.

Dylan famously annoyed some fans at each stage by going to a new place and then abandoning it. The annoyance is misplaced. There are times I thought Dylan was leading me astray, exploring a path that was not right for me. I didn't follow him down those paths.

But that's the point. That's the great lesson I learned from Dylan's aphorisms. The independence he championed, the emancipating proclamation of the self's right to be free, meant at the end that the real understanding of Dylan precisely meant not following him, but rather finding my own language.

For information about my book, Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

I've started a new blog called Jewish Observations. The first post is titled "The Meaning of Judaism." The URL is: http://jewishobservations.blogspot.com

Rhymes With Bob Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan structures his songs through rhymes. Given his skills, the results can be comforting, jarring, or rousing. But why do Dylan's rhymes work so well? Why are rhymes in any song often so enchanting?

Rhymes are pleasing to the ear. They are also pleasing to the brain because in a rhyme the second word becomes more familiar to us than if there had been no first word to rhyme with. Our brains like what's easy to think about and don't like what's difficult to think about. (Psychologists call this "cognitive fluency." Songwriters don't.)  Beyond the attractions of repetitive sounds, a rhyme offers the mystery of an unexpected affinity between two or more words that are seemingly different.

The coincidence of two or more words that rhyme suggests a linguistic order missing from the chaos of ordinary life. Rhymes hint at an alluring land of English, a place of beauty and design. But there's a danger to rhymes as well. Rhymes are mysterious and inexplicable. We have to confront mirror images and doubles, worlds that complicate the simplicity that the rhyme seemed to bring.

For songwriters, rhymes make it easier for audiences to memorize the material. It's no accident that nearly every popular song is written using rhymes. But rhymes can be traps, forcing songwriters to write words they don't want to all for the sake of having to rhyme.

Rhymes are often associated with simple, childlike feelings. Yet they can be a form of attack, a battering ram of words pounding away at the listener. That's why the rhymes in Dylan's protest songs work so well. They keep hitting us with their power, and the repetition forces us to confront what is being protested. The rhymes all through "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" reinforce Brown's growing despair and retrospectively explain his final, desperate action. Consider the concluding verse of the song:

There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born.

Anyone can hear obvious rhymes. It's the great lyricist who can hear what the rest of us can't. Dylan can hear that "farm" sounds like "born," and "born is the the perfect word, not only standing in contrast to the people Hollis Brown has killed but also in providing hope (for new people have replaced the dead) and a warning (don't let what happened to the Brown family happen to these newborns).

Similarly, rhyme as a form of attack works well in angry love songs. In "Idiot Wind," Dylan writes:

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth.
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Or take another pair of lines from the song:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.

The rhyme is more exact but is still unexpected. Additionally, it magnifies the subject of the song from beyond the angry subject to the singer himself and then to Washington. It's a neat shift of ascribing idiocy from an external partner to the internal self to the political.

The battering ram effect can also be seen in poignant love songs such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and attack songs about so-called friends, such as "Positively 4th Street" with lines like:

I know the reason
That you talk behind my back.
I used to be among the crowd
You're in with.

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don't know to begin with?

Here Dylan uses what is technically known as "feminine rhyme" in which the rhyme comes from the penultimate words (or syllables), in this case "in with" and "begin with." That is, Dylan's rhymes are far from simple. He doesn't just use traditional end rhymes. Additionally, he uses alliteration (repeating consonant sounds) and assonance (repeating vowel sounds creating internal rhymes in a line.) Here are some beautiful lines from "Mr. Tambourine Man":

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

The assonance of "fate" and "waves" and "deep" and "beneath" and the many examples of alliteration add to the rhymes and startling images to create the attractive world the tambourine man offers.

And that's why nobody rhymes with Bob Dylan.

For information about my new book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, visit my web page here.

Bob Dylan as Rebel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Subtlety is a threat to minds manacled by ideology. That is why Bob Dylan so angered those people who were determined to slap a label on him. Anthemic folk singer, protest poet, folk-rock hipster. It didn't matter. They were all traps. He had to escape. Bob Dylan was a rebel.

That is to say, he was a Romantic artist. He was unrestrained by the normal inhibitions that stop most people. His caution gene had been amputated. He went where others dared not go. He was a defiant descendant of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Like them, he filtered experience through the self. His feelings were the surest path to knowledge. If those who were angry that Dylan had abandoned his finger-pointing songs had examined his Romantic roots, they would have discovered that such an emphasis on personal emotions created a profound skepticism that a society could progress and a despair at any foolish effort to believe it could. The Romantics' artistry, in contrast, came out in their poems and in sculpting their own biographies.

The European brand of Romantic poetry Dylan inherited went through the Symbolists to T.S. Eliot to Dylan. The Symbolists searched their selves for symbols of emotional reactions to their lives. Their poems were carefully created collections of those personal symbols. Their poems were not subject to normal poetic analysis because they had no meaning outside the artist's life. All that mattered was what the poem did. The poem was a raft ride down the rapids of the artist's subconscious. If others recognized the sights and sounds along the way as they listened to Dylan, it was because, in words Terry Eagleton wrote about T.S. Eliot, Dylan "made guerilla raids on the collective unconscious."

The American Romanticism that preceded Dylan started with the Emersonian notion of the self's sufficiency. An individual's consciousness required no external resources. This American Romanticism went through Whitman to Woody Guthrie and the Beats and so on to Dylan.

But Dylan was a true rebel. Dylan rebelled against the rebels. He searched within himself and discovered a moral temperament that had dominion over the artistic temperament. Art, he concluded, was not immune from moral measure. Like the Biblical prophets, he stood in opposition, but also like them his fire and fury came from an understanding of his God-given mission. The Romantics sought spiritual reality, but in nature or Eastern religions, and, later, hallucinogenic drugs. Dylan eventually found his own way to the spiritual. God was the true north on Dylan's artistic compass. He was Abraham, not Adam. He reached toward Heaven instead of believing he could find the words to name all that is in the world.

But, like many honest, unfrightened believers before him, Dylan discovered that belief carries its own confusions. Inner peace could not be cheaply bought. He had to fight himself to discover who was this God and what did this god want of a poor singer from Minnesota. The twists and turns of his understanding of God--Jewish, Christian, a combination, an entity embracing all--has been shared with different hints at different times. Dylan had to struggle. Was he the political radical, the Romantic artist, or the believer? The radical and the artist had to rebel; the believer had to obey. Evidently, he chose to obey God's call to keep singing to as many audiences as he could, to pass on the astounding musical heritage he had absorbed, and to add more songs to his unmatched and utterly remarkable body of work.

Those tasks are the ones from which even a restless Bob Dylan has not rebelled.

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For information about my book on political folk music through Dylan, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

Writing About Dylan and Folk Music (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Woody Guthrie's sister answered the phone. I told her my name, explained that I was writing a book about folk singers, and asked if I could speak with her. After three minutes, Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon invited me over for lunch. I was in New York and she was in Oklahoma, but her humor and hospitality evaporated the miles. She told me stories of Woody's childhood, stories that I had never heard, stories that I could write about.

I've always thought of writing as a passport to a new world. Interviewing and researching let me explore that world, chart its logical and emotional geography, wander its landscape, listen carefully to its stories, rumors, and secrets. I sought out people who knew more than I did. They were shockingly abundant.

The book started out because of my interest in investigating some of Bob Dylan's principal musical and political roots. I spoke, for example, with two of Dylan's high school teachers. B.J. Rolfzen talked movingly about his memories of a young Robert Zimmerman. Rolfzen still uses the formal first name. Rolfzen and I exchanged life stories, and he sent me a privately printed memoir of his youth.

A book on folk music meant I got a chance to speak with Pete Seeger. For an audience of one, he sang a bunch of songs including one he had learned while spending a few hours in jail during his run-in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Peter, Paul, and Mary were all extraordinarily gracious. I spoke with Mary Travers about eighteen months before her death, and I was pleasantly amazed at her honesty and frankness. Tom Paxton had wonderful memories of Greenwich Village. I was taken with Izzy Young, the legendary proprietor of the Folklore Center, the man who sponsored Dylan's first concert. I enjoyed Izzy's stories and all the material he sent me.

Slowly the puzzle pieces began to form a picture. I kept talking to singers, writers, scholars, people with connections. The focus became on political folk music. The story I wanted to write was filled with fabulous characters, people like The Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, Joe Hill, Alan Lomax, Lead Belly, and Joan Baez.

And Dylan. What pleased me most was that I in exploring the folk world I could more deeply appreciate the footsteps Dylan Followed and the new paths he forged.

I was unsurprised to conclude that, finally, Dylan's greatness was beyond my critical reach. Here was a man who corners the language, captures it, and sings it for the rest of us but also a man who needs to keep a sacred corner of his own mind off limits. I was satisfied, though. Seeing Dylan in context was seeing him in a new way.

I wrote the book because I thought I had a story worth telling, and I wanted to share it.

For more information about my book on political folk music, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk.

Bob Dylan's Voice (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Mark Twain, in a characteristically wry observation, once noted that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." A comparable comment can be made about Bob Dylan's voice, or, more accurately, his voices. Anyone who, without warning, first listened to Nashville Skyline and thought the vocals were the result of studio engineering knows that like the man himself Dylan's voice shifts identity. Dylan's nasal Midwestern twang lately sounds like a weathered voice that has spoken and sung and battled its way down many miles of sorrow and found, from time to time, some refuges of hope along the way.

I'm writing about Dylan's classic voice, the voice on Freewheelin' through Blonde on Blonde, the voice that made Hibbing famous. It's fair to note that it was Dylan's lyrics that captured the age. But those arresting words would not have had same impact they had if Dylan had not sung them the way he did. I always thought he sang his songs better than all the covers.

Dylan's voice had many elements. The vocal qualities that so shocked Mitch Miller and almost everyone else at CBS Records were Dylan's successful effort to inhabit Woody Guthrie's voice box. The very untutored rawness of the voice with its inherent affront to the sweet, packaged conformity of the 1950s made it the right voice to attack those who made profits from war or wanted to block the way of a new generation.

The vocal elements, though, were only part of the overall voice. The reason so many Dylan covers fail is that the singers mouth the words but lack the ability to transmit their emotional power. George Burns once noted that, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made." I want to believe Dylan was sincere as he sang his songs. I believe he was, despite the fact that he sometimes dismissed this idea. But sincere or not he acted as though he was sincere. He was a great actor, that is, either because he believed in the line and could control his voice to make listeners believe he believed, or he could simply mimic and fake passion perfectly.

Beyond the vocal elements and the emotions, Dylan's voice was helped by his phrasing. Particular syllables were emphasized and forced the listener to focus on them. Sometimes the phrases were virtually spoken in a rhythm, like beat poetry or talking blues. Talking blues was developed by Chris Bouchillon who recorded "Talking Blues" in April 1926. The recording director noted that Bouchillon's pleasant voice sounded better when he talked than when he sang, and so the director suggested that Bouchillon talk while he played the guitar. Woody Guthrie made the style popular. In Woody's case, he used talking blues to de-emphasize any beauty in the songs so that listeners could focus on the social and political importance of the words.

Dylan sometimes altered normal word accents. In poetry, such an alteration of the normal word accent is called a wrenched accent. It was common in the folk ballads that made up Dylan's informal education.

Putting vocals, emotion, and phrasing together with incomparable lyrics made Bob Dylan's voice unique in musical history.

NOTE TO READERS:  My book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan will be published on March 16th. For further information see: http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

Will Dylan Survive? (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Salvatore Quasimodo wasn't the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature fifty years ago. Also in 1959, Robert Lewis Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. And who made more money for RKO in the 1930s than Cary Grant or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? The comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey did.

Today's success does not guarantee tomorrow's fame. Many popular artist have their hour or even decades in the spotlight and then are gone. Maybe public tastes have so shifted that the artists no longer resonate with audiences. Maybe the artists represented a particular era, that that era has receded from the public's attention. Maybe the artists weren't as good as they seemed to be when they were famous.

It is hard to imagine that Bob Dylan will be forgotten in fifty years. He is clearly the best songwriter of the second half of the 20th century. A convincing argument can be made that he is the best songwriter in American history. His talent certainly deserves survival. But, sad to say, talent is not enough either to become famous or to survive. No one is certain where Dylan will be unrecognized, known just by his name and a brief identifier, or be seen as the dazzling songwriter he is now. I assume that an artist like Dylan must be concerned about this. After all, his legacy continues in his children and his music. But family provides only a private memory. If he also wants a public memory, I have a suggestion.

The suggestion is based on the career of Woody Guthrie. Woody was not well-known even as he was producing his rousing songs. Two particular efforts, beyond his sheer talent, helped propel him to ongoing fame. Pete Seeger was responsible for the first effort. A blacklisted Seeger was forced to play not in night clubs but in camps and schools. The pay wasn't so good, and while the audience was enthusiastic it was young and unsophisticated. But the nimble Seeger had stumbled onto a great opportunity. Those impressionable minds heard Seeger sing Woody's songs, and, having heard them as children, they carried the songs into adulthood.

The second effort involved a man who deserves wider recognition. Howie Richmond had worked as a press agent for Frank Sinatra. He knew his way around the business. In 1951, Richmond was serving as Woody's music publisher and listened as Woody tape recorded hundreds of songs. Richmond's incredible ear picked out "This Land is Your Land." He made copies of the song and sent them free to school publishers that produced songbooks for young people. The publishers then sold the books to schools. It took about a decade and a half, but by then the song had been sung by untold numbers of young people, as it continues to be sung even now.

Howie Richmond had discovered the key to continuing fame. Dylan needs to use that key. The crucial first step for him to take to ensure survival of his material is to choose the most appealing (that is emotionally moving and easy to sing) songs for young people and make those songs available for free to schools, camps, and anyplace else where children gather.

Will Dylan survive? Look to America's children for the answer.

Dylan's Christmas Album (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

No one ever made a living betting on what Bob Dylan will do next. But a Christmas album? The balladeer of anthemic protest, the poet master of surreal imagery has recorded Christmas In The Heart, a collection of familiar Christmas tunes filtered, as an ad appropriate to the pre-rock feel of the album might put it, through Bob Dylan's unique vocal stylings.

I'm with those who applaud him for his giving all his profits in perpetuity to a variety of hunger charities. (Some places couldn't resist this. The Brisbane Times headlined their review: "Yule be surprised what Dylan has done for a good Claus.)

But I don't know how to review the album. Instead, let me made a few observations. First of all, this whole project is sincere. This is not some sort of in-joke or ironic post-modern creation. Dylan's not wearing a Santa Claus mask. I'm not sure what to make of a contented Bob Dylan. He seems to have found his direction home. I'm glad for him. but it was the little boy lost who fashioned so many rhyming guideposts for our journey through life. It was in moments of contentment that Dylan's songwriting suffered. Dylan's voice, even as its cheerful, still strikes me as more appropriate for melancholy than joy. His voice was built for a blues sound wailing despair or unleashing sarcastic anger. But it is cruel to wish someone sadness so there will be more songs, and doing so would certainly not be in the spirit of the album. I therefore limit this comment to an observation that doesn't cross the border into a hope.

There is no clear way to provide an analysis of the material, pondering its reverberating layers, dissecting its sources and allusions, locating its place in the ongoing Dylan narrative. The sole possible exception is the to consider the album's title. At first glance, Christmas In The Heart seems innocuous, sentimental, and familiar. but, and maybe only because this is Bob Dylan, it is tempting to unpack its meaning. For example, if Christmas is in the heart, it's inside us, a feeling more than a holy day. In that case, this is a spiritual Christmas rather than a religious one. On this reading, Dylan sees in Christmas a time for charity, for joy, for a celebration of life. This is Christmas in the Heartland.

And if that is so, then this is an American album more than a Christian album. For those alert to every twist and turn in the ongoing saga "Is He a Jew or a Christian?" this album provides less data than its subject matter might suggest. The album is about a good-hearted singer content to be a loyal citizen in the Land of the Great American Songbook and singing his heart out with some seasonal standards to help those in need.

Of course, don't get used to this Bob Dylan because who knows where he'll go next? It's okay to anticipate, but I wouldn't place any bets.

Bob's Nobel: A Modest Proposal (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

So once again Bob Dylan didn't receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Oh, sure, he can take solace from the fact that a few other literary artists didn't get it, folks like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Twain, Chekhov, Auden, and Borges, among others. But I don't think Bob should give up. He has until next February 1st when the nominations close and until early next October when the Prize is announced. He should begin preparing now.

To nudge Bob along, I have come up with a few suggestions for what he can do to improve his chances. I urge readers to supplement these ideas with others. Bob, it's time to get to work. Here's what you can do:

1. Make fun of mathematicians. There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. The standard rumor about this is that Nobel didn't want such a prize because it might go to a Swedish mathematician named Mittag-Leffler who supposedly had an affair with Nobel's wife. This is a good rumor, but it's considerably weakened by the small fact that Mr. Nobel never married. Never mind. The reason doesn't matter. Just start making fun of people who use numbers instead of words.

2. Buy a house near the Swedish Academy. These people decide who wins the Literature Prize, Bob. Get to know them. Start a never-ending tour just of Sweden. Start casually inserting the Swedish words "ombudsman' and "smorgasbord" frequently in conversation. Drop hints about how you love Swedish meatballs.

3. Write an album of songs that will help your cause. Include titles like "The Gates of Sweden." Avoid titles like "Stuck Inside of Stockholm With the Memphis Blues Again."

4. Rediscover your Hibbing roots. Note how its climate always reminded you of a Scandanavian country, but in a nice way. I mean the football team for the state is named the Minnesota Vikings. Come on, Bob, the Vikings. It's perfect. Get a helmet. Wear it at concerts. See #3 above about songs.

5. Use your connections. Shmooze with Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden. He is the King, after all. And he did present you a music prize in 2000. I know you didn't speak when you got the award, but the times they are a-changin' Bob. You've got to talk yourself up now.

So, Bob, there you go. Your fans are rooting for you. Don't think twice. It's all right.