DYLAN/MELVILLE - A Study in Affinity - Part II

If you began here go back to my last post - the first about Dylan and Melville -  and begin reading there- Thanks- JTM

This is a continuation of some random connections between Moby-Dick and Bob Dylan - some obvious, some obscure and after a few hours of web research I have found  a couple more references to MD by Dylan that I wanted to share. I'm sure there will be more - in a way it seems pretty easy to surmise that any successful artist trades in allegory, borrows from the past, steals tidbits of past poets, drops names in current works, and generally continues the storytelling tradition that fed their own love for it in the beginning.
 reminds me of this - which was found on the web a few years ago...

Anyways I think the term I like is   Synchronicities


These are a few more synchronicities about Dylan and MD/HM gleaned from the web


1)  Bob Dylan's Biography
This is from the blog "common sense dancing'  -    the link is 


http://commonsensedancing.blogspot.com/2009/03/bob-dylan-chronicles-volume-one.html


The writer describes his reading of "Bob Dylan's Chronicles -Volume One"


"Some paragraphs read like Dylan lyrics in paragraph form. Consider the description of Izzy Young, the proprietor of The Folklore Center, a periodical that covered folk music: 

"Young was an old-line folk enthusiast, very sardonic and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a thick Brooklyn dialect, wore wool slacks, skinny belt and work boots, tie at a careless slant. his voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room. Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good natured. In reality, a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me, too . . . I couldn't imagine what Izzy's battles were. Internal, external, who knows? Young was a man that concerned himself with social injustice, hunger and homelessness and he didn't mind telling you so. His heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Moby-Dick, the ultimate fish story, was his favorite tale."

2) Bob Dylan's Movie - "Masked and anonymous"

This is a great article about the film by Sean Wilentz      The link is 

http://www.sonyclassics.com/masked/sean-wilentz-essay.html

and it includes a great paragraph about Allegory and Dylan and Melville - the blog typeface won't let me copy and paste it here but READ IT - 

3) Minstrel acts - Dylan references again -

The same writer from before wrote the book -"Bob Dylan in america" and in a blog he pretty much proves that Bob Dylan had the same love for the character of Pip that I do in MD. At least he proves it in my mind - read this 

link-

http://seanwilentz.com/tag/masked-and-anonymous/

here's a short quote from it...

 “Love and Theft,” Dylan’s superb album of 2001, almost certainly takes its name from Eric Lott’s study of blackface minstrelsy with the same title.  Bob Dylan in America’s chapter about the album picks up the theme and describes Dylan as a modern minstrel, with the racism expunged. Elsewhere, the book discusses Dylan’s admiration for the [...]"

Brilliant!! and read future posts by me about the use of blackface in Moby-Dick that no scholar has ever unmasked (if u will) but I am about to - yes, ill-advised or not, there IS a scene in MD where HM has Ishmael put on "blackface" to 'pass' not in a  comedy minstrelsy way but in a very coy way - but we'll get to that later....

4) Moby-Dick "Shout-out"

in a funny, almost throwaway line from the song "lo and behold" by Dylan he sings out the line -“What's it to ya, Moby Dick?"

5) Ishmael and St. Augustine

 This is a bit of a stretch but there's also a great Dylan tune " I dreamed of St. augustine" that you should listen to. Strangely enough if you read a passage from the book "

A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature

 By David L. Jeffrey, you can read what St. augustine

 had to say about Ishmael in the bible - again I cant copy and paste it but here's the link - I hope it works -

http://books.google.com/books?id=zD6xVr1CizIC&pg=PA382&lpg=PA382&dq=st+augustine+ishmael&source=bl&ots=04zQgLODXm&sig=kLw2rgBZ0QImMlbStuylaVIOGOM&hl=en&ei=K1TdTfS8Mqfk0QGR_vjNDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=st%20augustine%20ishmael&f=false

if its not loading just google the book and read the Ishmael page - it's awesome as Ishmael history anyways - regardless of Dylan

6) "Time out of Mind" - melville shakespeare and Dylan - the triumvirate :)

For this last connection between Dylan and Melville I have to thank a writer I can only find named "harauo"

here is his link and  it's a genius find -

http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=56673

Here's a quote from it -

"A more recent event is the phrase "Time Out Of Mind" which is the title of Dylan's 1997 (slighty overrated) album. One of the paragraphs in Chapter 87 of Moby-Dick also begins with this phrase"

Wow! great find - I only disagree with the "overrated" comment - I think that album was, yes, later in Dylan's career, but I'll put it up there with his best when all is said and done.

Anyways Here is dylan borrowing another line from MD - and the crazy thing is that Chapter 87 , " The Grand Armada" is a chapter where Melville DIRECTLY quotes shakespeare - borrowing from King Lear (remember that is where HM got the idea for PIP from) he quotes,

"* To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively—to confound with fright. It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare:—

"The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves.

Lear, Act III, sc. ii"

I am going to take this chapter further and "Bring it All back Home" to my theory that "Mr. tambourine man" was written by Dylan about Chapter 110 in MD. Here's proof - in this same chapter 87 there's the line - "But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. "

"Circus-running"  - there is your direct use of 'circus' in 'MR.TM' by Dylan -  and in Chapter 110 queequeg's eyes were described as "But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like CIRCLES on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the RINGS of Eternity"

There's your "Mr.TM" line "circled by the circus sands"

and Yes, it was poor PIP who was "driven deep beneath the waves"(MR.TM) to emerge Queequeg's savior.

SO, in closing if you want to attribute Mr. tambourine man to 'drugs' you'll need to find another scholar who'll support that bs theory because, honestly - IT AIN"T ME BABE, it ain't me you're looking for, babe!