Book review: Another reading from the prophet of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan performs in Los Angeles. Picture: Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
- The Philosophy of Modern Song
- Bob Dylan
- Simon & Schuster, hb €29.99
Most Irish families have, if they dig deeply enough, uncles or aunts — maybe great uncles or great aunts at this stage — who were members of one Catholic order or another.
Ours, in the generation well past the Rubicon of three-score-and-ten, had three. All dead now.
Two aunts were nuns — we called them ‘nunts’.
An uncle was an old school but not quiet Old Testament provincial parish priest, of the roast beef, fast hurling, natural, active decency but unambiguous persuasion.
He spent the last years of his long life in a nursing home run by nuns, his Felix Randal body wilting and his spirit all-but broken by the scandals ending the hegemony of the institution to which he gave his life.
Shame-by-osmosis clouded his final years, he felt betrayed though he would never have said so.
In a way symbolically appropriate for a life undermined by atrocity, he died on August 15, 1998, another awful day on an island cursed by serial outrage, when the IRA murdered 29 people in Omagh because, as today’s noxious sanitisers assure us, “there was no alternative”.
His final years were spent in a very modest room with a small bed, a chair and little else.
All material comforts jettisoned as he began the final stage of one of the journeys laid out by his beliefs.
A constant in that tight, musty space was his anchor, his well-used breviary.
If I described Dylan’s book The Philosophy of Modern Song as a breviary for today my uncle might be more confused than offended.
He might have read parts of it, if our younger nunt, a feisty Liberation Theology Benedictine, coaxed him to do so.
The bareness, honesty and real humanity of the writing would have impressed and reassured him — much as his breviary did for seven decades.
He would have empathised too with Dylan’s anger at humanity’s many vulnerabilities.
Like that breviary, Dylan’s book, his first since he was named a Noble Laureate for Literature in 2016, may be best appreciated by dipping in it at random to 60 pieces dedicated to songwriters and performers as diverse as Willie Nelson, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Elvis Costello.
The range, for a culture foot soldier, is daunting.
I doubt there are 10 people on this island familiar with all 60 songs celebrated, but, again like a breviary, the book is a map that can lead to rewarding destinations and comforts.
Charlie Poole’s 1928 song ‘Old And Only In The Way’ may not be a popular party piece this Christmas but our changing demographics probably make it more pertinent than many of those reports on tomorrow’s needs gathering dust in government offices.
That judgement applies to more-or-less all the 60 pieces, some in preparation for over a decade.
It is hard to think of anyone alive who has had more written about them than Dylan.
He is 81 and for over 60 years has persistently produced work his peers simply cannot match.
His never-ending-tour — he played Dublin last month — is the constant, renewing pulse of his music.
This book renews his stick-in-your-eye agenda; his career-long parsing of the human spirit/condition, and is a magnificent physical thing, splendidly illustrated and with very high production values.
If my nunts and uncle were still alive The Philosophy of Modern Song might be in the feisty Benedictine’s Christmas stocking as she would know how to encourage others to share in the great wisdom, passion and contextualisation that animates all great art.
Like Dylan’s great works, this one will improve and inspire more and more as it ages.
It is uplifting even if it raises an ever-sharper question: How, when the time eventually comes, will Dylan be replaced? How to imagine such a void, much less fill it?
