Why academics love Dylan

For decades, scholars have dissected Bob Dylan’s boundary-pushing lyrics. Among those celebrating the American singer-songwriter’s Nobel Prize in Literature win Thursday was Stephen Scobie, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Victoria, who penned a letter in support of Dylan’s nomination 19 years ago. “I have always cherished Dylan’s words, and been both thrilled and nourished by them,” Scobie said Thursday. “I love the street-smart, razor-sharp rhymes of lines like, ‘God said to Abraham, kill me a son.’ I stand in awe at the sublime imagery of, ‘ The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,’ a line which any poet in history would gladly have died for.” The National Post’s Douglas Quan asked three other Canadian academics to share their favourite verses.

Ira Wells teaches Bob Dylan in his classes on American literature at the University of Toronto.

IDIOT WIND

Idiot Wind, blowing every time you move your mouth Blowing down the backroads, headin’ south 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

Dylan has written l yrics about every stage and phase and mood of his life: political outrage, spiritual devotion, erotic love, existential ennui, playfulness, despair, perseverance. These lines, from what many listeners consider his finest album, Blood on the Tracks, capture the pain and anger Dylan experienced during his divorce. Dylan can be an angry artist — at times a vengeful one — and his cap- acity for illuminating anger has been a continual source of lyrical power.

VISIONS OF JOHANNA

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to stay so quiet?

We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft

But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined

And t hese visi ons of Johanna that conquer my mind For Dylan, the one constant is change. No sooner had he been accepted as the great protest singer of his era — the heir of Pete Seeger — than he evolved into something very different. The singer of Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They are a- Changin’ had mutated into a visionary poet in the vein of a latter- day William Blake. These lines, from Visions of Johanna, showcase Dylan in this lyrically dense, evocative, chimerical — and more or less apolitical — style. Yet, despite the ingenuity and formal complexity of his lyrics, these are also pop songs: the ( extraordinarily long) first line above consists almost entirely of monosyllables, leading us into this evocative scene of coughing heat pipes, soft country music, entwined lovers, and Visions of Johanna. Bart Beaty, an English professor at the University of Calgary, wrote about Dylan every single day in a 2014 blog, LongandWastedYear.com.

EVERY GRAIN OF SAND

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me I am hanging in t he balance of the reality of man Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand Dylan’s late-1970s Christian rock period was derided by fans, but it also produced a remarkable number of classic expressions of faith. The most moving devotional song came from his third, and final, Christian- themed album. Every Grain of Sand is replete with the kind of mysterious i magery that can only be conjured when contemplating the insignificance of life amid the infinite grandeur of the universe. Dylan’s image of the falling sparrow is both tangible and ineffable.

BROWNSVILLE GIRL

“How far are y’all going?” Ruby asked us with a sigh

“We’re going all the way ’ til the wheels fall off and burn

’ Til the sun peels the paint and the seat covers fade and the water moccasin dies”

Ruby just smiled and said, “Ah, you know some babies never learn” Dylan’s 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded has only one good song, but what a song it is. Brownsville Girl is an 11- minute- long epic portrait of American outlaw life that reads like a Sam Peckinpah movie. The dusty imagery conjures scenes from west Texas through the filter of Gregory Peck’s The Gunfighter. Dylan sings about the commitments of love — not just to the ends of the Earth or until the ends of time, but until “the water moccasin dies.” It’s an unbelievably original and thoroughly concrete mental im- age — a kind of love that we all look for. Andy Wainwright, professor emeritus of English at Dalhousie University, used to teach a course called Bob Dylan and Literature of the ’ 60s.

GATES OF EDEN

Of war and peace the truth just twists Its curfew gull just glides Upon four- legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides With his candle lit into the sun

Though its glow is waxed in black

All except when ’neath the trees of Eden Dylan at the beginning of the Vietnam War and in the midst of civil rights protests intimates how the truth is distorted no matter the era. The apocalyptic “cowboy angel” signals Western promise and holy possibilities ( redolent of Kerouac’s desolation angels), though the single candle it takes to light the darkness is “waxed in black.” Only those days in Eden before the fall were not violently twisted or curbed by curfews. The consistent line stress and alliteration ground the emotional expressionism and surreal images in the real world where the singer takes his stand.