Sherry Chandler

Have fun.

And just for grins, a couple of fun articles about another guy I’m a slobbering fan of, Terry Pratchett here and here. Proud mother warning on the latter, though I do think he does a pretty good job pulling an essay together.

Speaking of being an unredeemed Dylan fan, spouse and I have recently watched The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965, Murray Lerner’s 2007 documentary put together from black-and-white archival footage he shot at the time. The film has no narrator. Except for a few audience commentaries and one interview with Joan Baez that is not about Bob Dylan, it mostly just consists of Bob Dylan on stage singing. And yet it is put together in such a way that you can trace his transition from a nervy, self-conscious young folksinger (who looked a lot like Kentucky’s own Silas House) to the black-jacketed cryptic oracle of a generation with halo of curls singing “Wa-once upon a time, you felt so fine, threw the bums a dime, in your prime, now didn’t you?” to Mike Bloomfield’s screaming electric guitar runs.

Lerner liked to shoot close in and given the ranks of microphones and the harmonica rig he always wore, that means we spend a lot of time watching Dylan’s eyes as he sings. I did not find that boring. The man’s eyes are very expressive (see above) but I did find myself wondering what he was perceiving.

Only one complaint. Johnny Cash only gets to sing one verse of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” I’d have liked to hear all of that. It was one of the best things I’ve heard him do.

By the way, you can listen to a preview stream of the whole of Dylan’s new release Tell Tale Signs here at NPR. It’s another “bootleg.”

I have been reading Randall Couch’s translation Madwomen, the Locas mujeres poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of Chicago, 2008).

In his introduction to this bilingual edition, Couch says

As a channel for “the song that comes,” Mistral’s medium was ventriloquy. In the dramatic monologues of the “madwomen,” the poet plays the part of prophet or sibyl, speaking through the masks of personae. To the extent that they form a composite portrait, the poems imply a fragmented subject: as songs of experience, they question the possibility of a unitary subject—a mujer who is not loca—in the face of extreme conditions. Here, as in her earlier work, it is specifically the experience of women that exposes the costs of history and the madness of a calculus that accepts those costs.

Because I am ignorant of both South American culture and the Spanish language, I feel I was not able to read these poems well. Where I could connect best was with poems where I was familiar with the back story: Martha and Mary, Electra, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Cassandra.

From “Martha and Mary:”

Martha and Mary were born together,
lived together, ate together.
They closed the same doors,
drank from the same cistern.
The same grove watched them,
and the same light robed them.

Martha’s dishes clinked,
her porridge-pot bubbled.
Her henyard teemed with doves,
with red cocks and plover.
Coming and going, Martha
was lost in a cloud of feathers.

In a whirlwind, she would rule
over meals and linens,
the winepress and beehives,
the minute, the hour, and the day . . .

And wherever she went, all things
voiced a wounded cry to her:
crockery, latches, doors,
as to their bellwether;
and for her sister they grew hushed,
spinning tears and Ave Marias.

From “Electra in the Mist”

Now she doesn’t breathe the Aegean Sea.
Now she’s more dumb than a tumbled stone.
Now she does no good or ill. She is without works.
She names me not, loves me not, hates me not.
She was my mother, and I was her milk,
nothing more than her milk turned blood.
Only her milk and her profile, moving or asleep.

From “Clytemnestra”

The little creatures know by the air,
and the ten fountains by the great shout,
that Agamemnon cast on the pyre
like cypress-pine or common cress
the lamb that slept in my arms,
that suckled my milk like a fawn
and, from my milk, was lithe and white.

The ragged shout of the crowd came
without a breeze to these thousand doors,
when her back the color of the myrtles
fell to the flame and the flame took her.
The crowd howls against heaven
as if drunk, whipped up by the fire,
the name of its King and not that of my lamb,
it dances and belches victory shouts,
swarms like ants, deafened by drums,
belches, dances, bellowing to its gods,
and she, Iphigenia, falls, falls, falls,
while I, walled in so near the pyre,
claw at the bolted palace doors.