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Bob Dylans Love And Theft: Fearful Symmetry & PotBoiling Alchemical Brains Know-How

Michael Gray said in Song & Dance Man III that Infidels was a pot-boiler pretending not to be. I felt eighteen years after Infidels that Love And Theft was something of a pot-boiler that the Dylan world was pretending it not to be. Opening song:
Brains in the pot, theyre beginning to boil Theyre dripping with garlic and olive oil

Closing song:
Sugar Baby, get on down the road You aint got no brains, no how

A pot where pecans go to spew. Fearful symmetry. The complacently fearless Michael Gray again airing his brains know-how in Song & Dance Man III (2000) p 465:
. . . it was all too obvious, even in the murky dusk of 1984, that this wasn't a tyger at all. No fearful symmetry here, no burning bright, no fire in the eyes. This was the runt of some domesticated mongrel litter, by Hollywood out of Tin Pan Alley, set loose just for the tourists. A real Bob Dylan tyger wouldn't have looked at it twice.

Closing Michael Grays favourite song from the sessions, the out-take BLIND WILLIE McTELL:
Im gazing out the window Of the St. James Hotel And I know no one can sing the blues Like Blind Willie McTell Copyright 1983 by Special Rider Music

St James Street/Where you blew Ps mind; brother named James; St James Hotel. Only the first of these three made it onto the album from the album sessions. The others appeared on the relevant songs of the Bootleg Series at the start of the Nineties as you know. Opening and closing Infidels: Hurricane blowing (JOKERMAN); St James Street / Where you blew Jackie Ps mind (DONT FALL APART ON ME TONIGHT): revisited eighteen years later in the secrets of the breeze and the blowing of Gabriels horn. Fearful symmetry between the opening and closing songs of Infidels and between Infidels and Love And Thefts own fearful symmetry between its opening and closing songs. Things twice.

In his book The Nightingales Code: A poetic study of Bob Dylan (2001), John Gibbens quotes from Henry Millers strangely surreal My Dream of Mobile: a chapter in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). Not that the (loquaciously) laconic Gibbens mentions how to locate it or even that it is just a chapter rather than a larger work. Here is a smaller snippet from Gibbenss own excerpt, the snippet fitting perfectly with the ways I have thought about Bob Dylans JOKERMAN since 1983; and from within the first few listenings. When I saw the excerpt in 2002, the snippet below just leapt out at me as original JOKERMAN inspiration (even though Gibbens does not evidently use it in that way) directly in keeping with the interpretative tenor of much that I had already thought and written:
Events transpire in all declensions at once; they are never conjugated. What is not Gog is Magog--and at nine punkt Gabriel always blows his horn. But is it music? Who cares?

But here immediate purpose here is to focus on Love And Theft. In the opening and closing songs:
They know the secrets of the breeze; Just as sure as were living, just as sure as youre born Look up, look upseek your Makerfore Gabriel blows his horn

So unifying the albums internally and between each other we have, amongst other things, this: hurricane blowing; blew Jackie Ps mind secrets of the breeze; Gabriel blows his horn And via the Miller passage anyone who wants to be uncool and come close (like Mick Brown) to understanding Dylans Eighties work can see that Infidels and Love And Theft are not shofar apart at least in respect of blowing. Anyone except Howard Sounes, that is. (But he contains multitudes the hayseed.) In December 2009 there was a BBC Radio 6 programme called Bob Dylan's Changing Times. In it we got this delusional and dull-witted tabloid biographer stroppily dismissing Dylan's Eighties work, in an irritating London wide-boy accent, as having 'no[oooow] unifying concepts!' Wrong: he just didnt perceive any. No surprise there. Last night the wind was whispering; Sounes was trying to make out what it was. I tell myself a big (Sounes-ifying) bang is coming but it never does: until now, that is. Sounes should just piss off out of Dylanology and stick to the only unifying concept he is any good at: tabloid muckraking into the lives of celebrities (and making elementary biographical errors far more serious than being out by one in the number of Hattie Carrolls children -- that could easily be checked even by a hack).

As for the other unifying concepts of Love And Thefts fearful symmetry, I figure that children who get too used to constant hand-outs of pecan candy can get spoiled: the Warmuthian generation. Not that any of this takes a genius to work out or in fact hasnt necessarily been thought about by anyone else or even written about in part somewhere. But I figure that as Im not getting paid, and by invisible readers who lurk (on the muddiest superhighway in the universe), theres no need to play all ones cards at once. Infidels and Love And Theft? Pot-boilers of one kind or another. The secrets of the breeze. Brains in the pot; critical brains know-how: Bob clearly had none in Infidels Michael said so. He preferred Blind Willie, who was no roaring primitive. Fearful symmetry just like that between, in the opening song, throwing knives into the tree and, in the closing song, the reference to Aunt Sally but interpreted as the game. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aunt%20sally
Definition of AUNT SALLY British : an object of criticism or contention; especially : one that is set up to invite criticism or be easily refuted Origin of AUNT SALLY Aunt Sally, name given to an effigy of a woman smoking a pipe set up as an amusement attraction at English fairs for patrons to throw missiles at First Known Use: 1879

Indeed, The game is the sameits just on a different level. Bob Dylan builds patterns into his albums: alchemy or random cut-and-paste bluff? Who cares? 2012 Paul Kirkman, Messianic Dylanologist

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