Saturnine Melancholy and Dylan's Jewish Gnosis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bob Dylan: Jewish Perspectives on His Repertoire - Themes of Prophecy and Redemption
Leading academics including Elliot Wolfson, James Diamond, Aubrey Glazer, Jonathan Karp, Frances Di Lauro, Samuel Zinner, Daniel Mackay, as well as music and cultural scholars Seth Rogovoy, Robert Sean Wilson, and rabbinic Dylanologists Rabbi David Zaslow, Rabbi Jonathan Seidel and Rabbi Joshua Rose will gather via Zoom on Sunday, March 14, 2021 for an all-day virtual conference on “Bob Dylan: Jewish Perspectives on His Repertoire – Themes of Prophecy and Redemption”. The 7-hour intensive organized by the Oregon Jewish Culture Project features panel discussions and keynote addresses with such topics as “Foot of Pride: Themes of (False) Prophecy and Redemption” and “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues: A Jewish Experience of Bob Dylan”, as well as “Darkness at the Break of Noon: Dylan's Apocalyptic Vision through a Kabbalistic Prism” and more. “We are honored to have such high-quality participants for this unique event,” says Ahava Oblak, co-founder of the Oregon Jewish Culture Project. “The deep level of insight into Dylan’s essential canon by these scholars and spiritual leaders who have spent decades tracking Dylan’s mercurial religious self-representations and spiritual-societal insights promises to make this day deeply impactful for Bob Dylan fans of every faith”. Panelist biographies, panel and keynote topics, and the complete speaker schedules are available at https://oregonjewishcultureproject.org All-day conference passes are available for $36 at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4839856 About the Oregon Jewish Culture Project: Established in 2016, the mission of the Oregon Jewish Culture Project (OJCP) is to offer unique Jewish cultural programming in strategic cooperation and collaboration with other Jewish community partners. The OJCP is located in Eugene, OR, and benefits residents of Lane County, the larger Oregon Jewish community and our allies and regional partners. Founded by Co-Directors Rabbi Jonathan Seidel and Ahavah Oblak, OJCP has hosted successful events such as the “ Jewish Food Conference”, “Native American-Jewish Storytelling Day of Sharing”, a concert featuring Sephardic singer Michelle Alany & The Mystics and classes such as “Jewish Food and Culture in History (Ancient and Medieval)”, “Introduction to Talmud: Hebrew and Aramaic”, “Basic Music and Liturgy of Judaism”, “Kabbalah and Science in the Renaissance and Judaism” and “Science: Antiquity to the Renaissance”.
2015
Dylan may come off as if he has all the answers in some of his music, but when it comes to religion he is as clueless as anyone. Although he would always keep his Jewish culture and education that his parents gave him, Dylan would wonder from Judaism into mysticism, the belief in some holy entity, and evangelical Christianity. His seemingly always cynical views of the world around him would lead him to be a mystic for most of his musical career. The influence of friends, love interests, possible born-again experience, and a need for new inspiration would lead him to his evangelical years. Although he would return to Judaism briefly, Dylan would eventually settle back into a culturally Jewish mystic. Gotta Serve Somebody: Bob Dylan in American Religion and Culture. Perf. Shalom Goldman. Duke Divinity School, 2013. YouTube Video. Duke Divinity School, one of Duke University’s graduate schools held a presentation comprised of musical performances and lectures exploring Dylan’s place in...
Leading academics including Elliot Wolfson, James Diamond, Aubrey Glazer, Jonathan Karp, Frances Di Lauro, Samuel Zinner, Daniel Mackay, as well as music and cultural scholars Seth Rogovoy, Robert Sean Wilson, and rabbinic Dylanologists Rabbi David Zaslow, Rabbi Jonathan Seidel and Rabbi Joshua Rose will gather via Zoom on Sunday, March 14, 2021 for an all-day virtual conference on “Bob Dylan: Jewish Perspectives on His Repertoire – Themes of Prophecy and Redemption”. The 7-hour intensive organized by the Oregon Jewish Culture Project features panel discussions and keynote addresses with such topics as “Foot of Pride: Themes of (False) Prophecy and Redemption” and “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues: A Jewish Experience of Bob Dylan”, as well as “Darkness at the Break of Noon: Dylan's Apocalyptic Vision through a Kabbalistic Prism” and more. “We are honored to have such high-quality participants for this unique event,” says Ahava Oblak, co-founder of the Oregon Jewish Culture Project. “The deep level of insight into Dylan’s essential canon by these scholars and spiritual leaders who have spent decades tracking Dylan’s mercurial religious self-representations and spiritual-societal insights promises to make this day deeply impactful for Bob Dylan fans of every faith”. Panelist biographies, panel and keynote topics, and the complete speaker schedules are available at https://oregonjewishcultureproject.org All-day conference passes are available for $36 at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4839856 About the Oregon Jewish Culture Project: Established in 2016, the mission of the Oregon Jewish Culture Project (OJCP) is to offer unique Jewish cultural programming in strategic cooperation and collaboration with other Jewish community partners. The OJCP is located in Eugene, OR, and benefits residents of Lane County, the larger Oregon Jewish community and our allies and regional partners. Founded by Co-Directors Rabbi Jonathan Seidel and Ahavah Oblak, OJCP has hosted successful events such as the “ Jewish Food Conference”, “Native American-Jewish Storytelling Day of Sharing”, a concert featuring Sephardic singer Michelle Alany & The Mystics and classes such as “Jewish Food and Culture in History (Ancient and Medieval)”, “Introduction to Talmud: Hebrew and Aramaic”, “Basic Music and Liturgy of Judaism”, “Kabbalah and Science in the Renaissance and Judaism” and “Science: Antiquity to the Renaissance”.
Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation: introduction
Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation:: a Reading of the 1965-67 Lyrics, 2017
This book expresses an unorthodox take on the Dylan lyrics in question. The argument assumes that the songs express not a conscious but the composing Dylan's sub-conscious spiritual drive toward facing the erasure of self-identity--which I term the "existential real." This amounts to a spiritual contextualization of existence per se minus any religionist reference. Many of the book's readings admittedly risk a "common sense" or more plausible understanding of the songs; yet strive toward a consistent interpretive relation to them that ambiguates such understandings.
Bob Dylan: Our Homer Lecture at the Humanties Research Center (HRC) UT Austin 2006
2006
The thesis of Palaima's presentation on March 1, 2006 is that, first of all, more than any other American popular artist during the last half century, Bob Dylan has the qualities of an oral poet; and second, that Dylan’s songs serve the same functions of social enculturation and witness to key realities of life that were the hallmark of ancient Greek oral poetry like Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Works and Days.
BD BMCR 2018 2018.11.51 Review of Richard Thomas Why Bob Dylan Matters.pdf
Bryn Mawr Classical review, 2018
A review of Richard Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, written specifically for classicists, broadly defined. In this book, you will get a sweeping overview of Dylan’s songs and writings, their cultural significance—what personal experiences and concerns, intellectual influences and historical issues called them into being—the methods that produced them, their intertextual relationships with works of other songsters, poets, writers, thinkers—mostly ancient, but a good many modern —all concentrating upon songs that best exemplify Dylan’s grounding and continuing interests in classical, mainly Latin, authors. Thomas also invites us to see classical form and rhetorical techniques in songs that contain no classical allusions, e.g., “Blowin’ in the Wind” (pp. 25-27). And he guides us through the poetic artistry of Virgil and Dylan (pp. 193-225), covering instances where Dylan is lovingly stealing from translations of Virgil (e.g., “Lonesome Day Blues” and Aeneid Book 6, p. 194) and ways in which Dylan’s painstaking reworkings of texts, now traceable in the Dylan archives in Tulsa, are Virgilian (pp. 203-225). Thomas discusses many clear thefts from translations of Ovid and Homer in chapter 8 (pp. 227-265). These riches are provided by a master of classical intertextuality who has longstanding intellectual and spiritual sympathies for Dylan’s art and what Dylan’s songs have meant and continue to mean to humankind, to himself, to you and to me. I also point out that the phrase on the Nobel Prize gold medallion is not Virgil’s original line: inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. It is a loving theft from it. The official translation offered by the Swedish Academy and perpetuated unthinkingly on almost every Web site retrieved by Google is not a translation of the medallion inscription, but of Virgil Aeneid 6.63. More significantly for the art of intertextuality, the Swedish Academy is using a translation of the Virgilian line taken from William Morris, The Aeneids of Virgil: Done Into English (London 1876) p. 175. Morris’ Latin was not all that good, but his deep human concerns for the literally miserable lives of many common human beings are very much in line with Dylan’s. The line on the medallion inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes means something appropriate to the individual Nobel awardees in literature and various scientific fields: it is of use (i.e., it is beneficial) to have improved life through discovered arts.
Postmodern Prophecy Bob Dylan and the Practices of Self Subversion
Understanding Religion and Culture, Ed. by Terry Ray Clark and Dan W. Clanton, Jr., 2012
The essay first utilizes the hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval in order to examine ancient Hebrew prophecy, with an eye toward eliminating the potentially repressive elements of this ancient tradition, and toward reclaiming those elements that contribute to the postmodern project of defending otherness, and fostering transformation. With this reclaimed prophecy in hand, then, the essay explores the songs, performance style, and life of Bob Dylan as an example of a distinctly postmodern prophecy, i.e., prophecy that remains in continuity with ancient prophecy, and yet is distinctly postmodern.