The Never Ending Pool

That's right. Only wannabe poseurs call him Bobby. Real poseurs say Boby.

clairedelalune was with Bobby in the 60s! he was a friend of him! so i'm told! he can even call him Zimmy!

Johan wrote:

QUOTE:
Bobby? I am fairly certain that no one currently refers to this nearly 67 year old man as "Bobby" except for wannabe poseurs on internet message boards.

"Fairly certain?"

Yeh, right.

4th Time Around wrote:

QUOTE:
clairdelalune wrote:

QUOTE:
Bobby is well, Bobby. That's just the familiar way of addressing that person. Of course, to his children he may be "dad" or "pops" or "father dearest". To Sara he may have been "darling" "honey" or "you fucking bastard". Isn't this true for all of us?

What you point out probably is true for all of us.
But, accepting that we are regarded in different ways by different people is the easy part.
The really interesting question is, how do we regard ourselves?
or, are there any selves 'there' to be regarded in any way whatsoever?
If 'I' am not 'there', or anywhere at all, what else, apart from inventing a 'self' or many selves, could possibly make sense?
Surely this is the key insight to which Dylan refers in Chronicles?

What he speaks to in Chronicles is depression. How he felt disconnected and not himself and makes the remark, "Something needs to change." And he didn't wait for the change he took it upon himself to make the change. With depression one does invent oneself for coping.

There is our self and there is our ultimate self - what we really are as to what we would ultimately like to be and they often struggle with each other like two different people.

Environmental factors out of our control can take the 'self' you are and are comfortable or familiar with and throw it into chaos. Your changing age, possibly getting fired from a job, getting dumped - can play a role in our loss of our own sense of self.

With Dylan it could have been his age, a change in the climate of music and musical taste, a case of a changing audience and a loss of response he once had when he first started out - the darling of the folk scene now had to compete in a larger and much more varied arena - so he questions who he was in this and how did he fit into it? Other personal factors unknown to the public could factor in as well.

Either way it's an identity crisis he speaks of in Chronicles.

pontiuspilatus wrote [in part]:

QUOTE:
he was a friend of him!

Hey, pontiuspilitonus, with a line like that you really do have better things to do than to be posting, here.


Note to 4th: Nice idea for a thread.

His 'identity crisis' may well have included a psychological component. But I think it went much deeper than that.

I remember being astounded by his extraordinary statement in the 60 Minutes interview, to the effect that some people are born in the wrong place, and even to the wrong parents.
Whatever about a 'place' being described as an 'accident of birth', to feel that you possibly had the wrong parents must lead to identity questions on the deepest level imaginable.


(from about 5'35&quot

4th Time Around wrote:

QUOTE:
His 'identity crisis' may well have included a psychological component. But I think it went much deeper than that.

I remember being astounded by his extraordinary statement in the 60 Minutes interview, to the effect that some people are born in the wrong place, and even to the wrong parents.
Whatever about a 'place' being described as an 'accident of birth', to feel that you possibly had the wrong parents must lead to identity questions on the deepest level imaginable.

(from about 5'35")

Depending on how you want to rip this out of context, his quote was, "Some people are born with the wrong name or the wrong parents...it happens sometimes." (Loosely translated: A lot of different things can happen to people, with me it just happened to be my name."

I think it would be misapplied as a statement he is making about himself being born to the wrong parents. I believe his point was he was born with the wrong name. The rest of it is just a universal example. "Some people." He could have just as easily added 'wrong parents, wrong names, wrong places.' It's a statement on a level of spirituality, but a universal one not strictly speaking of himself. It's his name he is talking about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07Haynes.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote, Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan were both familiar with. It was a quote that if he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have killed the project: “I is another.” Then came the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: “If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.” (A seventh Dylan, Charlie, “the ‘little tramp’ of Greenwich Village,” was eventually cut.)

Rimbaud mentality
by Roger Clarke

(The Independent, Mar 31, 1997)

... This Sixties fetishisation of the poet is evident in Charles Nicholl's new travel book Someone Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 (published by Cape in April). Nicholl observes the influence of Rimbaud on Bob Dylan who, as early as 1965, name-checked Rimbaud in an interview. Rimbaud became, for the Sixties generation, the original alienated rebel, vagabond poet, the dropout who practised "systematic derangement of the senses" 100 years before the "Summer of Love". Rimbaud is one of those template icons who is all things to all people: young kids identify with his rebellion, musicians (like Benjamin Britten, in Les Illuminations) with his verbal musicality, dancers and choreographers (like Richard Alston) with his physicality, gay men with his up-front sexual stance, travel writers (like Nicholl or Philip Smedley) with his feverish wanderlust. Born in the north of France in 1854, the son of a soldier, he had youthful ambitions to be a poet and ran away from home in his early teens, embarking upon what was always to be a nomadic existence. Written-out before the age of 19, he turned his back on the dandified poetry scene in Paris and went abroad to become a coffee-trader and arms-dealer on the north-east coast of Africa. Bruce Chatwin, with whom I wrote an opera libretto about Rimbaud's "lost" period in Africa, and who named his last book What Am I Doing Here after a Rimbaud quote, always said that the poet had to give up writing or "go mad". Every writer sometimes entertains the fantasy of "giving up writing for ever", but Rimbaud actually did it - he pushed the artistic self-destruct button. On his deathbed, nursed by a sister unaware that he had even been a poet, the family doctor at Roche casually asked his bedridden patient about his work written 15 years earlier. The great poet merely rasped "poetry is a load of shit" and turned away in disgust. ...

This speculation is out of hand. When you start making diagnoses of someone it's time we leave off.

More off the board.

interesting discussion
thanks