 16 April 2006
Re: Song of the day: The Wicked Messenger
Author: Roving Gambler (---.mclink.it) [info]
Date: 02-18-03 05:14
is bob dylan the wicked messenger? is the 66 tour persona, the messenger of a new music?
i always thought that JWH have a lot to do with bob dylan thinkin to his previous years, from 63 to 66 (tom payne, etc.), tryin to find a meaning to what happened to him in those burining moments of his life
Last Tape
I might have kept it. (Pause.) But I gave it to the dog.
Pause.
Ah well . . .
Pause.
Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . . for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely--(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again)--great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality--(Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again)--unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire--(Krapp curses loader, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again)--my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
Pause.
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
Pause.
Beckett in NYRB
"Krapp’s Last Tape opens on one man alone with his own memories and desires, punctuating a monotonous present by recall of a moment-lit past. As a writer and as a man lying ‘‘propped up in the dark,’’ Beckett makes Krapp’s associations with Proust even more pointedly prominent. The situation of Krapp stocktaking and listening to old stocktakings is dependent upon the catalysts of Time, Habit, and Memory, the trinity considered by Beckett in his 1931 study of Proust. Considerations that Krapp has made and will continue to make of his life—intellectual, physical, spiritual—are rendered... "
John Wesley Harding
I heard this album for the first time last year, I don't why it took me so long. Apart from its Old Testament roots, and the tug of the West, the thing that really struck me was Bob Dylan singing in a strong Minnesota ie Central European/Scandinavian accent. Also unusually, like Led Zeppelin's Trampled Underfoot, very dance oriented ... ceilidh. In its way, Dylan's most Hebridean album.
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