Is Bob Dylan overrated?

The daughter of a deceased Hibbing native is auctioning off a stash of 42 “love letters” that teenage Bob sent her mom in 1957-59.

jeez, that's embarrassing. i'm sure robert zimmerman's love letters are better than most teenagers. but still, maybe just wait til he dies until that stuff comes out

James Joyce's are still the gold standard.

OMG. I seem to recall Vladimir Nabokov shaking his head at Joyce’s rhapsodies on Nora’s callipygian splendors, to paraphrase.

I'm picturing a major discovery where we find out his most famous protest songs are simply rewrites of dirty missives from his youth.

it's a hard
it's a hard
it's a hard
it's a hard
it's a hard thiiiiiing to say but we're breaking up, babe

OMG, these Joyce letters!

what does “blocking” mean?

(ok, I get it now)

One of the books about Dylan quotes a youthful poem where he rhapsodizes about someone's "cans" the "size of headlights".

that's why he won the nobel prize

lol

can make it home with just one of those cans

This adds an extra level of confusion to The Wallflowers’ One Headlight

Thought maybe Dylan's People would spike this with a copyright claim, as Salinger or his estate did w letters that might have been published (also somebody's Pynchon stash never quite saw the light of day, but no, not so far, maybe because they're purportedly intended for archive perusal, not publication:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/love-letters-written-by-bob-dylan-sells-auction-670k-1235266424/ Sold sep.: "Poems Without Titles," from his college days, so mebbe moving beyond
mixing cans x headlights.

Just read that the Dylan book about other people's songs had a $600 hand signed edition that turns out to have used auto pen. The publisher is offering refunds, but defending it by saying that that actually was Dylan's signature, just automatically reprinted. Details, details ...

Indeed ^

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/arts/bob-dylan-fake-signature.html

I think a similar thing happened with "signed" copies of Keith Richards's book, but 1) he didn't charge anything close to $600 and 2) no one denied that it was done by an autopen, they admitted it when asked.

the replies to the S&S tweet don't agree with the "as it turns out" :

pic.twitter.com/s1buWZSTs8

— Simon & Schuster (@simonschuster) November 20, 2022

Wait, did they do a similar promotion with Lyrics? That will really compound the problem if those were autopenned too.

I used to have a replica of an original painting by Edward Hopper hanging with invisible tape in my dorm room.

A real replica?

Well, Hopper painted the original. The gift shop just made a perfect copy of it on poster paper that I was able to get for $15. Like, just glancing at it, it was practically identical. Looked like this:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQYz4LMXDQ4Ikq4krb95et0Hsk_YSWTcXVYK6eDhpk1-6zmySju8Gs_DnHKCK-KEcl8Zkg&usqp=CAU

If anyone wants a Dylan autograph, for free, here you go!

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/11/22/books/oakImage-1669149215382/oakImage-1669149215382-mediumSquareAt3X.jpg

You're welcome.

Suckah! Flipping that on eBay right now - starting bid, $100! (reserve not met)

Goddamit, you're one step ahead of me!

fuck eBay - I'm selling mine on Coinbase!

where can i purchase the nft?

Bob Dylan is an ai

Johnny's in the basement, mixin' up the medicine
I'm on the pavement, thinkin' about the government
The man in a trench coat, badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough, wants to get it paid off

Look out kid, the robbers have come around
Get inside you, kid we've got to lay low!

Why have you sided with The Elite?
Well, Spacebook's the bad choice they made

Man those bands are suckers and fucks
They can't come in, can't venture in
Because if you engage them you'll never live it down

Why have you sided with The Elite?
Booooooo! Hey!

While The FWA ain't garbage to begin with
Those men spout anarchy just to steal money
And sell them Swisher Sweets but plenty burned into the cane

Then the police pull a kid off the block
And march the next kid up in the cuffs
Of that home-made mason

Reading between the lines I’m wondering if the publisher was duped by the Dylan camp, like they sent the books off in good faith to be signed and nobody realised what had happened when they came back.

Is this different from what Margaret Atwood (and I assume other authors) did, where she signed books in other cities using some kind of remote-control arm and pen? Those seemed to be regarded as real signatures?

Dylan’s Own ShishetSweet cigars

There is a John Updike story in which Henry Bech is supposed to sign like a thousand pieces of paper that will later be tipped into books. He goes to a beach house with his girlfriend, procrastinates, and gets like a third of the way through and has to sepnd the last few hours hurrying. After writing "Henry Bech" a hundred times it gets to Hen Bch, then H B, then just, like B---.

Some years ago, a well-meaning relative gave me a "signed first edition" (created for the non-existent "Signed First Edition Club") of Witches of Eastwick. I looked at the signed flyleaf and knew instantly how it had been made.

I mean it IS your signature but it's not signed by you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VB8DuZMv8

Dillon is cleverly evoking deep American cultural history, per his norm: http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Duplicating_Polygraph

Xpost

Well, I bought a fully signed Echo and the bunnymen album, "Songs to learn and sing", some were signed "Ian McCullough" but most were "Ian Mac"

(my above autocorrect error is a happy-accident allusion to Bob's original pseudonym:

According to Dylan biographer Robert Shelton, the singer first confided his change of name to his high school girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, in 1958, telling her that he had found a "great name, Bob Dillon".

– interestingly, that's a different high school girlfriend than the recipient of those recently auctioned letters. player!)

xp FWIW Richard Thompson is a good example of someone whose signature has devolved over time to make signing quicker and more painless. What originally looked like a full cursive name gradually turned into a pair of indistinct squibbles. When I got a signed copy of his memoir, the latter is what I got - I was curious as to whether this was his usual signature (he posted a photo of him signing an enormous stack of books piled on to a long conference table) and I found someone who was able to document that development with a large collection of signed Thompson albums.

I can actually link to some examples - see below, but I think these signatures were all done around the time of the signed item's release:

https://i.ibb.co/njH93tk/01.jpg https://i.ibb.co/LC6GLYk/02.jpg https://i.ibb.co/PZHwRng/03.jpg

A couple times I saw John Wesley Harding (Wesley Stace) do an incredibly deft move with a ball-point pen to open, sign, and close a shrink-wrapped CD jewel case in one fluid movement. To this day I have no idea how he did it. I guess the answer is frequent practice.

When I was a card-collecting kid the in the '90s, I remember a baseball card mag running an article about a company rep going on a long sportsman's weekend with the then-hot prospect Ryan Klesko to ensure he signed 1000 insert cards, some of which were autographed in rowboat while the player was fishing, while others were done in a deer stand whilst hunting--the overall point being how hard it is collecting the signatures for such endeavors.

I would think a baseball player would be wary of cramping up his hand (or a musician, come to think of it)...

That was pretty much a Seinfeld episode, wasn't it? Where Jerry hates endorsing his enormous stack of paltry royalty checks because of what it does to his wrists?

Apparently the same Dylan signature used for the books have also been used on expensive "signed" art prints sold through various art galleries. It feels like a surefire class action lawsuit.

Michael Ondaatje’s signature is just a wiggly line. It used to be an arguable M and a wiggly line, but apparently that’s become too difficult.

https://www.biblio.com/book/divisadero-signed-dated-nyc-ondaatje-michael/d/1131007102

this guy has been pulling the football of his authenticated identity away from his fans over and over and over again since 1965 and every time it happens they make a face like it's the first time

And then there's his "signature" bourbon, Heaven's Door...

bourbob

Official Statement:

To my fans and followers,

I’ve been made aware that there’s some controversy about signatures on some of my recent artwork prints and on a limited-edition of Philosophy Of Modern Song. I’ve hand-signed each and every art print over the years, and there’s never been a problem.

However, in 2019 I had a bad case of vertigo and it continued into the pandemic years. It takes a crew of five working in close quarters with me to help enable these signing sessions, and we could not find a safe and workable way to complete what I needed to do while the virus was raging. So, during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help. With contractual deadlines looming, the idea of using an auto-pen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.

Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately. I’m working with Simon & Schuster and my gallery partners to do just that.

With my deepest regrets,
Bob Dylan