TRUE LOVE TENDS TO FORGET

Here's my review of Dylan's Chronicles on WBUR's Arts pages. Here's the passage nobody else seems to have noticed yet:

"...In the midst of all this blarney, there are scenes that conjure up dodged bullets. Once, while sitting around Johnny Cash's house after dinner with Graham Nash, Kris Kristofferson, and some others, trading tunes, an anti-Semitic remark from a Country Music patriarch Joe Carter stops the camaraderie cold. Dylan barely blinks. It's not news that the Carter family were paranoid misogynists with redneck vinegar in their veins, but it does seem fraudulent of Dylan, one of the sharper tools in the shed, to glance at it with nary a shrug..."

And here's the last graph without the edits:

But then, as usual, Dylan makes you feel like a grump for calling his bluff when he's getting away with the literary equivalent of murder: this book should have been much longer, but it's infinitely preferable shorter. Perhaps it took him a couple hundred bad songs and sessions to cough up a decent piece of prose. Perhaps he's biding his musical time, feels that the circus has long since passed him by and caught up with again too many times to get all sentimental about it, and the rearview mirror gets boring if you have nothing left to say. Perhaps the notebooks he's kept start pulling him back in, he found inspiration in writing about other people's music, and cranked it out as if a different medium had suddenly sparked the old muse--like one of those dusty crowd-pleasing flips he stumbled on during a slow night on the high-wire. He gives it extra play on a whim, and surprises himself yet again with how much music the words carry, how much the crowd buoys him. Suddenly, catching his balance, he snaps back into the habit of pleasing himself with his innate skill at making the crowd roar. Just for kicks he does it again, then falls backwards down into the net, grinning.