If you'll be my flotsam, I could be half the man I used to

This morning, getting ready for work*, I put on Dylan's Nashville Skyline. I know his fans consider this record a big letdown in Dylan's catalog, especially following Blonde On Blonde and the masterful John Wesley Harding, and while I can't defend the consistency of Nashville Skyline - or explain Dylan's "sweet" voice - I think the record is filled with great songs. "I Threw It All Away" and "Lay Lady Lay", in particular, stand up to anything Dylan has ever recorded.

One of the reasons people often write-off this record and assume Dylan wasn't firing on all cylinders when he put it together is its length. Clocking in at 27 minutes, it belongs in that rarified field of early Beach Boys records for cheating the consumer by delivering an album barely longer than a single LP side. As far as I'm concerned, that's a reason for greatness. As Don Was pointed out years ago, most people don't listen past the first 30 minutes of any record anyhow. When you're getting ready for work, it's nice to have an entire record you can listen to before you head out the door.

On the subject of length: whenever I listen to Nashville Skyline, I always skip the first track. Always. It's "The Girl from the North Country", a remake of an earlier Dylan composition, performed with Johnny Cash. Apparently, the record company had Dylan include it as (1) Johnny Cash was really big at the time (1969) and (2) they didn't think he should put out a 23 minute record, which he was apparently ready to do. The track is OK, I suppose, but it's kind of melancholy, and lacks the full arrangement of the rest of the LP. I always skip straight ahead to "Nashville Skyline Rag", a great way to kick off any record, even if I'd never claim it's the equal of "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Subterranean Homesick Blues".

This led me to think of all the first tracks I generally skip on various LPs:

• "Who Loves the Sun" on the Velvet Underground's Loaded. Beautiful record; lame first track. Or, at least, a track that pales next to everything else on the record (yes, even "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" -you got to see him in the rodeo!), particularly the restored "Sweet Jane" that follows. Now there's a song to kick off a record.
• "Sunday Morning" on the Velvet Underground's debut. What is it about the VU? I actually like this track a lot, but I think "Waiting for the Man" is (again) a much stronger way to begin a record. Interestingly, if you have the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box, you can tell that "Sunday Morning" was only prepended to this record at the last minute (it's handwritten on the tape box, while the other tracks are typed out).
• "White Light / White Heat" by... nah, just kidding.
• The first two tracks of Blonde On Blonde. What is it about Dylan? He's notorious for his inability to consistently discern his best work from his worst, and the choice of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" to open his arguably greatest record is a perfect example. Any way you look at it, this is a pretty weak song - like "Country Pie" but without the catchy riffs or lasting humor - and it's amazing that this made it to an LP while "She's Your Lover Now" never got out of the vaults and "Positively Fourth Street" was consigned to a 45. "Pledging My Time" is pretty good as an LP track, but also makes for a lousy opener. I go straight to Johanna on this one.
• The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society. I love the title track, which opens the album. But I love the nostalgia and melancholy of "Do You Remember Walter", the second track, even more. It sounds upbeat, and the narrator is reminiscing of good times, but he's also talking about times that are not only gone for good but forgotten by many. It almost breaks my heart every time I hear it. I could probably write a book about the way this song makes me feel.
  

"Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago / If you saw me now you wouldn't even know my name..."

* Yes, I got laid off last May, but oddly I still have my job as a fulltime employee. A ten-month layoff. Well, optional layoff. It's a long, boring story. My official end date is March 31.

What I am sort of reading

The pile of books next to my bed is ever-expanding, endangering my physical health each time I step out of bed and risk breaking my neck by trying to get my footing on a stack of paperbacks in lieu of the carpet. Some of these books I've read; some of them I've never opened; most I've started but gotten distracted by another book along the way. (I'm sure, by the time I finish this post, Strattera salesmen will be ringing my phone off the hook). Here's a list of the books next to my bed, and how far along I've gotten in each one.

As a general note, I don't do fiction well. I've always preferred history books, or at least nonfiction. I still read a few fiction books a year, but I have trouble finding the depth in fiction that I know is there, or at least should be there. Anyhow, about that pile of books...

• The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson.
  

I've been working my way through this book for a few weeks now. Ferguson is one of those historians who appears to write a book for every movie Ben Stiller appears in these days, and I read both Colossus and Empire in the last few months, and enjoyed both, particularly the latter, which recounts the rise and fall of the British Empire and how it functioned (economically, politically) at its peak. My father's background is British - his parents both immigrated to the US in the 1920s - while my maternal grandfather was born in a British colony and served with the British Army in WWI before immigrating here as well. So I'm always interested in British history - in fact, it occurs to me that pretty much the only classes I did well in during college dealt with British history, too. The Pity of War is a series of essays examining popular understandings of the factors behind the start and course of WWI and then attempting to debunk each one systematically. For example, that WWI was the result of excessive German militarization. Ferguson clearly has a passion for his subject, but the level of detail is occasionally overwhelming - e.g. it's interesting to know how French bonds performed in the years leading up to the war but I don't necessarily need as much detail as Ferguson is willing to provide. A more condensed argument would work just as well for me. I feel bad writing that, because it makes me sound like I want my history simplified, and I disdain that trait in others, but I'll absolve it by reminding myself how many other books I have to read right now.

• The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward.

If you study history in college, they drill the concept of historiography into your head. It changes the way you read current events for ever. In 2002, I went through a period of interest in the US Civil War and Reconstruction, which led me to a number of books written in the 1950s arguing, in what was novel for the time (and foreshadowed the subsequent highwater mark of the Civil Rights movement) that Reconstruction was less of a corrupt enterprise run by Northerners and collaborationist Southerners and more a failed but noble experiment.

Anyhow, I bought Woodward's book around this time. Unfortunately, I bought Eric Foner's massive tome on Reconstruction right around the same time (scoffing at the "abridged" version, to my own subsequent regret) and never made headway with either. (Foner's book left my bedside a few months ago and now resides in a bookshelf, normally the dominion of books I've already digested).

In this vein of Reconstruction revisionism, I'd gladly recommend the short and readable The Era of Reconstruction by Kenneth Stampp. It's worth noting that I was taught the more traditional "corrupt" interpretation of Reconstruction while in high school during the late 80s and early 90s in Massachusetts, which proves that Stampp's book (and others like it) might still be regarded as novel today. Certainly the repeated appearance of words like "carpetbagger" in the press during Hillary Clinton's 2000 senatorial campaign demonstrated that the traditional interpretation of Reconstruction remains widespread.

• Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, and Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960-1994, both by Clinton Heylin.

It took me a long time to get hooked on Dylan - years and year - but only intently in the last year or so. My traditional routine when finding myself interested in a new band or artist is to buy everything I can get my hands on. Dylan's catalog is a little big for that, though. Another thing I generally like to do (if you can't tell already) is read about the subjects I interest me, so I picked-up both of Heylin's books on Dylan. I've read two of Heylin's books before, roughly ten years ago. One was on the subject of Public Image Limited; the other the book that acted as a buying guide to much of my record collection, From the Velvets to the Voidoids. There are passages in the latter that I know by heart. But I am not having as much luck with these Dylan books. The Recording Sessions is easy enough to read, and Heylin is a stickler for detail, which I appreciate. But he also has a habit of injection his opinion into everything - a trait that didn't bother me at all ten years ago but now makes it hard to take him seriously at times. Behind the Shades is another matter entirely. The problem isn't Heylin's style (I don't think), but the feeling I have that I no longer want to know everything about the musicians I like. Maybe it's because I'm older and the feeling of wonder I get by admiring someone's talent no longer extends to expecting him or her to be ideal in any other way. Dylan has written some of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard - few albums contain as amazing a three-song streak as "Visions of Johanna", "One of Us Must Know", and "I Want You" constitute on Blonde on Blonde - but his personal life is depressingly full of human failure. I'm happier not really knowing. I only figured this out in the past few weeks, and it kept me from buying a Marc Bolan biography for the same reason just this past week.

• Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger.

I re-read The Catcher in the Rye a few months ago. I am pretty sure everyone in the US read this book in high school, but for some reason I missed it and only read it thanks to the insistence of a classmate my freshman year of college. Reading it again over a decade later, my impressions of Holden and the story he was telling had changed dramatically, but my enjoyment of the book remained unchanged and total. So I picked-up an ultra-cheap edition of Franny and Zooey shortly after, but have only managed to get through the shorter Franny portion so far.

• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman.

More of my WWI obsession. I borrowed this from a friend two years ago, but I haven't made any headway yet. After reading John Keegan's overwhelming detailed military history WWI, I'm not sure I can handle a whole book dedicated to a single month of diplomacy. It might be time for me to return it!

• Arguing About War, Michael Walzer.

I mistakenly included this on my Christmas list, forgetting that I had read (or attempted to read) Just and Unjust Wars by the same author. The subject matter is interesting, but the actual text is highly theoretical, too much so for me.

Not sure why this is still in the pile. It should probably be demoted to the box of books in the hall destined for the used book store.

• The Declassified Eisenhower, Blanche Weisen Cook.

On the fortieth anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address (the famous "military industrial complex" speech) in 2001, CSPAN broadcast a conference of academics discussing Eisenhower and his legacy. Blanche Weisen Cook was one of the authors who spoke, stressing Eisenhower's traits that would, by modern standards, put him on the left of the political spectrum. I tracked down her long out-of-print book shortly afterwards, only to discover that its subject matter is a bit different than her talk that day. It's been next to my bed in two different apartments, and I still haven't made any headway, but I'm willing to take another shot.

On the subject of Eisenhower, here's one of my favorite quotes - not sure when he said:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

• Herbert Hoover, Eugene Lyons.

Bought this for $1 at a Salvation Army in Portland this past summer. Hoover has always interested me as a good guy caught at a bad time, but as I paid for it, my wife said "You'll never read it." So far, she's right. I did open it at random to an eye-opening story about Hoover refusing to let his proponents invoke the Catholicism of his opponent in the 1928 race, Al Smith, as a mode of attack. Turns out we're still fighting over the same things 70-some years later.

• Jarhead, Anthony Swofford.

A co-worker lent this to me, but I haven't been able to read it yet. I've read and enjoyed a few other books on the Persian Gulf War, so I look forward to it.

• Classic Albums: Ziggy Stardust, Mark Paytress.

I read this a few years back and rescued it from the "sell" pile to glance through it again. I adore Bowie's work, and I appreciate that Paytress starts by nothing that Ziggy Stardust isn't anywhere near Bowie's best record. But otherwise I find that my feelings regarding the Heylin books on Dylan apply here, too.

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Re-reading this, at random stops and starts, for some ideas of my own. I read a lot of Fitzgerald's work after college, including Gatsby, and while I have some problems with Fitzgerald's plots (which feature far too many convenient deaths, especially in This Side of Paradise) I generally like his style.

• Catch 22, Joseph Heller.

I know I should like this book. I know. People always reference Heller alongside Kurt Vonnegut, and I've read almost everything Vonnegut's published, some of it again and again. (The two guys were even friendly). And it's supposedly a cynical look at "the good war", something that should appeal to me on several levels. But despite many, many attempts, I've never gotten more than a few pages into this. Maybe one of these days. I know I should like this book.

OK, I can't believe I just wrote so much about books I essentially HAVEN'T read.