Interviews With Writers

Author Interviews from Writers Around the World

  • Home
  • Advertising
  • Contact Us
  • Interview Submission
  • Privacy Policy
  • Sites in the BookGoodies Network
You are here: Home / Buyer's Guides / Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis

Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis

By Interviews With Writers

Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis

In Decoding Dylan, Jim Curtis takes readers behind Dylan‘s image as the quintessential rebel of the 1960s to reveal a new Dylan—Dylan the careful craftsman, a student of the art of songwriting. Curtis is the first Dylan scholar to draw on the revelations in his memoir Chronicles as well as a variety of sources about New York culture in the 1960s. He uses this material to arrive at a radically new interpretation of Dylan’s amazing songs, which revolutionized American music and which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Curtis shows that these songs are actually collages in which he ingeniously combined themes and images from American popular culture with themes and images from European high culture.
Readers of Decoding Dylan will come away with a new understanding, not just of Dylan, but also of his place in the history of American popular culture as a whole. .


Targeted Age Group:: 13+
Heat/Violence Level: Heat Level 1 – G Rated Clean Read

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
It started with Elvis. I grew up in Elvis' hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, and saw Elvis perform live there in 1956. It was an unforgettable experience, and it gave me a lifelong connection to rock and roll. Elvis opened me up to Dylan, so to speak, and I have lived with his songs in my heart and mind for over fifty years now. Sol it used to upset me when I kept hearing simplisic autobiographical interpretations of his work, such as "Who was he thinking about when he wrote 'Girl from the North Country'?" I believed then, and I believe now, that Dylan deserves better.
Amd yes. Dylan is a genius, but he's not the only one in the history of Western civilization. A lot of smart people have studied high achievers in the arts, and in the first part of "Decoding Dylan" I show how their findings deepen out understanding of Dylan.
Unlike most of his fans, Dylan doesn't distinguish between high culture and popular culture, between T.S. Eliot and the late Little Richard. for example. So I bring high culture and popular culture together to show how he creates a synthesis of the two, and does so in order to express what is ultimately a mystical vision of the world.

How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
nonfiction


Book Sample
Beginning of Preface:

In 2016, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the prize to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The awareness that Dylan innovated within tradition, and specifically within the great American song tradition, was long in coming. In the sixties, Dylan’s songs seemed startlingly, shockingly new. No one had ever sung such dense lyrics to the strident chords of an electric guitar before.
Corresponding to the dialectic between innovation and tradition in Dylan’s work is the dialectic between high culture and popular culture in his work. Dylan is an artist caught between extremes. This may explain his preference for luminal, transitional, spaces in songs such as “The Chimes of Freedom” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” It may also explain why he stands in a doorway on the cover of his album Street Legal.
Apart from the obvious reasons why anyone who loves popular music would be attracted to Dylan’s work, this dialectic between high culture and popular culture has a modest equivalent in my own life. I grew up in Elvis Presley’s hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, and I saw him perform live there in 1956. That experience gave me a lifelong fascination with rock and roll and popular music in general. But I also went north to school, and got a PhD in Russian literature from Columbia University. Odd as it may seem, I find Russian novels and rock and roll songs equally fascinating.
While I was working on this book, from time to time I did informal surveys with friends and family, asking them how many Dylan songs they could name. Most could name only two: “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Lay Lady Lay.” These two songs form bookends, as it were, for the great songs of the middle period such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Visions of Johanna.” These songs are too long and too demanding for people who are accustomed to listen to songs written in couplets about the agony and ecstasy of young love. For many people, it’s as though Dylan wrote these songs in code, so they give up on them.
I call this book Decoding Dylan because in it I follow the standard procedure of codebreakers and emphasize pattern recognition as a way of finding meaning in what was previously puzzling.. I show that it helps to make sense of Dylan by relating him to his cultural environment, namely New York in the sixties. It was in the sixties, that tumultuous decade, that Dylan revolutionized popular music, writing and performing the songs on which his reputation is based. That is why this book deals only with his songs of the sixtie.
Decoding Dylan follows chronological order by identifying some breakthrough moments during his early years in Hibbing, Minnesota, and then in Minneapolis, when he was enrolled at the University there. But his second, real life, began when he went to New York, where Bobby Zimmerman turned into Bob Dylan, and where hitherto unknown opportunities flooded his receptive sensibility, stimulating him to become a legendary singer-songwriter.
From this brief description it is obvious that Decoding Dylan is not a biography that describes his life in detail. Rather than isolating the subject, as American biographies tend to do, I treat the facts of Dylan’s biography and of his career in a broad cultural context. Although Dylan is a genius, and each genius is surely unique, it is nevertheless true that certain patterns such as birth order and ethnicity recur in the lives of high achievers in the arts. It enriches our understanding of Dylan if we match these specific features of his life to analogous features in the lives of the small group of his peers.


Links to Purchase Print Book version – Click links for book samples, reviews and to purchase
Buy Decoding Dylan Print Edition at Amazon

Links to Purchase eBook version – Click links for book samples, reviews and to purchase
Buy this eBook On Amazon


About the Author

Follow the author on Amazon

All information was provided by the author and not edited by us. This is so you get to know the author better.

Filed Under: Buyer's Guides, Heat Level 1 - G Rated Clean Read, Non-fiction Tagged With: Bob Dylan, classic rock, creativity, Jewish studies, Jim Curtis, music history, rock music

Follow Us!

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Search our Site

Featured Books

Featured Book: Uprooted: Family Trauma, Unknown Origins, and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination by Peter J. Boni

About Featured Book: Uprooted: Family Trauma, Unknown Origins, and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination by Peter J. Boni Only $0.99 for a limited time! 5/23/22 thru 6/6/22. How a journey of self-discovery unearthed the scandalous evolution of artificial insemination By his forties, Peter J. Boni was an accomplished CEO, with a specialty in navigating […]

Featured Book: Lothar the Lost by Richard R Lockwood

About Featured Book: Lothar the Lost by Richard R Lockwood Lothar von Richthofen was the little brother of Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron in the Great War. Lothar was not as famous as his brother, but he was also an ace, shooting down 40 opponents over the Western Front. He was shot […]

Featured Book: Think Like A Computer by Terysa Ridgeway

About Featured Book: Think Like A Computer by Terysa Ridgeway Limited Time Free Promotion (5/15 – 5/19) Looking for an engaging book to teach girls about Computer Science? This is it! Eight-year-old Terysa loves to solve problems. Give her some time and she’ll figure out how to solve anything. So when Terysa is given an […]

Featured Book: Zoomers vs Boomers by Sawyer Black

About Featured Book: Zoomers vs Boomers by Sawyer Black They’re live-streaming for their lives. When the influencers and live-streamers of Jackson High are selected as the winner of the Operation Gen Z contest, Craig Boucher and his friends can’t believe their luck. Sure, it’s a little awkward that Craig’s ex is on the team – […]

Featured Book: The Seven Hungers by Morgan Quaid

About Featured Book: The Seven Hungers by Morgan Quaid Regular price $2.99. Sale price $0.99 – 05/13/22 – 05/17/22 ———————— “Jaw-Dropping action, a great blend of investigation and horror. I’ve never quite read anything like it!” Grab your next urban fantasy thriller for just 99 cents! Censured Crown sorcerer Ambrose Drake is hired to investigate […]

Categories

  • Action & Adventure
  • Activity Books
  • Audiobook
  • Audiobooks
  • Autobiographies
  • Bargain Books Under $3
  • Biblical Studies
  • Biographical Fiction
  • Biographies & Memoirs
  • Birds
  • Body/Mind/Spirit
  • BookGoodies Network Merch
  • Business Books
  • Buyer's Guides
  • Children and Young Adult Books
  • Children's – Education & Reference
  • Children's Books
  • Children's eBooks
  • Christian Fiction
  • Christian Non-Fiction
  • Coloring Books for Kids
  • Comedy
  • Cowboy Romance
  • Cozy Mystery
  • Devotionals
  • Dogs
  • Drama
  • Educational/How-to
  • Erotic
  • Erotic Science Fiction
  • Erotica
  • Essays
  • Fairy Tale
  • Faith and Religion
  • Fantasy
  • Featured Books
  • Features
  • Fiction
    • Romance
  • Fiction Audio Books
  • Fitness
  • Giveaways
  • Health & Fitness
  • Heat Level 1 – G Rated Clean Read
  • Heat Level 2 – PG
  • Heat Level 3 – PG-13
  • Heat Level 4 – R Rated
  • Heat Level 5 – NC-17
  • Historical
  • Historical Fiction
  • Historical Romance
  • Horror
  • Humor
  • Humor (Fiction)
  • Interviews
  • Journal
  • Kindle Unlimited
  • Kindle Unlimited eBooks
  • Kindle Vella
  • Kindle Vella Serial
  • Limited Time Free Promotion
  • Love and Marriage
  • Magic
  • Memoir
  • Military Science Fiction
  • Music
  • Mystery
  • Mystery/Suspense
  • Mystery/Thriller
  • New Age
  • News
  • Non-fiction
  • Nonfiction Audio Books
  • Nonfiction Audiobooks
  • Paranormal
  • Paranormal Romance
  • Permafree
  • PermaFree Books
  • Personal Growth
  • Pet and Animal
  • Poetry
  • Print Books
  • Prophecy
  • Regency Romance
  • Romance – Erotica
  • Romantic Suspense
  • Science Fiction
  • SciFi
  • Spiritual Growth
  • Thriller
  • Time Travel
  • Travel
  • Urban Fantasy
  • Women's Fiction
  • Women's Health
  • YA – Action and Adventure
  • YA – Fantasy
  • Young Adult

Podcasts with Writers

Interview with Author – Onwe P. Alita

Interview with Author – Martini Fisher

Interview with Author – Dalton Smith

Interview with Author – Jim Curtis

Interview with Author – Alyson Mead

More Posts from this Category

Featured Books

Featured Book: The Girl Next Door by Lorhainne Eckhart

Featured Book: Doctor Lucky Charms by K.C. Crowne

Featured Book: Night Night, Norman by Marie Dimitrova

Featured Book: The Angelic Realm by Dennis Macy

Featured Book: The Games She Played by Meredith Bond

More Posts from this Category

Around the Site

  • Home
  • Advertising
  • Contact Us
  • Interview Submission
  • Privacy Policy
  • Sites in the BookGoodies Network

Copyright © 2022 · A BookGoodies Partner Site · Powered by WordPress and Genesis