Some excellent Dylaniana over at Zoilus. Apparently Sean Penn is doing the book-on-tape of Chronicles. If not Bob himself, I was hoping for Morgan Freeman. Carl and I are trying to figure out what in heaven's name Dylan is talking about in the Oh Mercy chapter when he unveils his new harmonic system ("If you're using the [diatonic] scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms"). Has he been reading Schillinger? Is he going to convert to twelve-tone music late in life, like Copland and Stravinsky? Momentary opacities aside, it is a gobsmacking great book. Among other surprises, it turns out that Dylan derived his entire songwriting art from Brecht and Weill's "Pirate Jenny," and that at some point in the early sixties he was listening to the violin concertos of Darius Milhaud. Time to get those out of storage, I guess.
