Regarding “A Complete Unknown”
I now compose this verse,
discussing Bob, whose famous choice
poetically perverse
to accompany his voice,
electrically induced
to amplify its feral sound
unnaturally — seduced
more than by Jewish faith he found
irrelevant to his persona
that changed Inconstantly, like times
which blew his music—moaner
in the wind, as in his famous
song when young. A winner
of Stockholm’s prize Bob won like Seamus
Heaney, though no sinner
for using electricity, forbidden
to Jews on Sabbath. Though Jewish,
most Torah laws that have been written
Bob treated as less than truish,
while with pure Jewish ungentility
his voice has the facility
to project affability
with ingenuous agility,
not ever gentle, one that scrapes
the skin, it’s said, like sandpaper,
not shifting from true Jewish shapes
Jews’ rule to love your neighbor,
while with the rough voice that he owns
he sings half-truths,
and moans.
Inspired by “Hit and myth A new film on the early days of Bob Dylan, “the most fecund empty vessel who ever did live,” TLS, 1/31/25, in which Toby Lichtig writes:
On the one hand, this is indeed the story of a young folk (and Elvis Presley) enthusiast from Saint Louis County, Minnesota, who rocks up in New York with a guitar and a whole load of chutzpah and proceeds very quickly to become Bob Dylan; on the other, it is the story of an artist who has remained, to his public and – in the public imagination – to those around him, wilfully unknowable, mercurial, mutable, prodigious, dissembling, disappointing, the most fecund empty vessel who ever did live. Focusing on the four extraordinarily productive years between 1961 and 1965 when Dylan went from being Woody Guthrie’s heir to a feedback-emitting “Judas” (another overblown legend), Mangold’s movie is more mythopic than biopic – and highly entertaining for it.,,,,,
If Robert Zimmerman was born to be Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet was born to play him. Several other actors have given it a go, including a full six in Todd Haynes’s experimental capitulation to the singer’s shapeshifting, I’m Not There (2007), but I suspect it will be Chalamet who will be remembered over time. He looks the part – reedy, tousled, prettily inscrutable, as smooth as a mossless stone; he knows how to suck on a cigarette and blow on a harmonica and wield a guitar and sneer at the men in suits. And he mostly sounds the part, capturing, in speech, the throwaway drawl, the Midwest snicker, and, in song, the “voice like sand and glue” (see David Bowie), “as if sandpaper could sing” (see Joyce Carol Oates). And if he is sometimes in danger of overdoing it, that seems fair enough: so was Bob.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
