Bob Dylan’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ Revealed

 

"Warmuth wrote that Chronicles is “meticulously fabricated” and that “dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources.

“Dylan has hidden many puzzles, jokes, secret messages, secondary meanings, and bizarre subtexts in his book,” Warmuth asserted in the essay. “Dylan borrows from American classics and travel guides, fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War, science fiction, crime novels, both Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe, Hemingway, books on photography, songwriting, Irish music, soul music, and a book about the art of sideshow banter.”

“He dipped into both a book favored by a nineteenth-century occult society and a book about the Lewinsky scandal by Showgirls screen writer Joe Eszterhas,” Warmuth wrote."

"That’s something that poets have been doing forever,” says Harvard classics professor Richard Thomas, who has written academic papers on Dylan’s use of the work of the first-century poet Virgil. “It’s a way of alluding to or correcting or parodying what came before,” Thomas told me last week. “You hear the stolen line, but it’s replaced by its new context. That’s how folk music works, how the blues works.” "

read analysis by CHRIS FRANCESCONI: 

Bob Dylan’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ Revealed - The Daily Beast