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Bob Dylan's Christmas Lights: A Scholarly Treatise
- denton-scratch 3y ago[flagged]
- Baxxter 3y agoThis is funny. It's a slight dig at those folks (of which I'm sure the author is one, or the self-effacing sort) who want every one of Bob's incoherent ramblings to be 'deep'. "Because I grew up in a world where nothing that Mr. Dylan ever did was too insignificant not to be worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny, I immediately understood that this was no ordinary, haphazardly arranged, string of colored lights. It had to contain a deeper meaning." A lot of Bob's work is the intellectual equivalent of a paltry string of Christmas lights. Your outlook with figure if that's an insult or a compliment.
- denton-scratch 3y agoWell, thanks for clarifying! I enjoy satire and sarcasm; but I found the parody of "dylanologists" weak enough that maybe that was how he actually thought. And anyway, is that really still a thing? So I doubted that he was trying to pastiche something we've all thought was silly for a couple of decades. Perhaps I have a sense-of-humour defect; maybe I just didn't get it.
- karaterobot 3y agoI assume this article is just for fun, a poke at the grand tradition of people overthinking everything Dylan says or does. I hope so anyway, and at Merrill Markoe didn't have to dig through his trash to gain these important insights.
- detourdog 3y agoMerrill Markoe was an early writer for and big influence on David Letterman.
- karaterobot 3y agoYep.
- libraryatnight 3y agoI found this hilarious, thanks for sharing - I didn't realize Merrill Markoe had a substack :)
- CharlesW 3y agoFor folks who've never heard the name, Merrill played a very important part in the post-Carson late-night TV of the late 1900s–early 2000s (think Letterman and Conan): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Markoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Markoe
- oluckyman 3y agoIn a similar but visual vein, here’s a Mad Magazine style treatment of the great man’s song Ballad of a Thin Man: https://paulpritchard.github.io/Ballad_of_a_Thin_Man/ https://paulpritchard.github.io/Ballad_of_a_Thin_Man/
- Boogie_Man 3y agoIs this entirely factitious, or did someone actually photograph one of Bob Dylan's houses once a year, layer "parodic humor" on top of it, and then publish it online? If the former, hardy har har. If the latter, I worry sincerely about the wellbeing of the person who completed this strange action, regardless of the layer of "it's just a joke I'm in on" placed on top. Edit: disregard. I realized I'm just "being a hater" on HN lately which is in the wrong spirit. My bad.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]