By contrast with this late arrival I always try to arrive at a cinema in good time. Good in the sense of fractionally before the film itself starts in order to avoid the trailers for forthcoming attractions. Half of these are for historical sagas which, with some slight variations in costume (competing brands of body-hugging designer armor, differences in the cut of peasants’ coarse and loose-fitting work-wear), all look the same. Arriving early for The Last Viking I did catch one of these trailers and, to my astonishment, discovered that it was for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Which was surprising because it looked like all the other made-for-teens epics I’d had the misfortune to glimpse over the years.

The film came out. I had no desire to see it but if I was going to see it it had to be in an IMAX. Same with Dunkirk which proved to be an immense cinematic experience. Not that I’m easily seduced by the tech specs of a given release. The debate about whether Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest films were best seen in 70mm, VistaVision or in whatever format they happened to be served up at your local multiplex deflected discussion from the more pressing question of whether they were worth seeing at all. The Odyssey, it turned out, was impossible to see at an IMAX. Every screening in London was sold out till the end of time. A few seats were always available but, as anyone who has ended up at a chiropractor’s after the neck-strain contortions of sitting in the first couple of rows will attest, only the central segment of seats offers anything like full IMAX immersion. In a life lacking in focus and purpose all sorts of little things whoosh into the attendant vacuum so I became absorbed in the search for tickets. The impossibility of getting tickets became the motor for getting tickets. Because it was so difficult to see I became desperate to see a film I had no desire to see. And suddenly this dedication was rewarded. A batch of seats in the middle of the middle of the Leicester Square Cineworld became available for a mid-afternoon Sunday screening.

As O-Day drew closer I viewed the prospect with less-and-less enthusiasm. Reports came back from profoundly unreliable sources — my friend Rob Doyle who saw it twice, first in an IMAX and then, a week later, on a regular screen — claiming it was great. Others said that it was rubbish.

And they were right. It turned out to be exactly as feared: a total bore but this boredom had its peaks. The candle- and fire-lit feasts were the biggest bore of all. Followed closely by the fight scenes. That’s the strange thing about fights in action films, especially sword fights: they’re always a bore. (Is any sound in cinema more boring than the metallic swish of a sword being drawn from its scabbard?) The script was so unspeakably stupid it should have been called The Idiossey. A reversal of the censor’s certificates is in order indicating that a film like this which is deemed unsuitable for persons under the age of 15 should not be seen by anyone over the age of 15. Would I have enjoyed it if I were 12? Impossible to say but to my adult eyes it seemed a pale shadow of movies that warmed my young heart: Jason and the Argonauts with a hint — provided by Charlize Theron’s Calypso — of One Million Years BC.

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It looked OK but not that great. There were some big seas, big beaches and big skies, like in Dunkirk, but without the patient queuing of the British troops which lent that film its double allegorical dimension: first as a realist parable of years of Soviet-style resignation in the face of canceled ferries and rail replacement services, and then as a still more prophetic — and politically ambiguous — depiction of the impossibility of stopping small boats crossing the channel. In a way The Idiossey was like several mini Dunkirks. Matt Damon and his crew are always rocking up on some beach with high hopes of it being the fringe of a Bounty advert, drawing their boring swords, and then splashing back to their boring boats to escape whichever monstrous bores happen to be in residence there. The lesson seems to be that Odysseus never learns his lesson. I admire and share Nolan’s aversion to CGI but what I learned from this latest venture is that he had gone to enormous effort and expense to create a reality that looks CG, like the irreal world of all those other historical epics pimped out in trailers.

CGI routinely dispenses with gravity but it also works its magic on another dimension of physics, that of time itself. It has created a mysterious realm, located somewhere in the bows-and-arrows past, but lacking what might be called historical specificity. It’s a realm of battles or rather a battle where the same fight — against tyranny or injustice (in The Odyssey it’s all about the breaking of Zeus’s Law) — can be endlessly waged and refought. It’s a realm in which the supernatural is indistinguishable from reality, where the historical record is no more than a mise-en-scène for the eternal struggle of getting people into the cinema to watch something not worth seeing. After the initial scene-setting captions — some empire or other has grown corrupt, the republic is giving way to dictatorship — we settle into the saga of some Birkenstock gladiator or other coming back to restore the founding values. In the age of Trump this has a certain appeal which, to be fair, Nolan milks like a gigantic cow. (Coming soon, in the sense of never: The Obamassy.) By contrast with this curiously ahistorical idea of history the much-loved caption from Second World War films — “1940: Somewhere in England” is a temporal and spatial pin-drop of extraordinary precision. Wherever we are it’s a dungeons-and-dragons theme park with a flotsam of historical bits and bobs — spears, swords, metallic knitwear — thrown in. The Odyssey is the biggest, most all-encompassing manifestation of this trend since it is set and made in a time when gods walk among us. More exactly when, by virtue of their various disguises, they look like they walk among us. The gods might well be — always are — Hollywood stars who, when decked out in Carhartt for contemporary dramas, look exactly like blue-collar guys who, on a Saturday, spend their money at the movies. Matt Damon is exemplary. Not just a regular guy but a regular God who, this time around, takes an inordinately long time to get home from work to his wife and kid. Of which religion, pray, are these gods the focus of such worship? The religion of giant paydays for all concerned. Including Emily Wilson who translated the book and then, to her immense credit, bit the Cyclopean hand that launched millions of dollars of royalties in her direction.

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I left before the end but, like Damon on one of them islands, should have headed for the exit sooner. I had a lovely bike ride home from Leicester Square. Maybe the illusory world of The Odyssey enhanced my enjoyment of the real world: the tinder-dry grass of London’s parks, the thirsty trees, all the different nationalities straying from the pedestrian half of shared lanes into the bike part. I didn’t mind. I was glad that people from all over could come to this island, this city, get in to the National Gallery for free and enjoy a pleasant stroll home. I liked all of that but mainly what I liked was the reverse opportunity cost, the thought that if I hadn’t left early I’d still be watching this moronic film, this enormous waste of material, talent (Nolan’s especially) and, though I have not read it, source material. And maybe it reasserted a sense of cinematic priorities. Action films are a bore but, at the other extreme, I can’t get excited about Eric Rohmer’s little Sunday-afternoon on-the-beach comedies and in-the-suburbs proverbs either. But on this Sunday afternoon Rohmer’s close-to-home vision seemed nothing short of epic.

All films today are too long, irrespective of how long they are. You sit there and think to yourself, in real time, as it were, how easy it would be to trim off bits here and there, 10% or 15% overall — and, in a lot of cases, 100% in total — with no loss at all, only an overall improvement in quality. Even Anora, which is a lot of fun, suffered from a kind of serial redundancy in that extended sequence where they’re driving around to about 50 different joints looking for the little Russian brat-punk, energy draining from the picture with each stop. Clocking in at precisely 197 minutes (why didn’t they add another three minutes and round it up 200?), About Dry Grasses was like the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Philippine Sea: at the extreme limit of my fuel, so even when all the sport on telly had come to an end, it still took an effort of will to get out of the house and into a cinema — the number of places it was showing had, by then, shriveled considerably — with very comfy reclining seats and plenty of leg room. This piece is a kind of one-year anniversary celebration of that evening in the middle of August when my wife and I schlepped into the West End, to the Picture House Central.

We were always going to go because Ceylan is not only a master, obviously, but a very funny one too. I pride myself on never having laughed during any film by the witless Coen brothers. Why? Because I have a sense of humor. Laughs in Coen films are just for laughs. They have a reputation as auteurs, those bros, but their films are more frat-house than art-house. Bong-water humor. Ceylan has a sense of humor in the more highly evolved — i.e. deeper-rooted — sense of a comprehensive worldview, a worldview that is pretty much restricted to Turkey, to Anatolia in particular — but it’s all-encompassing. There’s something funny going on most of the time, either in the center or lurking around the edges. I’ve no desire to go there, to Anatolia, which frankly looks like a bit of a shithole, but if I did at some level I’d be happy because it looks like the kind of place where you can have a bit of a laugh — have to have a lot of a laugh, actually, because otherwise life would be unendurable, which it might still be even with the laughter thrown or, more accurately, built in.

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Needless to say, when I say Ceylan is funny I mean he’s deadly serious, as serious as Mahmut, the intellectual and photographer in his 2002 film Uzak. Mahmut lives in Istanbul where he is obliged to host Yusuf, a clodhopping relative who has lost his job in a factory. Yusuf sits there, bored out of his mind, as they watch Tarkovsky’s Stalker on TV, the long tracking sequence where the three travelers take the little engine into the Zone. When the provincial visitor can’t take any more of this unbelievable tedium he trudges off to bed whereupon Mahmud flips off the Tarkovsky and settles down to some serious girl-on-girl porn — which he then has to hastily switch off when Yusuf makes an unexpected return to the living room. The humor is not at anyone’s expense, it’s free in the same way that the air we breathe is free, so even if it’s toxic you can’t expect a refund which, incidentally, my wife and I did manage to get from the relevant box offices after watching 20 minutes of Dune (at an Imax) and 30 minutes of David Fincher’s The Killer on the grounds that they were not fit for adult consumption.

Unlike Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) — which really puts the dead in deadpan — About Dry Grasses isn’t laugh-aloud funny. But it declares the film-maker’s stylistic signature instantly, opening with one of those wide-screen shots of a figure emerging out of a white blankness of snow. From that moment, I was able to relax, thinking, “Yeah, I’m glad I’ve come.” The figure we’ve seen coming out of the snowy nothingness is Samet, a teacher returning to a school in a remote village, a place with very few romantic possibilities, where everyone’s more or less pissed off. There’s another teacher, Kenan, and there are rumors of scandals and the possibility of a male teacher having crossed the line — less distinctly drawn here than it is in American universities — with a young female student. Discontent is simmering. Nothing ever quite comes to the boil in this place, but everything is almost boiling over the whole time. There’s a third teacher, an attractive woman called Nuray, who does bring things to the boil in a curious way in that, first of all, Samet tries to set her up with Kenan and then, when it appears that these two are indeed getting on well, conceives a perverse kind of longing for her, for himself: a desire to thwart the very things he’d previously set in motion.

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In all and any art, the bigger the theme the more important the details. About Dry Grasses deals with themes so huge I’m not even sure what they aren’t. The greater the work of art the more difficult it is to say what it’s about and this is true, of course, of un-Ronseal-ishly titled About Dry Grasses. That’s one of the things that makes it utterly transfixing — for the most part. Attention drifts during a long ideological debate but it’s then followed by a sequence — a sort of seduction — so intense you have to remind yourself to blink. Or there’s an earlier scene when Samet and Kenan are at a dreary diner, though that word “dreary” is redundant since everywhere in this town is dreary as all hell. They’re there to meet Nuray, the teacher Samet has told his friend he’ll be attracted to. She says she’s interested in Kenan’s face. The weather systems passing through Samet’s face as he registers this, as she takes a picture of his friend’s face, are so complex it would be a useful exercise to slow them down, like Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, to watch them unfold, but that would be futile because it’s not just the changes but the flickering speed of those changes that is so illuminating as to resist illumination.

Often an Oscar for Best Actor goes not for best acting but best impersonating: so Timothée Chalamet, for example, got a nomination for his dead ringer of the young Bob Dylan. Or an actor will impersonate a person with some physical or mental ailment. To paraphrase something Capote said of Kerouac, that’s not acting that’s afflicting. Speaking of affliction, Nuray has had a leg amputated as a result of an accident, which considerably complicates all of the many factors intermingling during the decision-making process of the seduction dinner and its aftermath. I don’t think I’ve ever studied faces as closely as I did those during these scenes. And I was compelled to do so.

In other words, this was the opposite of being bored which means it was the opposite of watching action scenes which bore the living shit out of me. In The Whole Equation, David Thomson writes that in the history of cinema no effect is “as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed”. I’d push this a bit further and draw attention to the face that can’t make up its mind, that perhaps doesn’t know for sure what its owner is thinking, or that is taking pains to make sure that this process is concealed from the other participants in the scene but is somehow revealed to the audience so that the face on screen effectively holds up a mirror to our attempts to work out what we’re seeing, if we are capable of attending closely enough. That, it goes without saying, is worth attending to very closely. About Dry Grasses insists not only that we attend very closely, but that we do so over an uncomfortably extended period of time. As a result time, if you have a comfortable seat, flies by, almost.

Much has been learned — so much that we are unable to process it, partly because nothing is resolved at the end. It’s like life, ongoing. This is in the starkest possible contrast with the pathetically neat little twist at the end of Conclave. And that got an Oscar for Best Original Script! You might as well have an Oscar for Best-Tied Tie or Best-Tied Shoelaces — and even then it would probably go to a pair of slip-ons because they’re easier to get (on and off). The human relations in About Dry Grasses are impossible to unknot; the more you pull at one strand of them, the tighter and more intractable the tangle becomes.

There are other elements to mention briefly. The breaking of the fourth wall — is it the fourth? I forget how many there are and what it is each of them do — that occurs immediately before the sexual negotiation has been concluded. That’s a vertiginous jolt, but I like a little detail here, as Samet washes down a pill of some kind in the bathroom. Presumably in anticipation of the sexual encounter that lies ahead, a precaution because he is not motivated by lust (neither is she) and both parties are of course acutely aware that the amputated leg, the leg that is not there, might play a part in how the sex might unfold. In a sense, they have sex in order to find out — which is often what motivates people to have sex for the first time anyway.

There are plenty of other points that I’d like to check again. But that would mean watching the film on my computer which I’m not prepared to do. I’ll wait for it to come around again on a big screen — and you should do the same — sometime in the future, ideally when it’s part of a complete Ceylan retrospective, when there’s no competing sport on TV. The film earns its size and its length and has elicited a corresponding loyalty on my part.

Weather-wise, Burning Man is rarely a holiday. I went for the first time with my girlfriend in 1999. We’d been warned about the extreme heat in the day, had been told that it was best to take it easy in the afternoons, to relax in the shade in preparation for nocturnal adventures later. The day-time temperatures that year were lovely, in the mid-70s; the nights were freezing. After dark I wore everything I had (which didn’t include a pair of gloves, unfortunately).

The following year it was windy and even slightly rainy. Our bikes got briefly clogged with mud. Another year there were horrendous sandstorms. These sandstorms are part of Burning Man in that they are not only to be expected but are, to an extent, caused by the event: the winds are an unalterable fact of nature but the amount of dust blowing around is increased by all the traffic and activity. One way or another the weather is rarely perfect. You have to be prepared for it being too hot, too cold and everything else. The one thing you didn’t need to worry about is drenching rain. Except now you do.

I went to Burning Man for what I thought was the last time in 2005. I’d finished that phase of my life and was, in addition, glad to be free of the multiple hardships of Black Rock City. There was always something to contend with, often a minor thing that became a major source of discomfort like painfully cracked heels from the acidic dust of the playa. Or there was the time I took a stupid gulp of what I thought was water but was actually the paraffin my friend used for her fire-spinning. Another year my wife ended up on an IV drip because of extreme dehydration.

So I was long done with it when a friend who was directing a documentary about the festival invited me to go with him in 2018. I had visions of this being a rather luxurious return. He was in talks with the organisers who were offering some logistical support. I’d heard rumours of luxury camps that went against the spirit of Burning Man and I was, of course, strongly opposed to such things. Nevertheless I said to my friend that while he should avoid using the word “resort” in any discussions, if it were possible for us to have something as close as possible to a “resort experience”, that would be ideal.

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It turned out to be far from ideal. But it did get better after the first night when my friend, the snoring film director, agreed to move out so I could have the decrepit trailer to myself. And on a couple of occasions other friends allowed us to sneak into their endowed camp and take a shower. So my experience was more luxurious than it had ever been and, overall, every bit as great as I remembered. It was still what it had been when I went that first time in 1999: a high-water mark of civilisation.

The toilets are a good symbol of this. The portapotties at festivals are always a site of potential trauma. But the principle of leaving it as you find it holds good at Burning Man. In my experience, one could be 90% confident there wouldn’t be piss or shit on the seat at any time. And there was always toilet paper. This year I heard that the torrential rain meant the toilets couldn’t be serviced. That is the stuff of nightmares, on top of the quagmire of sucking mud that dries into something like concrete. Jeez, it’s sounded, at times, like Passchendaele in the desert, albeit without the violence. “I too saw God through mud,” wrote Wilfred Owen but while many people regard Burning Man as an ecstatic religious experience, this was a vision few would have wanted to share.

England is a rainy little country, so it’s no surprise Glastonbury regularly turns into a mud-fest. People are prepared for and wallow in it. More than 10 years ago my wife and I set off for Glade Festival. It had been raining heavily. Reports of mud proved accurate but we found our friends and pitched our tent. There were two schools of thought among our group and, I’m guessing, the festival at large about what should happen next. One was: take more drugs and carry on. The other was to squelch around for a bit, pack up the tent and get the next train back to London. That’s what we did and it was a mistake; we shouldn’t have pitched the tent at all, should have just arrived, taken a look and retreated. Or, even better, not gone to Paddington. Or even left the house. The first rule of military strategy is never reinforce failure so, overall, I regard that aborted trip to the Glade in the same way that Nasa rated the Apollo 13 mission: a successful failure.

If I’d seen the weather forecast before heading off to Burning Man this year, I would have cut my losses and decided against it. But I want to make it clear: there’s not even a hint of schadenfreude about my relief at not being stranded there. Over the years, the organisers have consistently made the right decisions about policy and development, have been able to correct previous mistakes, and remained faithful to the festival’s core values in the face of its massive expansion — both actual and hegemonic — into the most influential cultural event on the planet. (Its tentacles have spread so far into the mainstream that people often aren’t aware that Black Rock City is where they’ve extended from.)

And they have always stressed that it takes place in an extreme environment unsuited to human well-being, even when conditions are optimal. Burning Man is a long-running experiment not just in radical self-expression (fun!) but radical self-reliance. At the moment this means waiting. Not waiting for someone to come to the rescue but waiting to turn a passive and challenging idea of self-reliance into a similarly challenging active and mobile one.

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Few words these days are more over-used than community. Raymond Williams, reflecting on its inclusions in his book Keywords, recalled that it was only when he noticed that “community” was never used in a negative way that he became suspicious of it. Had he lived, though, he might have seen fit to include these words from the late Larry Harvey, co-founder of Burning Man. “Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere good will. They grow out of a shared struggle.” Well, that is certainly being put to the test now — and I remain confident (from the comfort of my living room) that it’s a test that will be passed.

The larger question is what happens to the festival after this exceptional year of unprecedented struggle. The impact on the playa is presumably going to be extreme so the clean-up — meticulous, always, to the granular level — will be more difficult than ever. But it will happen and Burning Man will be back, hopefully with sunny skies, next year. I still believe in it, absolutely. And I hope the Man, however soggy and down in the mouth he may feel right now, does what he is there for and is burned, surrounded by whoever might still be around to see it happen. As Harvey argued with irrefutable logic: we have to burn the Man, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to burn him next year.

“He did it in Las Vegas / And he can do it here,” Bob Dylan sang on “Went to See the Gypsy”; Chronicles Volume 1 proved that, having done it on record, he could do it on the page too. Dylan writing about songs is roughly the equivalent of Shakespeare writing about drama, or Tolstoy on the novel, or… That’s about it really. (Beethoven could only write about music in music.) So you’d be well-advised to attend closely to what he has to say in these 60-odd little essays about songs that have caught his ear. And not only that; courtesy of a Spotify playlist you can have them in your ears while reading about them. Plus, with Dylan circumnavigating the globe with his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, the book is a hefty and highly appealing bit of merch.

None of which distracts from — possibly even draws attention to — the foundational problem with the project, a problem inextricably linked with the guarantee afforded by the author’s matchless qualifications, namely the songs. The discrepancy between the quality of Dylan’s own songs and the ones he’s chosen to write about is nothing short of chasmal. I’d estimate that a hundred Dylan songs are better than all but a handful celebrated here. We’d rather be reading Dylan trying to fathom the origins and inner workings of his own songs, so The Philosophy of Modern Song is actually a stand-in for what we really wanted for Christmas: Chronicles Volume 2.

Having said that, Greil Marcus was among the first to explain how the immense edifice of Dylan’s work was built on what had gone before — something we have become more conscious of as Dylan entered his late phase, dating from 1992’s Good As I Been To You onwards. He’s massively indebted to the stuff he writes about here, songs he heard as a teenager on the radio or jukebox. He couldn’t have become who he is — and we, in turn, couldn’t have become who we are — without it, without Elvis and all the rest (much of it junk). So yes, it’s of interest even when it’s about stuff — songs — of no interest.

Initially, I thought the reading would lag behind the playlist, that two or three pages might take longer to read than a three-minute song would take to hear, but as I skipped track after track the book took the lead. Then it all got jumbled as I found myself reading about songs that were three selections behind or four ahead of what I was hearing until, eventually, the book was being read without any supporting audio evidence, that is to say it was being read as a book. At this point another kind of syncing issue emerged, a disjuncture between words and readerly attentiveness to them. I started skipping not just the songs but the pages about them, so the whole experience of this immersive tandem became a tug-of-war between the impulse to fast-forward and the need for disciplined resistance to this urge. The impatience was mine — I couldn’t wait to get to “London Calling”! — but it was engendered by the meshed quality of what was on the stereo and on the page.

This, needless to say, is not a work of critical scrutiny, and the titular philosophy is manifest only in the Nietzschean sense that any philosophy is a form of transferred autobiography. So when Dylan writes about The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”, he’s chuckling in the mirror about “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness”. Writing songs like this — like “Masters of War”, say, or “Blowin’ in the Wind” — is easy: “First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment. Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes. Revolution/evolution/air pollution.” Ha ha. Johnny Cash was right when, in the liner notes to Nashville Skyline, he wrote that Dylan could “rhyme the tick of time”. He’s a great rhymer who, at any time, can also be a terrible rhymer. I’ve never made it through to the end of “Murder Most Foul” because of the crime of the rhymes. And the first time I listened to “Key West” — his best song of the last however many years? — I burst out laughing on hearing: “Twelve years old and they put me in a suit/ Forced me to marry a prostitute.”

There’s refracted autobiography here — I’m talking about the social-awareness songs, rhymes and so on, not marrying prostitutes — and in some ways the book might be seen as a belated textual equivalent of the derided album of cover versions, Self-Portrait from 1970. But this is an autobiography that contains multitudes. The stories are his, everybody else’s and nobody’s in particular, though they end up sounding like (cover versions of) Denis Johnson’s. Hence the tendency to deploy the second person, a “You” who is simultaneously a given song’s protagonist — the one doing the driving, dancing, drinking or whatever — and the “you” listening to it. But this “you” is identifiably Dylan in the sense that his DNA is imprinted in the syntax, in its waywardness and the ideas hatching within it.

What this means, in practice, is that he’s riffing on things. You — by which I mean everyone — love guitar riffs. At a gig in Rome in the Nineties, Patti Smith introduced her teenage son Jackson, on guitar, who proceeded to chop his way into “Smoke on the Water”, a beginner’s riff that is also an enduringly great one. But riffing on the page can become wearisome because it lacks exactly the propulsive quality that makes the riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” irresistible. There’s a drift or aimlessness to verbal riffing that is absent in a musical one. A riff in music is narrative in primal form. It could be said, I suppose, that Hamlet riffs on various topics but these are integral to the play’s dramatic scheme of actively suspended volition.

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There are fun bits and scattered off-the-cuff insights in The Philosophy — “The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life”; “Complex relationships come with a high price” — but Dylan is neither a Hamlet nor a thinker. Don’t let me be misunderstood: his trade does not require him to think things through so that’s not an issue. It does matter, however, that these pages don’t feel written. They feel talked through, like his Theme Time Radio Hour from a dozen or more years back. Or talked over, both in the sense of on top of (as in talking over the music) and warmed-over.

A pleasant quirk of radio is that you can listen to it while doing other things — “lots of other things,” to quote Cash from Nashville Skyline again — which makes it compatible with drift. Now, a tendency to drift helped make Chronicles absorbing. We hoped it might unlock the mystery of Dylan’s working, the process of how he became what he is (to go back to Nietzsche again); and it did, sort of: by straying into further increments of mystery, by adding extra layers of myth, by leaving stuff out. Even if it wasn’t a work of genius it was clearly the work of a genius. With the new book we tune — drift — in and out as we might while listening to the radio and doing chores, some taking us into rooms where the radio is out of earshot. Or on a road trip when the signal comes, fades and disappears, but we never feel like we’re getting anywhere, even by dint of accumulation.

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With the route through the songs unclear the navigating voice grows slovenly, weary, even, when approaching the outskirts of superlatives, surprisingly bland. “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes is “beautifully arranged and performed to perfection”, as if it were an item on the menu of a road-side diner you only stopped at because there was nowhere else for hundreds of miles in either direction. Tonally, some patches are weirdly out of kilter, as when Clint Eastwood and Travis Bickle in Dirty Harry or Taxi Driver are said to have “thumbed their noses” at earlier standards of morality. What on earth is that phrase doing here (or anywhere for that matter)? The same question could, in fairness, be asked of lines in even his greatest songs.

Long ago Clive James wrote that one of the defining features of Dylan’s work was the way that wonderful turns of phrase existed in the tightest proximity to woeful ones. The combination of apparent carelessness and incessant revision — both pre and post-release of a given number — is a key part of his restlessness and of our endless fascination with what emerged from it. You’d listen closely, on the stoned edge of your seat, because there was no telling what was going to come next, even when what came next ended up sounding retrospectively inevitable (another aspect of rhyme). I never approached, let alone sustained, that state of tranced and fulfilled expectation while reading — scanning, skipping, scuttling back and forth among — these decorative pages. I wanted to, but the words wouldn’t let me.

***

This article was first published on 15 November 2022.

“He did it in Las Vegas / And he can do it here,” Bob Dylan sang on “Went to See the Gypsy”; Chronicles Volume 1 proved that, having done it on record, he could do it on the page too. Dylan writing about songs is roughly the equivalent of Shakespeare writing about drama, or Tolstoy on the novel, or… That’s about it really. (Beethoven could only write about music in music.) So you’d be well-advised to attend closely to what he has to say in these 60-odd little essays about songs that have caught his ear. And not only that; courtesy of a Spotify playlist you can have them in your ears while reading about them. Plus, with Dylan circumnavigating the globe with his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, the book is a hefty and highly appealing bit of merch.

None of which distracts from — possibly even draws attention to — the foundational problem with the project, a problem inextricably linked with the guarantee afforded by the author’s matchless qualifications, namely the songs. The discrepancy between the quality of Dylan’s own songs and the ones he’s chosen to write about is nothing short of chasmal. I’d estimate that a hundred Dylan songs are better than all but a handful celebrated here. We’d rather be reading Dylan trying to fathom the origins and inner workings of his own songs, so The Philosophy of Modern Song is actually a stand-in for what we really wanted for Christmas: Chronicles Volume 2.

Having said that, Greil Marcus was among the first to explain how the immense edifice of Dylan’s work was built on what had gone before — something we have become more conscious of as Dylan entered his late phase, dating from 1992’s Good As I Been To You onwards. He’s massively indebted to the stuff he writes about here, songs he heard as a teenager on the radio or jukebox. He couldn’t have become who he is — and we, in turn, couldn’t have become who we are — without it, without Elvis and all the rest (much of it junk). So yes, it’s of interest even when it’s about stuff — songs — of no interest.

Initially, I thought the reading would lag behind the playlist, that two or three pages might take longer to read than a three-minute song would take to hear, but as I skipped track after track the book took the lead. Then it all got jumbled as I found myself reading about songs that were three selections behind or four ahead of what I was hearing until, eventually, the book was being read without any supporting audio evidence, that is to say it was being read as a book. At this point another kind of syncing issue emerged, a disjuncture between words and readerly attentiveness to them. I started skipping not just the songs but the pages about them, so the whole experience of this immersive tandem became a tug-of-war between the impulse to fast-forward and the need for disciplined resistance to this urge. The impatience was mine — I couldn’t wait to get to “London Calling”! — but it was engendered by the meshed quality of what was on the stereo and on the page.

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Leonard Cohen was enslaved by Eros

By Maurice Glasman

This, needless to say, is not a work of critical scrutiny, and the titular philosophy is manifest only in the Nietzschean sense that any philosophy is a form of transferred autobiography. So when Dylan writes about The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”, he’s chuckling in the mirror about “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness”. Writing songs like this — like “Masters of War”, say, or “Blowin’ in the Wind” — is easy: “First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment. Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes. Revolution/evolution/air pollution.” Ha ha. Johnny Cash was right when, in the liner notes to Nashville Skyline, he wrote that Dylan could “rhyme the tick of time”. He’s a great rhymer who, at any time, can also be a terrible rhymer. I’ve never made it through to the end of “Murder Most Foul” because of the crime of the rhymes. And the first time I listened to “Key West” — his best song of the last however many years? — I burst out laughing on hearing: “Twelve years old and they put me in a suit/ Forced me to marry a prostitute.”

There’s refracted autobiography here — I’m talking about the social-awareness songs, rhymes and so on, not marrying prostitutes — and in some ways the book might be seen as a belated textual equivalent of the derided album of cover versions, Self-Portrait from 1970.  But this is an autobiography that contains multitudes. The stories are his, everybody else’s and nobody’s in particular, though they end up sounding like (cover versions of) Denis Johnson’s. Hence the tendency to deploy the second person, a “You” who is simultaneously a given song’s protagonist — the one doing the driving, dancing, drinking or whatever — and the “you” listening to it. But this “you” is identifiably Dylan in the sense that his DNA is imprinted in the syntax, in its waywardness and the ideas hatching within it.

What this means, in practice, is that he’s riffing on things. You — by which I mean everyone — love guitar riffs. At a gig in Rome in the Nineties, Patti Smith introduced her teenage son Jackson, on guitar, who proceeded to chop his way into “Smoke on the Water”, a beginner’s riff that is also an enduringly great one. But riffing on the page can become wearisome because it lacks exactly the propulsive quality that makes the riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” irresistible. There’s a drift or aimlessness to verbal riffing that is absent in a musical one. A riff in music is narrative in primal form. It could be said, I suppose, that Hamlet riffs on various topics but these are integral to the play’s dramatic scheme of actively suspended volition.

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In conversation with Philip Roth

By Joyce Carol Oates

There are fun bits and scattered off-the-cuff insights in The Philosophy — “The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life”; “Complex relationships come with a high price” — but Dylan is neither a Hamlet nor a thinker. Don’t let me be misunderstood: his trade does not require him to think things through so that’s not an issue. It does matter, however, that these pages don’t feel written. They feel talked through, like his Theme Time Radio Hour from a dozen or more years back. Or talked over, both in the sense of on top of (as in talking over the music) and warmed-over.

A pleasant quirk of radio is that you can listen to it while doing other things — “lots of other things,” to quote Cash from Nashville Skyline again — which makes it compatible with drift. Now, a tendency to drift helped make Chronicles absorbing. We hoped it might unlock the mystery of Dylan’s working, the process of how he became what he is (to go back to Nietzsche again); and it did, sort of: by straying into further increments of mystery, by adding extra layers of myth, by leaving stuff out. Even if it wasn’t a work of genius it was clearly the work of a genius. With the new book we tune — drift — in and out as we might while listening to the radio and doing chores, some taking us into rooms where the radio is out of earshot. Or on a road trip when the signal comes, fades and disappears, but we never feel like we’re getting anywhere, even by dint of accumulation.

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Bob Dylan doesn't like you

By Dorian Lynskey

With the route through the songs unclear the navigating voice grows slovenly, weary, even, when approaching the outskirts of superlatives, surprisingly bland. “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes is “beautifully arranged and performed to perfection”, as if it were an item on the menu of a road-side diner you only stopped at because there was nowhere else for hundreds of miles in either direction. Tonally, some patches are weirdly out of kilter, as when Clint Eastwood and Travis Bickle in Dirty Harry or Taxi Driver are said to have “thumbed their noses” at earlier standards of morality. What on earth is that phrase doing here (or anywhere for that matter)? The same question could, in fairness, be asked of lines in even his greatest songs.

Long ago Clive James wrote that one of the defining features of Dylan’s work was the way that wonderful turns of phrase existed in the tightest proximity to woeful ones. The combination of apparent carelessness and incessant revision — both pre and post-release of a given number — is a key part of his restlessness and of our endless fascination with what emerged from it. You’d listen closely, on the stoned edge of your seat, because there was no telling what was going to come next, even when what came next ended up sounding retrospectively inevitable (another aspect of rhyme). I never approached, let alone sustained, that state of tranced and fulfilled expectation while reading — scanning, skipping, scuttling back and forth among — these decorative pages. I wanted to, but the words wouldn’t let me.