Junkballs

...When he came to New York for the first time in 1961, he fashioned an entire past for himself out of whole cloth he'd traveled by freight train...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Junkballs Chronicles: Volume by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $24) Reviewed by Paul Beston OB DYLAN'S EFFORTS TO TELL HIS STORY have usually been more in the service of disguise than revelation...

...his parents were dead...

...Chronicles gives pieces of the story of Dylan's life—but the important word is story...

...But wasn't there a more believable way of saying so...

...Some of his oldest devotees expressed dismay when he recently agreed to appear in a commercial for Victoria's Secret...

...The U.S...

...Dylan's version might be, "Better to enslave myself in my own system than in yours...

...He can't possibly mean it, could he...

...All this parsing will make the book an engrossing read for those who aren't yet tired of the game...

...Never trust the artist, trust the tale," warned D.H...

...When he toured Europe during the height of Vietnam unrest in the 1960s, he draped an enormous American flag behind him on stage...

...we start to think, and then the old suspicions bring us up short, or ought to...

...Now what about the Civil War...

...Dylan helped finish off that country, and then lived long enough to rue its passing...

...1/4 Legal Plunder Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain by Steven Greenhut (Seven Locks Press, 311 pages, $17.95) Reviewed by Doug Bandow FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES the Michigan Supreme Court's decision in Poletown Neighborhood Council v. Detroit allowed governments in that state to take most any property they wanted to transfer to most anyone they wanted for most any reason they wanted...

...There's a sadness to our laughter, though, because of a gnawing sense that he actually might mean what he's saying, and we'd never know it...

...Alas, this case was no anomaly...

...Reviewers have responded positively to the book's vitality, of which there is plenty...

...Constitution's "public use" restriction was satisfied, the court ruled, even when Detroit seized an entire ethnic neighborhood to hand over to General Motors for a new factory...

...I wasn't the toastmaster of any generation, and that notion needed to be pulled up by its roots...

...Dylan's writing is often rhythmic and musical, as one would expect, and his wit redeems his forays into self-pity and grandiosity...

...Maybe Dylan dreamed of attending West Point when he was a boy, as he claims...

...As Dylan well NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 BOOKS IN REVIEW knows, William Blake once wrote, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's...

...It's difficult to know, though, at what level he understands that his deepest con game has worked a con on him as well...

...he came from a conservative, Middle American Jewish family...

...But there are passages that make clear he is a songwriter, not an essayist: What kind of alchemy, I wondered, could create a perfume that would make reaction to a person lukewarm, indifferent, and apathetic...

...And what to do but laugh when he claims that "the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write" could be found in the American Civil War...

...At least one of the Paul Beston is a writer in New York City.following statements, for example, seems to be in earnest: 1. "The press...

...It's a charming story, though, and it does no harm to tell...

...You gotta start somewhere...

...As Steven Greenhut, an editorial writer for the Orange County Register, observes in his timely new book, Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain, "governments increasingly use eminent domain to take property from one private owner in Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a member of the California and Washington, D.C...

...You have to wonder where they have been the last 40 years...

...It's pretty safe to say, for example, that Dylan is telling tales when he opens the book by describing a meeting with Jack Dempsey one evening in 1961 at the former champion's restaurant...

...But even an elderly Dempsey, a man who really had traveled on freight trains and worked odd jobs, wouldn't have mistaken Dylan for anything other than a welterweight bohemian...

...When he played at West Point during the first Gulf War, he sang "Masters of War...

...This main meal of garbage had to be mixed up with some butter and mushrooms and I'd have to go to great lengths to do it...

...It maybe classed under nonfiction/autobiography, but Chronicles is as much a story as "Tangled Up in Blue," even if the names aren't changed this time...

...Surely he wouldn't let this masterpiece of self-parody and mixed metaphor slip by unless he meant to...

...Yet the reader senses that there is no game here, just a patch of bad prose...

...HATEVER THE MERITS of this personal struggle, Dylan's fealty to his music is the great redeeming truth of his life...

...The challenge with a Dylan autobiography, of which Chronicles is said to be the first of three volumes, is that the artist and the tale become one...

...As an autobiographer, he is a good junkball pitcher, all flutters and dips and arcs, and somewhere in that mess is 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 the ball...

...It's tempting to regard the book as another Dylan put-on, but even a cursory read makes clear that it isn't all misdirection...

...Lawrence...

...In 1966, at the height of his fame, he gave a notorious interview to Nat Hentoff for Playboy, virtually the entirety of which was drug-addled free association and red herrings...

...Put beside those achievements, his life does not seem nearly so interesting, or so necessary to understand...

...Chronicles is a fitting encapsulation of Dylan's art—the reader must sort out the authentic from the contrived, and guessing at times is unavoidable...

...You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds," the old champion tells him, and signs off with, "Don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard...

...Much of his career of misdirection has been dedicated to resisting the effort of a voracious pop culture to define him, to put him in a frame from which he cannot escape...

...For a book of tales, it starts things off on a high note, and a symbolic one—the counterculture's wonder boy coming face to face with a man who was an icon of the Old America...

...Few musicians can claim to have served American music so well, to have inhabited, stretched, and disseminated so many of its traditions...

...he'd worked all around the country, doing odd jobs...

...There's a sadness to that, too...

...The only error worse than letting Dylan fool you is assuming he must be putting you on merely because he is writing poorly...

...His efforts, as self-serving as they often are, have been successful to an impressive degree...

...To avoid being a prisoner of fame, he's become a prisoner of anti-fame...

...I wanted to get some...

...If Dylan himself is shrouded in mystery, his musical canon seems increasingly of a piece, invariably connected with the music of American popular or folk traditions, even if he often bent them beyond recognition and made them seem almost his own personal property...

...I figured you lied to it...

...But you would think after 40 years of cat and mouse, they would be less easily swayed by Dylan's claims that all he ever really wanted was to settle down with his family, have a white picket fence (he actually uses the phrase), and putter around the house...

...No doubt there is truth lurking here somewhere...

...None of Dylan's contemporaries developed as keen an understanding of the way American fame can frame a person for life within a single, constricting identity...

...he must have loved Luis Tiant...

...bars...

...He became a guru of misdirection...

...He once wrote a song about Catfish Hunter...

...2. "In my real life I got to do the things that I loved best and that was all that mattered—the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school...

...But it sure sounds like another piece of hipster hokum...