dylan's biography

ok, so i spent yesterday afternoon upstairs on the loveseat...yeah the one in front of the window that is too high for a view of the creek.......reading bob dylan's autobiography...the one nominated for a book award.......an easy read for a drizzled afternoon.....and a disappointing one, for that matter........for starts, dylan goes to great lengths to uphold his main contention...that he is no prophet....and certainly not the voice of a generation........and so he only discusses writing a very few songs.....and those are the truly 'folk' ones......like ones about sinking boats and train wrecks.......and he only mentions his own songs in the context of other people singing them........when he liked the other guys version better.......and curiously, his entire recording career happened without his wives or his children being involved/being around/being distracting.........he mentions casually that his farm in woodstock new york became problematic, because people would drive up and get out of their cars.....and look at a guy sitting at the picnic table with 5 children and 'say...that couldn't be him'.....and leave........an entire book, and the only mention of his children is in passing...........and i only know that he had more than one wife because i got on line half-way through and looked up other references...........he really only mentions his first wife's name in the last chapter.......and other than a few mentions about her being there for some seminal event......his comments after 12 years of marriage were....she took one road and i took the other..........either she wouldn't let him say anything....and the kids didn't want to be mentioned, or he is a selfish sonofagun......the second wife fares no better......she is also mentioned only briefly despite a 6-year marriage......ok, so that is what disaapointed me about the book.....so let us talk about that parts that i enjoyed....like the nyc apartment where he 'crashed' on the fold-out sofa in the library for what seemed like months......the aprtment owners were hippie-types who came from inherited wealth...so the library was stocked with all sorts of first editions and intellectual stuff......dylan read homer, ovid, faulkner......whom he couldn't finish ........freud.......dostevysky........he would just pull them off the shelves, and either read them through or recall why he didn't bother to finish.......i liked that perspective on his backround.......he really never mentions that he dropped out of the u of minnesota.......but thsi was an education he kind of did on his own that might have influenced his songwriting......though he never says so....because other than woody guthrie, dylan never really credits an influences.......he does, however, seem to recall every bar/hall,stage he ever played in or on....and every musician he ever sat down with...whether on stage or in someone's kitchen.........and he had many meetings with the poet archibald mccleish......a guy who was a parisian ex-pat when hemingway lived there.......mccleish spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made dylan tick, and dylan seemed to enjoy getting together with him.....mccleish seemed to see dylan as a poet rather than a songwriter...........so maybe that is why chronicles is subtitled volume one....maybe he plans to explain everything missing in volume one in a future volume 2.......like.....what he meant by the siamese cat that the guy carried on his shoulder..... in the song like a rolling stone.......i like that part and would love to know it what it meant .........ah well.......we are closing in on the last day of january...when i intend to list the books obtained versus the books read this past month........my goal for the new year........running out of time, i see.......