[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 18:19:18 -0400
  "Dan Lusthaus" <dlusthau at mailer.fsu.edu> wrote:
> So now going after Bush and his cronies isn't enough. We 
>have to dump on
> Bobby Zimmerman too?

Nobody is dumping on Minnesota Skinny, at least not in the 
way that Bush and his gang of outlaws are deservedly 
dumped on with as much regularity as time permits.

> Richard, give another listen to "To Ramona," "God on Our 
>Side," and "The > Ballad of Hollis Brown" for starters. 

As I believe I made clear, but perhaps did not, the early 
Dylan is great. Much of that material will always endure. 
Beginning with "Another Side of Bob Dylan," however, 
little that he wrote has endured. He was over the hill by 
the time he was twenty. But that's fine. At least he had a 
hill.

> Nothing around today compares.

I am not in a position to know, not having listened to any 
of the people to whom young people are now listening.

> Dylan is not inarticulate, he just connects the verbal 
>dots a bit > differently than most of the rest of us, which is the 
>prerogative of poets.

Nice try. I'm afraid Plato pretty much got it right. The 
vast majority of poets have no idea what they are saying. 
If even they cannot understand their words, how can anyone 
else? And why waste the time trying to make sense of 
nonsense?

> Put another way, poetry is a shared incoherence.

No, it's solepsistic incoherence. It is hot blasts of 
asmitaa.

> I have it on good authority that Buddha's ipod mostly 
>contains early Dylan, Beatles, some Hendrix, and Bach orchestral pieces. Rumor 
>has it he was also
> partial to Coltrane and Thelonius Monk.
  
The Beatles and Hendix? Afraid not. They are the 
antithesis of everything the Buddha stood for. Coltrane 
and Monk? Definitely. Toss in Charlie Parker and Miles 
Davis, and we're talking real Buddhism. Which raises the 
interesting question, how does being a heroin addict 
differ from being an arhant?


Richard Hayes