Inspired by Jeanette Winterson’s and Fiona Hill’s books about their escape from dead-end childhood homes in the north of England, I experimented with the generative AI tool, Midjourney.
First, what would my life have been like if I never left my hometown of Crewe?
PROMPT: <my photo> in a bleak north of England town with rain falling –stylize 1000 –v 5
(Click all photos to enlarge)
This prompt used the latest Midjourney version 5 which was released on Wednesday March 14 to acclaimed levels of ‘stunning’ photo-realism. I certainly found that to be true in the mod of my own photo which looked eerily like Crewe on a rainy day. Friends on Facebook (who did not see the side-by-side comparison), commented that the chap-in-the-cap seemed grim.
In response, I created these variations of the image on the right above:
PROMPT: <IMG from 1st iteration> bemused smile and distant look –v 5
Interesting to see the gender fluidity that crept in.
This was something I’d seen in earlier experiments with a picture of a much younger me (I’m guessing Bristol in 1978 or California very early 80s) which went through a rather rapid series of revisions that rival Bowie at his glam best:
Back to true north. I was next prompted (so to speak!) to experiment with factory girls (figuratively, of course), in honor of the Beatles “She was a working girl / North of England way…”
PROMPT: factory girl in north of England street shot on Tri-X 400 –ar 16:9 –v 5
I borrowed the [camera style] add-on from Midjourney expert Nick St. Pierre on Twitter who posts a wide range of his informative and educational experiments — and where I first learned that version 5 was available.
From here it was a short JOURNEY to a series of less-than-successful attempts to capture the gritty reality of northern life:
PROMPT: Working class men fishing on a canal in the north of England in the 1950s , shot on Tri-X 400 –ar 16:9 –v 5
PROMPT: a crowd of factory workers leaving work on bicycles in north of England town, shot on Tri-X 400 –q 2 –v 5
Dirty Old Town
I moved on to experiment with a couple of folk songs from the 1960s that are anthems to life up North.
The classic ‘Dirty Old Town‘ by Ewan MacColl was written about Salford, Lancs, a short 30 miles north of Crewe. I started with a prompt that tried to summarize the theme of the song:
PROMPT: teenage couple embrace in north of England 1950s with gasworks in background shot on Tri-X 400 –ar 16:9 –v 5
There’s great photo-realism, but the gasworks are not actually what you’d find in Salford or Crewe. I then simply used the lyrics of the first stanza and see what Midjourney made of it. The results were nothing short of astounding:
PROMPT: I met my love by the gas works wall Dreamed a dream by the old canal I kissed my girl by the factory wall Dirty old town, shot on Tri-X 400 –ar 16:9 –v 5
We see the embrace by the canal and the weathered brick wall. There’s no gasworks, but, actually, the lyrics only say they were ‘by the gasworks wall’. Game, set, and match to Midjourney!
Homeward Bound
Having started my JOURNEY thinking about the old home town, it seemed appropriate to end by trying to capture the mood of Simon & Garfunkle’s classic song, written on Widnes railway station.
PROMPT: A teenage boy with a guitar case sitting on a railway platform in the north of England in 1960 shot on Tri-X 400 –ar 16:9 –v 5
As others have noted, version 5 gets the number of fingers correct (earlier versions often showed hands with 6+ fingers or missing thumbs). However, once again, just feeding in the lyrics is FAR more effective:
PROMPT: I’m sittin’ in the railway station Got a ticket to my destination On a tour of one-night stands My suitcase and guitar in hand And every stop is neatly planned For a poet and a one-man band, shot on Tri-X 400 –ar 16:9 –v 5
The one downside to Midjourney is how addictive it becomes. However, others might not agree. Share your thoughts in the Comments below.
Thanks to Monu Sohal over on Facebook, here’s an amusing illustration of ChatGPT’s output. It takes Fleishman-Kincaid to a whole new level! Why do *you* think it rains?
Pretend to be a person with an IQ of 200. Why does it rain?
Rain occurs as a result of the atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture. When the air becomes saturated with water vapor, it rises and cools, leading to the condensation of water droplets, which form clouds. When the clouds become sufficiently dense and heavy, the water droplets combine and fall to the ground as precipitation, in the form of rain. This process is known as the water cycle and is an integral part of Earth’s climate system.
Pretend to be a person with an IQ of 100. Why does it rain?
Rain happens because the clouds get too full of water and then it falls down to the ground. That’s what we call rain.
NOTE: I got dramatically different answers to the lower IQ prompt that Monu showed in his original posts. Not sure if ChatGPT ‘evolved’ since he ran them, or he edited them for effect after they were generated.
A sister program from OpenAI to ChatGPT which I’ve experimented with is Dall-E2. This does for images what the other program does for text. In response to prompts, it creates realistic images and art. Just as knowledge workers should find out about ChatGPT before it finds them, so graphic designers and illustrators should check out Dall-E2.
I experimented with Ulysses, supplying snippets of the poetic text that stood out for me when I read the novel. Here’s some of the results.
**UPDATE: I ran the same prompts through Midjourney and added the results below. Some are the original 4x results, others were upscaled.
Dalle2: “Old wall where sudden lizards flash.” (Scylla and Charybdis, p. 194)
Midjourney: “Old wall where sudden lizards flash.”
Dalle2: “Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.” (Wandering Rocks, p. 232)
Midjourney (4x): “Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.”
Dalle2: “…stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” (Ithaca, p. 651)Midjourney (4x): “…stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”Dalle2: “…the extreme boundary of space…” (Ithaca, p. 680)
Midjourney (4x): “…the extreme boundary of space…”
Dalle2: “…past beds of reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs.” (Hades, p. 95)
Midjourney: “…past beds of reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs.”
We’ve entered a new era of computing. Similar to the dawn of the Netscape browser, of Google, and of mp3 music, the availability of ‘chatbot’ software opens new horizons. It’s a tool that some might find useful, others find challenging, and some find offensive.
If you are not familiar with its capabilities, I spent a few minutes (literally, just a few) asking it questions about what many consider one of the most challenging of novels: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
ChatGPT is free to use (login required) and has a simple interface where you can pose questions for an immediate response.
Here’s are the responses to my questions about Ulysses.
Q: Write a 100 word introduction to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a modernist novel that chronicles the experiences of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on a single day in Dublin, Ireland. The book is known for its complex and experimental style, which includes stream-of-consciousness narration, symbolism, and a wide range of literary and cultural references. Ulysses is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century, and has had a significant influence on modernist and postmodernist literature. Despite its challenging content and structure, the novel remains a popular and widely studied classic of literature.
Q: List the chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses
James Joyce’s Ulysses is divided into 18 chapters, also known as “episodes,” each of which is associated with a specific episode from Homer’s Odyssey:
Telemachus
Nestor
Proteus
Calypso
Lotus Eaters
Hades
Aeolus
Lestrygonians
Scylla and Charybdis
Wandering Rocks
Sirens
Cyclops
Nausicaa
Oxen of the Sun
Circe
Eumaeus
Ithaca
Penelope
Each of these chapters is further divided into smaller sections, and the novel as a whole covers a wide range of themes and subjects, including love, loss, identity, and the human condition.
Q: Tell me more about 1.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first chapter, also known as the “Telemachus” episode, follows the character of Stephen Dedalus as he wakes up and begins his day. The chapter is named after the son of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, and it introduces many of the themes and motifs that will be explored throughout the novel.
In this chapter, we see Stephen struggling with feelings of disillusionment and a sense of disconnection from his surroundings. He is also grappling with the recent death of his mother and the absence of his father, which has left him feeling adrift and alone.
Despite these challenges, Stephen is a deeply intelligent and creative young man, and the “Telemachus” chapter showcases his wit and his ability to find meaning in the world around him. As the chapter unfolds, we see Stephen interacting with a range of characters, including his roommates, his students, and a number of eccentric figures he encounters on the streets of Dublin.
Overall, the “Telemachus” chapter serves as an introduction to Stephen as a character and to the themes and concerns that will be central to the novel as a whole.
Q: Tell me more about 2.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the second chapter, also known as the “Nestor” episode, follows the character of Leopold Bloom as he goes about his daily routine. The chapter is named after the wise old man in Homer’s Odyssey, and it serves as a contrast to the first chapter, which focuses on the youthful and intellectual Stephen Dedalus.
In this chapter, we see Bloom performing a variety of mundane tasks, such as making breakfast, paying bills, and running errands. Despite the ordinariness of these activities, Joyce uses them to reveal key aspects of Bloom’s character, including his kindness, his intelligence, and his ability to find joy in the simple things in life.
As the chapter progresses, we see Bloom interacting with a number of characters, including his wife, Molly, his daughter, Milly, and a range of friends and acquaintances. These interactions provide further insights into Bloom’s personality and his relationships with others.
Overall, the “Nestor” chapter serves as a portrait of Bloom as a character and as an introduction to the domestic and personal aspects of his life that will be explored more fully in later chapters.
And so on, through to the final
Q: Tell me more about 18.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the 18th and final chapter, also known as the “Penelope” episode, follows the character of Molly Bloom as she reflects on her life and her relationships. The chapter is named after the wife of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, and it serves as a contrast to the first chapter, which focuses on the youthful and intellectual Stephen Dedalus.
The “Penelope” chapter is notable for its distinctive style, which consists of a single, unbroken stream-of-consciousness monologue that spans more than 50 pages. In this monologue, Molly reflects on a wide range of topics, including her marriage, her affairs, and her thoughts and feelings about the world around her.
Throughout the chapter, Molly’s thoughts and feelings are expressed with a frankness and honesty that is unusual for a female character in literature at the time. As a result, the “Penelope” chapter has often been seen as a feminist and pioneering work, and it has had a significant influence on modernist and postmodernist literature.
Overall, the “Penelope” chapter serves as a powerful and poignant conclusion to the novel, offering a nuanced and deeply human portrait of Molly as a character and a meditation on the complexities and contradictions of human experience.
On a somewhat more sophisticated level…
Q: What is the relationship between the main characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses?
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the main characters are Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom. The relationship between these characters is complex and multifaceted, and it evolves over the course of the novel.
Leopold Bloom is a middle-aged Jewish man who works as an advertising canvasser and lives in Dublin with his wife, Molly. Stephen Dedalus is a young artist and intellectual who is struggling to find his place in the world. The two men are initially strangers, but their paths intersect on several occasions throughout the course of the novel, and they eventually develop a friendship of sorts.
Molly Bloom is the wife of Leopold Bloom and the mother of their daughter, Milly. She is a strong-willed and intelligent woman who is deeply unhappy in her marriage and has had a number of affairs. Despite this, she remains devoted to her husband and her family.
Throughout the novel, the relationships between these three characters are explored and tested in various ways, as they each struggle with their own desires, fears, and insecurities. Despite the challenges they face, they are ultimately united by their shared humanity and their desire to find meaning and connection in their lives.
And, at a deeper level:
Q: How does James Joyce explore the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ireland in his novel Ulysses?
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses explores the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ireland in a number of ways.
One way in which Joyce explores this relationship is through the character of Leopold Bloom, who is of Hungarian descent and has a complex and ambiguous relationship with his own identity. Throughout the novel, Bloom grapples with the tensions between his Jewish heritage and his Irish upbringing, and he is often seen as an outsider or an “other” within Irish society.
Another way in which Joyce explores the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ireland is through the use of historical and cultural references. The novel is full of allusions to the history and literature of both regions, and it suggests a deep connection between them that goes beyond the political and economic ties of the time.
Finally, Joyce uses the motif of the Odyssey to explore the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ireland. The novel is structured as a retelling of the Odyssey, and many of the characters and events in Ulysses can be seen as echoes or reflections of the original story. This structure suggests a universal and enduring quality to the themes and issues explored in the novel, and it suggests that the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ireland is part of a larger, timeless pattern of human experience.
Once more, with feeling:
Q: What feelings does James Joyce’s Ulysses elicit in readers?
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a complex and challenging novel that can elicit a wide range of feelings in readers. Some readers may find the novel intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant, while others may find it dense, confusing, or even frustrating.
One feeling that many readers may experience while reading Ulysses is admiration for Joyce’s technical skill and artistic vision. The novel is known for its innovative and experimental style, which includes stream-of-consciousness narration, symbolism, and a wide range of literary and cultural references. Many readers may be struck by Joyce’s ability to create a rich and immersive world through his writing, and they may be impressed by the depth and complexity of his characters and themes.
At the same time, some readers may find Ulysses to be emotionally challenging or unsettling. The novel deals with a wide range of themes, including love, loss, identity, and the human condition, and it often portrays these themes in a raw and unflinching way. As a result, some readers may feel moved, saddened, or even disturbed by the novel’s portrayal of these themes.
Ultimately, the feelings that Ulysses elicits in readers will depend on their individual experiences, perspectives, and expectations, and there is no one “right” way to feel about the novel.
In conclusion
I would like to emphasize that the responses to the questions above were created entirely by ChatGPT. My sole contribution (as someone who has read Ulysses and knows enough about the novel to ask the right questions) was to create the prompts that the AI system processed.
While there might be room to edit the answers, they do, overall, present accurate information. An example of a mistake is the notion that Stephen interacts with “his students” in the first episode, something that occurs in the second. Were someone to turn this in as an essay, unedited, to their professor, their deception would become immediately apparent.
However, I ‘created’ this content in under 15 minutes. A few minor edits and it’s flawless. And much more succinct than Googling ‘a summary of Ulysses’
I’d recommend that you take ChatCPT for a spin in your area of expertise and see what you find. If you make you living as a content creator (speechwriter, blogger, essayist or other knowledge worker) you owe it to yourself to become acquainted with this new tool. You might be up against it in the near future.
If you are a college or high school teacher who grades student essays, good luck!
(with apologies to The Proclaimers, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan)
Here’s some midnight ramblings from the 36 hours I spent in bed after contracting COVID flying back from Europe among the great unmasked who airlines welcome on board these days. Although we kept our masks on for the journey, my wife Sandra & I had to remove them to eat and drink. So, thanks go to the snuffling, unmasked, Irishman in the window seat next to us who passed on his germs, five days later, we both tested positive.
Sandra was able to function. Me, I spent a couple of days and nights in bed, unable to speak, my throat hurt so bad.
Writing lyrics to a COVID Rock Opera from the songs that got me through the night kept me amused. In the cold light of day, they’re probably nothing more than a false creation, proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain. But they kept me amused. Your mileage may vary.
(And yes, we’re both well on the road to recovery.)
Act One (To the tune ‘Oh Jean’ by The Proclaimers, sung in a broad Glaswegian accent)
Ya went through half the human race Ta getta me Ya went through half the human race Ta getta me.
I used to think Ya’d never find me That I was safe From your embrace But COVID, oh COVID You got lucky with me.
I was so wrong What took ya so long? Ya gotta to me ‘cos you could Like ya always said ya would. Ah COVID, oh COVID You got lucky with me.
And now I know What it means To have ya all over me Like others do From Wuhan to Crewe But COVID, oh COVID Ah got lucky with you.
Ya went through half the human race Ta getta me Ya went through half the human race Ta getta me.
Act Two (no need for many revisions to the lyrics, Bruce Springsteen says it like it is)
I’m on fire At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet And a freight train running through the middle of my head But COVID, you cool my desire. Sometimes it’s like someone took a syringe baby edgy and dull And put a vial fulla virus in the middle of my skull Oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire
Act Three (From an original song by Bob Dylan, which fits the mood with just a few tweaks.)
COVID didn’t mean To treat you so bad You shouldn’t take it so personal It didn’t mean To make you so sad You just happened to be there, that’s all.
When it saw you take your mask off and smile It thought that it was well understood That you’d be infected in a little while I didn’t know that you were vaccinated for good.
But, sooner or later, one of us must know That COVID just did what it’s supposed to do Sooner or later, one of us must know That it really did try to get close to you.
It couldn’t see What you could show me Your mask had kept your mouth well hid. It couldn’t see How you could know me But you said you knew me and I believed you did.
When it whispered in my ear And asked me if it was infecting you or her It didn’t realize just what I did hear It didn’t realize that both of us were.
But, sooner or later, one of us must know That COVIDs just doin’ what it’s supposed to do Sooner or later, one of us must know That it really did try to get close to you. That you were just kiddin’ me, you weren’t really negative at all An’ it told you, as it clawed out your throat that it Never really meant to do you any harm.
But, sooner or later, one of us must know That COVID just did what it’s supposed to do Sooner or later, one of us must know That it really did try to get close to you.
Fiona Hill burst onto the national, and international, stage when she testified in the 2019 impeachment hearings for President Donald J. Trump.
At the time, British commentators were struck by the woman with a distinctive working-class Northern accent who was an advisor to a US President and senior member of the American foreign policy establishment. The Financial Times referred to her as the “improbable” Fiona Hill. The sting in the tail of her testimony was, for the British establishment, her comment that she felt her background impeded her in the UK in the way it did not in the USA. They wondered how on earth she’d made it from an obscure northern hometown (Bishop Auckland, County Durham) to work in the White House, or, as she puts it in her new book There is Nothing For You Here, “from the coal house to the White House.”
The book is part autobiography, part indictment of the failings of the Trump administration. It embodies the lyrics of the Beatles song, Honey Pie:
She was a working girl North of England way Now she’s hit the big time In the U.S.A.
A coal miner’s daughter
Hill was, literally, a coal miner’s daughter. Born in 1965, her childhood was marred by the decline of the mining industry in the north-east of England. Her father was laid off from the mines and scraped by as a hospital porter. Her lived experience in the region stayed with her as she passed the 11+ exam, survived the challenges of a comprehensive school, made it to St. Andrews University, a scholarship to Harvard, and a stellar career as a fluent Russian-speaking expert the geopolitics of the 21st century and Vladimir Putin.
The book resonated for me because it has echoes of my own path from the north-west of England and the declining industrial town of Crewe to the States. I bailed out of an academic career, but the coincidences, fortuitous meetings, significant mentors, and sheer improbability of life in the USA that Hill notes were also my experience. That, and a shared distaste for what America has become under Trump, were themes in the book that grabbed me.
Populism at home and abroad
Throughout the book, Hill notes how the three countries she has lived and traveled in have embraced populism. The declining industrial areas of the UK are mirrored in the “Rust Belt” regions of the USA and magnified by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time and again, in ways large and small, she notes how the rise of an authoritarian like Putin is predicated on the same populism exploited by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign in the UK, and, inevitably, the 45th President of the US.
Her academic background and serious foreign policy chops give rise to analysis and insights that distill the confusion surrounding Trump, Brexit, and Russian influence into clearly understandable themes. When political elites ignore the dispossessed, strongmen take center stage. Here’s one of many passages in the book–worth quoting at length–where Hill analyzes this:
Those who were attracted to the Tea Party and other populist movements were reacting to, and hoping to counter and even reverse, the effects of economic crises and demographic changes. The populists’ supporters were also reacting to and seeking a salve for the intense emotions that these changes and challenges elicited. Major societal changes, especially when they happen rapidly and in combination, help fuel what celebrated scholars of the twentieth century like Fritz Stern called “cultural despair.” Cultural despair is the sense of loss, grievance, and anxiety that occurs when people feel dislocated from their communities and broader society as everything and everyone shifts around them. Especially when the sense of identity that develops from working in a particular job or industry, like my father’s image of himself as a coal miner, also recedes or is abruptly removed, people lose their grip on the familiar. They can easily fall prey to those who promise to put things–including jobs, people, or even entire counties–back in “their rightful place.”
Hence, Hill demonstrates, Brexit, Putin, Trump. The clear and present danger she identifies is the continuation of populism and the emergence of a leader as competent as Putin on the American scene.
In the aftermath of Trump’s disastrous reign, it was tempting to breath a sign of relief. But that would have been premature, because there was no indication that his dynasty would fade away. And American populism looked like it was here to stay–unless we could find a way to mend our social and political divisions.
The “Russia bitch”
The experience of this multi-lingual academic expert in the Trump White House is no surprise, but nevertheless shocking. It follows challenges she’d experienced being mistaken for a high-end prostitute by hotel doormen when attending senior-level meetings in Moscow, discovering her salary as a woman was significantly lower than less qualified male counterparts in academia, and–early in her university days–being dismissed as a ‘common northerner’ by hoity-toity classmates. In the White House Trump’s first words to her were to yell “Hey, darlin’, are you listening?” when he mistook her as the only woman in an Oval Office meeting for a secretary. Later, she heard, staffers and first family members dismissed her as “the Russia bitch.”
She dishes the dirt on how Trump’s view of the world was that of a New York construction boss used to bullying suppliers, his lack of interest in briefing documents, and fragile ego easily exploitable by savvy foreign powers. Her account adds more damning evidence to the likes of Woodward and Costa’s Peril and Leonning and Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It.
Education
Hill mounts an appeal to expand the opportunities that gave her a ticket out of County Durham, and me a ticket out of Crewe: education as, in the words of the books’ subtitle a way of ‘Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century.’
Absent this, she concludes
These left-behind people deserve better. but their problems are everyone’s. They are our fellow Americans and fellow Brits, in some cases our family members and friends. Helping them will not be purely a selfless act. Because as long as they feel that there is no hope for them, there will be no hope for the rest of us. There will be nothing for us, anywhere.
On a recent episode of the charming Start the Week BBC Radio 4 program we heard Frances Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Simon Armitage discuss the rehabilitation of DH Lawrence and the relationship between the writer and their work. In the closing minutes (approx 37:00) host Andrew Marr asks Armitage about an essay that claims Bob Dylan’s lyrics “don’t really hold up as great poetry, you have to listen to the songs in order to understand the interleaving of the music and the words….can you tell us what you think doesn’t work on the page? Is it repetition, is it sloppiness of the language, evasiveness?”
Armitage responds that in a poem “everything that happens in a poem has to happen within the text, in silence really…it has to be done with the alphabet.” Whereas songwriters can “write the lyric and even ‘la-la-la’ might sound very good if you put it to the right chord progression. It can be utterly transcendent if it’s working well with the music and if you’re wearing the right cowboy boots and if you’ve got the right voice.”
He reports taking Dylan lyrics into his poetry class where younger students (unfamiliar with the tune) might appreciate the poetic aspects, nevertheless see cheesy rhymes, repetition, tautology and other elements “that you can’t get away with on the printed page.”
Speechwriters as songwriters
In many ways Armitage is stating the obvious. Songs are created to be listened to, not read (as rewarding as a close reading of Dylan’s lyrics can be). As with great songs, so with great speeches.
Speechwriting authorities Nancy Duarte and Bob Lehrman drive home the message that speeches (like songs) need to be written for the ear not, (as are poems) for the eye.
Sparklines
Nancy Duarte’s seminal 2010 book Resonate focuses on visual storytelling. With the use of what she calls ‘sparklines’ she graphically illustrates the arc of a speech and maps the emotion and delivery by tracking the laughter and applause alongside the words (lyrics) of great speeches such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. It would be fascinating to apply a sparkline mapping audience reaction to live musical performances.
Political speechwriting
Political pundit and speechwriting professor Bob Lehrman (literally) wrote the book on speechwriting. In examining why persuasive speeches work, he lists the various forms of repetition (anaphora, epistrope, antimetabol, and climatic order) and forms of vivid language (simile and metaphor, understatement and irony) that work on the heartstrings, not just the head space, of the audience.
While these techniques can be employed by poets, they resonate differently when delivered by a compelling speaker.
In the beginning was the word
In claiming that “everything that happens in a poem has to happen within the text, in silence really” Armitage overlooks the pre-literate origins of poetry, when bards of old, the minstrels of Medieval times, recited epic poems which the tellers knew by heart. The literary techniques they used provided aide memoirs for themselves and for their listeners.
Since ancient times, humans have memorized and recited poetry. Before the invention of writing, the only way to possess a poem was to memorize it. Long after scrolls and folios supplemented our brains, court poets, priests and wandering bards recited poetry in order to entertain and connect with the divine.
Sorry, Simon, the origins of the poem are with the word, not the page.
Dylan’s recording of Desolation Row was the longest track (at just over 11 minutes) on his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. While I can’t remember the first time I heard it, it’s been in my head for most of my adult life. It’s one of my defining anthems that, together with Roy Harper and Leonard Cohen’s songs, I love more for the lyrics than the melodies. It’s pure poetry set to music.
The Getty Museum owns the Ensor painting and paired it with Dylan’s song with it in the book The Superhuman Crew, noting
Ensor’s huge, vibrant, and startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and barely visible amid the swirling crowds the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. “Desolation Row,” from Dylan’s classic 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, presents its own surreal portrait of modern life in strangely similar terms.
That “surreal portrait of modern life” becomes more appropriate with each passing year. As I listened again to the song I know so well, themes emerged. It is a song rooted in the time Dylan wrote when cracks were appearing in 50s America, and those with open eyes and ears witnessed the “chimes of freedom flashing.”
Dylan sings of the contrast between two world-views: those embracing emerging freedoms and the guardians of the old order. He paints this contrast in both stark black and white terms (Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?!”) as well as shades of grey.
They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown
The dystopian scene is set. Repression, autocracy, and violence rule in a time when hangings were public events. These might be images of lynching’s in the Deep South or scenes from The Handmaids Tale. What sort of society trades in picture postcards of the dead? One where individual identity is subject to a brown-out. Arguments about the color of passports were part of the Brexit debate that consumed Britain. Painting passports is something “they” do to restrict our liberty to travel and escape the dystopia. Internal passports restricted movement in apartheid-era South Africa, North Korea, and modern China.
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town
Yet, the scene is not monochrome. There’s a rambunctiousness in a world where the sailors (presumably men) fill the beauty parlors, and the circus is in town. Dylan sets the scene in a port city–one he visits again in 1974 when he tells of a man who “Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in” (Simple Twist of Fate from Blood on the Tracks). What would groups of sailors want in a beauty parlor? More than a haircut. Hello sailor! Perhaps some eye shadow, a waxing, or lip gloss? Anything to juice up their shore leave.
The opening two lines contrast repression with freedom, heralding an awakening sense of personal expression at the dawn of the ’60s. Soon enough, many would choose the option to dance beneath the diamond sky/With one hand waving free (Mr. Tambourine Man--recorded six months earlier.) Meanwhile, the representatives of the old order are on parade, like Shriners striding down Main Street in Anytown, USA.
Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance
The first of the old order makes an entrance. I see the blind commissioner four rows back in the Ensor painting — the man with the handlebar mustache, center stage. An authority figure (perhaps the port commissioner?) who is both literally and metaphorically blind. Blind like Lady Justice holding her scales. Except “they” (the ones selling postcards of hangings and painting passports) have him in a trance. Hypnotized. In their power. Unable to function.
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants
Not only blind and hypnotized but bound. Guided by the tight-rope walker from the circus, accomplished at balancing in his own way, just as Lady Justice balances her scales. He is leading the blind commissioner, who is all the while pleasuring himself with his free hand. While some might see his free hand resting innocently in a trouser pocket, the words “in his pants” always implied something far raunchier to me — long before Borat filmed the blind commissioner Rudy Giuliani in the hotel room with one hand in his pants.
And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go
Three years before the Chicago police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention and decades before the last US President stirred the restlessness of his own rioting squad and suggested somewhere they could go (down Pennsylvania Avenue and up the steps of the Capitol), Dylan has the measure of the inherent restlessness of the enforcement arm of the old order.
As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row
Meanwhile, above it all, the poet sits with his “Lady” looking out over the unfolding nighttime scene, not “on” but “from” Desolation Row. The home of the residents of the emerging zeitgeist. I see Desolation Row as the New York apartment Dylan writes about in Visions of Johanna:
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet? We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
They look out over the dystopian landscape of blind commissioners and riot squads, perched on an island of sanity, observing the crazy world.
Lady is the mythical companion of the Tramp in the Disney film of a decade earlier. Dylan as the Chaplinesque Everyman “Tramp” alongside a woman who might be slumming from the aristocracy in those timeless dystopian times.
Desolation Row might also be a knowing reference to California’s Cannery Row, described by Steinbeck as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” The sardine industry had collapsed, in desolation, a decade before Dylan wrote his song. Cross-referenced with Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, which declared, “Everything’ll be all right, desolation is desolation everywhere and desolation is all we got and desolation ain’t so bad.”
Cinderella, she seems so easy, “It takes one to know one,” she smiles And puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style
Alongside Lady, Cinderella is another Disney character, an archetype of emerging freedom. She is ignored by her establishment sisters, standing free, knowing the power of her sexuality. A woman who only “seems so easy” (as in easy to seduce, or perhaps at her ease?) acknowledging others (like Dylan?) who hold the same appeal. Insouciant, seductive, captivating. Someone who would have turned heads in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village.
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning. “You Belong to Me I Believe” And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend, you’d better leave.”
Cinderella’s anthesis arrives on the scene. Romeo sans Juliet, desperate to own whatever woman he can find. Down on his luck, off his game, and “moaning.” A visitor from the dark side. His inappropriate advances earning a rebuke–not only to put him in his place but to tell him, with the threatening tone of a nightclub bouncer or mobster’s bodyguard, that he needs to leave. The two lines of dialog tied together in rhyme are polar opposite in intention. Those who claim ownership (capitalists, The Man?) having no place in the communal world of Desolation Row.
And the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.
And so we come to the end of Act One. The sirens are silenced. The riot squad has done its worst. Chaos has reigned off-screen. We’re witness to the cleaning-up operations, with Cinders doing what her stepmother required — sweeping up the broken glass on the street. Indeed, it must be broken glass. After all, if it was just the
empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights.
The Waste Land, Fire Sermon, lines 177-178
of Eliot’s Fire Sermon, we wouldn’t hear her at work.
Now the moon is almost hidden, the stars are beginning to hide
The night is growing darker, colder, older. Clouds are moving in.
The fortune-telling lady has even taken all her things inside
Another circus refugee has called it a night, signaling the transition from one part of the day to another. Her tarot cards, crystal ball, and tasseled gown are now inside whatever she calls home – gypsy caravan, tent, or tenement building. Minus the fortune teller, the future is an unknown.
All except for Cain and Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame / Everybody is making love or else expecting rain
But wait, not everyone has quit the scene. Three more archetypes of the old order are introduced. The brothers from the Bible and Quasimodo –monsters in their own way–are the exception to others, engaged in the trivial and the profound. When is making love as trivial as expecting rain? Family members from my English childhood often commented on the weather. They rarely spoke about lovemaking. Depending on which group of people this describes the juxtaposition either challenges the romantic ideal of lovemaking as no more significant an option than commenting on the weather (“Do you want to make out or put on your Wellingtons? It’s all the same to me…”) or the hipsters are making love while the squares look to the cloudy sky. Dylan is unclear about which “everybody” it is — everybody in the apartment, everyone on the street, or the whole world? Shades of grey.
And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing, he’s getting ready for the show He’s going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row
Again, a contrast. While the fratricidal boys in the Bible represent murder and martyrdom, the Good Samaritan signifies freedom, preparing for the evening’s entertainment (the night is young). Whether the “show” is something the circus is putting on or the carnival Ensor painted is unclear. However, Desolation Row seems like the fun side of town, more benign than the disorder in the debris-filled streets.
Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window for her I feel so afraid On her twenty-second birthday she already is an old maid To her, death is quite romantic she wears an iron vest Her profession’s her religion, her sin is her lifelessness And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row.
Switching back to Shakespearean archetypes, Dylan notices Ophelia beneath the window (that Lady and he looks out of, standing where Romeo would have wooed his Juliet on her balcony). He’s empathetic, concerned, aware of the limitations playing out in her young life. A tragic career woman (her profession’s her religion), she is a lifeless “old maid” — one of Shakespeare’s ‘cold maids’ in Ophelia’s death scene:
Thereis a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them
Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7
She’s fixated on her namesakes’ romantic death, armored against feelings of passion, or trapped like youthful Polio victims in an iron lung? Her goal cemented by Old Testament certainty:
And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
Genesis, 9-13
Ophelia is missing the mark, the juice having been squeezed out of her life, denying her true feelings, but trying to make a break, curious about what she’s missing. Despite being an uptight career girl, she can’t help “peeking into Desolation Row.”
This echoes Dylan’s admonition in the opening track on the album (Like a Rolling Stone) to embrace our feelings, recognize our freedoms:
How does it feel, how does it feel? To be without a home Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
While there are those like Ophelia who sense the possibility of freedom and might be tempted to overcome their fears to experience it, other sad unfortunates have been destroyed by madness. Among them, as Ginsburg noted, “the best minds of my generation.” (Howl, 1956). What more impressive mind than Einstein?
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood with his memories in a trunk Passed this way an hour ago with his friend, a jealous monk
Archetypes nest like Matryoshka dolls. The father of relativity, whose theories upended the certainties of space and time itself, now disguised as the folk-hero of Sherwood Forest, robbing from the rich, giving to the poor, accompanied by Friar Tuck. There’s a nod to Einstein’s lot as a refugee, forced to stay in the United States in the 1930s to avoid Hitler’s Germany, who would have no doubt have a store of photographs and diaries from the Europe of his youth in a trunk.
Now he looked so immaculately frightful as he bummed a cigarette And he went off sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet
This heroic figure is down at heel, a hobo like those who rode the rails Dylan’s mentor Woody Guthrie sang about. As disheveled as he might be, he appears “immaculately frightful” (a state of dishabille that perfectly describes a street person I once saw in Paris, where a sense of fashion doesn’t desert those without the means to buy new clothes)—now compelled to neurotically sniff drainpipes and recite the alphabet—a far cry from authoring the Theory of Relativity.
You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row.
Just as you’d say about any down-and-out who was once a person of note, “you would not think to look at him, but…” he was once a banker, school principal, a respected member of the community, Nobel Laureate in Theoretical Physics. Or, in the case of a musician like Dylan, a violinist he shared the stage with before things took a turn for the worse.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world inside of a leather cup But all his sexless patients, they’re trying to blow it up
We now come to one of the central characters on the dark side of the street. Dr. Filth is a name straight out of a Marvel comic book. The leather cup could be an athletic support cup around his manhood that his “sexless patients” are trying to blow (pun intended?). Or it could be a leather liar’s dice cup sitting on a barroom counter that the patients want to dynamite. Anyone who needs to keep their world inside anything as small as a cup must have a paranoid need to keep it safe. Like memories in a trunk, they might well be keepsakes. Or patient records. I wonder what HIPPA regulations require? What insecurities drive this?
Now his nurse, some local loser, she’s in charge of the cyanide hole And she also keeps the cards that read, “Have Mercy on His Soul.”
The doctor’s assistant is “some local loser”—more likely to be found working as a waitress in a greasy spoon or matinee movie theatre attendant than as a qualified nurse. She guards (and administers?) a toxic substance whose only use in emergency medical situations is to effect a rapid decrease in blood pressure. She’s also representative of the local losers recruited to administer gas into the cyanide holes above the Nazi death camps’ shower stalls. Coupled with overseeing the cards that judges read from when pronouncing the death sentence, we are firmly in a dystopian hell realm.
They all play on the penny whistles, you can hear them blow If you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row.
These nightmare characters (Dr. Filth and the local loser employed as his poison dispensing, capital-punishment enabling nurse) create discordant noise blowing on penny whistles—discernable when you “lean your head out far enough” to catch the vague traces of the distant spinning wheels of sound.
Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains, they’re getting ready for the feast
Back in the low-rent district (Greenwich Village being affordable back then), neighbors nail curtains across their windows–cheap privacy for their nighttime feast. Neighbors who also feature in Visions of Johanna:
Lights flicker from the opposite loft In this room the heat pipes just cough
Next, we meet the Paris opera house’s ghost, invited to the feast to berate Casanova, given form as a man of God, able to dispense judgment. Introduced in a line that hangs suspended in the song, held back for a beat.
The Phantom of the Opera in a perfect image of a priest
Casanova–an archetype of masculine power and a master of seduction is reduced to the level of an invalid needing to be spoon-fed assurances.
They are spoon feeding Casanova to get him to feel more assured Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning him with words
He’s destined to be sacrificed on the self-improvement altar of positive thinking, poisoned by the words of authors such as Norman Vincent Peale and Napoleon Hill.
And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls, “Get outta here if you don’t know.” Casanova is just being punished for going to Desolation Row
The Phantom is reanimated, announcing that Casanova’s transgression is to have crossed over from the conventional world and embraced Desolation Row’s freedoms. His audience is the “skinny girls” who might welcome Casanova’s attention, but, like Romeo before them, have to leave. The stage is set: a group of girls, the Phantom and Casanova with his attendants. This echoes Deputy Duperret’s advice to Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’s 1963 play The Marat/Sade. Both women are ignorant of the politics of revenge and repression.
Dearest Charlotte you must return
Return to your friends the pious nuns
And live in prayer and contemplation
You cannot fight
The hard-faced enemies surrounding us.
The Marat/Sade, Act 1
Casanova, Jean-Paul Marat, the Marquis de Sade—three European libertines at odds with Middle America’s morality.
At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
The dystopian frenzy is unleashed at the stroke of midnight. Scenes similar to those portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale and lived by the victims of the Chilean dictators and Hitler’s brownshirts. Victims of a group of the Übermensch who accompany J. Edgar’s agents. The deplorables against the elites. The revenge of the conspiracy theorists against those with knowledge of the facts. Punishment Park a possibility.
Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine Is strapped across their shoulders, and then the kerosene Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row.
Conformity is enforced on the salt of the earth workers, whole-life policies for those with no life to live. Orwell’s’ 1984. Dictates from the mansions of the one percent keeping the workers from their freedom. A theme explored by John Lennon five years later:
As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small By giving you no time instead of it all ‘Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
~~
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years Then they expect you to pick a career When you can’t really function, you’re so full of fear
~~
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you’re so clever and classless and free But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
Working Class Hero, 1970.
The conclusion, but not the coda, is in the next six lines.
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?!”
The emperor who fiddled while Rome burned sets sail on the doomed liner. The pretentions of the entitled end up at the bottom of the ocean. Division in the land – Red states and Blue, Proud Boys and Antifa, them and us. Is any of it more than rearranging the deckchairs?
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.
Ivory tower intellectuals battle for supremacy while artists and artisans celebrate life in the wonderous watery reaches of this blue planet, an ocean of bliss, feeling without limitation, freed from analysis of current and future conflicts.
After an interlude on the harmonica, Dylan delivers a footnote, responding to a letter the mailman delivered.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday, about the time the doorknob broke When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke All these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they’re quite lame I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name Right now, I can’t read too good, don’t send me no more letters no Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.
While the battle between the forces of good and evil rage, trite domesticity occupies others. He confesses that he sang about the people he knew, anonymized with archetypes and aliases. He admonishes his correspondent to stop sending trivial news. And only write if, and when, they have stepped out of their suburban cocoon.
Take a listen
If you’ve got this far in my endless screed about the song, you deserve a treat. Take a listen to Dylan as he sings the lines that so inspired me.
A decade before Charles Joseph Minard famous chart that portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812, which Edward Tufte claims was “probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn”, English nurse Florence Nightingale created a “rose diagram.”
In 1858 she published Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. Founded Chiefly on the Experience of the Late War. Presented by Request to the Secretary of State for War. This work contained a color statistical graph. Her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East” showed that epidemic disease, which was responsible for more British deaths in the course of the Crimean War than battlefield wounds, could be controlled by a variety of factors including nutrition, ventilation, and shelter. This was, believe it or not, denied by the medical establishment of the time.
Rose chart showing the causes of mortality in the Crimean War
Nightingale went on to develop other statistical graphics in her reports to Parliament, realizing this was the most effective way of bringing data to life.
The circle on the right has 12 sectors going clockwise representing the first 12 months of the war. The circle on the left is the second 12 months. The superimposed dark shapes show the monthly death rates. The diagram illustrates how the Sanitary Commission, sent out in the middle of the war, dramatically reduced the death rate. The length of the radial line in each month is proportional to the death rate, but both the text and the appearance imply that it is the shaded area that is proportional to the death rate, rather than the length of the radial lines. Florence recognized this error and inserted an erratum slip, but then replaced this diagram in later documents.
Indeed, the 19th Century was a time of great progress in data collection. In 1837 the General Registry Office at Somerset House, led by William Farr who later helped Nightingale with her Crimean statistics, began to systematically record births, deaths, and marriages in the UK. While census data had been collected every ten years since 1801, the 1841 census was the first to list the names of every individual. This gave researchers the opportunity to examine new cause and effect relationships using registration statistics.
Here’s another chart created by Nightingale:
Hugh Small comments on the ways in which this chart is designed for maximum emotional impact:
The title ‘Lines’ (in ornate script in the original) makes it sound like a poem, as in Lines on the Death of Bismarck. There are four pairs of bars, when actually the message is clear from one pair alone. There seems to be a kind of repetition, as in a chorus. This effect is increased by the words, repeated at the end of each line, English Men, English Soldiers … It sounds like a funeral march. Second, the red bar for the soldiers would certainly make some people think of the ‘Thin Red Line’ which had become famous in the Crimean War when a two-deep row of red-jacketed British infantrymen stopped a Russian heavy cavalry charge, something that was thought to be impossible. The thin red lines on Nightingale’s chart represented these same heroic soldiers who were now dying unnecessarily because of bad hygiene in their barracks.
The variation of death rates due to differences in hygiene was very important to reformers like Nightingale because it showed that even the civilian death rate could probably also be improved by better hygiene.
Her goal with these charts was not just to inform, but to change hearts and minds.
In our time
In recent weeks, a number of temporary field hospitals have sprung up across Britain for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Named “Nightingale Hospitals,” they pay homage to the famous “lady of the lamp.” Florence Nightingale’s pioneering approach to sanitation changed the understanding of public health in Victorian Britain and laid the foundations for the profession of nursing as we know it.
In our time of “mask deniers” and people who doubt the safety of vaccinations, or even that the pandemic is “real” and not a “Plandemic“, we need the persuasive power of modern-day Nightingales more than ever.
