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03/24/2005 Archived Entry: "Dylan at the CCCs"

Dylan at the CCCs

Part II
The bar - Ulmer writes - is one place where the popcycle operates.

Let me consider now the atmosphere or mood of the bar that my Analogy offers, as part of the acknowledgement of the way in which electracy draws upon the legacy of Marx. In heuretic terms, the bar, tavern, speakeasy, honky tonk, saloon by any name is the scene of writing analogous to what is needed in order to invent electracy

The bar as place; but the bar also as grammatology of music (how many bars in this song?).
The paragraph or sentence is to literacy what the bar is to electracy. In electracy, we learn to riff, rather than to argue.
Dylan's career began in the bars of New York: The Gaslight, Gerde's Folk City. The main composition conference, CCCC, is known for being a place where ideas are exchanged among those in the field. Most exchanges, participants often agree, take place not in the panels, but rather in the bars throughout a given host city's terrain.

Dylan's "A Song to Woody" is often listed as having been written in a bar. A handwritten note attributed to Dylan reads:

"Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie."

This is the legacy of the folksonome. In Guthrie, Dylan found identity. In Dylan, I forge a disciplinary identity (the critical and the personal). Some of this derives from Ulmer's analogy with Method Acting - merging the personal with the medium. Some of it derives from a desire to develop a digital rhetoric, my invention of the folksonome. In previous mystorical adventures, I found the "one" to be a major component of my search; it signifies the funk deviation from standard 4/4 time (and echoes my father yelling out "that's one," a threat that I would get smacked for misbehaving when he stopped the car).
In the folksonome, I want to know what the new bar should be. Not the one, but not 4/4 either. The clue for what it might be may (I am still in speculative mode) come from a local bar here in Metro Detroit, The WAB.
The WAB's initials (standing for Woodward Avenue Brewers) might be construed as a mis-spelling of WPA. Might it? Let me see. The connection may come out of the concept of "work" and "deal" (borrowing the choral meaning of the New Deal from the original WPA program). My occasional after work stops at the WAB for a brew make me wonder if it might serve as an analogy to what the New Deal Writing Program for electronic culture might look like if it makes the bar its basis of digital rhetoric. The key may be found in juxtaposition. My juxtaposition, intuition tells me, should come from Dylan’s note: the 14th day of February. Temporal juxtaposition, I have written, is the original model for hip hop pedagogy.

Posted by Renuka @ 03/24/2005 01:40 PM EST

where does the jukebox come into play in all of this?

Posted by called to the bar @ 03/24/2005 11:12 AM EST