4.13.2005

An academic worth reading

Tangled up in Blue is one of the greatest songs of all time. The lyrics are a love story twisted in with a road movie... and we know it's impossible to make a bad road movie. The music, too, is inspirational, especially the Jerry Garcia Band live version.

I was debating the lyrics via Yahoo Messenger with Ignatius in Berkeley. He was fixated on the chronology of the song, which is, to say the least, confusing. I thought the chronology of the song was irrelevant and that it was a series of vignettes from the narrator's life that came together to make an incredibly interesting and moving whole. Ignatius disagreed, saying that the out-of-order chronology was central to the song, akin to Quentin Tarantino's use of the technique in Pulp Fiction.

Doing a bit of searching on the web, I found a great analysis of the lyrics by Robert Bell of Williams College. Bell agrees with Ignatius, but I don't like the possibility he raises that the woman in each verse is not the same woman throughout the song. The whole thing is worth reading, but the lyrical analysis starts about halfway down, at the paragraph beginning with "One line."

No comments:

QE has permanently ruined bonds for investors

You used to earn an interest rate roughly inline with nominal GDP growth, even slightly better. Since the Fed started manipulating interest...