Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 76, June 2017

Newsletter – Summer 2017 91
MY WORLD – YOU’RE WELCOME TO IT
Art cuts deep
I’m Sorry, So Sorry, (that I made you cry)
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “where has mwywti been, I’ve
missed the mix of professional satire with surreal juxtapositions, all
told with good-natured, gentle humour”. Well, I’m telling you,
mwywti suffered an existential crisis at the prospect of not being in
print; sort of allergic to being digitalised. However, examining its own
navel, or rather, self-descriptive title, it realised that, all along, it had
had the freedom to be whatever it wished, so could just be itself at last
and damn the medium (yeah, matey, but we’ll all be keeping an eye
on what this so called “self” turns out to be [columns don’t really have
“selves” do they?]).
BOB
If mwywti had not suffered its dark night of the soul it would have
been here last year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of
Blonde On Blonde (BOB) in June1966. As it is, in the meanwhile Bob
has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created
new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
Interviewed after giving the announcement, Sara Danius, Permanent
Secretary of the Swedish Academy, said a good place to start with Bob
Dylan was Blonde On Blonde, going on to place him not just in the
cannon of English and American literature but in the tradition of
troubadours going back to oral traditions in Greece 2500 years ago.
Mwywti would go along with this, primarily because it
regards BOB as his supreme work (not his most perfect, that’s John
Wesley Harding). If this column persuades just one person to listen
again, its work here will be done (and yes, Chris MacGregor, that does
include you. I know you prefer Laughing Len, apparently all women
do, something to do with his “soul”, but give Bob a chance to entrance).
Let us count the ways:
Bob’s voice. A combination of chant, talking blues, singing, moaning,
deadpan tone, passion, indifference, and channelling generations of
blues, country, folk and pop singers including Buddy Holly (whom he
acknowledged as both an influence and as transmitting something to
him when Buddy looked into Bob’s eyes from the stage – “it gave me
the chills” he says). It is a wondrous thing, unique to this album, a