[HN Gopher] Bob Dylan's Christmas Lights: A Scholarly Treatise
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       Bob Dylan's Christmas Lights: A Scholarly Treatise
        
       Author : NaOH
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2023-12-25 16:53 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (merrillmarkoe.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (merrillmarkoe.substack.com)
        
       | denton-scratch wrote:
       | > arranging his lights to mimic the Monthly Unemployment levels
       | 
       | Oh, come on. This is an abuse of the word "scholarly". I assume
       | it's a pastiche, but I didn't find an obvious "tell".
        
         | Baxxter wrote:
         | This is funny. It's a slight dig at those folks (of which I'm
         | sure the author is one, or the self-effacing sort) who want
         | every one of Bob's incoherent ramblings to be 'deep'.
         | 
         | "Because I grew up in a world where nothing that Mr. Dylan ever
         | did was too insignificant not to be worthy of serious
         | intellectual scrutiny, I immediately understood that this was
         | no ordinary, haphazardly arranged, string of colored lights. It
         | had to contain a deeper meaning."
         | 
         | A lot of Bob's work is the intellectual equivalent of a paltry
         | string of Christmas lights. Your outlook with figure if that's
         | an insult or a compliment.
        
           | denton-scratch wrote:
           | Well, thanks for clarifying!
           | 
           | I enjoy satire and sarcasm; but I found the parody of
           | "dylanologists" weak enough that maybe that was how he
           | actually thought. And anyway, is that really still a thing?
           | So I doubted that he was trying to pastiche something we've
           | all thought was silly for a couple of decades.
           | 
           | Perhaps I have a sense-of-humour defect; maybe I just didn't
           | get it.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | I assume this article is just for fun, a poke at the grand
       | tradition of people overthinking everything Dylan says or does. I
       | hope so anyway, and at Merrill Markoe didn't have to dig through
       | his trash to gain these important insights.
        
       | libraryatnight wrote:
       | I found this hilarious, thanks for sharing - I didn't realize
       | Merrill Markoe had a substack :)
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | For folks who've never heard the name, Merrill played a very
         | important part in the post-Carson late-night TV of the late
         | 1900s-early 2000s (think Letterman and Conan):
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Markoe
        
       | oluckyman wrote:
       | In a similar but visual vein, here's a Mad Magazine style
       | treatment of the great man's song Ballad of a Thin Man:
       | https://paulpritchard.github.io/Ballad_of_a_Thin_Man/
        
       | Boogie_Man wrote:
       | Is this entirely factitious, or did someone actually photograph
       | one of Bob Dylan's houses once a year, layer "parodic humor" on
       | top of it, and then publish it online? If the former, hardy har
       | har. If the latter, I worry sincerely about the wellbeing of the
       | person who completed this strange action, regardless of the layer
       | of "it's just a joke I'm in on" placed on top.
       | 
       | Edit: disregard. I realized I'm just "being a hater" on HN lately
       | which is in the wrong spirit. My bad.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-26 23:01 UTC)