About Bob Dylan's Science Fiction Novel

@bobdylan

Bob Dylan on Instagram

Dylan posted the above on Instagram yesterday (my son Simon Vozick-Levinson alerted me to it this morning). On Instagram and Reddit, and probably in other places, people are speculating that if Dylan did write it, he used AI to write it. I’m no expert on AI, but I’ve been listening to Dylan’s lyrics since the 1960s, and the excerpt he posted certainly seems consonant with the style and content of his lyrics. 

 Lyrics often repeat ideas and feelings — indeed, that’s what choruses explicitly do. And the ideas and emotion presented in this excerpt feel like a lyric — a song without music, lamenting, protesting, objecting to the danger, the destruction of our democracy that we see happening all around us, every day. I’m glad to see a man who actually won the Nobel Peace prize come out and assess this, decry this, in his own inimitable way. 

His novel/lyric aim in particular at universities who acquiesce, crumble under the pressure of the Trump administration and his allies. I’m looking at you, Columbia University. 

And, by the way, Dylan’s no stranger to science fiction. His Frankenstein-like song, "My Own Version of You" in his Rough and Rowdy Ways LP in 2020, is a funny, great little piece of science fiction, in one of his best albums. We the people who believe in freedom and democracy need all the help we can get in these desperate days, and it’s welcome indeed to have Dylan stepping up and in any way he can.

See also Dylan's Murder Most Foul: From Then To Now

Obama's Missing Columbia Univ Paper: Another Conservative Red Herring

Conservative columnists have been trying to make a big deal about a paper that Barack Obama wrote when he was a student at Columbia University - they seem to think the fact that no one has a copy is a sign that Obama has something to hide. MSNBC's First Read has the whole story.

Here's the reality - which I happen to know as a Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University:

1. Colleges and universities do not usually keep or formally retain copies of undergraduate papers. If we do not return them to students at the end of the term, we might hold on to them in our offices for a few months into the next term, in case a student wants to come by and pick up the paper. That's it - they're gone after that (even in my messy office).

2. PhD dissertations and sometimes Masters theses are indeed kept on file both by universities, and by central repositories (such as University Microfilms - UMI). But Obama's paper was neither a doctoral dissertation or a masters thesis.

3. In fact, it would be a violation of a student's privacy for a professor to provide any journalist with a copy of a student paper.

4. Students are of course free to do with their papers as they please. But how many of you still have copies of your college papers? I don't (though for some reason I did keep a high school paper I wrote about Charles De Gaulle way back when. Go figure.) But there's no reason to think that Obama kept any of his college papers.

Hey, this whole subject is a good topic for a paper - maybe I'll assign it to my students at Fordham this Fall.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia: Three Principles

Every once in a while I agree with just the way an event is unfolding.

About Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University:

1. As a professor who could invite Ahmadinejad to any one of a number of classes at Fordham University, I would not. Although I think it is indeed very valuable to confront world leaders with delusions head-on, and allow students to do the same, I think this value would be offset by the propaganda advantage Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would derive from addressing any class or gathering in America. Such an address and the response it drew could easily be edited to make the Iranian President look good to his supporters back home and around the world.

2. Nonetheless, I think other professors and universities are entitled to reach their own different decisions on this difficult issue. Therefore, I support Columbia University's right to invite Ahmadinejad. Part of the zest and real freedom of American life is that individual professors and universities can make their own decisions in such matters. We would be living in a much poorer place, intellectually, if all classrooms and universities were the same.

3. But I also support the right of Columbia University students, alumni, and indeed any and all Americans to protest Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia. This is all part of that same democratic process of a free, open society - and it distinguishes us from the type of closed society Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sits at the top of in Iran.