The Ideas They Kept A-Rollin’

This morning I was pleased to discover that the number of hits on my blogspot had taken a noticeable spike, I suspect in part because of the stimulating exchange (stimulating to me, anyway) Tim Lucas and I have had the past couple of days regarding the relationship between psychedelia and bubblegum music. I invite all my blogspot visitors to read his comments, available through the comments link at the end of my “Bubblegum Breakthrough (Slight Return)” entry. (His initial comment, that prompted the subsequent discussion, is available at the end of the previous day’s entry.)

I am especially gratified by the number of visitors because I think he and I have, in the space of about 48 hours, generated more ideas about how to read (as in interpret) popular music than one can find on websites specifically dedicated to the task of reviewing albums. It’s true that we have been focused on a rather narrow slice of popular music history--admittedly, a slice that is perhaps not interesting to all readers. But what I’ve found so stimulating (as I think Tim has) is not so much our individual valuations of the individual albums or songs--disagreement is a healthy thing, not a “bad” thing, because it promotes further discussion that usually translates into knowledge--but the various methods we’ve employed to make the music meaningful in the first place. After all, popular music doesn’t “mean” anything at all—doesn’t gain any adherents--until it conforms to certain trends and ideas that make it valuable to listeners.

Perhaps the point is best expressed by James Lincoln Collier, in Jazz: The American Theme Song (Oxford University Press, 1993), a critic whose knowledge about jazz is encyclopedic in its breadth. Although he is writing about how jazz music came to represent the new modern spirit of America in the 1920s (“Modernism”), his point is applicable to the way all popular music is ascribed meaning and value:

The point is that a particular style or form in art gains adherents not simply from purely aesthetic considerations, but also from how well it appears to agree with fashionable social, philosophic, or even political considerations . . . . (p. 9)

It was Collier’s insight that formed the basis of my initial assertion, that psychedelia is the aural equivalent of a hallucinogenic drug trip: the particular “sound” that became known as psychedelia meant nothing until it was ascribed a certain analogical meaning.

I think exchanges of the sort Tim and I have the past couple of days are rare in the sense that they happen because the individual participants coincidentally have the time to dedicate to such pursuits. (He’s trying to assemble the latest issue of Video Watchdog while I’m trying to provide him with the material to do just that.) Although Tim has been writing on the cinema since he was a teenager, and I’ve been writing for Video Watchdog for the past 11 years, both of us have keen interest in popular music and it has always been a pleasure for me to share ideas and views about music with him. I don’t think our mutual love of movies and music should be surprising to those who know us primarily through Video Watchdog, as we’re both extremely interested in what in the most general terms is called the “entertainment industry,” the way it has formed our identities and contributed to the life of our individual imaginations. We’re also interested in it because we’re both striving to understand ourselves as individuals whose identities were formed during a particular historical moment when the cultural influence of the entertainment industry had finally achieved the cultural dominance that we now accept as a given, like a fact of nature.

In short, we take popular music very seriously. Last year he and I both submitted proposals to Contiuum’s 33 1/3 series, only to have our proposals rejected by the editor. The manuscript for his book, on Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation, has been completed for a year now if not longer; my manuscript, on Wall of Voodoo’s Call of the West, is perhaps half completed, as I stopped working on it once I received the rejection notice (an email). Both of us obviously were disappointed by the outcome, as we’d each completed a considerable amount of original research, and a number of original interviews. In my case, I had the complete cooperation and total support of the defunct band’s leader, Stan Ridgway, who is still active touring and making albums. If anyone knows of a potential publisher for these books, please let Tim or me know.

Bubblegum Breakthrough (Slight Return)

Last night my friend Tim Lucas took the time to post comments to my recent entries, “Bubblegum Breakthrough” and “DIDs,” a gesture that I very much appreciate--one hopes that one’s blog entries are taken seriously by somebody. While I’d like to respond at length to the many ideas in both of his posts, for the moment I’ll confine my remarks to Tim’s remarks on my most recent entry, “Bubblegum Breakthrough,” simply because it’s the most recent.

Having mentioned the co-songwriters of “The Rain, the Park & Other Things”--Artie Kornfeld (pictured, at the Woodstock festival) and Steve Duboff--he was right to remind readers that I’d overlooked the fact that Artie Kornfeld was one of the co-producers of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Those interested might want to visit his webpage, where one can find biographical information as well as behind-the-scenes information on the complexities of staging the famous music and arts festival. (Alternatively, a brief bio of Kornfeld is available here.)

Tim makes an intriguing link between “The Rain, the Park & Other Things” and the heavy rains that festival-goers had to endure while at Woodstock:

No wonder he [Kornfeld] . . . looks so blissed out while standing onstage and rapping to the ABC newsman about all the people sitting in the rain in the Woodstock movie. His rap is the one Charlton Heston has memorized in The Omega Man.

Having read Tim’s comment, it occurred to me that one could think of “The Rain, the Park & Other Things” as a sort of virtual rehearsal for the Woodstock festival itself, as if Kornfeld had, in some half-formed or perhaps unconscious way, the idea for the Woodstock festival in his head when he wrote the song years before, thus making the lyrical content an example of what rhetoricians call prolepsis—speaking of something that has not yet happened as if it already has happened. One wonders if Kornfeld being “blissed out” during the interview isn’t, in part, his own bewildered reaction to the literal realization that “The Rain, the Park & Other Things” was, remarkably, unfolding before him.

In response to my assertion that "The Rain, the Park, & Other Things" was bubblegum music, Tim responded:

The Cowsills may have been a bubblegum act by definition, but I would personally categorize their performance of this song as psychedelia. There is no insincerity or irony in the vocals, for one thing, and the instrumentation has a wonderfully iridescent quality. Wholesome yes, but psychedelic nonetheless--like a black light poster or a strawberry scented candle.

In response, I would say that a fundamental problem--and what makes writing about this sort of music difficult--is that the categories of “bubblegum” and “psychedelia” are ill-defined concepts: they have “fuzzy boundaries” (no pun intended). As an old philosophy professor of mine once warned me: avoid creating false dichotomies between ill-defined concepts. The problem is this: is psychedelia defined by instrumentation, that is, by sound, or by lyrical content, or, as Tim suggests, by a certain rhetorical posture toward the subject matter? (Irony being a defining feature of bubblegum as I understand his argument.)

I agree with him in his characterization of the song’s instrumentation (sound being essential to psychedelic music), and I also think he’s correct in his observation that there’s no “insincerity or irony in the vocals.” But we disagree over the issue of irony: actually, I would take the opposite position, and say that it is psychedelia that is defined by irony, not bubblegum, the latter music being the one characterized by a certain naïvete and lack of irony--an absence of self-consciousness. In order to illustrate my point, juxtapose “The Rain, the Park, & Other Things” with, say, the Rolling Stones’ “2000 Light Years From Home”--a song which, historically speaking, has the virtue of being released almost exactly at the same time as “The Rain, the Park, & Other Things.” Which song seems more obviously psychedelic? To me, it is “2000 Light Years From Home,” certainly the more irony-laden and self-conscious of the two. What’s more, the lyrics are more “surreal” as opposed to those of “The Rain, the Park…,” which form a more coherent narrative, even if the narrator can’t decide if the event really happened or was a dream. In contrast, psychedelic lyrics are often highly fragmented, repetitive, and, as I mentioned earlier, surrealistic. As an example, think of the Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow”:

Have you seen her all in gold?
Like a queen in days of old
She shoots colors all around
Like a sunset going down
Have you seen a lady fairer?

She comes in colors everywhere;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming, colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

She’s like a rainbow
Coming, colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

I see psychedelic music as the aural equivalent of an hallucinogenic drug trip--“She’s a Rainbow” being the Stones’ answer to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”--while bubblegum is the aural equivalent of non-alcoholic beer (or, alternatively, psychedelic music played by a band that doesn't inhale).

I think the Cowsills’ (cleaned-up) cover of “Hair” also works as wholesome psychedelia--listen to the sound effects during the “It can get caught in the trees” stanza--but “Indian Lake” is unabashed bubblegum.

Yes, and yes--although I was never a fan of the musical Hair nor the Cowsills (which doesn’t mean, incidentally, that just because I wasn’t “for” them meant I was “against” them). “Indian Lake” is on The Best of the Cowsills, but when I play that CD I usually press the “skip” button when “Indian Lake” cues up. To be honest, the only Cowsills record to which I really ever gave a listen was The Cowsills In Concert (which included “Hair” live), an album that a friend insisted I borrow, along with the first Vanilla Fudge album. I have to say that at the time, for some now long-forgotten reason, my tastes gravitated toward Vanilla Fudge, although the last time I listened to their first album (on CD), probably a year or so ago, I found it extraordinarily dull and turgid. Some critic once remarked about the work of the novelist Henry James, “He chewed rather more than he bit off,” a remark that is an apt description of the first Vanilla Fudge album. I probably thought at the time that it was “psychedelic,” but now I think it is just “pulverizedelic,” a plodding, Hammond organ-heavy album that is utterly devoid of any humor or imagination. You can’t imagine how many local bands at the time tried to copy its sound, bands that played so many high school proms I don’t even wish to think about it. In contrast, and to its credit, The Cowsills in Concert is, now, what it was, then--completely innocuous and benign.

Looking back at my previous post, I see that the fundamental issues became even more complicated when I suggested that "Power Pop" developed out of "bubblegum." Anyone wish to chime in on (for example), the relation between . . . the Cowsills and . . . Big Star?

1967: Bubblegum Breakthrough

It is no accident that virtually every album considered among the greatest in rock history is not a live album but made in the studio. To name some obvious examples, think of Elvis Presley's first LP for RCA (1956), The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (1973)--all products of improvements in studio recording and engineering technology. Moreover, in the case of Dark Side of the Moon, developments in electronic music and the invention of the Moog synthesizer both contributed to its success and its achievement. Because of developments in electronic music and recording methods, by 1967 popular music had begun to provide an aural, electronic equivalent to the hallucinogenic drug experience, known as “psychedelic rock” or simply “psychedelia.”

What came to be referred to, pejoratively, as Bubblegum Music emerged from, and was a response to, psychedelia. The acknowledged masters of this form of pop music were Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz (known as Super K Productions), who were to Bubblegum music what Alan Parsons was to psychedelic rock. Under the banner of Super K Productions, Kasenetz-Katz were responsible for hits such as “Simon Says” by The 1910 Fruitgum Company and “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” by the Ohio Express, both released in 1968.

In my mind, though, Bubblegum’s first big hit was recorded by The Cowsills, who, as everyone knows, became the model for the musical family depicted in the TV show The Partridge Family (1970-74). The hit, released late in 1967, was titled “The Rain, The Park & Other Things.” It was written by Artie Kornfeld and Steve Duboff, who’d also written the hit “The Pied Piper” for Crispian St. Peters.

I saw her sitting in the rain, raindrops falling on her
She didn't seem to care, she sat there and smiled at me
Then I knew (I knew, I knew, I knew) she could make me happy (happy, happy!)
Flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere!
I love the flower girl! Oh, I don't know just why, she simply caught my eye
I love the flower girl! She seemed so sweet and kind, she crept into my mind
I knew I had to say hello
She smiled up at me, and she took my hand and we walked through the park alone
And I knew (I knew, I knew, I knew) she had made me happy (happy, happy!)
Flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere!
I love the flower girl! Oh, I don't know just why, she simply caught my eye
I love the flower girl! She seemed so sweet and kind, she crept into my mind
Suddenly the sun broke through (see the sun)
I turned around she was gone (where did she go?)
And all I had left was one little flower in my hand
But I knew (I knew, I knew, I knew) she had made me happy (happy, happy!)
Flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere!
I love the flower girl! Was she reality or just a dream to me?
I love the flower girl! Her love showed me the way to find a sunny day

Betraying Bubblegum’s psychedelic origins, the singer is unsure whether he’s just experienced something real or an hallucination. “The Rain, The Park & Other Things” can also be understood as a benign version of The Association’s “Along Comes Mary” with its supposedly cloaked drug reference (“Mary,” so the story goes, is short for “Mary Jane,” one of the many coded names for marijuana).

Although providing similar titillations as rock but for a younger, teenage set, Bubblegum was psychedelic music deprived of its substance. It was psychedelia with the malignant property removed, the 1960s equivalent of today’s decaffeinated coffee, fat free cream, beer without alcohol, sugarless soda pop. It was The Monkees rather than The Beatles, “I Think We’re Alone Now” rather than “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Crimson and Clover” as the good (drug) trip rather than the bad one of “2000 Light Years From Home.”

Bubblegum’s novel flavor dissipated fast, and by the early 1970s it was gone, supplanted by what’s since become known as “Power Pop”—think of The Raspberries’ “Go All the Way” instead of Tommy James’ “Hanky Panky.”

DIDs: Of Records, Albums, and Theology

The collocation “Desert Island Discs”—DIDs— normally refers to a music critic’s list of revered recordings, usually consisting of ten (10) albums, as in Top 10. The term is derived from the question, “If you were stranded on a desert island, what ten albums (normally ten, out of respect to the commandments), out of all the albums you own, would you want to have with you?” Given the hypothetical nature of the question, it might just as easily be phrased as, “If your house were on fire, what ten albums would you grab on the way out?” Implicit in the question is the assumption that the critic compiling the list has hoarded, in a grossly materialistic way, more albums than he could ever possibly listen to (or rather, listen to carefully). Actually, the compilation of a “DIDs” list is a tacit admission by the critic that he really listens only to a small portion of the many hundreds (or thousands) he owns.

I vividly remember a conversation I had about ten years ago or so with my friend Mike Jarrett, a music critic himself and a world expert on jazz, when the topic of DIDs came up. In the context of a conversation regarding what each of us might include on a DIDs list, he paused to ask me a question that he prefaced by insisting he was asking in all seriousness. Of course, I said, ask it. Why would I think you were not asking a serious question? The question was this, brilliant really, which I’ve pondered many times in the years since: What makes up God’s record collection: Every record ever made, or just the best records ever made?

You don’t have to have any sort of conventional religious belief--even none--to answer the question. How do you answer it--not in a “theoretical” way, meaning, how “would” you answer it assuming the off-chance that someone ever asked you--but how do you? Does the most ideal of album collections in God’s place consist of all the albums ever made, or only the best (however the Almighty should decide that)? Is heaven (a desert island, of the tropical paradise sort) a place of plenty, of excess, of everything, or is it premised on the Puritan Principle of Parsimony—that is, DIDs. (When you go to heaven, in other words, and you’ve got only ten choices, what shall they be?) Is it all-inclusive, or exclusive? If you had your druthers, do you invite everybody, or only a select few? Certain Christian traditions, of course, tell us that those selected are an elite few—the Chosen. But I recall answering Mike’s question, “all of them. God has all of them.” Mike’s response was, “But does He listen to them all?” Isn’t this the real paradox of desire: Is desire polymorphously perverse (indiscriminate), or fetishistically perverse (rarified)?

I have never seen a list of DIDs that was really anything more than a particular critic’s fetishized list, selected from a standardized list of “Rock Greats”—the critic’s favorite Beatles album, favorite Rolling Stones album, favorite Pink Floyd album, Led Zeppelin album, Bob Dylan album—you get the idea. And outside of some occasional, unexpected flourishes—Cream, perhaps, or U2, Grateful Dead, Nirvana—the list never contains surprises. (Or, if it does, it’s the “Guilty Pleasure” sort, that is, the fetishized sort, meaning the critic "can’t explain it," "just likes it" sort, meaning it eludes rational explication--he’s a mystery even to himself.) In other words, we all know the critical darlings that are going to be there—Rock music’s Great Tradition—the suspense is simply finding out which album by the canonical bands happens to be the critic’s favorite (at the moment).

The problem is that many music critics are really just fans who’ve learned how to write and found a forum to expound from, fans in the sense that their judgment is uncritical—everything by the band (Beatles, Pink Floyd, fill in the blank) is great. Every song, every album, every note by the band is just as good as every other one. Now this just can’t be true--or can it?

By way of analogy, think of the work by a major literary figure—Shakespeare, for example. As Harold Bloom points out—Bloom being one of America’s best critics—had Shakespeare died at the same age as his contemporary, playwright Christopher Marlowe, and Marlowe lived on instead, Marlowe would have been considered historically the greater playwright. Shakespeare’s early plays do not have the level of sophistication and craft of Marlowe’s early plays. At a younger age, the fact is, Marlowe was the stronger playwright of the two. Of course, history is radically contingent: Marlowe was murdered, and Shakespeare lived, eventually composing the great tragedies upon which his reputation largely, and justly, rests. Likewise, of all the many volumes of his writings, the crucial importance of British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) rests, according to Bloom, on a mere nine poems—but what a brilliant nine they are. In popular music criticism, most critics refuse to make such keen discriminations, partly because they are afraid history will prove them wrong, and so overestimate the importance of every album ("five stars"), or else invent an ad hoc system on which to base their judgment--yet another mechanism of desire--which is presented as “objective.”

Question: Is Meet the Beatles as good a record as the White Album? Or, alternatively: Does God have all the Beatles albums, are only the very best?

Some, rightly so, will cry foul and claim a category error: first I asked about records, and then I asked about albums. In an earlier post, I claimed the two were not the same, a record being a material artifact, an album a concept. But if an album is a concept, does God, then, prefer "Greatest Hits" packages, or the individual albums, in the sense of particular records? Example: Does God have The Eagles' Hotel California, or The Eagles' Greatest Hits? Or all of the individual albums, avoiding the Greatest Hits?

Thursday, January 28, 1960: Why Are There Lyrics, Anyway?

Four years earlier than the above date, in his first national television appearance on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, broadcast January 28 1956, Elvis Presley chose to open with “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” a song that Frank Sinatra, for one, would never have condescended to perform. Sinatra probably snorted in derision at Elvis’s second song that evening, too: “Flip, Flop & Fly.” Three months later, when Elvis again appeared on the Stage Show, he sang “Tutti Frutti.” Forget what young females thought about Elvis’s bad boy sneer, his gyrating hips, his wiggling and shimmying, his clamorous shouts and erotic moans—that’s legendary. The more important question is, why did Elvis choose to perform, on a national stage, such “nonsensical” songs?

One of the reasons Elvis was derided early on was that his choice of material seemed so ludicrous: “Flip Flop & Fly”? “Tutti Frutti”? Why not the deep yearning of classic ballads such as “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” or “When Your Lover Has Gone”? Why choose songs that are so devoid of substance—so apparently trivial? Why not perform the old standards instead? Frank Sinatra was so incensed by Elvis’s music that he wrote a magazine article condemning rock as “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.” He averred that rock ‘n’ roll is “sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact—dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” (qtd. from Kitty Kelley, His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, Bantam Books, p. 277).

However, according to Donald Clarke, by the time Elvis appeared on the historical scene, the music business wasn’t the same as it had been when Sinatra began his career slightly over a decade earlier. By the early 1950s, “good white songs were becoming scarce. The Berlins, Gershwins and the rest had died or retired, and the classic songs they had written could not be imitated.” Hence, Elvis never had access to the sort of material to which Sinatra had access (“standards”), and perhaps that made all the difference. (As a corollary, Elvis was never offered the sort of strong dramatic roles in movies that Sinatra was offered, either.) The composers of many of Elvis’s early songs were black, who were writing for the black music market, and who had a different sensibility than the Berlins and Gershwins. So, in answer to the question as to why Elvis chose to perform songs such as “Flip Flop & Fly” and “Tutti Frutti,” the reason is because Elvis chose songs that didn’t sound like anything else. But to Frank Sinatra, if songs weren’t standards, they were aberrations.

Simon Frith offers a way of understanding the difference between Sinatra and Elvis by referring to Dave Laing’s book, Buddy Holly (1972). Laing says that those interested in understanding rock music need to have the musical equivalent of film studies’ distinction between the auteur and the metteur en scene. According to Laing:

The musical equivalent of the metteur en scene is the performer who regards a song as an actor does his part—as something to be expressed, something to get across . . . . The vocal style of the singer is determined almost entirely by the emotional connotations of the words.

Frank Sinatra, then, was the musical equivalent of the metteur en scene. In contrast, says Laing, the rock auteur

is determined not by the unique features of the song but by his personal style, the ensemble of vocal effects that characterize the whole body his work.

Elvis, then, was the equivalent of an auteur: the meaning of the song is not simply organized around the words, but rather in the exceptional nature of his singing style. Sinatra condemned Elvis because he didn’t understand his music, nor could he, at the time, quite grasp the historic rupture in American popular music that Elvis represented. In film historical terms, Sinatra was the old, “classical” Hollywood, while Elvis anticipated the age—our age—of the independent film, the age of the auteur.

Mondegreen Pt. 3: Melon Calling Baby

Although there are rather sophisticated Site Meter services available for monitoring website traffic, I use only the “basic” service—in other words, the free one. Other than page views, I don’t pay any attention to the various sorts of traffic data available to me—this isn’t a commercial site, after all, so such information is not critically important to me. The other day, however, I decided to take a look at the data as listed in the category “By Referrals,” information on how one’s particular website is found by a particular viewer other than by directly entering the specific URL (that is, data on re-directed traffic).

I was mildly astonished to discover how many individuals had been directed to my blogspot as a consequence of searching the key words, “Betty and the Jets lyrics.” The reason for this is that a few blog entries ago I wrote a blog entry on the mondegreen, “Dead Ants Are My Friends, A-Blowin’ in the Wind,” followed a few days later by a second entry, a follow-up that I’d titled, as a jape, “Betty and the Jets.”

After learning how many page visits my blogspot had received as a consequence of individuals searching for the lyrics to “Betty and the Jets,” I felt a tad bit guilty: wasn’t I perpetuating what is clearly a rather widespread misunderstanding, adding to, rather than clarifying, the essential homophonic ambiguity regarding “Bennie and the Jets” by disseminating the deformed, mondegreen version, “Betty and the Jets”? On the other hand, I decided, perhaps having read about the mondegreen, the searchers might, in a sort of roundabout way, figure out the song’s actual title, and hence find the lyrics they had set out to find.

In my earlier “Betty and the Jets” blog entry, I’d suggested the existence of the mondegreen, at least insofar as lyrics are concerned, is a consequence of a message being deformed once it is subject to electronic transmission, a technology which emphasizes the received nature of messages.

But perhaps on this Easter Sunday, we might want to consider an entirely different theoretical issue, that of the (invisible) effect of homophonic ambiguity (the mondegreen) on the transmission of messages that were originally made within a largely oral (that is, largely illiterate) culture, and consider whether the transmission of Biblical texts might also have been subject to deformation by the mondegreen. I’m sure such a possibility has given many a Biblical scholar a sleepless night or two (or three). I know it has been exploited for comic effect: think, for instance, of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the line, "Blessed are the cheesemakers," although this is an example of an intentional deformation, not an unintentional one, as is the mondegreen. However, the point is clear enough.

There is certainly textual evidence that serves as a sort of “smoking gun” for the existence of the Biblical mondegreen, as Frank Kermode has astutely pointed out in his fascinating book, The Genesis of Secrecy. In his discussion of figura (i.e., typology, a method of Biblical interpretation premised on the assumption that events in the New Testament are “pre-figured,” or anticipated, by textual material found in the Old Testament), Kermode discusses the evidence that Old Testament texts were sometimes “christologized,” that is, “rewritten in a more convenient form.” He writes:

A famous instance is the Christian version of Psalms 96:10, as found in Justin, where the words “from the tree” are added to the original text, “The Lord has reigned.” (107)

The footnote Kermode adds to this passage is worth looking at in detail:

I have heard this example contested on the ground that we cannot be sure there were not Septuagint manuscripts that included the words apo tou xulou (“from the tree”). An explanation of how such an intrusive reading might have come about is this: a translator, coming across the Hebrew word selah, which, though it is not infrequent in the Psalms, has no certain meaning, transliterated it into Greek xela or even xyla, so that the text read “The Lord shall reign xyla.” The addition was modified to xylou, and somebody then made sense of it by inserting apo and reading apo xulou, “from the tree”—thus “manufacturing a prophecy of the crucifixion which was to be welcomed by Christian exegetes” . . . . (158-59).

In other words, the actual text was modified by the exegete’s desire for the New Testament to fulfill the promises of the Old Testament. The analogy, of course, is that one hears what one wants to hear. True, Kermode’s specific example is one of scribal corruption of the orthographic sort (orthography concerns spelling, but also the issue of how sounds are expressed by written symbols), but it is only one of the many kinds of ambiguity in language. Some words have one sound but multiple spellings, with different meanings for each spelling (e.g., main/mane), homophones in the strict sense. But there are words that have one spelling but have multiple meanings (e.g., “bank,” as in river bank, but also “bank” as in financial institution) called polysemous words. Obviously, both kinds of words can confuse listeners. In Kermode’s example, the argument for the addition of “from the tree” is based on the assumption that some ancient redactor, confused by the Hebrew word selah, decided it was a pseudohomophone (for a contemporary example, for instance, think of the use of “luv” for “love”) and therefore made an orthographic error, substituting either the Greek word xela or possibly xyla. A subsequent redactor then modified xela/xyla to xylou, creating yet another confusion, one subsequently resolved by yet another redactor, the later one adding of the word apo and reading apo xulou, “from the tree.” Note the progressive deformation caused by the original substitution.

There’s a famous example in the history of literary criticism of a scholarly article having been written based on a text that had an error of the orthographic kind. The literary scholar in question (nameless) wrote a long, involved interpretation of the profound religious and metaphysical implications of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, mistakenly basing his interpretation on a textual source in which the phrase, “soiled fish of the sea” was, unknown to the critic, a corruption of the phrase found in the first and early editions of the novel, “coiled fish of the sea.” (“Soiled fish” vaguely suggesting of the idea of original sin, while “coiled fish” suggesting the meaning of the Old English “wyrm,” a serpent or dragon, and hence the Devil.) How easily some later copy-editor could have made such a mistake; how seemingly minor such a simple substitution of the glyph “s” for the glyph “c”—but how astonishing the interpretive flight made possible by such a seemingly insignificant error!

I’ve made the same sort of mistake myself. I am one of those listeners who for years thought Bob Dylan sang, in “Tangled Up in Blue,”

Split up on the docks that night

rather than the lyric as published on his website:

Split up on a dark sad night

Obviously, my interpretation of the song had always rested, in part, on mishearing this particular lyric. I still prefer my version over the actual lyric (the role of desire in hearing). That the song’s narrator and the unnamed woman “split up on the docks that night” always had a wonderfully cinematic, mysterious quality to it: a foggy, dockside scene in chiaroscuro, two figures in silhouette, illuminated from behind by a single bulb beneath a metal canopy overhanging the entrance to some small, dilapidated shack, with the small squibs of light marking the portholes of the docked ships behind them. I thought it was a suitably romantic image for such a somber parting. How non-cinematic is the actual lyric (to me), but the point is how one’s interpretation rests on how one has decoded the message.

And just think, all this time, you wanted to be a rockin’ polestar? Or how about a rockin' pollster? Examine not the boat in your neighbor's eye, remove the bead from your own!