No sooner had I put up my last post when the website to which I linked, Dylan Hears a Who, was taken down. No explanation but I suspect that the estate of the late Dr. Seuss (the site featured a “lost” Dylan album, with full cuts of Bob singing “Green Eggs and Ham” etc. complete with Hammond organ and old LP scratches and pops, and one of the funniest graphics — Carnaby St. era Bob in a Cat in the Hat hat) demanded it’s removal. Seuss’s widow Audrey Geisel has been quick to quash parodies and such that infringe on the Seuss legacy in the past. Which would be all well and good had she not given her blessings to the loathsome Mike Meyers film of the Cat in the Hat. That featured a scene of the Cat ogling a Playboy-style fold-out of the kids’s mother, meaning I suppose its okay to imply that this beloved childhood character — who is, you remember, a cat — wants to shag your mom but not to let some Dylan parodyist sing your beloved husband’s rhymes.
O the thinks that you’ll think.
Also, Charley and Stephanie were not going to see the Bunuel film Exterminating Angel but rather the contemporary exercise in French soft porn, Exterminating Angels. No word back from them yet. Charley and Stephanie, that is. Not the angels.
The beauty of Dylan Hears a Who went beyond the funny concept. What made it note (or link) worthy was the loving detail that went into its production. It was a labor of love by someone who clearly DID love Dylan and Seuss equally — just as the similarly litigation inspiring Grey Album was made by a deejay who loved Jay Z and the Beatles.
The web of course is rife with change: I threw the I Ching yesterday (a line that Dylan, speaking of who, threw out of his first version of “Idiot Wind”) and consulted the same I Ching site I had recommended in this space last year. But where once there was a fairly full and faithful rendering of the Bollingen Series’ Wilhelm translation of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, what’s left looks like a handful of fortune cookies. Tossing the virtual coins I came up with hexagram seven, The Army with this explanation:
The army encamps to the left.
Without fault.
There is not much work to do, so one steps back. Nothing wrong with that.
(“Encamping to the left” means that the army encamps while it has no war to fight.)
Compare this to the five page reading Wilhelm gives the same hexagram (“The attributes of the two trigrams are danger inside and obedience outside”) is enough to send you back to the library. See you there.