Self Portrait (1970) Bob Dylan
By Kimberly Mayer
They sat next to each other, essentially, in first class. Aisle seats across from each other on a United Airline flight out of Tulsa to Denver. My friend, Karen, and the older man who was the last passenger to board the plane. Wearing shades and a leather jacket. Bob Dylan.
What I love is that for the one and a half hours of the flight she gave him his space and anonymity. Dylan, with a newspaper upon his tray, tearing articles into strips and rearranging them on the page of a notebook where he began writing. Having just toured the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa and seen his many notebooks of songs, rewrites and revisions, she was not surprised by the way he cramped his hand to write so small. His handwriting is miniscule.
And just when you think you are traveling with the gods, Dylan begins dropping things. First his newspaper, later his drink with ice cubes.
Dylan sold his archive to the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa in 2016 and there lie unreleased recordings, poems, notebooks, handwritten manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, leather jackets, and the like. Dylan was born in Minnesota, but folk singer Woody Guthrie was an Oklahoman—and a huge influence on the early Dylan. Oil billionaire George Kaiser also founded the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa. “Tulsa is the beginning of the west, but it is also on the edge of north, south, and east,” notes historian Douglas Brinkley. “There is no better crossroads city in America.”
And didn’t Dylan always like the heartland?
But back to what he was doing on that plane, tearing the articles into strips. What Karen witnessed was a creative process, of course, as well as Dylan’s extraordinary skill at detachment. A master at it, finding a personal domain in which to write.
I found a YouTube “Don’t Look Back” out take (1965) of Dylan demonstrating a similar process. “I wrote out the song, you know? Then I cut it up on the paper, like into four. I cut it in the middle, then I cut it across. And then I rearranged the paper so it comes out like this.” And then he continues in a song-like manner, “It’s just a technique, which some people say some people invented and other people say other people invented. And some people say it’s a very old technique.
And I realize it’s similar to how I learned to write papers—on index cards, all over the floor of my room. It’s the only way I’ve ever known. I’ve graduated since to tables, but my notes remain on index cards. I wrote two manuscripts this way. I write my blog posts this way.
And now I’m going to sound like Dylan and say: some people say they taught me, some people say I made it up. And some people say it doesn’t matter anyway.
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 