That's My Story, But Not Where It Ends: Robert Polito on Bob Dylan's Second Act

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. I think it was in his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, that F. Scott Fitzgerald made his famous remark about there not being any second acts in American life. I'm not sure if he really meant it. Maybe he meant it to be so wrong that we would all still remember him. Maybe it's his second or third act. Certainly, the idea of second acts has been a persistent theme in American cultural history. Bob Dylan, for example. We all know, of course, of his first act, which, was celebrated in the last few years, particularly in the movie A Complete Unknown. But Dylan has had many acts. Of course, he's had many names, many styles, many relationships. And his second act, his main second act, I think, is brilliantly covered in a in a major new I don't know if it's a cultural biography or analysis by my guest, Robert Polito, whose new book, After the Flood Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace, is already being acclaimed as one of the major nonfiction works of 2026. Robert is joining us from New Paltz in new york, just ninety minutes north of the city. Robert, congratulations on the new book.

00:01:52 Robert Polito: Thank you very much. Andrew, and it's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:57 Andrew Keen: Robert, is it a bit cheesy to bring up that old, F. Scott Fitzgerald chestnut about there not being any second acts in American history?

00:02:06 Robert Polito: Oh, I don't think it's cheesy at all. I mean, sometimes, like, scholars of F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know, don't don't take that line quite as metaphorically as we do. You know? Meaning that, you know, you have a first act and a second act and that that that they think that Fitzgerald might have been referring to contemporary plays as he understood them in a way. But I think that, like, you know, I was just interested in the second act of Dylan's career.

00:02:57 Andrew Keen: You're also a noted biographer. You your your biography of Jim Thompson, the noir writer, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Do you feel when you're writing these books that you play on your subject's team? Do you consider yourself a team Dylan kinda guy?

00:03:18 Robert Polito: I don't I don't think so. I mean, tell me a little bit more about what you might mean by that.

00:03:24 Andrew Keen: Well, that you're taking his position, that you're representing him. I mean, Dylan is a controversial figure. Some people think he's the greatest American cultural, figure in in American history. Others think he's a little bit of a charlatan. Some people think he stole all his stuff. Others think that, you know, his great moment was in the early sixties. Others, like you, suggest that he's got better with time. Is this book in a way making an argument on behalf of Dylan? Dylan is notoriously, obstinate about making his own argument, I think.

00:04:00 Robert Polito: Well, I wouldn't purport to speak for Dylan at all. And and in fact, like, the, you know, the structure of the book is, is in an abecedarium, 26 chapters a to z. And, I think I first encountered that in in in the book of Ephraim, the first volume of of James Merrill's Ouija board trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. And part of what attracted me to the, you know, that form for the book in a, you know, in addition to the way that it allowed me to be chronological when I wanted to be chronological and to explore subjects when I wanted to explore subjects was was was the was the arbitrariness of it. I mean, I wanted a form that would acknowledge the limits of of what I know, what I can know about Dylan. And that, I don't think there'll be a definitive or even a kind of comprehensive book about Dylan for a long, long time. And so that if if anything, I was aiming for, you know, an an engagement and investigation and an exploration without purporting in any way to be definitive. As, you know, as I say in the book, I mean, you know, as far as I could tell, there's no rosebud sled in, you know, in Dylan's archive in in Tulsa that that explains everything.

00:05:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, just to remind

00:05:46 Robert Polito: you that the opposite, I think, of what you, you know, were suggesting, I think. I was aiming for tentativeness and self skepticism.

00:05:57 Andrew Keen: Perhaps like Dylan himself. The Rosebud reference, of course, is to Citizen Kane. You're a movie guy. And I didn't quite realize, actually, from the book how much of a movie guy Dylan is as well. That was something I learned from the book.

00:06:13 Robert Polito: Well, there are all these stories that people who, you know, who have either ridden on the on the bus on the tour bus with Dylan or met him, and, you know, he's always watching movies on the on the bus.

00:06:29 Andrew Keen: The subtitle of the book, which really resonates me, I'm not entirely sure what it means, is inside Bob Dylan's memory palace. We've done shows in the past about memory palaces of one kind or another. Joshua Foer wrote a best selling book Moonwalking with Einstein, the art and science of remembering everything. It's about, memory competitions. We actually did a show with another US memory champion a few weeks ago. Your book could have been called Moonwalking with Dylan in the way in which he seems to remember everything intuitively, doesn't he? He has a a remarkable I wouldn't say a remarkable mind, whatever that means, but certainly a remarkable memory. Just everything stuck, didn't it, or doesn't it?

00:07:13 Robert Polito: Well, it seems to. I mean, people who, you know, who have gone record who knew him in the nineteen sixties, either by writing books or or, you know, sitting for interviews, one of the things that they often say about him is is that he could recount more or less verbatim conference conversations that they had had years and even decades before. And so that I so that I think that, you know, the power of the, you know, the the kind of metaphorical title for me, you know, of of memory palaces that, you know, memory palaces were a kind of classical mnemonic device. You know? People would teach themselves to remember things by imagining a kind of spatialization of memory, and they would deposit things they wanted to remember maybe in a specific room or a specific a specific place. And you see that in writers as very various as Cicero or Augustine or, you know, the Jesuit, Matteo Ricci. And, it it seemed to me that what I was looking for was a, you know, an image for how much those late songs of Dylan know and, you know, the ways in which he might write, you know, a song that touches on the civil war by embedding in it phrases from nineteenth century American poets on both sides of the of the conflict. You know, that kind of thing that he that he does over and over again, or the way on on Modern Times, he embeds phrases from Ovid's exile poems or on Tempest from from from Homer. And, and the memory palace gave me a way of visualizing as it were. You know? The, the the range of knowledges inside those poems, musical, literary, historical,

00:09:26 Andrew Keen: Cultural. If if Dylan's cultural life at least is made up of these two acts, the first one being bound up in the early sixties and the movie, A Complete Unknown, and then the the second one, which you focus on, after, I think, you you note in the book, Time Out of Mind, which came out in 1997, to to to extend the theatrical or movie metaphor, there was an interlude between this first and second act, and it it wasn't a very it couldn't have been a very pleasant one for Dylan himself, or maybe he just wasn't quite aware of the interlude. But what happened between these two acts, Robert?

00:10:10 Robert Polito: Well, I mean, you know, my books you know, one of the starting points from my book was Dylan being awarded a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 1991. And, you know, Jack Nicholson introduces him and gives him the plaque. And, Dylan looks like he's about to wander off, and then, you know, he reapproaches the the microphone. And what he, you know, what he said in his little speech there, like, I mean, I I can only paraphrase it without it exactly in front of me right now. But it's something like, you know, sometimes you can become so defiled in this world you know, your mother and father and you, God will believe in your ability and and that because I think one of the, you know, the obvious inferences of that speech was that he was looking upon, you know, his work in the 1980s as virtually a failure. And I think a lot of people thought that that Grammy lifetime achievement award moment was was the end of everything. You know? It was Dylan getting his gold watch and, you know, easing into retirement, and maybe every decade, there'd be a a lavish, you know, stadium tour or something like that. But in fact, it was really starting all over again. You know? Soon after that, he puts out World Gone Wrong and Good as I Been to You, in in which he's reconnecting with his, you know, original folk sort of but I think he was also teaching himself how to sing again. He starts putting together his own bands, And that, you know, and a phase of that culminates in, you know, the album you just mentioned in, you know, in 1997.

00:12:11 Andrew Keen: Time Out of Mind. And then, of course, you're going to Love and Theft. One of the things you don't I mean, the the book is jam packed. It's not a very long book, but, it's jam packed and incredibly dense book, but also very readable, Robert. One of the things you don't address directly, probably it's been addressed so many times before, but I'm intrigued with your take on it, maybe why you didn't really address it directly, is the whole Christian chapter. And, also, there have been a couple of books recently on Dylan's, more than a couple. We've had a couple of authors on the show talking about Dylan's Jewish identity. I know you make a reference at the end, in, Key West. Maybe there's some sort of reference to his bar mitzvah. But do you think religion and for for people trying to figure out this character, Bob Dylan, is religion important? Is the Christian chapter relevant, or is it just part of that interlude between the first and second act? Did he have to go through it to get to the second act?

00:13:13 Robert Polito: I don't know. I mean, like, you know, maybe this is, like, a a a good example of kind of what I meant when I said I wanted a form that could reflect the limits of of what I know and maybe even what's possible to know. I thought it was really interesting in 1991, as I just said, that he identified, you know, his lapses in the nineteen eighties as a spiritual failing rather than simply an aesthetic failing or or, a musical failing. And it seems to me that running through all of the music that I, you know, I write about in the book are are kind of spiritual concerns. You know? And you just mentioned Key West, and that's probably, my favorite song on on Rough and Rowdy Ways. And and I think that it's it's Dylan's, I think, kind of spiritual yearning, but in a in an interestingly kind of also self skeptical way. I mean, the way that he talks about Key West being on the horizon line, it's it's literally halfway between earth and heaven the way that, you know, the horizon line is. And and so I see spiritual yearnings all through it without my purporting to know anything specifically about Dylan's specific religious affiliations, if any.

00:14:47 Andrew Keen: I remember maybe correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I'm imagining this is the kind of book where if it's not in the book, you imagine it's in the book. But at one point in the sixties, even Dylan wondered where he got his lyrics from. They sometimes seem as if they're just delivered from somewhere else with some deity. I wonder in this second act whether it was a little it it was a bit tougher for him. Maybe the first act was unexpected, and I think you quote him when he said, what happens to a 20 year old who gets everything they've ever dreamt of? What are they supposed to do with the rest of their life? Do you think this second act rec I mean, there's always a remarkable and and maybe this reflects great genius or the appearance of great genius. There always seems to be an effortlessness about him, but I'm assuming he had to sweat. There's that famous Leonard Cohen remark when he met Dylan, and they were talking about how long it took them to write songs. And Cohen was talking about one of his songs. He said, yeah. It took me two or three years, and Dylan said, yeah. It took me about ten minutes. Did this second act require a little bit more work, do you think?

00:15:55 Robert Polito: You know, I think one thing that characterizes the years I write about is something you might call [unclear]. What he did more intuitively and spontaneously in the first, you know, six years of his, you know, of of his career. The, you know, the surprises for me when I went to the Tulsa archive really was was how hard Dylan works. You know? There were lots of drafts of a lot of those songs, multiple drafts, and and songs will change radically from one draft to the to the next. And, you know, so for instance, on Time Out of Mind, you know, what I found was three or four songs that Dylan had already completed, you know, before he got there. And he ripped those songs up and took lines from them and moved them, you know, to be moved them all over the place to become the songs that we recognize from the record. I've I've always wondered about that famous moment where, you know, in a hotel room, he reads the lyrics to Daniel Lanois. And Lanois might have heard every line that's on the record, but not necessarily in the songs or even in the places that they are on the, you know, on the album. And so that, Dylan works very, very hard. You know, he he he works, I think, harder than anyone would expect somebody with his his his success, his accomplishments to to do. And some of it for me, I think, maybe goes back to folk process. You know, when he was a young songwriter, his songs were often his folk songs were often rooted in earlier folk songs, songs of the of the nineteenth century or or even earlier child ballads and and things like that. And I think at some point, it occurred to him that he could take that template of of folk process and introduce into it poems and movies and novels and speeches and and histories. And I think with him, my kind of folk process bumps up against literary modernism, early twentieth century literary modernism. Someone like Eliot or Joyce or Gertrude Stein.

00:18:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting you bring up Daniel Lanois, who, he wrote about in to something in some detail in his autobiography Chronicles. He very famous record producer. He produced, Time Out of Mind, the first maybe the first album in this second act in 1997. But you note in the book that ultimately fell out a little bit with Lanois because Dylan always wanted to sing differently. He wanted to perpetually reinvent himself. Maybe it goes back to that old disagreement between Socrates and Plato about the value of the spoken versus the written word. Should we take Dylan's albums then seriously? I know, and and we're gonna come on to, Murder Most Foul, which you have a very original, take on, and and and the album, which that comes from. Is the the album not really the ideal format for Dylan given that he always likes to record and reinvent and rewrite and resing everything he's ever written?

00:19:46 Robert Polito: I, yeah, I think that's a good question because I think that the albums are really just the stage in his composition process. You know? It's preceded by these drafts that I've been talking about, but it's followed by his kind of continuous reinvention of those songs night to night as he as he plays them around the world. You know, even this week as we're as we're talking, you know, he's on tour, and the the set list don't change a lot from night to night, though they've been changing a little bit. But the but but the arrangements and the tones and the angles on those songs change enormously from from night to night. There's almost a jazz quality to

00:20:38 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And to begin

00:20:39 Robert Polito: and and to its current band, especially. You know?

00:20:42 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And that's why, the the reinvented albums or the reinvented recordings are sometimes more popular and more interesting than the originals. One of the the arguments you make in the book, and maybe it's the central argument, which I think is brilliant in its own way. I never really quite thought of it like the way you argue in the book is that, his Rough and Rowdy Ways, this 2020 album, which you love, I love, many Dylan people love, is his Nobel Prize winning speech. Of course, there was a great deal of controversy when Dylan won the literature Nobel Prize. Some people think he didn't deserve it. He didn't show up, then he made a speech that wasn't exactly memorable. But you argue that Rough and Rowdy Ways is the speech. That's the legacy. That's what he was saying to the the committee in Stockholm.

00:21:41 Robert Polito: Yeah. It it seems to me that that album, almost every song on it, really every song on it, either addresses or engages his his art forms in some way or addresses, you know, the political role that comes out of. Yeah. So that, you know, that I'm writing about are very heavily collaged. And, you know, Dylan addresses that in My Own Version of You via Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the way, you know, a song like, you know, I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You is simultaneously Dylan talking to a lover, to god maybe. But I think he's also talking to his audience at the at the same time, or I Contain Multitudes in exploring that or exploring the idea of transcendence in in Key West and, you know, the the Kennedy assassination in the early sixties in in Murder Most Foul. And so I think it was Dylan's real Nobel Prize speech in his own forms and idioms that got him the Nobel Prize in the in the first place.

00:23:03 Andrew Keen: And it's a great speech then, isn't it?

00:23:06 Robert Polito: Yeah. I think so. I think so. And I think that, you know, that that realization that you just referred to that this was his real Nobel Prize speech, that's that's when I felt I could really start writing the book. For a long time, I was just kind of collecting notes and and filling notebooks with sentences and paragraphs and phrases and things like that. And, Rough and Rowdy Ways gave me a a way into writing about the entire period because in part, it was Dylan's self reflection about his work and his life.

00:23:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. In a way, it is the memory palace, isn't it? I mean, the subtitle of the book is inside Bob Dylan's memory palace. We could read your book or you could go out and get Rough and Rowdy Ways.

00:23:56 Robert Polito: Well, or there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of memory palaces in this period. I mean, Theme Time Radio Hour is in fact another memory palace. You know, it it's Dylan playing the songs that he admires and loves and have meant a lot to him and that he's learned from on the on the radio for people. 100 shows.

00:24:19 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Talk a little bit more about, Key West. There's this great line, from, from from Key West. And I when my son first heard the album, he thought it was the best. Of course, I thought the Kennedy one was the best, although maybe I'm not anymore. But there's this remarkable line in the in the in the song. That's my story, but not where it ends. It might also be that's my story, but not where it begins. Storytelling is is critical. I mean, he is, and that's perhaps why he deserves a Nobel Prize, and that's why this is an album in which he's telling his story, which is why

00:25:00 Robert Polito: Well, that's a good instance of the tentativeness and self skepticism that I was talking about before. You know? If the last line had been that's my story, you know, there there would have been a kind of definitiveness about that. But that's my story, and then he he subverts the line or undercuts it in the very next one, but not where it ends.

00:25:24 Andrew Keen: And yet also there are some persistent themes in Dylan.

00:25:30 Robert Polito: You Oh, yeah. Sure.

00:25:32 Andrew Keen: You refer to Blonde on the Tracks, one of the tribute albums that you like. I mean, of course it comes from, Blood on the Tracks, his great 1975 album. Many people, including my own favorite, song from that is Tangled Up in Blue, in which she, at one point, says, but me, I'm still on the road heading for another joint. He hasn't changed in that sense, Robert, has he? He's still on the road. He's still heading for another on

00:26:01 Robert Polito: the road even as we speak. Yeah.

00:26:04 Andrew Keen: There must be something sometimes when one thinks about him, do do you feel that sort of old testament idea if he somehow sacrificed everything for us? He doesn't say it. He's the reverse of Bruce Springsteen. He doesn't have a very intimate relationship with his followers. He doesn't open up. But there is a sacrificial quality to what he's done, isn't there?

00:26:25 Robert Polito: I think so. I mean, some of the ways that in interviews, he's talked about the period that I write about, you know, was you know, for instance, like, in addition to the Grammy lifetime achievement award speech, you know, he he'll talk in Chronicles about almost like this visitation that he experienced once on on stage. And and the idea that he kind of took away from it was that, you know, he has this gift, and he has to go out and play these songs for people. And and and I think that's that's behind, I think, a lot of of what he does, you know, was this recognition that that he was given something, and he shouldn't squander it.

00:27:18 Andrew Keen: And in that sense, my interpretation I mean, I've never met the guy. I'm not sure if you've met him. I'm guessing there must be a loneliness about him. I'm not sure. It'd be a lot of fun being Bob Dylan, wouldn't it?

00:27:31 Robert Polito: Well, I I think it's certainly strange being Bob Dylan. I mean, I think one of the things that I pick up on on Rough and Rowdy Ways, in in fact, I mean, is the strangeness of of being Bob Dylan. I mean, you know, like like, imagine if you could go back and tap him on the shoulder in Hibbing Minnesota at high school graduation and tell him, you're gonna win the Nobel prize in literature, and you're gonna [unclear]. You're gonna become one of the most famous people on the planet. And then, in 2026, at the age of 84, you're still gonna be on the road performing for people. I mean, it just sounds preposterous. Right?

00:28:19 Andrew Keen: Would it have seemed preposterous preposterous to him, though? You indicate that there may have been something about that boy at in in the in the in the school in Hibbing.

00:28:31 Robert Polito: I lost you for a second there, Andrew.

00:28:33 Andrew Keen: Would it have been preposterous, though, to the the boy in Hibbing? Did he was there something about him, do you think? Did he always have a sense of something? I mean, you know, time out of my sorry. A Complete Unknown presents him as just another rock and roll guy, but I wonder whether there's something else about him.

00:28:53 Robert Polito: Well, I think one of the things that I really like about A Complete Unknown is the way that it it foregrounds the power and uniqueness of those songs. I mean, one of the one of the downsides of most biopics is that they don't know what to do with the art that the person created, presumably the reason why you're watching the biopic in the in the first place. And I think what that movie does very effectively is is is focus, you know, how powerful those songs were, how unusual they were, and and how they engage people, who who heard them, whether they were hearing them in a, you know, in a in a in a concert situation or a or a small room. But I guess what I mean by the preposterousness is, like, you know, the the idea that in 1957, 5859, that that somebody could put together an entire lifetime in popular music and be taken seriously as a as a writer and artist to the point where you, you know, win the Nobel Prize in literature. I still think that that might have struck most people as preposterous.

00:30:24 Andrew Keen: The complete unknown movie presents Dylan ultimately a splitting with the left. He chose art. They chose politics. But reading your book and being myself someone who enjoys, Bob Dylan's music, I I wonder whether there are there is a deeply political quality to his work, particularly when it comes to race. What's your

00:30:47 Robert Polito: Oh, I agree. Yeah. I I I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think he's someone who's obsessed with the civil war. He's obsessed also with the war of eighteen twelve. He's obsessed with the legacy of the civil war across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think a lot of his civil rights work in the 1960s comes out of that that obsession. And I think even, you know, an album like like Love and Theft, which is presumably titled after the Eric Lott book about minstrel singing. I mean, it's it's very much a book very much a book and an album that that explores the the interactions and complexities and contradictions of of white and black musics across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. And I and I think Dylan is steeped in that. And I think part of the the poignance of of Love and Theft for me, it's it's it's implicitly Dylan's acknowledgment that as a white blues singer, he is following in a dubious minstrel That it's inescapable. And I think, his his insistence on implicating himself in the issues that he's writing about is is always a large part of his power.

00:32:12 Andrew Keen: Maybe that explains his sort of ambivalent reference to the great Bud Powell at the end of, Murder Most Foul. What do you make, Robert, also of some other writers on Dylan's argument that, like Ron Rosencrantz, I'm not sure if you've seen his new book, that the holocaust and this issue of good and evil, what he calls theosophy, dominated his thinking in life. Is there any truth to that, do you think?

00:32:44 Robert Polito: I think so. I mean, I don't, you know, I think that for the period that I'm writing about, the focus is more often than not on, you know, American history and the civil war and the and the legacies of slavery and Native American genocide. But, but but I think that in the in the work that he did in the in the sixties and seventies and eighties, that's that's very much a a central theme. Do you do you hear it in the music of the period that I was writing about as much as in the earlier yourself?

00:33:24 Andrew Keen: Well, having read the the Rosencrantz book and talking to him, I'm gonna do an interview with him at some point in person in New York because he he's not so good on the Internet. And it made me relisten to some of the lyrics. And that's the problem, I think, with some of the Dylan stuff is you can listen. And if you have an idea or a a need, a wish, then you can always read something into the lyrics, can't you?

00:33:50 Robert Polito: I don't know about that. I mean, explain what you mean by that.

00:33:54 Andrew Keen: Well, the Desolation Row, you know, what is the what is how does it begin?

00:34:01 Robert Polito: I lost you again.

00:34:03 Andrew Keen: The the lyrics from Desolation Row that Rosencrantz really focuses on. I wonder whether also he's always sort of writing back to himself. You mentioned Tulsa and where all all the the the Dylan data is. In, in, in Murder Most Foul, he has a line, take me back to Tulsa, to the scene of the crime.

00:34:32 Robert Polito: Yeah.

00:34:32 Andrew Keen: I mean, obviously, that refers to the race riots.

00:34:36 Robert Polito: Yeah. In in 1921. Yeah.

00:34:39 Andrew Keen: But might it also be a a reference to himself, this idea of the scene of the crime of Dylan himself? You're a crime noir expert. Is there a, a noir quality to not just his mind, but to his narrative?

00:34:55 Robert Polito: Well, I mean, I think he's somebody that, you know, tumbles through chains of association. I think one of the one of, I think, the consistent ways in which his his songs have been organized from the mid-sixties through, you know, you know, 2020 is that, like, you know, and I write about this a little bit in the book is that, like, Dylan isn't really a kind of singer songwriter in the way that, say, Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell are are great singer songwriters. I mean, what I've come to feel is that the singer songwriter model, in a way, is almost the the James Joyce short story, the store stories of Dubliners, in which, a a moment or an episode kind of builds to an epiphany. And Dylan's songs rarely, I think, contain epiphanies in that sense. What they tend to do is kind of set up situations that that even in songs on Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61, he sets up these situations that are linked by a refrain in some ways. And so that he's often writing about and speaking about and singing about multiple circumstances at the at the same time. And I think that's very true of the period that I write about.

00:36:29 Andrew Keen: And, of course, it's most memorably reflected that idea in, I Contain Multitudes, the another great songs from, Rough and Rowdy Ways when he says, I'm just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones, and then British Bad Boys, the Rolling Stones. It's a wonderful line.

00:36:48 Robert Polito: Yeah. No. I mean, it's sort of you you have those three those three instances, and there's almost like, oh, what's wrong with this picture? Kind of. You know?

00:36:56 Andrew Keen: Well, but it it makes sense in terms of, Dylan.

00:36:58 Robert Polito: Never said the same sentence before.

00:37:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, we're talking about Anne Frank, the holocaust, Indiana Jones, Hollywood, and then, of course, the Rolling Stones, the quintessential rock and roll band. It it all makes it's not an absurd thing to say. And then, of course, there's that wonderful song also in Rough and Rowdy Ways, in "My Own Version of You," My Own Version of You when he says, I'll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando, mix it up in a tank, and get a robot commando. Is he the robot commando?

00:37:28 Robert Polito: Well, I think he's the person who made the robot commando, isn't it?

00:37:32 Andrew Keen: I don't know. You're the expert.

00:37:35 Robert Polito: I mean, well, it seems to me that that, like I mean, the the way that I sort of hear that song in a way, it it it it's Dylan talking about, you know, the the musical and literary collages of of the songs that he writes. And and he found, an image for that in, you know, in in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

00:37:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And if I do it upright and put the head on straight, I'll be saved by the creature that I create. And, of course, he's that creature, I guess, in a way. There's so much more to talk about, but, let's end with a couple of wonderful stories that you tell in the book. It's not just dense literary analysis. You've got some great anecdotes in the book. You got a great anecdote when you went out for lunch at Chez Panisse in Berkeley over the, over the bay from me, with with with, Milosz, the great Polish poet, after Dylan won or as Dylan was about to win, I think, the Nobel Prize. I know that

00:38:35 Robert Polito: he won. Years before he won. That that that once took place in 1999.

00:38:40 Andrew Keen: So just to come back to Dylan won the Nobel Prize, and it pissed off a lot of literary people, probably some of your friends and colleagues. You're a very distinguished poet.

00:38:51 Robert Polito: What did

00:38:51 Andrew Keen: what did Milosz say? And and and what's your reading, so to speak, of of of Well,

00:38:58 Robert Polito: I mean Dylan's

00:38:59 Andrew Keen: award of the

00:39:00 Robert Polito: Nobel Prize. Hearing from people around Milosz when that you know, that semester that I was a visiting poet at Berkeley, that that Milosz was saying was was it was that Dylan was really the only American writer in serious contention for the Nobel Prize, And that the people like, you know, say, like like like Philip Roth or John Updike, who are almost expecting it in some in some ways, really weren't in serious contention. And, and what Milosz told me is that he thought, Dylan would win the Nobel Prize if he lived long enough, that they weren't gonna give it to him, you know, in his fifties. But but that, if he lived long enough, there was a good chance that he would win it. And that what what that also reflected was the the the Nobel Prize Academy's sort of suspicions about the the value of mainstream American writing, that they were looking for something more political, more original, more inventive, you know, than the novels of the people and and, you know, who were who were expecting to win it or thought they were in serious consideration. I've always been very impressed that one of the people who who endorsed, you know, Dylan receiving the prize completely was Toni Morrison. She thought it was a great idea, you know, and and I think Toni Morrison is one of America's great experimental writers. Beloved is an incredible novel, but the others are too. And they're they're original, they're daring, and they're bold.

00:40:56 Andrew Keen: Finally, you tell a great story about how Dylan was picked up by the police one afternoon when he was visiting. Where where was it? Who was he visiting? And and and let's end with that story because it somehow captures the the the surreal quality of what it's like to be Bob Dylan. Maybe maybe it's the best example of what it's like to be Bob Dylan from the inside.

00:41:19 Robert Polito: Yeah. I mean, it it's an interesting story. I mean, my understanding is that he was kind of wandering around New Jersey in the rain sort of in search of, you know, where Bruce Springsteen had grown up, just kind of looking that way. And there's very much a kind of hidden in plain sight quality, Dylan. Like, there are all these stories that that that you hear about him, you know, going on a a tourist tour of John Lennon's house, and nobody recognized him. And they recognized him. Yeah. Nobody and nobody recognizes him. Or or him routinely going to to shows that his you know, where his son's band is performing, and and nobody also recognizing him. And and I think what the what what's fascinating about the story is that he gets picked up by the police, and they start asking him questions. And they said, you know you know, I the way that I understand it, it went something like this. You know? What's your name? And he goes, Bob Dylan. And they don't believe that he's Bob Dylan, so so they say, what's your real name? You know? And he tells them, you know, Robert Zimmerman. And they ask him, well, where do you live? And he says, well, that's a good question. I have, you know, I have houses all over the place, and he starts listing the places where he has houses. And maybe this is a little bit like going back to what I was talking about before about the preposterous of his of his life and career in some ways to, you know, to his high school self, is that it seemed to that the more Dylan precisely told the truth, the more the police were skeptical and assumed he was just lying to them or conning them or crazy.

00:43:07 Andrew Keen: And the way you tell the story, Robert, he's sitting at the back of the police car, police car chattering. As a childlike quality. Of course, Dylan famously wrote about, if you don't if you don't become a child or continually grow to become a child, you don't grow up. But there seems to be this remarkable maybe that's his key, that he just retained this innocence. The the whole story, the whole anecdote is one of Dylan's pure innocence with the world around him.

00:43:39 Robert Polito: Well, his his innocence, but also his too. It seems to me that it's a story about curiosity, about art. You know, Springsteen is an artist he presumably admires in the way that Lennon was an artist that he presumably admires, and he's interested in in figuring out or exploring where did they come from? What's, you know, what's the world that that formed them? So I very much also see it as a story about his kind of insatiable curiosity. And it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of his touring is rooted in that as well.

00:44:18 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe maybe we should entitle this interview, knowing innocence, which would summarize all the contradictions in Dylan.

00:44:26 Robert Polito: What was that? I couldn't hear you.

00:44:28 Andrew Keen: Maybe we should, entitle this conversation knowing innocence, which somehow captures all the contradictions. Well, that's how

00:44:37 Robert Polito: maybe equal emphasis on each of those words. Yeah.

00:44:41 Andrew Keen: There we have it. Knowing innocence of one of America's greatest cultural figures, Bob Dylan, a wonderful new book of essential anyone who likes Dylan, whether you like the old or the new Dylan or both Dylans, After the Flood Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace by Robert Polito is a wonderful book, incredibly readable. Congratulations, Robert, on the book. And Well, thank you. I apologize

00:45:01 Robert Polito: for this conversation and and those kind words. I really appreciate it.

00:45:05 Andrew Keen: And I apologize, if the audio on this for our listeners and viewers and even you, but Robert, the the one or two problems with the audio. But, I think, as with Dylan, all the good stuff eventually will come through. So thank you so much.

00:45:19 Robert Polito: I hope so, but thank you. Really appreciate it.