A Streetcar Named Delight

I like country songs and poems about politics. At high school I had a band with my friends. With the Confederation flag behind us we were raving in the striking beats of southern rock. I was reading Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, also Saroyan or Tennesse Williams. In our senior year we got captivated by beatnics and instead of sitting in cafés we were going outside to recite Bukowski or “contemplate about jazz.”

Colours in Boston

The possibility of becoming part of all this was certainly one of the key elements that led me to apply to an American university. I got lucky and in the end of summer I walked onto Boston University campus in the close neighborhood of faded laundromats, comic book stores and streets full of genuine hipsters like from the 40s. One of them is a dining hall manager. His name is Jack; he collects old blazers, wears a fired shotgun shell around his neck and crafts knives from animal bones.

Reader

Soon after the beginning of the school year I found out that my neighbor was a good friend of the guitarist Joe Perry. One evening he came to my dorm and saying: “Listen to the new Aerosmith album,” he threw me his iPod. “I don’t think it’s out yet,” I was puzzled. He only replied: “Yeah, It’s not.” The next day I saw Aerosmith for free playing in front of their old apartment. Steven Tyler was recalling the good ol’ days when they had to pick quarters from the ground to have money for beer.

Steven Tyler

A rock’n’roll storm of last century’s matadors began from which I have to highlight The Who and their rock opera Quadrophenia. For Thanksgiving break the campus closed and I had to start searching for a hotel in Boston. Last minute, I got an offer to spend the days off at a Chinese family in New York. The traditional turkey was only a mere vision; however, the vibrant palette of sensums and mysteries of Chinese cuisine was such an exotic experience so that the one dinner (at which, with non-English speakers, I didn’t converse much) will remain profoundly carved in the internal memory of my taste buds forever. At that time, Bob Dylan was supposed to play with his band in Brooklyn. Because we were frequently listening to his provocative music in the dorms, I took the remaining dollars that I had saved on the hotel and went to see the show. And right after I got back to Boston, I registered for Bob Dylan’s Lyrics course for the next semester.

New York

The class had a very refined atmosphere; there was only about ten of us enthusiasts. We analyzed Dylan’s lyrics from the poetic side: word choice, rhymes, figures of speech, meter, etc. Instead of lectures, we listened to records or watched documentaries. Other parts of the course were poetry readings of contemporary artists – the American, British or Irish ones. Professor Barents was drawing us deeper and deeper in the principles of dylanology. In the second part of the semester we had a private discussion with Christopher Ricks, one of the greatest experts on Bob Dylan and the author of Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Later on, I also met him personally and we had a debate about T. S. Eliot’s or Ginsberg’s influence on Dylan’s work. Allegedly, a part of my paper about A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was also published in a new encyclopedia about Bob Dylan, although I’ve never seen that book.

Every single one of these and many other enlightening experiences was given by a huge coincidence. What is going to happen next year is written in the wind. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m going to be living in the same building where Eugene O’Neill spent the last two years of his life and where he burned his unfinished manuscripts. Perhaps I will absorb some of his wit and thoughts. Perhaps I will hit upon his Muse. And maybe I will marry Electra. Mourning becomes comeliness, right?