For various reasons, I’ve put my Dylan-oriented writings together to a book. It is available for download at http://www.dylanchords.com/tt.pdf (2 Mb).
The main reason I have done this has nothing to do with Dylan, but more with Seal: it’s an experiment in LaTeX, inspired by the wonders of this typesetting environment, gradually revealed to me through Seal, which gave me the urge to try it out myself.
Another reason is the long period of inactivity here. I guess I felt that something needed to happen.
The third reason, and the most direct one, is the Lonnie series, which I thought I had brought to a conclusion. As it happened, I still had more to say. I have extended it with a practical demonstration in a concrete analysis of three versions of Mr Tambourine Man, which I consider prime examples of the method. This is included as a new chapter in the book.
Other than that, the book contains most of the articles that are already available in the Professors section of the site, but I have also added some stuff which is not there (teaser…). The new stuff is: the rewritten Lonnie chapter, the follow-up about the Three Tambourine Men, an article I wrote for Judas! a while back, about Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one…!), and a short piece about In The Garden. I have also rewritten and updated several of the other articles. Eventually, I may re-incorporate the changes into the webpages, but from now on, I consider the book the main source.
The music examples to the analysis of the T-Men can be downloaded separately, both as midi-files and as pdf-files. Get them here.
All the music examples in the book have been produced with Lilypond, a free, open-source music typesetter which is quite similar to LaTeX: plain-text input, steep learning curve, but superb output, once one gets to know the machinery. Highly recommended.
As this is a learning experiment, there are still some things that are not perfect — some figures that are missing, some hyphens which ought to be en dashes, etc. Bear with me — I will clean it up, eventually.
Happy reading!
Absolutely brilliant! The best thing I could ever possibly imagine. The only bad thing is that it is only in virtual form and so it creates the possibility of a beautiful book that I do not own. Thanks again.
You could always take it to your local print shop and bind it yourself (or convince a publisher to publish it…). I\’d recommend to wait a while, though – I plan to do some more revisions and cleanups before I\’ll consider calling it Things Twice, v. 1.0. Currently, it\’s more like a beta or even a pre-beta version.
Beautiful book, great content! Keep up the incredible work! Greetings from Sweden!
I definately agree, your site is bookmarked as on of my top 3 on the web….the only thing I wish you had was tabs to Dylan’s version of “love minus zero/no limit” from No Direction Home… I know the fifth fret is capoed instead of the 4th, but the strumming in between verses is different as well. Here is a URL…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKoV1yJnqAI
Wow! Just saw this now, and downloaded it. I had never checked out the “Self Oradined Professors” section before. But this is bloody amazing. Hope to see more soon (something about MT maybe?)
Regards
Joseph
What?! You hadn’t checked out the Professors? But… but… that’s the most important part of the site…! I think I’ll have to remove all the chords so that people aren’t distracted by them. Or, wait – I already did that…
Thanks for you comment. There are indeed things about MT in the making — give me a couple of hours (or days)