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Like a frozen puck to the head
Belated revelation for today . . .
One of my favorite Bob Dylan quotes, especially in recent political years, has been these lines from the last verse of "Sweetheart Like You":
They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king
(Ahem, ahem.)
Yesterday I was browsing reviews at moviediva and ran across one for the 1933 film of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, which is both a play I have never read and a film I have never seen. (Desire Under the Elms, yes. Mourning Becomes Electra, yes. Past the classical variants, we're on shakier territory—I think Long Day’s Journey into Night is it, although I have some faint memory of reading Anna Christie under the desk in high school chemistry.) There I found the following speech, by the eponymous Brutus Jones:
Dere's little stealing like you does, and dere's big stealin' like I does. For the little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks.
Why is it that I started listening to PJ Harvey last winter and already I know the connections between her "A Perfect Day, Elise" and J.D. Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," but it took me over twenty years—because I can't remember a time when I didn't know Dylan's music, even if it was only through Joan Baez—to learn that Bob Dylan read Eugene O'Neill?
I bet there's an academic footnote in here somewhere.
One of my favorite Bob Dylan quotes, especially in recent political years, has been these lines from the last verse of "Sweetheart Like You":
They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king
(Ahem, ahem.)
Yesterday I was browsing reviews at moviediva and ran across one for the 1933 film of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, which is both a play I have never read and a film I have never seen. (Desire Under the Elms, yes. Mourning Becomes Electra, yes. Past the classical variants, we're on shakier territory—I think Long Day’s Journey into Night is it, although I have some faint memory of reading Anna Christie under the desk in high school chemistry.) There I found the following speech, by the eponymous Brutus Jones:
Dere's little stealing like you does, and dere's big stealin' like I does. For the little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks.
Why is it that I started listening to PJ Harvey last winter and already I know the connections between her "A Perfect Day, Elise" and J.D. Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," but it took me over twenty years—because I can't remember a time when I didn't know Dylan's music, even if it was only through Joan Baez—to learn that Bob Dylan read Eugene O'Neill?
I bet there's an academic footnote in here somewhere.
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