“He chose his genre, and he takes on the burden of that choice and notices what it excludes”

…is a very smart way of looking at the book: Leonard complains at length that Lethem won’t commit himself fully to Literature, but that is an aesthetic choice, not immaturity.

I agree with you, too, that Lethem isn’t trying to dismiss or ridicule the material he writes about; a key leg of Dylan’s passage from childhood to adulthood comes as a radio DJ, when he takes his own voice and image out of the equation and begins simply reading on-air the liner notes to the records he plays. (Though Dylan’s appreciation isn’t gospel, either; his own liner note receives some very keen criticism from his mentor, who implies that he is just engaging in a subtler form of self-fashioning.) As I said in the entry, one of the few things Leonard gets right in his review is the novel’s balance between our experience of events at the time and our often rueful memories of them given the benefit of distance. This may also be why the latter half of the novel, without the same distance, is less satisfying.

Incidentally, I agree with you about “New Dork”—I hoped my disdain for Leonard’s neologism would come through as sarcasm, but I’ll ramp it up next time.

But it seems to me you go a bit astray in your urge to distance yourself from Leonard’s foolishness. Eliot and Pound didn’t Charleston, true, but Joyce and Lethem maintained closer ties to unsyllabied culture. Joyce’s intellectual and emotional engagement with songs like “The Croppy Boy” and “The Low-Backed Car” go far deeper than his interest in the Gold Cup of 1904: he dreamt of becoming a professional singer, not a jockey. In Lethem’s novel the songs’ popularity is ephemeral, but not so much the songs: remember, the only sample of Dylan’s lifework we see is the booklet for a CD retrospective. Graffiti makes a poignant contrast, being more of a performance than a collectible, but has the ephemerality of theater made it impossible to study? An English department isn’t the place to find serious scholars of either zombie movies or graffiti, I agree; still, such scholars do exist.

There’s something Lethem deals with (not entirely satisfyingly) which I think you and Leonard both in separate directions miss. Lethem comes to much of this “material” neither as a totally committed insider, nor as a totally detached observer. He chose his genre, and he takes on the burden of that choice and notices what it excludes…. (God damn it, I guess I have to try to finish that thing I gave up on in 2005.)

Yes, any dorkwad can “read” anything. But so what? Lots of ordinary chitchat consists of just such readings, only delivered in bits and snippits of conversation and blogging, without scholarly apparatus or the appearence of an argument. Just ordinary people exchanging their thoughts and impressions about the things they like or dislike. That’s the process of culture. But it’s not an intellectual discipline and you can’t make it one by stuffing it with two-bit words and tacking on footnotes.