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And speaking of The Book Architecture Method, sometimes the simplest demonstrations are the clearest. In this case, let’s focus on a song that I, personally, think kicked off the 1960s. Well, the good part, anyway…and that is “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” by Bob Dylan.

Now before you go stating that song lyrics aren’t literature, let alone poetry, let me just say that October 24th is a national holiday in the Book Architecture offices. That is the date in 2016 when Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Validation for many of us — despite tweets like Jodi Picoult’s (“I’m happy for Bob Dylan, #ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?”) — that few Americans have had a greater impact on arts & letters than Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota.

Glad that’s out of the way. To study a song or poem in the context of longer-form literature, begins with an appreciation that poetry was the first language art. Long before writing existed, in fact, poetry as an oral tradition helped human beings remember their mythologies and their histories — even their laws — because their rhythm and repetition helped early humans commit things to memory.

This rhythm and repetition is at the heart of The Book Architecture Method’s focus on series: the repetition and variation of a narrative element so that the repetition and variation creates meaning. For a song, this repetition is often centered in the chorus. In Subterranean Homesick Blues, there is no chorus, but there is an important clue…

We interrupt the unfolding of this piece to let you know that if you would like to read the lyrics of Dylan’s song, you can find them here. If you would like to listen to the original you can find it: here. If you want to listen to a bluegrass version where the lyrics are even clearer, you can go: here. And if you want to listen to 11 versions of the song in the same playlist compiled by some fanatic, you can go: here.

So, where is the key repetition and what does that series tell us about the theme of this song? Each of the four stanzas has a section that begins, “Look out kid.” The singer is positioning himself as a kind of elder who is giving the listener advice, even if they don’t necessarily want to believe how bad things have gotten. (Timely song alert.) 

What the kid needs to look out for is different in each stanza. “It’s something you did / God knows when / But you’re doing it again,” (if you listen you can almost hear Dylan smiling through these lines). This progresses to “Look out kid / Don’t matter what you did,” just so we’re clear that the paranoia of the burgeoning counter-culture in the mid-1960s doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Then we get, “Look out kid / You’re gonna get hit / By users, cheaters / Six-time losers.” And finally, in the clearest formulation: “Look out kid / They keep it all hid.”

These four repetitions of the Look out kid series point to the theme of the song: Don’t follow leaders. The scenes in this case are the other data points present. On the one hand, as the poet thinks about the government, we get someone with a badge looking for a payoff, the “heat” (slang for police) planting bugs and tapping phones, a DA who has to make a bust in a certain timeframe, plainclothes policemen, and a law enforcement capable of training fire hoses on the protestors of the Civil Rights movement.

But on the other side, we have you, kid. You probably know to avoid scandals. You may even strive to keep a clean nose. But even more importantly is that, as the listener, you trust their own perceptions. “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.” And of course that you watch your parking meters.

In four stanzas of 18 short lines each, less than 325 words, we have a central series which repeats and varies, and points up the pyramid (see image for link) to the theme, and down the pyramid to the scenes, or symbolic manifestations. We have a voice which reaches its audience through the agency of tone, which includes shared referents and values. Is it easier to pull this off in a condensed carousel of largely surrealistic images? Or is it easier to organize and deploy your structural elements over the course of 300 pages? Or is it the same, provided that you work with scene, series and theme to keep like with like, and introduce movement to get your point/s across? 

As we like to say at Book Architecture, “These are the questions.”