Montague Street Journal: Brooklyn-Based Reflections on Bob Dylan

In “Joey,” from the Desire album, Bob Dylan sings about Joey Gallo (aka “Crazy Joe” and “Joe the Blond”), a mob figure from Red Hook, Brooklyn, elevating him from gang boss and gunman to a more mythical status, more guru than Brooklyn gangsta. Now, a new Dylan journal, has been published, “Montague Street Journal: The Art of Bob Dylan,” that not only takes its name from a street in the “town of Brooklyn” (that itself appears in “Tangled Up in Blue”), but also is published right here in the borough of Kings.

Montague Street Journal features more scholarly takes on the work and impact of Bob Dylan. Articles include “Reading Masked and Anonymous: A close of examination of Larry Charles’ off-beat masterpiece” and “Minds out of time: societal dichotomy and anachronism as recurring theme in Dylan’s lyrics.” It isn’t available in bookstores yet, but is available online here.

MSJ's editorial and publishing staff are Brooklyn residents. Editor Nina Goss grew up in Brooklyn Heights (attended P.S. 8 and P.S. 7), although, like many natives, she has migrated elsewhere in the borough. “Montague Street is a real and remembered place for me, like the layers of time portrayed throughout Blood on the Tracks,” she said in an email, “and it meant quite a lot” that her colleagues at the journal concurred on using it as a title.

She, like me, was at Dylan’s first Brooklyn show in Prospect Park in 2008, although on the masthead she indicates she also has attended a total of 38 shows. I always thought that, were Dylan to play Brooklyn, BAM would have been the first venue chosen. Nina recalls that Prospect Park was “a strong and vigorous set, and a wonderful counterpart to the next night's show at Asbury Park, which had a dark edgy quality to it.”

Nina Goss delivered her paper on globalization and Bob Dylan entitled “Show me all around the world, or the Whole Wide World Which People Say is Round” at the 2009 Northeast MLA conference, it will be published in an upcoming book on Dylan she is editing. She also publishes a website, Gardener is Gone, on Dylan.

For more on the bona fides of the editorial and publishing team (including number of Dylan concerts attended) here

A more in-depth interview from the Examiner online appears here.

Although I didn't have the opportunity to ask, I recall having heard a-- probably apocryphal/urban legend-type-- tale that in Dylan's post-Born Again days, in the 80s, around the time of Infidels, he spent a lot of time in Brooklyn, re-immersing himself in Jewish culture and studying with an Orthodox rabbi.

As a fan of all things in print, not just digital text, I salute Montague Street Journal's decision to go paper and am happy to see that Brooklyn remains fertile ground for the launching of new intellectual enterprise and as source of new knowledge and analysis on this important American artist.