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into a noun. Out of that Dylan gained the freedom to step back and get away with anything he chose to do, commercially and artistically. The fact that more than a year now separates one album from another heightens their impact, regardless of how much less they have to offer than the older albums which established this matrix of power in the first place. In a real way, Dylan is trading on the treasure of myth, fame, and awe he gathered in ’65 and ’66. In mythical terms, he doesn’t have to do good, because he has done good. One wonders, in mythical terms of course, how long he can get away with it.
     
    (21) “Minstrel Boy” is the best of the Isle of Wight cuts; it rides easy.
     
    (22) The Band plays pretty on “She Belongs to Me” and Dylan runs through the vocal the way he used to hurry through the first half of a concert, getting the crowd-pleasers out of the way so that he could play the music that mattered. Garth Hudson has the best moment of the song.

(23)
    Vocation as a Vocation. Dylan is, if he wants to be, an American with a vocation. It might almost be a calling—the old Puritan idea of a gift one should live up to—but it’s not, and vocation is strong enough.
    There is no theme richer for an American artist than the spirit and the themes of the country and the country’s history. We have never figured out what this place is about or what it is for, and the only way to even begin to answer those questions is to watch our movies, read our poets, our
novelists, and listen to our music. Robert Johnson and Melville, Hank Williams and Hawthorne, Bob Dylan and Mark Twain, Jimmie Rodgers and John Wayne. America is the life’s work of the American artist because he is doomed to be an American. Dylan has a feel for it; his impulses seem to take him back into the forgotten parts of our history, and even on Self Portrait there is a sense of this—he’s almost on the verge of writing a western. But it’s an ambitious vocation and there is not enough of that, only an impulse without the determination to follow it up.
    Dylan has a vocation if he wants it; his audience may refuse to accept his refusal unless he simply goes away. In the midst of that vocation there might be something like Hamlet asking questions, old questions, with a bit of magic to them; but hardly a prophet, merely a man with good vision.
     
    (23) “Wigwam” slowly leads the album to its end. Campfire music, or “3 A.M., After the Bullfight.” It’s a great job of arranging, and the B-side of the album’s second natural single, backing “Living the Blues.” “Wigwam” puts you to bed, and by that I don’t mean it puts you to sleep.

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    Self Portrait, the Auteur, and Home Movies. “Auteur” means, literally, author, and in America the word has come to signify a formula about films: movies (like books), are made by authors, i.e., directors. This has led to a dictum which tends to affirm the following: movies are about the personality of the director. We should judge a movie in terms of how well the auteur has developed his personality in relation to previous films. His best film is that which most fully presents the flowering of his personality. Needless to say such an approach requires a devotion to mannerism, quirk, and self-indulgence. It also turns out that the greatest auteurs are those with the most consistent, obvious, and recognizable mannerisms, quirks, and self-indulgences. By this approach Stolen Kisses is a better film than Jules and Jim because in Stolen Kisses there is nothing to look for but Truffaut while in Jules and Jim there was this story and those actors who kept getting in the way. The spirit of the auteur approach can be transferred to other arts, and by its dictum Self Portrait is a better album
than Highway 61 Revisited, because Self Portrait is about the auteur, that is, Dylan, and Highway 61 Revisited takes on the world, which tends to get in the way. ( Highway 61 Revisited might well be about Dylan