Jay's WHY BLOGGIN' IN THE WIND Post - The Story Behind the Title

When you read, do you ever tap your foot? Does music ever spark an idea in your head? Can you come up with a song or an artist that blends music and literature? Joyce Carol Oates wrote one of her most enduring works of short fiction after hearing Bob Dylan on the radio.

  This semester we will read the Joyce Carol Oates short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” In my copy, she includes “For Bob Dylan”  directly underneath her title.  In 1965,  JCO was just beginning her teaching career at Universtiy of  Detroit when Dylan released the album  Bringing It All Back Home.  Off of this record, JCO heard the song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and something clicked in her head.    She was writing a work of fiction based on a true-to-life Arizona  psycho-killer that preyed on innoent high-school girls. She had read about him in Life Magazine.  They were calling him the “Pied Piper of Tuscon.”  This guy was 23-years old and short  - he could pass for a high-schooler  - and that’s what he did.  He died his hair jet black and wore pancake make-up and mascara.  On several occasions, he succeeded at enrolling on high-school campuses. Maybe because he was five years older than the the girls he pursued and drove a classic gold-painted Oldsmobile, he attracted young girls at drive-in restarurants, bowling alleys and public swimming pools, like he could never do before.  He killed at least three of them before he was caught. Bob Dylan sings, “The lover who just walked out your door / Has taken all his blankets from the floor / The carpet, too, is moving under you.”  From this song, Joyce transformed Bob’s lyrics into a Gothic fairy tale.  A dark visitor,  a hardened criminal,  shows up mysteriously at high-school hang-outs and leads young girls to their deaths.

If Bob works for Joyce Carol Oates, it’s good enough for me.  This semester, beyond “Where Are You Going,”  I’ve assigned a sixties novel and a sixties research paper.  In my mind it’s difficult to talk about the sixties without mentioning Bob Dylan.  He left a deep impression on the counter-culture generation to come.  His song “Blowin’ in the Wind” asks the question how long are we going to wait for things to change – war, poverty, racism - before it won’t be too late.  It contains a message that is just as powerful today as it was in sixty years ago.

Bob was just twenty-one when he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” not to many years from the ages my students are today.  Several times this semester, we will discuss in class Bob’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement and his impact on the music we listen to today.  I expect many of my students to see the new Dylan bio-film scheduled to be released on Christmas Day 2024.  Some will be inspired to research Vietnam, The Cuban Missle Crisis, Martin Luther King.  Their best writing will be published in Jay’s “Bloggin’ in the Wind.”