“The Lady is a Tramp,” music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart. It’s probably my favorite Rodgers and Hart song—though there’s a lot of competition, and it’s fierce. “The Lady is a Tramp” is a perfect example of Hart’s wit on the one side and Rodgers’s gift for up-tempo melodies on the other. Hart’s irony is such that not everyone who loves this great song presumes to understand it, so here’s a quick primer: the song defies the classy “lady” by listing some of the ways she defies convention and stereotype—and thus is a “tramp” in the eyes of fakes and phonies. She is a down-home gal, happy with common things—the rowing in Central Park lake, the beach at Coney Island—who disdains slumming and idle gossip: “Won’t go to Harlem in ermine and pearls, / Won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the girls.” The Frank Sinatra version from his 1957 record A Swingin’ Affair (or from the soundtrack of the 1957 movie Pal Joey) is the preferred choice here.

“Nice Work If You Can Get It,” music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. One of two joyous Gershwin and Gershwin songs that punctuate their celebration of love with the same rhetorical question: “Who can ask for anything more?” (The other song is “I Got Rhythm.”) I have a particular affection for Mel Torme’s version, which he recorded with the Marty Paich “Dek-Tette” in November 1956. Torme sings the verse—usually given at the start of the song—in the middle, as a second bridge. It contains Ira Gershwin’s immortal couplet: “The only work that really bring enjoyment / Is the kind that is for girl and boy meant.”

“All the Things You Are,” music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. There are so many fine renditions it’s hard to know which to recommend: Helen Forrest’s voice mingling sexily with Artie Shaw’s clarinet in 1939; Sinatra reaching vocal heights on a V-disc in 1944; Beverly Sills pouring forth like Keats’s nightingale in 1973; the late John McGlinn giving it the full operatic treatment on his Broadway Showstoppers album of 1993. “Popular songs are subject to constant interpretation,” as Mel Torme has noted, and “All the Things You Are” works as a big-band tune, a pretext for bop improvisation, a ballad, an aria, or a big chorus number developing out a duet. Many consider it the all-time greatest love song. What makes it such? The soaring melody, the harmonic complexities and daring shifts of key, the marriage of the music and the words, the lyrics that express longing and epitomize the ode in praise of one’s sought-for partner. Hammerstein wasn’t very proud of “that moment divine” toward the end: “Someday I’ll know that moment divine / When all the things you are, / Are mine.” The need to rhyme forced the inversion of usual word order. Yet somehow even this poetical outburst enhances the sublime effect.

“Stormy Weather,” music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler. When Arlen and Koehler wrote and played their songs as house musicians for the Cotton Club in Harlem, they created such standards as “Get Happy,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” In “Stormy Weather,” they came up with the signature songs of two great singers, Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. It is a lament for a lost love, but it has an unusual spiritual quality. “All I do is pray / The Lord above will let me / Walk in that sun once more.” The music manages to make you feel the sadness of the moment and the promise of that moment redeemed. “Stormy Weather” is at or near the top of meteorological love songs, a surprisingly populous category.

“Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Every time you think that you can sum up Irving Berlin—with his “simplicity” and his “common touch” and his unabashed sentimentality—along comes a song of such melodic complexity and melancholy mood that makes you understand why George Gershwin likened Berlin to Franz Schubert. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” from 1936, is a song very much of its moment: dark days of bankruptcy and unemployment, with threatening signals of strife to come in Europe. The song is both an invitation to the dance and a variant on the theme of carpe diem: “There may be trouble ahead, / But while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance,” what else can we do but “face the music”—in a double sense—“and dance.” Fred Astaire sings it to Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet (1936).

“Over the Rainbow,” music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Yip Harburg. “Over the Rainbow” as sung by the teenage Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939) tops most all-time lists of favorite songs in Hollywood movies. The Technicolor vision of Oz that commences after Garland sings the song in black-and-white occurs not only as a magical answer to her vast yearning prayer but as an allegorical representation of the fantasized end of the Depression. If, following the song from the soundtrack, you listen to Judy sing “Over the Rainbow” in her famous Carnegie Hall concert of April 23, 1961, you’ll enrich your experience of this most famous of Arlen’s songs.

“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Originally, Jerome Kern was commissioned to write Annie Get Your Gun. When Kern died in 1945, the producers turned to Irving Berlin, who wrote a major score in half the usual time. A peerless mix of humor and sentiment, its anthem, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” quickly became the ultimate Broadway anthem. (Its most formidable competition is “That’s Entertainment” by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.) Berlin’s song will always be associated with Ethel Merman, queen of the ladies who can belt to the back row without no need of artificial magnification. There’s a 1954 Hollywood movie called There’s No Business Like Show Business starring Merman, Donald O’Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor, Johnny Ray, and Dan Dailey: all Berlin songs, and when everyone assembles to do the title number, you’ll want to sing along.

“A Fine Romance,” music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Ginger Rogers sings it to Fred Astaire, but the version I fell in love with is Billie Holiday’s from the 1930s. It’s a sarcastic love song. We may be used to the genre of the lover’s complaint, but it usually comes from the man, and this one is from the female point of view and has a top-drawer Dorothy Fields lyric, “You’re calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean. / At least they flap their fins to express emotion.”

“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin. Carol Channing performed this song from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes superbly on stage, and Channing’s remains the definitive version, though Marilyn Monroe’s seductive delivery in the movie leaves little to be desired. Jule Styne is a master of the big brassy Broadway number and Leo Robin’s lyrics are unbeatably witty and smart. The triple rhymes come at you fast: a guy may think you’re “awful nice/ but get that ‘ice’ or else no dice.” Never has the adult male aptitude for irresponsible philandering been stated with such melodious gusto: “He’s your guy / When stocks are high, / But beware when they start to descend. / It’s then that those louses / Go back to their spouses.”

“I Can’t Get Started,” music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It’s that evergreen story: I have conquered worlds but not, alas, your heart. The music is marvelous, and the lyric is an outstanding instance of the inventory as a lyrical form, listing the singer’s diverse accomplishments yet ruefully concluding that he (or she) is downhearted for the simple reason that “I can’t get started with you.” Ira Gershwin’s gift for polysyllabic rhyme is on heroic display: “Oh, tell me why / Am I no kick to you? / I, / Who’d always stick to you? / Fly / Through thin and thick to you? / Tell me why I’m taboo!” Frank Sinatra’s cover on the 1959 album No One Cares) wins my vote for capturing the song’s melancholy. But you might prefer the jovial duet of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney under Billy May’s direction in August 1958.

On November 10, David Lehman will speak at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. To purchase tickets for this event, click here.

Pat Crest, Playboy Playmate

That the book should appear now makes for its own strange sort of irony, for this is the age of the retrospective Dylan, in which he has become reflective and, for him, accessible, willing to engage with his history even as he acknowledges (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that it’s another pose. Partly, that’s a matter of pop star reinvention, but Dylan has never been a pop star in the traditional sense. Rather, he’s a one-man diaspora, who blew into Greenwich Village in 1961 like a figure out of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America.” As he wrote in Chronicles about 1941, the year of his birth,” Luc Sante notes in his foreword to Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, ‘If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both.’”

What does it mean to be born at such a moment, when the verities are revealed as lies? What does it mean to have to reimagine everything, to rewrite the world from day to day? All of us now have a certain sense of that, living, as we do, in the aftermath. But for Dylan, this has meant a fundamental air of exile, which has, at times, led to some startling juxtapositions. When he appeared (with his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and actor Harry Dean Stanton) at the 1989 Chabad telethon in Los Angeles and performed Hava Nagila”, it was an experience equally bizarre, in its own way, to that of watching him sing Saved.”

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric evokes these same sorts of tensions. It’s an unlikely project that ends up making unexpected sense. To be sure, the conflation of Dylan and Hollywood takes some getting used to, especially when you remember that 1964 was the year of the Beatles and the Freedom Summer, and thus, almost perfectly emblematic of the seismic social shift to which Chronicles refers. And yet, Dylan gives us a clue to the allure of the project in that same introductory Q&A. I liked Barry’s photos a lot,” he says. They reminded me of Robert Frank’s photos. … Just in their stark atmosphere.” In fact, they’re particularly reminiscent of Frank’s landmark collection The Americans, published six years before. In that book, Frank caught the United States, its small towns and cities, at the very moment it was undergoing the changes Dylan writes about.

Feinstein’s photos do something similar for Hollywood, tracing the eclipse of the old guard and its replacement by a more fluid territory of storefronts and star maps, and nondescript bungalows in which women smoke in cheaply paneled waiting rooms while others perform figure modeling” (read: pose nude). Among the images here is a sequence taken at Gary Cooper’s funeral, to which Dylan riffs:

looking at life
watchin it being lowered into the ground
unable t change a thing
you too
yes
have committed
some wicked sins.

It doesn’t matter whose funeral it is; Dylan’s being impressionistic, after all. What’s important is the idea that illusions cannot sustain us, which makes the dream factory, with its dependence on the manufactured image, the most nefarious sort of lie.

Stairway to Paradise, 20th Century Fox backlot

Such a notion resides at the heart of Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, which is not a book of glamour shots but something more ambiguous, full of grainy black-and-whites that reveal a kind of flattened bleakness, the hunger and yearning beneath the surface of the myth. Even when celebrities are present, they’re not thinking of the camera. In one picture, Jayne Mansfield strolls along a walkway with a life-size statue of Jesus rising up behind her. In another, Judy Garland chews her thumb on a rehearsal stage. More often, Feinstein shoots along the edges, capturing discarded sets, extras at Central Casting, street scenes, makeup artists, waiting rooms. It’s the old, weird America transformed into a more modern disconnection, the diaspora gone Hollywood.

In such a landscape, Dylan discovers a perverse sort of freedom, the freedom to step outside himself. He’s lost, we’re all lost, but as any diasporic knows, that’s the point. What’s important are the contradictions (between past and present, celebrity and substance, social commentary and art), and what they tell us if we can just look at them clearly and see them for what they really are.

These are the issues that have always motivated Dylan, and he addresses them in language that is off the cuff, even spontaneous, simpler than his lyrics, although not without its own distinctive bite.

t be born with choice
t be carried free
out of cradled touch
clothed completely
in rapid change

he writes in a long poem that accompanies a photo of a discarded stairway, reaching up into the empty sky like a metaphor for the ephemerality of everything. In another poem, he observes that today no one thinks of / himself as the devil”; the implication, clearly, is that everyone should.

There’s a certain Old Testament morality at work here, the old world breaking through again, the glimmer of a connection that evaporates in the face of our flawed fragility and loss. Nowhere is this more movingly expressed than in an eight-line poem that accompanies two shots of Marilyn Monroe’s backyard swimming pool, taken on the morning of her death. Even then, perhaps, Dylan recognized Monroe as a cautionary symbol of the dangers of celebrity. death silenced her pool,” he writes,

the day she died
hovered over
her little toy dogs
but left no trace
of itself
at her
funeral.

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric closes with an explicitly autobiographical poem in which Dylan writes about winning the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in December 1963. At a ceremony just three weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he shocked the crowd by declaring, I have to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where—what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too—I saw some of myself in him.”

From the perspective of the present, it’s obvious that Dylan was talking about shared complicity, the idea that we are all responsible, that a society is only as good as its basest impulses, its most destructive acts. This, of course, is a classically Jewish notion, although he probably didn’t think of it in those terms. Either way, the experience stayed with him, and is recounted here alongside a group of photos of disembodied hands clutching Oscar statuettes. ah mama but it’s so hard,” he writes,

for I’m living in movement
not stopping an categorizing
the movement
an so
I could not explain t them
about what I was doin
instead I finished
my thoughts
without compromise
(a course
of course
for none
but one).

Here, we see Dylan at his most elemental, as he has always seen himself. a course / of course / for none / but one”—that’s the code of the exile, born between cultures, between generations, with one foot in the past and one in the future, yet condemned to live in the unreconciled present tense. It’s a hell of a wilderness in which to wander, and Dylan’s known this from the start.

i cupped it t my breast,” he writes, describing his reaction to the Paine Award,

looked into its eyes
stroked it
fixed it as a club
pretended it was a barbell
the room was silent mama
the room was silent
except for this hysterical laughin
stemmin from the ridiculousness
of such useless property
but i couldn’t tell
who was laughing mama
i couldn’t tell if it was me
or this thing
i was holding.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology.