Legendary Graphic Designer

 

Massimo Vignelli, an acclaimed graphic designer who gave shape to his world

is spare, Modernist vision in book covers and shopping bags, furniture and corporate logos, even a church and a New York City subway map that enchanted aesthetes and baffled straphangers, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death, after a long illness, was confirmed by Carl Nolan, a longtime employee of Mr. Vignelli’s.

An admirer of the architects Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Mr. Vignelli moved to New York from Italy in the mid-1960s with the hope of propagating a design aesthetic inspired by their ideal of functional beauty.

He preached clarity and coherence and practiced them with intense discipline in everything he turned out, whether kitchenware, public signage, books or home interiors.

"Massimo, probably more than anyone else, gets the credit for introducing a European Modernist point of view to American graphic design," Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, a leading graphic design firm, said.

Mr. Vignelli’s work has been shown in North America and Europe. It is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, as well as museums in Philadelphia, Montreal, Jerusalem, Munich and Hamburg, Germany.

His clients included American Airlines, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Gillette. St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan had him design an entire church. His brochures for the National Park Service are still used. Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys all gave out Vignelli-designed shopping bags in the 1970s. He designed the signs for the New York and Washington subways and suggested the name Metro for the Washington system.

Mr. Vignelli described himself as an "information architect," one who structures information to make it more understandable. But when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released his new subway map in 1972, many riders found it the opposite of understandable. Rather than representing the subway lines as the spaghetti tangle they are, it showed them as uniform stripes of various colors running straight up and down or across at 45-degree angles — not unlike an engineer’s schematic diagram of the movement of electricity.

What upset many riders even more was that the map ignored much of the city aboveground. It reduced the boroughs to white geometric shapes and eliminated many streets, parks and other familiar features of the cityscape. Tourists complained of getting off the subway near the southern end of Central Park and finding that a stroll to its northern tip, 51 blocks away, took more than the 30 minutes they had expected. Gray, not green, was used to denote Central Park; beige, not blue, to indicate waterways.

"Of course, I know the park is green and not gray," Mr. Vignelli said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006. "Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti."

Design aficionados considered the map — Mr. Vignelli preferred to call it a diagram — an ingenious work of streamlined beauty. It earned a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of postwar design.

The map was replaced in 1979 with a more geographically faithful one. But in 2011, the M.T.A. warmed to the Vignelli approach: It asked him to reinterpret his 1972 design for an interactive map on its website. Called the Weekender, it tells of changes in weekend subway service.

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing on The New Yorker magazine’s website about the map’s revival, called the original Vignelli design "more than beautiful."

"It was," he said, "a nearly canonical piece of abstract graphic design."

Massimo Vignelli was born on Jan. 10, 1931, in Milan, where he grew up enthralled by the city’s Northern Italian Renaissance architecture. At 14, he decided to be an architect, and at 16 he went to work as an architectural draftsman. He studied art and architecture in Milan and Venice and worked as a designer for Venini Glass, a renowned manufacturer on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon.

While studying at the University of Venice’s architecture school, he met Lella Elena Valle, whom he married in 1957. Both studied in the United States, then returned to Italy to start a design firm.

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Vignelli joined six other designers in Chicago to form Unimark International, which became one of the world’s largest design firms and among the first to focus on creating corporate identities through design. He opened its New York office with Bob Noorda, a Dutch-born graphic designer who worked with him on subway signage and other major projects. (Mr. Noorda died in 2010.)

Mr. Vignelli and his wife founded their own firm, Vignelli Associates, in 1971. It became Vignelli Designs in 1978. Mrs. Vignelli worked hand in hand with her husband, managing the business and helping with design. "She’s very much an equal partner," said Jan Conradi, a design professor at Rowan University, whose book, "Lella and Massimo Vignelli: Two Lives, One Vision," will be published in July by RIT Press. "Everything he did was touched by both of them."

Mr. Vignelli propounded the virtues of simplicity and rigor, suggesting that they could lead to a permanence that is unusual in the graphic arts, though he allowed that "trying to do timeless things is a dangerous game."

Mr. Vignelli’s reputation certainly endured. "He is fetishized by young 20-something designers today," said Mr. Bierut, who worked for Mr. Vignelli early in his career.

Tom Geismar, a leading graphic designer with the firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, said in an interview, "What always amazes me about Massimo is his ability to take lots of information and somehow clarify it."

But some designers saw his austerity as uniformity. "The knock was they all sort of look alike," Mr. Geismar said.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Vignelli is survived by his son, Luca; his daughter, Valentina Vignelli Zimmer; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Vignelli said he would have liked the job of developing a corporate identity for the Vatican. "I would go to the pope and say, ‘Your holiness, the logo is O.K.,’ " he said, referring to the cross, "but everything else has to go."

　
MIAMI HERALD WATCHDOG

Behind Bars a Brutal and Unexplained Death

Julie K. Brown
The purported details of Darren Rainey’s last hour are difficult to read.

"I can’t take it no more, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,’’ he screamed over and over, according to a grievance complaint from a fellow inmate, as Rainey was allegedly locked in a shower with the scalding water turned on full blast.

A 50-year-old mentally ill inmate at the Dade Correctional Institution, Rainey was pulled into the locked shower by prison guards as punishment after defecating in his cell and refusing to clean it up, said the fellow inmate, who worked as an orderly. He was left there unattended for more than an hour as the narrow chamber filled with steam and water.

When guards finally checked on prisoner 060954, he was on his back and dead. His skin was so burned that it had shriveled from his body, a condition referred to as slippage, according to a medical document involving the death.

But nearly two years after Rainey’s death on June 23, 2012, the Miami-Dade medical examiner has yet to complete an autopsy and Miami-Dade police have not charged anyone. The Florida Department of Corrections halted its probe into the matter, saying it could be restarted if the autopsy and police investigation unearth new information.

"They told people that he had a heart attack,’’ said a source close to the prison system with knowledge of the case.

The shower treatment was only one form of punishment inflicted by the prison’s guards to keep mentally ill patients in line, according to the inmate/orderly and two other sources privy to the goings-on at the state prison.

The inmate/orderly, a convicted burglar named Harold Hempstead serving a decades-long sentence, filed repeated formal complaints, beginning in January 2013, with the DOC inspector general, alleging that prison guards subjected inmates — housed in the mental health unit — to extreme physical abuse and withheld food from some who became unruly. The complaints were sent back, most with a short, type-written note saying the appeal was being returned "without action" or had already been addressed.

In September, another inmate was found dead inside his cell. Richard Mair, 40, hanged himself from an air conditioning vent.

According to the police report, Mair left a suicide note in his boxer shorts claiming he and other prisoners were sexually and physically abused on a routine basis by guards.

DOC officials declined to be interviewed for this story. A spokeswoman said Friday that the agency would provide public records in response to the newspaper’s formal written requests, but no comments.

Over the past several weeks, the newspaper has requested maintenance records, grievance logs, prison death records, guards’ disciplinary records and emails by administrators, including DCI Warden Jerry Cummings.

As of Friday, the agency had released a handful of documents: a single report about a prison guard admonished for falling asleep on duty last year; brief, coded disciplinary records for Hempstead, Rainey and several other inmates who Hempstead says were also subjected to searing hot showers as punishment; and a heavily redacted copy of the DOC inspector general’s report on Rainey’s death.

On Friday, the Herald learned from three independent sources that Cummings and four of his top aides had been temporarily relieved of duty last week.

It’s not clear why Cummings and other administrators were suspended, or for how long.

The DOC did not respond to an email query about the suspensions late Friday.

Rainey’s family, meanwhile, finds the silence surrounding his death disturbing.

"Two years is a very long time to wait to find out why your brother was found dead in a shower,’’ said Rainey’s brother, Andre Chapman.

Rainey, who was serving a two-year sentence for possession of cocaine, was scheduled to be released in July.

Numerous complaints

Between January and February 2013, Hempstead filed numerous grievances and complaints with DOC officials about Rainey’s death, all alleging that the circumstances were being covered up.

His reports, replete with the names of other inmate witnesses and prison guards on duty that evening, describe what he and others purportedly saw and heard that night. The details in his complaints match the wording in the inspector general’s report — at least the parts not redacted.

The inspector general’s report said that the video camera in the shower area showed DOC officer Roland Clarke place Rainey in the shower at 7:38 p.m.

Hempstead said the shower had sufficient room for an inmate to avoid a direct hit from the spray, but that the extreme heat would eventually make the air unbreathable as the scalding water lapped at inmates’ feet.

Hempstead wrote that he and other inmates, whose cells are directly below the shower, began hearing Rainey’s screams about 8:55 p.m. It went on for about 30 minutes before it sounded like he fell to the shower floor, he said in his complaint.

The DOC inspector general’s report said Clarke found Rainey dead at 9:30 p.m. and called for medical assistance.

"I then seen [sic] his burnt dead body naked body go about two feet from my cell door on a stretcher,’’ Hempstead wrote.

Miami-Dade homicide investigators were called to the prison.

But another inmate, a convicted murderer named Mark Joiner, wrote in a letter to the inspector general that he was ordered to "clean up the crime scene’’ prior to the area being secured.

Early in the week after the incident, maintenance workers at the prison disabled the plumbing that fed the shower, Hempstead told the Herald in an interview at the prison.

Despite all his written complaints, Hempstead was never interviewed by anyone from the prison system, he said. Another inmate was spoken to, according to the report. That’s presumably Joiner, although the DOC will not divulge the name. The Herald is waiting for a transcript of that interview, which DOC officials said would be redacted of any information pertaining to an open criminal investigation.

As for the video camera in the shower area, the inspector general’s report noted that it malfunctioned right after Clarke put Rainey in the shower. As a result, the disc that may have recorded what happened was "damaged,’’ the report said.

The redacted report doesn’t say how Rainey’s body was found, whether the water was on or off when he was found or whether state investigators ever questioned any of the guards or nurses in the unit at the time of Rainey’s death.

The union that represents the prison guards was not aware of the incident as of this past week. No record was provided to the Herald to indicate that anyone has been held accountable for what happened.

A suicide note

Mair was found hanging in his cell on Sept. 11, 2013. A braided rope, made from cut sections of bed sheets, was attached to the ceiling air vent and looped around his neck, according to a Miami-Dade police report.

Tucked into a pocket sewed into his boxer shorts was a suicide note in which Mair, serving life for second-degree murder, described a litany of abuses against inmates in the mental health unit.

"Life sucks and then you die, but just before I go, I’m going to expose everyone for who and what they are,’’ he wrote.

"I’m in a mental health facility...I’m supposed to be getting help for my depression, suicidal tendencies and I was sexually assaulted.’’

He then goes on to allege that guards forced inmates in the unit to perform sex acts and threatened them if they filed complaints.

He said guards — identified by name in the note — gambled on duty, sold marijuana and cigarettes, and stole money and property belonging to inmates.

"If they didn’t like you, they put you on a starvation diet,’’ he wrote.

He also alleged that guards encouraged racial hatred by forcing white and black inmates to fight each other in the yard, claiming that the guards would place bets on who would win.

Mair’s next of kin was in prison in Maine and unavailable for comment.

There’s no evidence that the state inspector general’s probe into Mair’s death addressed any of the allegations in the suicide note.

The probe concluded that guards had been negligent in failing to adequately check on Mair the evening he killed himself.

Les Cantrell, state coordinator for Teamsters Local 2011 — the union representing the state’s 17,000 corrections and probation officers — said there has been a spike in prison complaints across the state. Employee turnover is staggering, he said, particularly among prison guards who are often forced to work long hours to compensate for officers they have lost and failed to replace.

"In general, we have a difficult time retaining good officers,’’ Cantrell said. "Assaults on officers have risen and inmates know they are short-staffed.

"It makes it unsafe for the officers and for the inmates,’’ he said.

The six-page inspector general’s investigation into Rainey’s death was completed in October 2012. DOC Inspector General Jeffrey Beasley closed the case, concluding there was not enough information to issue any finding.

"...the exact cause of death has not been determined by the Medical Examiner. Upon receipt of the autopsy report, it will be included in the investigative file,’’ the report said, noting that if "administrative matters" subsequently arise as a result of the autopsy, they will be addressed at a future time.

The report, which includes brief written statements by Clarke as well as other guards and nurses, has large passages that have been redacted — obscured with a black marker.

The Department of Corrections has not responded to requests from the Herald to provide the legal justification for each redaction, as required under the state’s public records law.

After Hempstead was interviewed at the prison by a Herald journalist on April 14, Miami-Dade homicide investigators also paid him a visit to interview him about the two-year-old case, he wrote in a letter emailed to Gov. Rick Scott last week through a family member.

According to the letter, three corrections officers, including a sergeant, responded to the visits by threatening to set him up with false disciplinary reports and to place him in solitary confinement if he didn’t stop talking to the media and police.

He said he feared for his safety and wanted to be relocated to a different prison.

Last week, the Herald sought clearance to speak with Hempstead in the prison a second time after receiving a letter from him authorizing the return visit.

Jessica Carey, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections, responded that Hempstead "had a custody classification which prohibits interviews at this time.’’

When pressed further about whether he was being punished, Carey said she had made "a mistake’’ and directed a Herald reporter to fill out a visitation form.

Neither Miami-Dade police nor the Miami-Dade medical examiner responded to requests for information about the Rainey case. Each say his death is still an open investigation, but did not address why it has taken almost two years.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/17/4123183/behind-bars-a-brutal-and-unexplained.html#storylink=cpy

Hunter Falls Fire 5 18 2014 5 Miles SW of Reno

Bob Dylan’s Da Vinci Code Revealed

Chris Francescani Daily Beast

Researchers say they’ve uncovered more than 1,000 items lifted from other authors in Dylan’s Chronicles. And that’s just the beginning.

For half a century, fans of rock’s enigmatic poet laureate have picked apart his words—and even his garbage—searching relentlessly for hidden meaning. Now a small band of Dylan sleuths led by an Albuquerque disc jockey may finally have found the key … but, to what?

In recent years, the singer’s followers have been quietly uncovering clues to what New Mexico DJ Scott Warmuth calls Bob Dylan’s own personal "Da Vinci Code," a hidden metatext within his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, full of fabrication, allusion, and widespread appropriation of material from a vast and surprising spectrum of sources.

Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Kinney is spotlighting Warmuth’s research for a mainstream audience in his just-published book, The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob, Kinney writes that Dylan had expected to keep Dylanologists busy for a long time after his death: "He said it would take a hundred years for people to figure him out. But what he probably didn’t foresee was the scope of the Internet, and in particular Google Books."

Kinney, a former reporter at The Star-Ledger in New Jersey, said he understands why some fans are uneasy about Warmuth’s conclusions. But he’s convinced that Warmuth is on to something.

"There are a couple of different reactions to it," Kinney told The Daily Beast. "The first level is the denial – the people who think, ‘C’mon, these are commonplace phrases,' or 'Maybe he’s just reading stuff and he’s got one of those weird minds that can recall this stuff.’ That’s become a harder and harder case to make as more stuff has come out.

"The second point of debate goes to whether all artists borrow and recast and appropriate." It's the argument about plagiarism Jonathan Lethem put forth in a famous 2007 essay: Why are we worried about this? All art comes from someplace. "Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time."

Dylan’s Chronicles, one of five finalists for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for biography or autobiography, appears to sample everything from Ovid and Virgil to Twain, Hemingway, H.G. Wells, a March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine, and scores of other far-flung source material—even self-help books.

Since 2003, when a Minnesota schoolteacher came across lines from Dylan’s 2001 album "Love and Theft"in an obscure biography of a Japanese mobster, the legendary songwriter has faced accusations of plagiarism. His subsequent album Modern Times also borrowed liberally from the work of Henry Timrod, a Civil War era poet from Charleston, South Carolina.

Dylan’s appropriation has been explained away by scholars and many fans as part of a rich folk and blues tradition of sampling lines from older songs.

"That’s something that poets have been doing forever," says Harvard classics professor Richard Thomas, who has written academic papers on Dylan’s use of the work of the first-century poet Virgil. "It’s a way of alluding to or correcting or parodying what came before," Thomas told me last week. "You hear the stolen line, but it’s replaced by its new context. That’s how folk music works, how the blues works."

But far more compelling—and for many of Dylan’s most ardent fans, troubling—is Warmuth’s contention that many of Dylan’s phrases, anecdotes, and descriptions in Chronicles are cleverly-contrived tall tales, rich with hidden clues and subtle nods to myriad sources, both profound and prosaic.

"He tells you plenty about himself on the surface," Warmuth told me when I got him on the phone. "But what’s going on beneath the surface is even more fascinating."

In a scholarly essay published in The New Haven Review in 2010 (PDF), Warmuth wrote that Chronicles is "meticulously fabricated" and that "dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources.

"Dylan has hidden many puzzles, jokes, secret messages, secondary meanings, and bizarre subtexts in his book," Warmuth asserted in the essay. "Dylan borrows from American classics and travel guides, fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War, science fiction, crime novels, both Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe, Hemingway, books on photography, songwriting, Irish music, soul music, and a book about the art of sideshow banter."

"He dipped into both a book favored by a nineteenth-century occult society and a book about the Lewinsky scandal by Showgirls screen writer Joe Eszterhas," Warmuth wrote.

But while the scholarship was solid, it has been slow to gain acceptance. "Some people argue that those searching for these borrowings are engaged in a sort of 'gotcha' game -- finding these things and leaving it at that with no further analysis beyond, 'Well, Dylan's a thief,'" says Kinney. "But Scott [Warmuth] is trying to take it to the next step by digging into why Dylan uses the borrowed phrases that he does, and how he uses them. And that's the most interesting work to my mind. It really could keep people occupied for a hundred years."

Like many traditional blues and folk singers, Dylan has been known throughout his career for appropriating lines and melodies from others’ earlier work. "Blowin’ in the Wind" was a rewrite of the slave-era folk song "No More Auction Block."

When "Love and Theft" came out in the fall of 2001, a renewed scrutiny of Dylan’s creative techniques began.

Fans, including Warmuth, started to collect allusions and the cribbed lines they noticed in Dylan’s most dynamic new album in years. A well-worn phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby was spotted almost immediately by many (including this writer) in Love and Theft‘s third track, "Summer Days."

"You can’t repeat the past." I say, "You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can."

After the Wall Street Journal published a story in 2003 about Minnesota school teacher Chris Johnson’s discovery that numerous lines and phrasings from "Love and Theft" appeared to be lifted from Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yazuka, Dylan detectives began digging deeper.

"That was, for me, like the ‘game on’ moment,’" Warmuth recalls with a chuckle.

The following year, Simon & Schuster released Chronicles: Volume One, describing it as "an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times."

While most reviewers hailed the book for its seemingly unique turns of phrase, Warmuth quickly spotted inconsistencies that piqued his curiosity.

"I had read the book in 2004 and was fascinated like everybody else," Warmuth explained. "But a couple of things had jumped out at me at the time, like the story he tells about watching Joe Tex on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson [in the late 1980s]. As a Joe Tex fan, I knew that Joe Tex would have been dead already."

Warmuth threw himself into his new Dylan decoding project. He began studying cryptography, code-breaking and puzzle-solving books. He began crowdsourcing his finds with other Dylan fans, among them Edward M. Cook, a Catholic University associate professor who specializes in Dead Sea Scroll translations.

"It just built and built from there, and got more fascinating as we went along," Warmuth told me. Each discovery—many harvested from simple Google Books searches—drew Warmuth in deeper and deeper.

In one memorable passage in Chronicles, Dylan offers a vivid description of country legend Johnny Cash: "Johnny didn’t have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he’s at the edge of the fire, or in deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of consciousness obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger."

Nearly every word in that description, Warmuth reports, has been cut, pasted and recast from the Jack London short story The Son of the Wolf. Indeed, Warmuth eventually would compile a list of Jack London appropriations in Chronicles that ran 12 pages long.

Elsewhere in Chronicles, Warmuth says he found several anecdotes which are "barely disguised rewrites of stories from Gerry Hirshey’s Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music.

When Warmuth found similarities between phrases in Chronicles and Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s book about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, American Rhapsody, he was dumbfounded. "Even I was thinking, ‘there’s no chance,’ but as it turns out, some of the more salty lines in Chronicles comes from Eszterhas!"

At other points in the book, Dylan appears to be telegraphing his intentions, Warmuth says.

On page 82 of Chronicles, for example, Dylan writes: "Both Len and Tom wrote topical songs—songs where you’d pick articles out of newspapers, fractured, demented stuff—some nuns getting married, a high school teacher taking a flying leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, tourists who robbed a gas station, Broadway beauty being beaten and left in the snow, things like that."

The examples Dylan cites are the actual headlines ("Nun Will Wed Gob," "Tourists Rob Gas Station," "Broadway Beauty Beaten") from a 1936 John Dos Passos’ novel, The Big Money. "The headlines he lists are actual headlines that Dos Passos had cut out and used in his writing, so—with things like that, Dylan’s tipping his hat, saying ‘this is exactly what I’m doing here.’" He "lets you know that he’s hip to this experimental writing technique."

Elsewhere in Dylan’s memoir, Warmuth has turned up what appears to be a thinly veiled borrowing from Robert Greene’s 1998 self-help bestseller The 48 Laws of Power.

Page 159 of Chronicle: "Passion and enthusiasm, which sometimes can be enough to sway a crowd, aren’t even necessary. You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key—all deceptively simple. You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust that the listeners maker their own connections, and it’s very seldom they don’t. Miscalculations can also cause no serious harm."

Page 216 of The 48 Laws of Power: "Passion and enthusiasm swept through the crowd like a contagion…Always in a rush to believe in something, we will manufacture saints and faiths out of nothing…In searching, as you must, for the methods that will gain you the most power for the least effort, you will find the creation of a cult-like following one of the most effective." Earlier, on page 214, Greene writes: "It is often wiser to use such dupes in more innocent endeavors, where mistakes and miscalculations will cause no serious harm."

And then there are the more comical samplings.

"Sometimes what Dylan has done with material from other sources is witty, crafty, and sly," Warmuth writes in the New Haven Review essay. "Other times it’s just sloppy. For instance, he works in some delicate touches when he recalls his encounter with Archibald MacLeish’s poem, "Conquistador." "In the same passage, though, many remarks that Dylan claims MacLeish made in conversation are lifted from MacLeish’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, where Sandburg’s own "Notes for a Preface" also appear. "Dylan seems to have conflated the two, perhaps flipping pages and not realizing that MacLeish’s words have ended and Sandburg’s have begun, with the result that [Dylan’s recollected] ‘conversation’ with MacLeish becomes a bizarre mix of the voices of both MacLeish and Sandburg."

All told, Warmuth said he has compiled a list of more than 1,000 appropriations, or "citations" as he calls them, in Chronicles. And in Dylan’s recent albums, it’s not just words that Dylan is appropriating. In a remarkable audio comparison Warmuth posted on YouTube, he shows how much of Dylan’s "Love and Theft" appears indebted to The New Lost City Ramblers, a late 1950s old-time string band, whose leader, John Cohen, is the "John" in the Grateful Dead’s single "Uncle John’s Band."

A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster, which published both Chronicles and Kinney’s new book The Dylanologists, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Dylan’s writing techniques. A spokesperson for Dylan also declined comment.

For his part, Dylan’s only public comments on charges that he appropriated or plagiarized some of his later work came in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview and his response was explicit and unequivocal: "All those motherfuckers can rot in hell," he said. "Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff….It’s an old thing," he said of appropriation. "It's part of the tradition. It goes way back."

Thomas, the Harvard classics professor, agrees that Dylan’s pastiche approach falls within a well-established literary tradition.

"You could start with [T.S.] Eliot," Thomas told me. "Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ borrows or steals from any number of figures, from ancient Greek epigrams to Dante, basically."

"Virgil himself was accused of stealing from Homer, and the voice of Bob Dylan is like that," Thomas said. To underscore his point, he quoted to me Virgil’s response to charges of that he plagiarized Homer, as recounted in Roman historian Suetonius’ The Life of Virgil: "Why don’t they try the same thefts? They’ll find out it’s easier to snatch Hercules’ club from him than a single line from Homer."

"What Virgil meant by that," Thomas explains, "is that to steal means to improve upon, which is basically what Dylan is doing."

Thomas himself has spent years delightedly uncovering and crowdsourcing allusions and appropriations to Ovid and Virgil in Love & Theft, Modern Times and Dylan’s 2012 release, Tempest. He and others, including a New Zealand creative writing teacher, have crowd-sourced 19 appropriations of Ovid in a single Dylan song, "Ain’t Talkin."

Dylan’s "layering of his work with intertexts from Ovid and Virgil enriches and universally changes the context of those lines, so that where we first heard a line from Virgil -- with Dylan’s intertextual usage of the line in a new context -- it becomes something new."

Thomas says Dylan’s unique brand of recycling language and melody is consistent with his literary predecessors.

"The start of the process is to discover that the theft has happened, but what’s really important is the next step -- to think about what effect the intertext in the song has on you as a listener."

"Whether it’s Timrod or Ovid or Twain, literature is letting the prior context be transmuted into something completely new."

Put another way, Thomas says, "If you’re dumb enough to believe this is like a student plagiarizing a paper in school, that’s your own problem."

Neither Thomas nor Kinney believes that every last "citation" Warmuth has uncovered is irrefutable, but both feel he has stumbled onto a significant new way to understand Dylan’s creative process.

"The question is…what does it all amount to?" Kinney asks, ever the journalist. What Dylan appears to be doing in Chronicles and elsewhere in recent work is "sort of like a little parlor trick," he says. "Is there more to it than that? Who knows?"

While Ukraine drifts into fantasy republics, will America's radical right follow suit! Will we see Revolution in Washington this summer? David A Fairbanks     The Constitution of The United States of America The Declaration Of Independence

OAS Articles of Impeachment How can Americans fight back IMPEACHMENT We The People

OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING - Washington, D.C. in the cross-hairs - The Out-of-Control Government Leadership Must Be Stopped OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING OAS (Please add the above title and some or all data from below to your FB, Twitter, Blog, Email list) TO: Patriots (black, white, red, yellow, brown, male, female, civilian, military, truckers, bikers, militias, veterans, old, young, every American that loves freedom and liberty) Mission: Restoration of Constitutional government, rule of law, freedom, liberty "of the people, by the people, for the people" from despotic and tyrannical federal leadership. Assumptions: Millions of Americans will participate. American veterans and patriots are energized to end the tyranny, lawlessness, and shredding of the US Constitution. Government is not the target, it is sound; corrupt and criminal leadership must be replaced. Those in power could use force against unarmed, peaceful patriots exercising their constitutional rights. Patriots could be harmed, but not expected. There is no hope given today’s technology of secrecy for the effort nor do we want it secret. Concept of Operations: Phase 1 - Field millions, as many as ten million, patriots who will assemble in a peaceful, non-violent, physically unarmed (Spiritually/Constitutionally armed), display of unswerving loyalty to the US Constitution and against the incumbent government leadership in Washington D.C., with the mission to replace with law abiding leadership. Go full-bore, no looking back, steadfast in the mission. Phase 2 - One million or more of the assembled 10 million must be prepared to stay in D.C. as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office. Consistent with the US Constitution, as required, the U.S. Congress will take appropriate action, execute appropriate legislation, deal with vacancies, or U.S. States will appoint replacements for positions vacated consistent with established constitutional requirements. Phase 3 - Those with the principles of a West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, should comprise a tribunal and assume positions of authority to convene investigations, recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees to the new U.S. Attorney General appointed by the new President. *All actions in Phase 2 & 3 will be consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Date of Operation: "OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING - Beginning Of Tyranny Housecleaning, May 16, 2014, completion to be determined We are past the point of no return, thus must move forward with an effort to save our nation, as there is no other choice. We are asking, pleading with you, and any others that have resources, national voices, email lists, blogs, FB, Twitter, to call for a non-violent American Spring May 16 2014 in Washington D.C. We must appeal to ten million and more American patriots to come and stay in Washington, D.C. to stop the White House and Congress from total destruction of the United States. It's now or never. God help us. .....the law of nature rules. A fluffy, cuddly lamb gets eaten by a mean old wolf is not an illegal or immoral event...the law of nature. When some greedy, self-serving occupant of the White House or Congress, or elements outside America, is threatening our existence, our freedom, our liberty, our Constitution, our life resources, our America, then we fight back to destroy the threat and there is nothing immoral or illegal about it. When the government becomes lawless, then "we the people" no longer are obligated to follow the government......there is no law when government picks and chooses for political purposes or personal agenda. At this time the government is performing as a lawless entity...... A duck cannot be turned into a fox; an elephant cannot be turned into a flea; the laws of nature will not permit. Likewise, a nation ordained and principled by the laws of nature, sovereign, free, with liberty for all cannot naturally become a nation guided by royalty, decrees, tyranny, elitist, self-serving criminals. The former has proven desirable, the latter has proven human pain. "We can become a nation guided by royalty IF "we the people" beguiled by the government in surrender to our lusts for that which we have not earned --for what is not natural --if we have become intoxicated by unbroken success" as Lincoln proclaimed in March 30 ,1863 call for fasting, humiliation, and prayer--we can very easily heap to ourselves leaders, and with itching ears, be turned from the Truth to become enslaved by the LIE." The United States of America (elephant) while embracing the "LIE" is teetering on the abyss of becoming a sniveling, blood sucking, undesirable nation (flea). OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING will be a gigantic step in removing the flea infestation that is sucking the blood out of America. We see no reasonable, hopeful sign that indicates there are honorable, loyal, mature, critical thinking, experienced people in government that understands the chaos about to rain down on America, nor do they care....our only hope is that "we the people" call, organize, and draw a few million patriots to stay in D.C. for an "American Spring". It would be the catalyst to draw the line and bring to a conclusion a decision on the out of control government, one way or the other. America will rise up or surrender.........for me, I only go to my knees in the presence of God Almighty...........my knees will not touch the surface as a result of some piss ant occupant of the White House or a corrupt legislator, or outside element...I will fall to my death standing if necessary. http://patriotsforamerica.ning.com/forum/topics/purging-senior-military-officers-ncos-martial-law-in-the-not?xg_source=activity http://patriotsforamerica.ning.com/forum/topics/any-doubt-an-american-spring-is-needed http://patriotsforamerica.ning.com/forum/topics/the-uber-presidency-by-general-paul-vallely There is not much time and the only planning necessary is to select a starting date, which we have done, and then show up in Washington, D.C. on that date, and plan to stay for the duration. The goal is restoring the US Constitution as the law of the land, removing the lawless leadership. Will this be a cake-walk? No, it will be painful, and some people may die because the government will not be non-violent; some of us will end up in a cell, and some may be injured. If that's what it will take to save our nation, do we have any choice? Freedom loving Americans will say there is no choice, we must begin the second American Revolution. Not with guns, but with millions of Americans demanding a return to constitutional government and the resignation of Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Holder as a start...then the constitutional restoration process can begin. An AMERICAN SPRING can be avoided only if the above mentioned officials resign. Will our national patriot leaders step forward and declare, "send me", I'll lead? There are millions of veterans and patriots ready to follow and have said "I will go". I urge all organizations, groups, particularly veterans and military retirees begin planning to visit Washington, D.C beginning May 16, 2014. Keep tuned to Constitutional Emergency/Patriots for America www.patriotsforamerica.ning.com for updates and guidance. Please bathe this effort in prayer as there is no personal agenda or gain save liberty, freedom, and restoration of constitutional government for "we the people". Harry Riley, COL, USA, Ret

Inside East Ukraine’s Make-Believe Republics

Jamie Dettner Daily Beast

A journey through the looking glass into the fake states run by losers who claim they’ve just won independence (with a little help from Mother Russia).

SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — Two months ago a band of chanting pro-Russian separatists marched past commuter traffic into the state treasury building in Donetsk—the east Ukrainian city they now say they rule following Sunday’s flawed secession referendum. Their first order of business: instructing startled officials to stop transferring the region’s tax money to Kiev and to give it to them instead.

Twelve days before, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled Kiev, ousted after months-long protests by pro-European agitators. Revolution was in the air and now a bunch of pro-Russian protesters faced the state treasurer of Donetsk oblast, a province with 4.3 million people—10 percent of Ukraine’s population—and much of the country’s heavy industry. At first nervous, the portly state treasurer’s confidence grew as he realized the emphatic would-be revolutionaries were ignorant of the complexity of state finance and didn’t even realize revenues were not physically stored in the treasury but were deposited in various commercial bank accounts.

What started out as a confrontation turned swiftly into a noisy class on the intricacies of taxes and pensions, with the state treasurer switching from sitting defensively in his chair to standing up, smoking a cigarette and teaching.

"Would there be enough revenue to cover all the obligations in Donetsk without Kiev’s contribution?" the state treasurer asked them. And in a Saturday Night Live moment, the revolutionaries protested they were sure there would be.

Well, "pretty sure," they amended.

The leader of the group, Pavel Gubarev, a man who declared himself the "people’s governor" of Donetsk oblast at a rally four days before, can be spotted in an online video of the confrontation student-like scribbling notes as the state treasurer lectures. The would-be revolutionaries are finally advised to open bank accounts and to set up a country before they can demand tax.

That surreal moment of revolutionary play-acting by a motley group of Moscow-backed insurrectionists is now being performed every day in what feels to increasingly frustrated locals like a make-believe state.

The separatists now say with Sunday’s sham referendum they have formed a sovereign country. But they are ill prepared and blithely ignorant of the mechanics of practical politics—let alone state making. And their naiveté stands in marked contrast to the gravity of the position they find themselves in: at the center of an effort to dismember a real country and in the middle of the biggest East-West standoff since the Cold War.

The towns in the region where the separatists hold sway are trapped in a twilight world created by an obscure nine-year-old separatist party called the Donetsk Republic, where stores open their doors and businesses try to get on with trading, but where government doesn’t really function. Courts have stopped working in some towns and capricious leaders and unpredictable camouflaged gunmen, or club-wielding unemployed youths eager for status, arbitrarily enforce what passes for order in separatist flashpoints.

"We are reduced to waiting to see what happens—everything is on hold," says Vladimir, a 45-year-old lawyer in the town of Slovyansk, 100 kilometers north of the city of Donetsk. He and his wife, also a lawyer, are standing in a long, irritable queue to retrieve cash from one of only two functioning banks in the town of 130,000. Since this rust belt town is the main target of an "anti-terrorist" operation by Kiev, its 23 other banks have shuttered for safety reasons. Maybe Ukrainian security forces will come storming in or maybe they’ll just continue with a seemingly aimless siege that is punctured by occasional clashes on the outskirts.

"The court here is not functioning," says Vladimir, the frustrated attorney. He is clutching more out of habit than for any practical reason his black briefcase. "People can’t get divorced, land disputes can’t be settled and broken contracts aren’t being enforced," he says. "It is very stressful for people. My wife and I have had no work for two months."

It isn’t clear if Vladimir will have cases to plead for some time to come—if the Donetsk Republic persists. It’s made up of nothing more than seized government buildings in a dozen cities, armed followers (predominantly former soldiers drawn from either the Ukrainian or Russian armies commanded by a Russian military intelligence officer) and people with selective nostalgia for the bygone Soviet Union. The same applies in the neighboring oblast of Luhansk, which on the basis of its own dubious plebiscite has declared sovereign status.

There is no constitution ready, no idea about what the new country’s political system should be and nothing planned yet on how to draw up new laws to replace the Ukrainian legal system. Prior to the uprising no detailed thought had been given to this. There are no blueprints—despite the fact that the hard-core separatist leadership has been agitating for years and grumbling obsessively in apartments and dingy cafés about how things would be better, if only Donetsk oblast could restore a short-lived, self-declared republic from 1918 that lasted anarchically for one month before even the Soviets wearied of it.

Some of the leaders, like Vladimir Makovich, the speaker of the presidium of the self-styled Donetsk Republic, who sports a long Russian Orthodox-style beard, were members of a conspiratorial, informal Slav history-discussion group. Secretive and Masonic-like, the few dozen members had a special membership badge designed. Makovich himself is a keen ecologist—and other members like him are opposed to shale gas drilling.

Aside from separatist dreams, the leaders come from different political traditions and seem able to swap ideological allegiances with unabashed ease.

Thirty-one-year-old Gubarev, who has had a series of jobs, including advertising salesman and seasonal work for an entertainment company as a Santa Claus for hire, has switched affiliations with careless intellectual promiscuity—shifting from membership of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity party to joining the pan-Slav Progressive Socialist Party. On Wednesday he announced the creation of his own party—the Novorossiya (New Russia) Party. "The new party will be led only by those people who in this difficult time showed themselves as true patriots of their Motherland and proved themselves as true fighters and defenders of their Fatherland," he said in a statement.

Gubarev says elections for a parliament will soon be announced. Other leaders say the elections should be for a president and there are signs of increasing splits in the separatist leadership over joining Russia or being an independent state.

The lack of preparedness by the Donetsk breakaway leaders is reminiscent of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March, when Russian separatist Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov, a notorious crime boss, waved away trifling questions about technical details concerning government and laws saying all such matters could quickly be resolved by working groups following a vote to secede.

But in Crimea’s case it was clear that the Black Sea peninsula would quickly be folded into Russia and annexed with indecent haste by Moscow. There are signs that Moscow may be having buyer’s remorse now when it comes to eastern Ukraine, preferring the option of keeping Ukraine destabilized and fragmented and eventually transformed into a federation more easily manipulated by the Kremlin. And if Russia doesn’t speedily comply with Monday’s appeal by separatist leaders to annex the oblast, then this Donetsk Republic is likely to last less time than its predecessor.

Separatist inadequacy was stripped away midweek by the Kiev-appointed official regional governor Serhiy Taruta, a successful businessman and Woody Allen look-alike. Unfazed by the 89 percent majority claimed by the separatists in Sunday’s referendum, Taruta quipped, "Behind the two words Donetsk Republic there is nothing of substance." Speaking to reporters at the plush Donbas Palace Hotel in central Donetsk, he noted the new republic "exists in name only. They have no economic and social programs, no law enforcement."

But the separatists continue to think they are basking in the glory of their accomplishment. Suddenly nobodies have become somebodies—an ego-inflating, if daunting prospect when you claim to be governing 4.3 million people.

There are signs that Moscow may be having buyer’s remorse now when it comes to eastern Ukraine.

Three days into the life of the fledgling country and separatists dissemble on how far advanced they are in state making. "We have a group of experts working on things now," says 31-year-old Myroslav Rudenko, who like Gubarev is a history graduate from Donetsk National University. He insists the unrest in eastern Ukraine is homegrown and a mirror image of the Maidan uprising in Kiev that ousted President Yanukovych in late February.

"On the constitution they will come up with a few drafts and we will choose which one to adopt," he adds. How the selection will be made and by whom, he can’t say. Nor has he any idea what models will form the basis of their thinking. Likewise he is unclear on the legal system or whether the new republic will be a presidential or a parliamentary democracy.

Unless Russia President Vladimir Putin does decide to annex the east, the separatist leaders are on a hook they don’t appear to know how to get off. They are even having difficulty overcoming basic day-to-day problems in the outrageously trashed 11-floor regional administration building they occupy in Donetsk. Leaders are constantly issuing contradictory orders and security commanders are bickering. Recently when a group of separatist gunmen raided an emergency services building in Donetsk and kidnapped a couple of firemen, some leaders complained the action was stupid. "So if we have a fire here, will the firemen come now that we have grabbed some of their people?" one demanded.

Official Donetsk Republic business is frequently log-jammed because the high command has only one stamp for documents and identity papers. A hard-pressed secretary on the 11th floor, the chaotic nerve center of the political leadership, holds it and is faced every day with clamoring groups needing her to stamp papers.

On the outskirts of Slovyansk, a hundred kilometers away, frustration is building among some of the townsfolk. "We never thought we would be in the middle of a battlefield," says Galina, a 49-year-old mother of two, who has built up a good life in Slovyansk with her advertising executive husband. They have a large, modern house and a café business. But they live on a junction on the outskirts of town in a district that has seen clashes between separatist gunmen and Ukrainian Special Forces.

"We keep our lights off when it gets dark," says Galina, over tea at the family’s kitchen table. She fusses around hospitably, offering radishes, cucumbers, spring onions—and some delicious cheesecakes. But the atmosphere of domesticity is fragile. Her house has been shot up in firefights and in the background we can hear the occasional report of guns. Outside, her husband lifts his head from working on the family’s vegetable garden.

A few streets away on May 5 a young woman whose sixth-floor apartment overlooks a wood that has become a tug of war between combatants was shot dead by a sniper when she was on the balcony at night and silhouetted by the living room light.

Galina is unnerved by the arrival two days ago on a nearby main road of a large group of heavily armed, camouflaged gunmen who built a formidable checkpoint. She says they are not locals. "I think they are from Crimea, but we don’t look at their faces too much. They act like professional soldiers and were quick and efficient putting up tents and building the block post." Unlike the often drunken local gunmen manning the main checkpoint entering Slovyansk before a bridge spanning the Torets River, these gunmen search rigorously every car and examine identity documents carefully.

If the drift and danger persist, Galina doesn’t know what the family will do. Many families are leaving but she has relatives in the area and doesn’t want to desert them or her home. Her 14-year-old boy nods vigorously at this. He has been kicking his heels at home for weeks now as local schools are closed. But Galina has had to close her café and lay off the five workers.

Galina and her husband, Vladimir, are the rare citizens of Slovyansk who will speak openly with a Western reporter. Many, when they are approached, nervously wave away the request to comment on what life is like in the separatist-controlled town of Slovyansk in the make-believe state of the Donetsk Republic. They have every right to be self-protective. Russian television outlets hype the danger of spies and the separatists have instructed townsfolk to report anything suspicious, including anyone heard speaking Ukrainian. There have been several abductions and rough interrogations.

As I scribble in my notebook the name of a street near the center of town where taxis are lined up with their drivers forlornly waiting for customers, an old lady approaches and loudly denounces me as a spotter for bombers. "You are a spy," she screams, waving first her walking stick and then a bunch of dill at me. "You are plotting where our checkpoints are for them to be bombed. American, English, you are the first enemy," she yells.

"She’s been watching too much Russian television," says Galina as she offers me another one of her delicious cakes.