Plumb brandi plumb bob5/6/2023 ![]() ![]() I started listening again… and didn’t stop. But when Bob won his Nobel, the ensuing cultural brouhaha piqued my curiosity and made me wonder what all the fuss was about, and what perhaps I’d been missing. Yes, of course I’d listened to a little Dylan before – songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, exhaustively overplayed anthems I’d learned to strum on my guitar more than a decade prior. And yet, fall of 2016 also happened to encompass that bizarre episode when the Swedes awarded Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize in Literature and set off a brief firestorm of cultural debate, a happenstance that would not be wasted on me. Perhaps the word “desolation” best captures the range of emotions I bore within – some mix of loneliness, anxiety, melancholy, and despair. That fall was a time when I felt like I was getting pummeled from various sources-the strain of our nation’s politics, a rough patch in my private life, and most bruisingly, the daily struggle and massive personal inadequacies I faced as a second-year Middle School English teacher.įor months, I felt like I was trudging through dark space, my soul tethered to a lead balloon. One such period in my life was the fall of 2016, when in my gloomy state I became utterly obsessed with Bob Dylan, that endlessly polarizing and iconic weirdo who perhaps has always bestridden the borderland between “high” and “low” art, not that it much matters. Looking back, those have been the sources of succor and inspiration that have really stuck with me, that have sustained and even slowly shaped me for the better over my twenties and thirties, like the persistent drip of water over rock. I assume we all know it well, not least in this age of COVID-19.īut there have been times in my life when I felt similarly overcome by the weight of the world and yet found consolation in slightly more meaningful forms of art or entertainment, let’s say reading Dostoyevsky or singing in a choir. Let’s call that the path of least resistance. In difficult times such as these, I tend to forego the “high art” and seek solace more in what you might call blobbin’ out – binge-watching sitcoms or superhero flicks while scrolling through social media and shoveling various combinations of salt, fat, and carbs down my gullet. In the last outback, at the world’s end – Bob Dylan, “Ain’t Talkin’” (2006)įolks, I love me some lowbrow entertainment. – Suze Rotolo, in No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (1986) This plumb line is important for lining up anatomical geometries and visualizing the subject's center of balance.The thing that struck me about Bobby was his despair, that deathlike quality about him… People live with hope for green trees and beautiful flowers… but Dylan seems to lack that sort of simple hope. The device used may be purpose-made plumb lines, or simply makeshift devices made from a piece of string and a weighted object, such as a metal washer. Students of figure drawing will also make use of a plumb line to find the vertical axis through the center of gravity of their subject and lay it down on paper as a point of reference. Ī plumb bob may be in a container of water (when conditions are above freezing temperatures), molasses, very viscous oils or other liquids to dampen any swinging movement, functioning as a shock absorber.ĭetermining center of gravity of an irregular shape The early skyscrapers used heavy plumb bobs, hung on wire in their elevator shafts. ![]() A variation of this tool has the plumb line hung from the top of an inverted T shape. An A-frame level with a plumb line hung from the vertex was also used to find horizontal these were used in Europe until the mid–19th century. However, if they are mounted on a suitable scale the instrument may also be used as an inclinometer to measure angles to the vertical.Īncient Egyptians used a plumb line attached to the top outer part of a tool resembling a letter E when placed against a wall, the plumb line would indicate a vertical line. ![]() A plumb bob and line alone can determine only a vertical reference. ![]()
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