First Thoughts on 'The Academy'

A piece of cultural forensics written in the moment of discovery

Bob can still surprise the most jaded Dylan watcher. On Saturday 17 January, there appeared on his official Instagram feed some excerpts from what is supposed to be “a forthcoming science fiction novel, Fool’s Gold.” These consist of five images across which stretches a text entitled The Academy, credited to one Larry Morrison. Morrison is said to be a “character from” this forthcoming opus. Nobody is quite sure what it is.

Nobody is credited as the author of Fool’s Gold, but the heavy implication is that this is a work by the Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter whose feed this is. It wouldn’t, of course, be his first prose work. His collection of sixties skits, Tarantula, was published in 1971. His extraordinary, Pulitzer-winning memoir Chronicles: Volume One appeared in 2004, and in 2022 a collection of intense and, frankly, at times strange and even obscene meditations on sixty-six twentieth-century songs was unleashed, The Philosophy of Modern Song. These were all major publishing events. Putting a short excerpt on Instagram, hardly the most prestigious publishing venue, is not what we expect from a Nobel Prize-winning writer. But then again, if Dylan is consistent in anything, it’s in doing the unexpected.

What of the content of The Academy? The text by “Larry Morrison” is a vituperative but controlled dissection of deep disillusionment with an institution named The Academy, its neglect of talent and genius in favour of the repetition of the expected - a diagnosis Morrison extends to “institutions” in general.

They reward caution over courage, repetition over creation, politeness over force of will.
Institutions, I concluded, do not exist to cultivate greatness; they exist to domesticate it.

There follows a kind of expressed vow or manifesto, in which Morrison articulates his loathing for The Academy’s procedural managerialism, its obstruction of individual aptitude, and his determination to set his face against it. This is expressed not in a threatening or violent way, but in the resolve to bypass the academy, its rules and petty gatekeepers, and go “not through them, but around them - or over them.”

What are we to make of this text? There are some in the comments on Instagram who suspect it of being AI-generated. It is true that the piece initially seems to possess a cleanliness of expression, stripped of quirkiness. It is a long way from the spidery mind-dumps of Tarantula. But on closer inspection, the piece has a formal literary quality which bespeaks an authorship that, if it isn’t Dylan, is hard to know who else it could be.

The content of the piece at first appears reminiscent of a libertarian critique of social institutions. The first person I thought of was Ayn Rand (albeit the piece is subtler and more controlled than anything she ever wrote). Morrison is not sympathetic to the productions of ordinary minds. Is Larry Morrison a kind of Dylanesque equivalent to John Galt, the scourge of collectivism and arch proponent of individuality in Atlas Shrugged? Yet Galt’s philosophy is essentially political, whereas Morrison seems more like a hole-in-the-corner figure - a sci-fi equivalent of a Dostoyevsky antihero (the nameless narrator of Notes from Underground), or the narrator of Leonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan. Strategists fantasising about rewarding their enemies. Like Cohen’s character, we do not know Morrison’s position in the world, so his threats to undermine The Academy may amount to little more than impotent mutterings.

He is certainly self-presenting as aristocratic, though. Not a literal aristocrat, but someone who feels himself to be better than others, even without any of the trappings of what society would recognise as success. He writes,

Poverty I could endure; obscurity I already knew. But dismissal by people so evidently small? That lodged itself somewhere deeper.

This feels reminiscent of the revengeful narrator in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe:

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.

His rank has been injured. He can endure the “thousand injuries” of poverty, obscurity, material deprivation, but there is one thing he will not tolerate - judgement by inferiors. The wound exposed here is not economic or reputational - it is existential. His sense of self is violated by the implication that small people can sit in judgement over him, his work, his genius.

There is something, as well, of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe about Larry Morrison. There is a distinct trace of hard-boiled noir about this, not just in atmosphere but in ethical posture. The noir narrator is obsessed with procedure as a cover for rot - police departments, courts, corporations, commissions. Chandler’s Los Angeles is full of people “just doing their jobs”.

Hiding behind procedure is exactly the complaint at the heart of noir disgust: bureaucracy as moral laundering. Committees exist so no one has to own a decision. Larry Morrison is angry at this - he speaks of his “fury sharpened by clarity”. But he is also self-analysing, and defending himself against accusations that his position is mere pettiness:

Some call this resentment. That is convenient— it allows them to dismiss conviction as pathology.

If you imagine this as a Marlowe voiceover, it fits perfectly. A man who knows the city is corrupt, knows committees exist to spread guilt thinly, and knows that the easiest way to silence someone is to call them damaged. Dylan has trodden noir paths before - the Empire Burlesque album is infamous for its lifts from Humphrey Bogart’s dialogue.

And this is sci-fi noir. We are in the world of Blade Runner. But perhaps Philip K. Dick is not the proper touchstone. Anti-collectivist pulp prose takes us more towards Robert A. Heinlein. Not the playful Heinlein, but the one who writes chapters that exist largely to let a character explain how the world really works.

The Academy echoes Heinlein’s unornamented prose, his confidence bordering on severity, his protagonists’ tendency to believe that clarity itself is a moral virtue. This is the voice of someone who has reasoned their way out of society and wants to record the logic of that escape.

This is not sci-fi about strange worlds or technologies; it is about systems, legitimacy, selection, authority. It has pulp’s refusal of interiority, lyric digression, sensory estrangement. It is just propositions and consequences. Perhaps The Academy is churning out Starship Troopers – meat for the grinder – and Morrison simply couldn’t make the cut.

It is not much of a stretch from there to Burroughs. Not cut-up Burroughs, not hallucinatory Burroughs - but Burroughs when he is laying out a system coldly and coherently, critiquing Control. The voice of the diagnostician. William S. Burroughs writes as someone who has already stepped outside the system and is now describing it with surgical detachment. The Academy does the same.

The speaker does not plead or argue; he diagnoses. The system is hostile by design. Selection is not neutral. Gatekeeping is not accidental. The Academy presents this without frenzy. It is not a rant; it is a report. It is Burroughs at his chilliest - “fury sharpened by clarity.”

But Burroughs usually exposes control systems in order to escape them through mutation - drugs, sex, cut-up, outlaw zones. Larry Morrison looks to escape by hardening - discipline, hierarchy, clarity.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

The key Blakean move in The Academy is that institutions are not merely inefficient or unjust; it tells us that they are spiritually dead. They are allowing society to wither. The line “institutions fear what they cannot discipline” could be paraphrased directly into Blake’s idiom. So could the metaphor of systems as cages rather than ladders. This is mind-forg’d manacles reappearing in bureaucratic form.

I understood very quickly that the academy was not searching for vision.

William Blake was ignored by the Royal Academy, and he rejected its theoretician Sir Joshua Reynolds in return. Blake’s Devil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell explains things in the same cold, final voice as Larry Morrison:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors,

Left and Right are systems. If one forgoes reflex assumptions about Dylan’s politics, the ideological temperature of the piece is unmistakably not left-liberal, and not even comfortably conservative in the traditional sense. It sits much closer to libertarian or anti-managerial thought, with clear overlaps with the rhetorical world of Jordan Peterson - particularly Peterson’s emphasis on hierarchy, competence, discipline, and the corruption of institutions by procedural moralism.

A voice crying in the wilderness just before Brexit announced:

I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.

Trump followed Brexit as neatly as a next chapter in a novel. If you couldn’t see it coming, you weren’t paying attention. Larry Morrison is fed up with being rejected by The Academy. So is the President.

Donald Trump writes on Truth Social,

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America...

Larry Morrison writes,

And slowly, a truth took shape: if the gates are guarded by men of limited imagination, then the only path forward is not through them, but around them—or over them.
They believed they had closed a door.
What they truly did was relieve me of illusion.
I was no longer obliged to seek permission.

Whatever else this text is, it is here and now. The old Academies are being rejected and, like Lydon’s Religion, “it’s all falling to bits gloriously.”

Whatever The Academy turns out to be, whether the sci-fi Fool’s Gold ever appears (Chronicles, Volume Two never did, and likely never will), The Academy is a remarkable output from a man in his mid-80s. It is gnomic. It is mysterious. It is not quite the done thing.

A “fan” on Facebook wrote:

Who can ever tell what’s going on in Bob’s mind, but in a time of aggressive even violent assaults on the institutions, norms and safeguards that have made progress possible in so many areas—from medicine to civil rights to poverty—this feels like a very unfortunate post.

The same voices didn’t want him going electric; he’d betrayed folk music. They didn’t like him finding something of himself in the alienation of Lee Harvey Oswald. They didn’t like him giving Christians the ammunition of his conversion. They likely won’t like this.

But the words are Larry Morrison’s. You can’t pin them on Bob Dylan.

I cannot say the word eye any more . . . . when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody’s eye that I faintly remember . . . . there is no eye -- there is only a series of mouths -- long live the mouths -- your rooftop -- if you don’t already know -- has been demolished . . . . eye is plasma & you are right about that too -- you are lucky -- you don’t have to think about such things as eye & rooftops & quazimodo.

Me, I confess find The Academy amazing. Even if it turns out not to be Bob’s, or to be AI, even if it really is just fool’s gold…