About

I use this blog to explore my primary passions as a consumer/critic of art, mainly film and music. I’ve never made a film nor written a song, so my writing approach tends toward a blend of “reader response” and cultural studies. I might write a little about baseball, a little about learning. I’m a college professor who studies Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift, and communication in learning environments.

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Selling Dust is named for my favorite mondegreen, one with which I have a personal connection: I formerly used the handle “Hobo Sailor” on the Dylan fan site Expecting Rain and there, in a discussion of mondegreens, another Bobcat mentioned that my handle relates to his own mishearing in the song “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” The correct lyric, which is the one and only mention of the phrase I used as my handle, is “I came in through the front door like a hobo sailor does,” but the other Bobcat used to hear it as “I came in through the front door like a hobo selling dust.” Obviously, I love the real lyric enough to call it out in my handle, but the phrase “like a hobo selling dust” is what makes mondegreens so wonderful and what makes reading the often aesthetically reactionary Harold Bloom still, nevertheless, insightful: it’s a creative mishearing that is more interesting than its original.

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Also dust-invoking, a favorite lyric from a favorite song:

But tomorrow’s a dream away and today has turned to dust

Your silver tongue has turned to clay and your golden road to rust

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