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Authenticity and Feng Shui A look at Bob Dylan's home town of Hibbing Minnesota will give you some unique insights into how he got that way. They aren't what you'd expect. (Incidentally, I've been told that the present residents of Hibbing aren't enthusiastic about the guy, but that's their problem. Their iron mine is played out, too) To begin with, Hibbing's feng shui is globally unique. Hibbing is located very near a continental triple divide. Water to the north and west of Hibbing ultimately flows into the Hudson Bay via the Red River. Water to the north and east flows into the north Atlantic via the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. And water to the south flows into the Gulf of Mexico via the Missisippi. The only more significant divide on the face of the earth is in Tibet, where the headwaters of the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, and Iriwaddy are found within a few miles of one another. Furthermore, Hibbing is also the location of the largest man-made hole in the world -- the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine, which was the chief source of ore during the great age of the American steel industry. As is well known, mining and tunnelling severely disturb the feng shui of an area, and this was the biggest mine in the world. In the course of a few generations, an enormous quantity of iron ore (with its important magnetic properties) was removed, leaving nothing behind but an enormous man-made canyon with a lake in the bottom. This could only accelerate the transformational processes impacting young Zimmerman. And while Dylan grew up near Hibbing, he was actually born in Duluth, located at the west end of Lake Superior -- which, as the world's second-largest lake by volume, obviously packs an enormous feng-shui wallop. (The largest? Lake Baikal in Siberia -- near the birthplace of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan, incidentally, did not have a brother Don, but he did have a Christian grandson named George. No, I didn't make that up.) This leads to the second point. Bob Dylan has always gotten a bad rap as this nice middle-class Jewish boy who pretended to be a hillbilly. Supposedly he reinvented himself in Greenwich Village and pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. However, Hibbing is genuinely out in the boonies. Duluth and Fargo, the largest nearby cities of any size, are not very big, not very close, and not very cosmopolitan. Hibbing itself was a tough mining town with a large, mostly Slavic, immigrant population, and was culturally more comparable to a mining or mill town in Pennsylvania than to anyplace in the Midwest. The Iron Range was a hotbed of radicalism during the Thirties, when Minnesota was the most left-wing state in the nation, so when Dylan ran into Communists in New York it was not a new experience for him. (Dylan did turn out to be a hard guy to recruit.) And as far as being Jewish goes, Dylan's grandparents had come over from Odessa on the Black Sea, which (as any reader of Isaac Babel knows) was the home of the toughest Jews in Russia. In short, when Bob Dylan remade himself it wasn't because he was a phony trying to hide a boring suburban past. Presumably it was because he realized that the times were indeed a-changin', and also because he realized that the things that might have worked in Hibbing weren't going to work very well in New York. As for the feng shui -- I have no idea what significance that had, but next time the bot comes around I should be at the top of the "Bob Dylan feng shui" searches, because I couldn't find anything when I Googled it just now. (Update: #1 in Google). Hibbing ethnicity ca. 1900 (The "Austrians" are mostly fromthe country once called Yugoslavia). The Duluth of today from a Jewish Point of View Update: Pseudonyms from the middle of nowhere Bob Dylan wasn't the first person from his neighborhood to become famous under a pseudonym. In 1939 (two years before Dylan's birth) 16-year old Frances Gumm from Grand Rapids, Minnesota (about fifty miles from Hibbing) became famous under the name of "Judy Garland" in the movie "The Wizard of Oz"*. In 1959 the slightly younger Robert Velline of Fargo got his break as the local emergency replacement for Buddy Holly when Holly died in a plane crash; he went on to top forty success as Bobby Vee at about the same time that Dylan was getting started in Greenwich Village. (The two had played together a couple of times.) But the father of them all was North Dakota's James Gatz, who F. Scott Fitzgerald made famous as Jay Gatsby. (Incidentally, there are no oysters in Lake Superior, and Fitzgerald's story about Gatz making his living gathering oysters is bogus.) * OK, she left Minnesota when she was about five. But with a routine 50-mile / 18-year adjustment, most of the feng shui stuff applies to her, too.
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