For all Bob Dylan’s achievements and acclaim — including the Nobel Prize for literature — Dylan still has the capacity, and the urge, to catch his public unaware. There is no resting on laurels from him, no loafing about on crowded sidewalks. He wants to be at once canonical and elusive. As he told a newspaper interviewer in 1984: “I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now.”
~ quote of note You Lose - Jozef - Yourself, You Reappear
Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days
“In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger and darkness that reflected my imagination and my inner self,” Springsteen wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run. More than anything else, the tension of Springsteen’s Catholic upbringing – and its complex resonance through his life – has sustained his art. Letter to You, released in October 2020, is Springsteen’s most spiritual album yet, and reveals that he is one of the essential contemporary Catholic artists.
I'm not sure I’d go that far. But I’ll leave it up to God.
The Science Behind Your Ums… and Ahs…
Indeed, these verbal hesitations have been viewed as undesirable since the days of ancient Greece and, more recently, the American linguist Noam Chomsky characterised them as ‘errors’ irrelevant to language. But could there be more to these utterances than initially meets the ear? – Aeon
The Culture Of Citations That Props Up Writing
“Like many systems that appear meticulous, the writing of citations is a subjective art. Never more so than in fiction, where citation is an entirely other kind of animal, not required or even expected, except in the “acknowledgments” page, which is often a who’s who of the publishing world. (Also a good way to find out who is married to whom.) But in the last two decades, bibliographies and sources cited pages have increasingly cropped up in the backs of novels.” – The Drift
A trio of books try to capture the conflict between trickster and soothsayer embodied in the ‘voice of a generation’
Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961, a novice folk singer from the flyover state of Minnesota. Across the Atlantic, an elderly artist showed him the way forward. “In the world news,” Dylan recalled in his memoir Chronicles, “Picasso at 79 years old had just married his 35-year-old model. Wow. Picasso wasn’t just loafing about on crowded sidewalks. Life hadn’t flowed past him yet. Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that.” Dylan is now the same age Pablo Picasso was 60 years ago.
This month he turns 80. His romantic life is unknown; if there are ever to be any more Dylan nuptials, the world’s press will not be invited. But he shares Picasso’s desire to advertise his vigour at a stage of life when others have faded away. In that respect, last year’s surprise-released album Rough and Rowdy Ways was an intentional display of unextinguished artistic virility. It met with the same exclamation as Dylan’s response to news of Picasso’s marriage in 1961. Wow.
A price for everything. All the future proceeds from Bob Dylan’s songbook, perhaps the most influential of the 20th century: $300m, or thereabouts. So we found out this week when the old man, with an unsentimental swipe of the pen, sold the lot to Universal Music. What are his fans to make of this? Let’s get one idiotic idea out of the way at the outset. The sale was not an ironic coda to the Sixties, the crowing sellout of a generation who, as they aged, let their principles go cheap. That idea was stale 50 years ago. For longer than that, Dylan has been begging us to see him as nothing more or less than a musician. Asked as a young man whether he considered himself more a poet or a songwriter, he quipped that he was a “song-and-dance man”. The audience laughed, and he did too. But he was making a serious point, as he went on to demonstrate.
