Enduring Dylan

Such is life in Greece that I didn't even *know* Dylan had a new album coming.

Good timing: I can have the girls bring it out as birthday prez for their Ya-Ya, then when she's finished giving it an odd look she can give it to *me*.

Such also is life in Greece that I trust we can now get back to some sort of service in restaurants, instead of trying to catch the zombies' attention as they walk around colliding and spilling in their efforts to miss not one second of the World Cup.

Back to Dylan - Not that "novelist Don DeLillo and rock writer Greil Marcus" are the first names that spring to mind to discuss Dylan's "enduring mystique", but DD makes an interesting phrase when talking about "Like a Rolling Stone":

"It's 40 years now since Dylan first came out with it. It's not about civil rights or the Cold War or assassination; mysteriously, for someone of a certain age, it carries such enormous power that all of these things are in it.

It carries the sound of that period. It's got nothing to do with nostalgia; it's too powerful for that. And it's not purely personal. It's the entire age funnelled through 40 years in one song."

And I did have to chuckle at the reference to how people want more and more of Dylan in the movie "No Direction Home":

"Paul Nelson is interviewed in the film; he probably first met Dylan around 1959 or 1960 in Minneapolis.

He once said that in the mid-'60s it got to the point where people would follow Bob Dylan around and pick up his cigarette butts searching for significance.

"The scary part is, they'd find it."