Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” released on this day in 1974, adapted as a charming illustrated children’s book by artist Paul Rogers.
Bob Dylan
LATEST
“How many of these will you make? How many of these will you break?”
Bob Dylan reads the 10 most popular New Year’s resolutions of all time.
Complement with Woody Guthrie’s timelessly heart-warming resolution list.
Q: How do you work?
A: Most of the time I work at night. I don’t really like to think of it as work. I don’t know how important it is. It’s not important to the average cat who works eight hours a day. What does he care? The world can get along very well without it. I’m hip to that.
Nora Ephron interviews Bob Dylan, 1965. Complement with the daily routines of famous writers.
What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
Bob Dylan, echoing Alan Watts and Maira Kalman’s definition of being an artist.
Thoreau put it even more eloquently: “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
This is the essence of the popular arts in America: Be a magpie, take from everywhere, but assemble the scraps and shiny things you’ve lifted in ways that not only seem inventive, but really do make new meanings. Fabrication is elemental to this process — not fakery, exactly, but the careful construction of a series of masks through which the artist can not only speak for himself, but channel and transform the vast and complicated past that bears him or her forward.
On Bob Dylan And Jonah Lehrer, Two Fabulists – the only piece on the Lehrer scandal worth reading comes from NPR, who remind us that the only transgression here is in failing to enact the different standards of journalism and art.
Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should…study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.
Bob Dylan, among 24 more great songwriters on the art of song
