A reader writes about last week’s edition of Bob’s radio show:

[George Jones -- Just One More
( "A song written by Dallas Frasier. Like they say in AA, 'One's too many, and a hundred ain't enough.'" )]

Bob never ceases to amaze me. I’ve been in AA just over a year and have actually heard that very thing in meetings. Had I never heard it with my own ears, the comment would have just been received as a nice turn of phrase.

But for we alcoholics, it is a statement full of truth and power.

Just, wow.

Well, I have to say, Bob never ceases to amaze me too. These shows are pure gold. Humor, wisdom, nonsensical trivia, and great music — all of it brilliantly balanced, especially in this, his second season on XM Radio. It’s like he was born to do it. Most of us are lucky if we figure out the one thing we were born to do. Bob seems to be able to just keep finding more. I mean, even his music career — in isolation — is really like multiple music careers. He leaves it all behind and starts again, at least in a certain sense, over and over. Then there’s his book(s), his paintings, not to mention his, ah, notable turns on the silver screen (which after all include not only acting but writing and direction). It’s 2008, and we still don’t know what to expect next from the soon-to-be sixty-seven year-old. That really is amazing, and he deserves great credit for his willingness to keep putting himself out there in so many different ways.

…

On a not completely unrelated note, there is this from author Nick Hornby’s blog:

As I get older, I appreciate the greatness of Bob Dylan more and more. (This, perhaps, proves that Dylan is, after all, God: my increasing respect contains an echo of the bet-hedging interest in religion that people traditionally discover in their later years. I’m scared that I’ll be met at the Pearly Gates by a Dylanologist who will tell me that I haven’t listened to enough mid-sixties bootlegs, or that I’m too ignorant of the 80s albums, to be let in.) I have always liked his music, but for real Dylan fans, this isn’t good enough: saying that you like his music is, to their strange way of thinking, the same as saying that you don’t like it — there’s not enough wild-eyed zeal in your enjoyment for them.

What he’s getting at in that last sentence is true enough. The thing is, if someone tells me that they like one particular Dylan album or “period,” but not the rest, then it communicates to me the fact that they don’t get Dylan, and I would be inclined to try and argue them into a broader appreciation of his work (though not as aggressively inclined as I used to be).

Hornby goes on in his post to describe “I’m Not There” as the “best film about a musician, or I think any artist” that he can think of. Now, there’s something I don’t get. I enjoyed “I’m Not There” on a certain level — found it very humorous a lot of the time — but, fundamentally, I don’t think it’s really about Dylan, and I believe even the director has stated this clearly enough. One thing it is about is the wildly varying perceptions of the star known as Bob Dylan that many people have had through the decades. And it’s about other things too. But what it doesn’t do is give you anything concrete and true about the actual Bob Dylan himself. That’s not necessarily a condemnation of the film, since it may not have been aiming to do that, and indeed I don’t think that it was. If you want to know something of “the real Bob Dylan,” the place to begin and end is always going to be his own work, isn’t it? It’s not as a rule autobiographical, but it is as a rule truthful, on a deeper level, and that matters more, I think.

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On Monday, I’m delighted to say that I expect to be posting a new Q & A with Joseph Bottum, who is the Editor of First Things, a writer and a poet himself, and a profoundly perceptive fan of Bob Dylan’s.

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