On the Douglas Brinkley interview about the Bob Dylan interview, Sue writes to say:

Some interesting comments there and as you say, nothing revelatory to your fellow RWBers. One thing I don’t like about his comments is the use of the term “nationalist”. That has very negative connotations to me, bordering on fascism. I think Bob simply has a great love of his country but I don’t think he necessarily holds it up as superior to any other place on the planet, like a true nationalist would. I feel exactly the same way about Australia as Bob does about America – as stated in that article -particularly about the things I remember from my childhood and youth and how much the country has changed. I certainly wouldn’t call myself a nationalist, I just love this place. I also miss our own kind of “can-do-ism” and our national identity which was so unique and is becoming more, well US-influenced. I think the world in general is becoming more homogenized and each country’s uniqueness is slowly filtering away. I agree with Bob entirely about Euros!!! It’s all progress I guess and we can’t stop it but I don’t know that it’s made the world a better place, certainly a less interesting one.

Sue makes an excellent point regarding that word, “nationalist.” It does have strong negative connotations, especially in certain parts of the world. Why, I wonder, did Brinkley choose to describe Bob as being nationalistic, versus, say, just patriotic? Well, patriotism has negative connotations to some people too, and maybe Brinkley — consciously or sub-consciously — sought to bypass that by using a less commonly-heard term. Americans don’t talk about nationalism, in general, but they do talk about patriotism. As did Bob himself on Theme Time Radio Hour when he talked about “the days before we were all citizens of the world, in a global environment, when it was still possible to be a patriot in deed and not just in words.”

One might see a parallel in Brinkley’s use of the term “old-fashioned” in contexts where some might use the word conservative. Of-course, all of this is also illustrative of why Dylan has generally run away from labels of all kinds; none of them mean exactly the same thing to every person who uses them. And indeed they can mean wildly different things.

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Thanks to Don for sending me the link to Frank Miele’s interesting piece on Together Through Life, in the Northwest Montana Daily Inter Lake: Bob Dylan’s back and ‘It’s All Good.’

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At First Things, there’s a nice post by Keith Pavlischek commenting on Bob Dylan’s interview with Bill Flanagan, titled “Dylan on Goods Internal to Practices and Not Messing with Texas.”

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And thanks to Richard who e-mailed a follow-up on the notion that Bob Dylan plays “war songs” every Tuesday. Indeed:

Just because I thought of it I checked Dyl’s set list for Tues, may 5, and there they were, Masters of War, and John Brown. Also 14th and 21st April, but not on other randomly chosen week days.

And this is how you spend your mornings, Mr. Wells? I’m afraid so, yer Honor.

Amazing. There’s obviously something to this days-of-the-week theory. I just refuse, personally-speaking, to look into it. Doctor’s orders.

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Together Through Life, if you haven’t heard, is the number one selling album in the U.S. and the U.K. and is at or near number one in a plethora of other markets. Some say, “Well, he does so well in the charts now because it’s only the old people who buy CDs anymore.” There is some truth in that, of-course, but it’s hardly the whole story. You only have to go to a Dylan show to see the young people who are such a big part of his audience these days. No, being number one in the digital age certainly ain’t what it used to be, but it’s still a whole lot, and it is a remarkable place for Bob Dylan to be finding himself, a couple of weeks shy of his 68th birthday.

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