NEW ISSUE OF THE BRIDGE: 2 GEMS

The new issue of fanzine The Bridge arrived in this morning's post. It contains two gems - the astonishingly thorough run-down on that Minnesota Dylan Symposium held in March this year: 'Go Ahead And Talk', by John Hinchey, who clearly paid everyone immense attention and had the energy and persistence over the event's several days to make detailed notes there and then (and who writes complimentarily about us all); and Roy Kelly's even longer disquisition on Bob Dylan and plagiarism, 'A Shiny Bed of Lights: Bob Dylan's Modified Versions'.

This might be said to take a while to get going, but once he's into his long stride, what we're given is a rather magnificent, majestic swell of implacable, truth-is-an-arrow argument, which utterly rejects the special-pleading defences offered all over the place by enthusiasts for Modern Times, demolishing these with wise calm in an essay that, as always with his work, eschews scorn and rancour for heart and soul. This is an important piece, and stands with the best of Roy Kelly's prose about Dylan. (For more on his body of work, see the entry on him in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.)

PS. For anyone with an afternoon to spare, and sufficient stamina, there's a 63-minute-long interview with me online here on the website of The Generalist (a site I wrongly thought I had put in my Links list months ago; I've added it now). The interview ranges over the topics of Dylan and Blind Willie McTell, and was conducted by John May in London in July.