John Baker’s Blog

A taster: this section comes at a meeting between the narrator and the Swede, a former ballplayer and one of his boyhood heroes:
I was impressed as the meal wore on, by how assured he seemed of everything commonplace he said, and how everything he said was suffused by his good nature. I kept waiting for [...]

Sean Wilentz recalls some mystic nights at the Oxford American:
At age twenty-four, Dylan, spinning on the edge, had a well-ordered mind and an intense, at times biting, rapport with reality. The songs are rich meditations on desire, frailty, promises, boredom, hurt, envy, connections, missed connections, paranoia, and transcendent beauty—in short, the lures and snares of [...]