Bob Dylan’s 80th Birthday

A significant day – Bob Dylan‘s 80th birthday

Here’s our posting from last year (with a check-list of postings on Bob Dylan on The Allen Ginsberg Project)

Here‘s Allen on Dylan from the recently-published Fall of America Journals – (see also here)

Drew Wardle in Far Out magazine writes on “The Unbreakable Friendship of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg”  (check out also David S Wills in Beatdom (from 2007) and Sean Wilentz (from 2010), “Bob Dylan, the Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America” in The New Yorker)

Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan at the grave of Jack Kerouac

Here’s Elsa Dorfman‘s wonderful photo – Dylan teaching Allen –  “The Guitar Lesson”

Bob Dylan at 80 – Bob Dylan@80, the three-day conference organized by Sean Latham, director of the Tulsa University Institute for Bob Dylan Studies continues, including a round-table discussion of several recent Dylan books and the official launch of The World of Bob Dylan, Latham’s own book, “a major new collection that provides a diverse look at the singer-songwriter’s music, creativity, art, politics, and legacy, featuring twenty-seven essays by scholars, critics, and journalists from around the world”.  Latham’s five-part series, recorded for the BBC, “It Ain’t Me You’re Looking For”, is now available here

Other new titles new/old titles include Robert Shelton‘s 1986 biography, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, a new illustrated edition (with a foreword and afterword by Elizabeth Thomson , author of the acclaimed Joan Baez biography, Joan Baez: The Last Leaf )

and premier Dylan-ologist, Clinton Heylin – A Restless Hungry Feeling  (Volume 1 of his monumental projected two-volume biography)

Howard Sounes’ 2001 biography, Down The Highway, gets substantially revised

and then there’s  You Lose Yourself You Reappear, an idiosyncratic reassessment of Dylan’s life and work from the writer-critic Paul Morley

Happy Birthday, Mr Bob 

Dylan books – that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
More on Bob Dylan scholarship (recent Bob scholarship) – here  (and here!)

The world’s press, The world’s music fans, The world celebrates.

Far too many locations to list here but here’s just a smattering:

Harvey Kubernick in Music Connection
Ross Altman for Folkworks
Mike Regenstreif at CKCU  (check out also Mike’s three recent CKCU radio broadcasts)
Michael Gray on Hard Rain & Slow Trains
Bob Dylan at 80 in The New Yorker
Bob Dylan at 80 in Rolling Stone 
John Harris in The Guardian
Edward Docx in The Guardian
Edward Helmore in The Guardian
“My Favourite Dylan Song”
Robert Wiersemar on Zoomer
Oliver Hamilton on Paudal
Egil Mosbron
Michael Dwyer in The Sydney Morning Herald
The Minnesota Star Tribune
The Minnesota Reformer
Minnesota Monthly 
BBC
RTE
Barry Davis in The Jerusalem Post 
Johnny Belknap in The Jewish Chronicle
Damian Costello in America (the Jesuit Review)
Dougal McNeill – Red Flag
Bob Dylan (from Australia)
Bob Dylan (from New Zealand)
celebrations/commemorations/notices in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Slovenian, and Hebrew

–  for more see the incomparable Expecting Rain site – here, 

Dignity – A Celebration of Bob Dylan at 80  – tune in today (3pm EST, 8pm GMT) for a live-stream event from Dublin

Speaking of Dublin, Dublin also provides this four-hour BobFest

We’ll conclude with two great statements from the man himself. The first, from 2015, his pre-Grammy Awards’ MusiCares Person of the Year acceptance speech, the second, his 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature Prize Speech

and here’s his 2015 AARP (sic) interview

and his more recent (2020) New York Times interview (with Douglas Brinkley)

Happy Birthday, Bob!  – Indeed, “may you stay forever young“! – Birthday Greetings 2021 from The Allen Ginsberg Project