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Julie Cohn's avatar

This post blows my mind!

You have eloquently described something I've never read but imagined about Dylan. Few women have dared to let the light shine into this interior space of time, intimacy, and creativity with him in a way that's personal and hard to articulate. You are doing something that seems verboten in the Dylan sphere which is to merge the artist's life and his work. Because this has never been part of the conversation about him you seem literally to be in uncharted waters but with a life jacket, unafraid of silencing your experience. This is not a Bro conversation or an intellectual dissertation on his work. As a woman artist who is fascinated by his creative process my takeaway is his process is NO process. He's a guy walking through life, love and art without a hierachy of judgement about it and let's the river flow. You have added something missing in much of the male conversation about Dylan. I would love to hear a conversation with you and Laura Tenschart of Definitely Dylan. You're adding a missing piece of a broader conversation that's never been had. Thank you!

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Jim McCue's avatar

I agree with Julie (and all the others who have commented): this is an endearing and enduring testimony, and I think it will stand alongside some of the famous accounts of great writers by those who knew them (Hazlitt on Coleridge and Wordsworth; Walton on Donne and Herbert; John Forster's Dickens, perhaps even Boswell on Johnson). As you acknowledge, there is a question of breach of trust or perhaps simply decorum, and I'm intensely aware that my mentor and friend Christopher Ricks, in his magnificent critical book *Dylan's Visions of Sin*, scrupulously avoids writing about The Life and writes only about what Dylan has written and sung. But his is a different perspective and his involvement with Dylan has been professional and professorial. We have no proper written portrayal of Shakespeare by anyone who knew him, and in one sense perhaps his reputation has benefited from the sheer mystery. But the mystery of Dylan isn't likely ever to be thoroughly understood, and after all, he has chosen to make his vast archive available, which must signal to some extent that he knows he doesn't belong only to himself. Anyhow, this is a fascinating read.

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