Bob Dylan stole my youth

If The Old Testament is about real estate and The New Testament is about marketing, then it's possible that the next great works of literature will come from the secrets we keep from one another, passed one speaker at a time to ones who promise not to tell, the unkept secrets then being published as a story or a song by the ones who promised they'd never tell publishing it as a story or a song.

Readers in our age are trending away from experimental fiction toward Big Box literature. I know I prefer reading Anthony Trollope now to reading John Barth, not that John Barth is experimental now but he was when I began reading him, and Trollope wasn't then on my reading list. Trollope wrote novels that never end, as did Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi and Emile Zola, to name others writing in the age of the novel.

I first read "Anna Karinina" while camping beside a river in British Columbia; it rained for a week and a day and I stayed in the tent reading Tolstoi until I came to the end of the book. When it finally stopped raining I crawled out of the tent, ready for Bob Dylan. I'd never heard anything like it; by that time he was so electric that other writers were jealous. One of them (Robert Lowell) said Dylan 'hid behind his guitar.' Bob Dylan was everywhere then, even where he wasn't; it was like he was passing secrets around, both publicly and privately. Everyone had a Dylan story, a sighting, knew someone who knew him. Dylan would appear and then disappear; just when you thought Dylan had vanished you'd hear something on the radio, some of it good, some bad.

Sometime in the late 1970s I had to see Bob Dylan myself. I bought a ticket for a Bob Dylan show at The Forum in Los Angeles. All I could afford was a seat in the top row of the roman arena. I could almost see Bob Dylan on stage, I could almost see his right hand strum some strings on his guitar, though it took at least a second or two for the sound he was making to reach me.