Random Stuff

We slept in this morning - something we very rarely do. I don't know why we keep to such a rigid timetable- getting up, eating and going to bed at set times. It's not as though we have to go to work. And we can't say we do it for my mother because she she no longer knows what time of day it is.

Leonard Cohen says of Dylan's Prize that it's like pinning a medal on Everest for being the highest mountain.

We think of urban pollution as something that came in with the industrial revolution, but according to a programme I saw on TV last night the combination of coal fires and badly designed chimneys meant that 17th century London was as unhealthy as any modern city- with the average hearth pumping as much poison into people's living rooms as a modern diesel engine would.

More On Dylan

I've gone through life thinking the line "It's life and life only" was Al Stewart's (he has a song which uses it as a refrain) but I found out today it's one of Dylan's. I suppose Stewart was paying homage. No reason he shouldn't. It's a great line- eminently quotable; there's a whole philosophy in it.

Dylan is full of great lines. He's a channeller. He opens himself up to whatever's out there- and much of what comes through is just words- but every so often it's rather better than that. With his best songs it's like watching a thunder storm- lots of roiling and moiling and every so often the lightning strike. Some poets take more care than Dylan does to craft the stuff that comes in between- so that there are fewer duff rhymes and clumsy formulations (among fellow song-writers Leonard Cohen is a good example, he's a very meticulous writer) but few of them achieve more strikes than Dylan does. There are poets who have acquired deathless reputations on the strength of as many strikes as you could count on your fingers, but Dylan has hundreds and hundreds.