The Uneven Heart — Bob Dylan The Musician

Most of my posts begin “it’s been a while”, it seems, and so does this one. This time, it’s been a self-imposed silence, because I’ve been busy finishing a book on lauda singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — perhaps not your cup of tea, but it’s what I do for a living.

Anyway, my real book is coming along as well — my collected writings about Dylan and his music — and I’ve wrapped up another article, this time an extended translation of the article I wrote for the Norwegian philosophical journal Agora last spring. It’s a survey of some traits of Dylan’s musical carreer, seen as a pulse of phases of appropriation, internalization, and moving on, almost like a heartbeat, hence the title “The Uneven Heart”.

The article is available as a separate pdf file or as part of the full book, Things Twice. There is also a plain HTML version, without the typographical niceties of the book version.

As always, I welcome comments. As always, too, there may be typos, errors, inconsistencies, the odd word in Norwegian which I’ve overlooked in the translation, etc. If you spot any such things, please let me know.