Dylan the Postmodernist?

I had originally thought that I wasn’t going to write much about Modern Times. I was wrong. What started out as a short, indignant review of the musical borrowings on the album, was then followed up by a somewhat longer discussion of the lyrical borrowings from H. Timrod, which I have now wrapped up in a longish piece which traverses the death of the author, copyright laws, various connections between ethics and aesthetics, oh yes, and Dylan’s later work. The last piece has so much significant use of italics that I don’t dare to let it out in a plain-html version, so you will have to download a pdf file. I’ve made it available in two versions: one with only the article itself, the other bundled with the two previous texts (both links go to pdf files).

About Love
(What it’s about)

I discovered what love is all about the other day. This social construct, refined through centuries of human civilization and surrounded by myths and taboos, idealized, demonized, attributed to G/god or to body fluid imbalance, hormons or mormons — but what it’s really about…
Try to put your arms gently around the one you love, with bare arms (like the cavemen early in our evolution must have had), and rest your wrists against the naked skin of your partner — already warm under the mammoth fur or the blanket — and tell me if that isn’t what it’s all about — all these years of evolution and poetry: to get your wrists warmed.