At the bobdylan subreddit this morning, somebody asks "Why doesn't Dylan speak out more about politics?"

Here.

And somebody quotes something that I track down to this 1984 Rolling Stone interview:

Do you follow the political scene or have any sort of fix on what the politicians are talking about this election year?

I think politics is an instrument of the Devil. Just that clear. I think politics is what kills; it doesn’t bring anything alive. Politics is corrupt; I mean, anybody knows that.

"Women could never, for example, have made High Noon. Instead, we would have made High Noon-ish..."

"... with the added rider: ‘Just get here when you can, love, and if we don’t get round to vengeance today maybe we can do it tomorrow, at High Ten-ish. Does this work for you?’ So, for this reason, I opted for the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and...? My dears, how one longed for some tumbleweed to roll by. It would have seemed quite thrilling. Never Let Me Go is, first and foremost, as well as second and secondmost, a spectacularly inert film; so inert that even I, who favours inertness, wanted to go at it with a stick in the hope of beating it into some kind of life. Perhaps such passive solemnity is true to the book, but on screen, along with the sad tinkling piano and the sad violins that just won’t quit, the overall effect is so enervating that you simply don’t feel a damned thing. It was the same with, for example, Jane Campion’s Bright Star. It did all the right things in all the right places, but was so painterly and restrained and in such good taste it could not draw you in emotionally. Indeed, when Keats began to cough, instead of feeling moved or distressed, you simply thought, ‘Oh, good. Not long to go now.’ And that is just what this is like."

From a 2011 review by Deborah Ross (in The Spectator) of the movie "Never Let Me Go," which I watched yesterday after finishing the book. Interesting how, one decade ago, it was so acceptable to trade in such blatant gender stereotypes.

Here's the trailer for the movie (chock full of spoilers, basically, the entire story):

I read another book by the new Nobelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and was surprised to find a "Reader's Guide" with 11 questions at the end of the text.

Here's the book, "Never Let Me Go."

I've never seen this in a book before. I wonder when that was added and why. I suspect it's because there's at least one really obvious question that they wanted to get out there to say, yeah, we know, the author knows, and he meant to do that. It's your job to figure out why the book doesn't contain pages answering that question for you.

Spoilers after the page break:

"In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, 'John Wesley Harding,' and worked backward from there."

"He and his friends would sit around for hours nodding along to Dylan’s obscure lyrics as though they understood every word. It was like a microcosm of adolescence, he told me, pretending to know while knowing nothing. Ishiguro wasn’t just bluffing, though. From Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, he learned about the possibilities of the first-person: how a character could be summoned into being with just a few words.... 'You probably work harder at your job than I do,' Ishiguro said one evening in early December.... 'Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: 'I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.':

From "Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us," a NYT article about the Nobel laureate by Giles Harvey, published last February. I'm reading it this morning because I'm getting around to listening to things I saved in my Audm app. 

You probably work harder at your job than I do... I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation....

It's so rare to get that from a highly accomplished person. Usually what we hear is that success is mostly about the very hard work you put on top of whatever basic talent you have. Ishiguro has written only 8 novels. He works very intensely at times, but he also takes lots of time off. 

Between the lines in that article, I'm reading that he's as good as he is because of all the refreshment time and because writing novels is not where he set his ambition when he was young. He wanted to be a singer-songwriter. It's the reverse of Leonard Cohen. 

As for Dylan, there are many here among us who spent our early years absorbing his influence. We all started somewhere. Ishiguro's entry point was the album "John Wesley Harding." I went in through "Bringing It All Back Home."

"In the early nineteen-eighties... a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet."

"It was launched by Craig Raine’s poem 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization—what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie—as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: 'Model T is a room with the lock inside— / a key is turned to free the world / for movement.' Or, later in the poem: 'In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.' For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: 'Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings— / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. / I have never seen one fly, but / Sometimes they perch on the hand.' Teachers liked Raine’s poem, and perhaps the whole Berlitz-like apparatus of Martianism, because it made estrangement as straightforward as translation. What is the haunted apparatus? A telephone, miss. Well done. What are Caxtons? Books, sir. Splendid." 

 From "Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own/In his latest novel, the gaze of an inhuman narrator gives us a new perspective on human life, a vision that is at once deeply ordinary and profoundly strange" by James Wood (in The New Yorker).

Here's the full text of "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home."

"Do you believe in the human heart?... Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?"

"And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?... And that could be difficult, no? Something beyond even your wonderful capabilities. Because an impersonation wouldn’t do, however skillful. You’d have to learn her heart, and learn it fully, or you’ll never become Josie in any sense that matters."/"The heart you speak of... It might indeed be the hardest part of Josie to learn. It might be like a house with many rooms. Even so, a devoted AF, given time, could walk through each of those rooms, studying them carefully in turn, until they became like her own home."/"But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms... and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be, trying to learn Josie’s heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn’t there always be others you’d not yet entered?"/"Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited.... there’ll be an end to what there is to learn...."

From Kazuo Ishiguro, "Klara and the Sun."

I just finished reading this. Maybe you have too. Let's talk about it. I quoted what was for me the most memorable passage. The first speaker is the father of a girl (Josie), and the second speaker, the "I," is her AF — "artificial friend" (a robot). 

SPOILER ALERT: The question under discussion in that passage is whether the AF will be able to learn Josie to the point where she could replace Josie and be loved as actually Josie by Josie's mother if Josie dies.

"Each novel takes him around five years: a long build-up of research and thinking, followed by a speedy first draft, a process he compares to a samurai sword fight."

"'You stare at each other silently for ages, usually with tall grass blowing away and moody sky. You are thinking all the time, and then in a split second it happens. The swords are drawn: Wham! Wham! Wham! And one of them falls,' he explains, wielding an imaginary sword at the screen. 'You had to get your mind absolutely right and then when you drew that sword you just did it: Wham! It had to be the perfect cut.' As a child, he was mystified by swashbuckling Errol Flynn films when he first came to the UK, in which the sword fights consisted of actors going 'ching, ching, ching, ching, for about 20 minutes while talking to each other,' he says. 'Perhaps there’s a way of writing fiction like that, where you work it out in the act, but I tend towards the "Don’t do anything, it’s all internal" approach.'"

From "Kazuo Ishiguro: 'AI, gene-editing, big data ... I worry we are not in control of these things any more'" (The Guardian). Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.