Scattered updates must mean I’m busy, which is a good thing. My article “Scenes of Love and Theft: Bob Dylan, Piracy, and Cultures of Transgression” for the Los Angeles Review of Books should be up today. It reviews two new books: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! and Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free. (Edit: Here’s the link.) Further thoughts? You bet. The “leftovers and notes” document was 11k words. I’ll have much less than that in a day or two.
Meanwhile I think my proposal for Nothing Has Been Done Before, my book of music criticism, is in good hands and headed in the right direction. Hope to have more to say about that in the near future.
The last few weeks have been devoted to revising my novel from its bloated 450 pp. incarnation down to 346 pp. at the moment. It’s been exhausting but good work. More on that later, too.
A new PopMatters column is in the pipeline, as is my long overdue review of Tom Williams’ excellent novel Don’t Start Me Talkin’, which will appear in Heavy Feather Review.
The Blind Engineer appeared a couple weeks ago, a fact I neglected to advertise here. We’re working on some new songs today, as it happens. Still planning on releasing an EP this year if we can. Here’s our newest member, Jesse Charles, and myself:
And now, Sonny Boy Williamson performing “Nine Below Zero,” which it thankfully hasn’t been here since, what, January?
Robert Loss 