You Modern Folk: On Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace

Bob Dylan turned 85 in May, and as of this writing he is still on the road. This year and counting he has played 27 shows — that’s six more than Geese in roughly half the time: his spring tour opened in Omaha on March 21 and closed in Abilene on May 1. As he says: “What could be bad about traveling places, seeing different things, moving? It keeps you alive.” Dylan has played over 3,000 live shows since 1993.

The American Dream-Master: On Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon returns, let us hope not for the last time, to an America finally besieged by its own Gestapo, Ice also being the surname of the tech-lord villain of his last novel, 2013’s Bleeding Edge. Twelve years on, on my own side of the pond, we endure the resistible rise of our own British-grown wannabe fascists, led by an anti-European whose fake French surname is one vowel shift away from “Nigel Farrago,” a Pynchon-ass moniker if ever there was one. Yes, we know where we are. So forth, as the man himself likes to say.