Housmans – radical booksellers since 1945
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‘Bob Dylan & Babylon: together through life’
with John Gibbens
Wednesday 11th November – 7pm to 8.30pm
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Drawing on his book ‘The Nightingale's Code: A Poetic Study of Bob Dylan’ John Gibbens will be discussing the many influences on Dylan’s music, examining his more recent works, and playing some tracks.
As a poet and rock musician, John Gibbens has the background to give us a fresh perspective on Bob Dylan's substantial body of work. He has also read all the major critical studies and biographies and tracked down Dylan's literary and musical sources, from Blake and the Bible to Howlin' Wolf and Woody Guthrie. As a result, this book is literate, personal, refreshing and shows a deep affection for the artist he calls 'our first old rock star'.
Dylan, Gibbens suggests, made himself into a particular kind of folksinger, an individual who picked up pieces of whatever lay around, including the 'museum of sound' of 20th-century recorded music, to create an individual vision, continually open to what was new and fresh. Gibbens looks at all the different kinds of music Dylan has appropriated in this way, from country to gospel, and also at the social and political background against which Dylan has worked, particularly the rise and fall of the 1960s counterculture.
This evening will concentrate on the works since 2001 that have made the latter part of Dylan's career as brilliant as any before. There'll be some singing to leaven the speaking and at the end, even if the hour is getting late, some time to not talk falsely.
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Event information
Wednesday 11th November – 7pm to 8.30pm
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
King's Cross
London N1 9DX
Tel: 020 7837 4473
Free entry
Nearest tube: King's Cross
www.housmans.com
Tel: +44 (0)20 7837 4473
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