Dylan & Pynchon

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/14/opinion/14CUNN.html

May 14, 2001 
The Sound of Protest
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

[...] "Bob Dylan's most durable gift as a writer may be his obdurate,
unapologetic intensity. He has never once been even slightly ironic. He has
never stood to the side of anything and commented wryly. In a world swamped
by irony, he's held fast.
"Bob Dylan belongs to a line that includes not only Woody Guthrie and Jack
Kerouac, but Flaubert, Woolf, William Gaddis, and even Maria Callas. Like
them, Bob Dylan is one of the slightly preposterous and wholly necessary
figures who've risked public humiliation by making no secret of their
passions; who've courted reputations as fools, romantics and hysterics;
who've rambled the highways so that we in our beds could imagine them out
there roaming a world so immense and mysterious that the only conceivable
thing to do is try to make art of it."


....you could probably add Pynchon to that list: "making no secret of their
passions; who've courted reputations as fools, romantics and hysterics"