To begin with, you're Sammy Hagar. Even if you'd been David Lee Roth, I don't think this could have been love— what chance could you really have? Also, you're the lead singer of Van Halen, which means your romantic life involves a winding procession of dazed dipstick groupies. Not much room for love in that arrangement, sir. And then, of course, there's the fact that we're both heterosexual men. To be fair, though, you didn't specify whether it was eros, philia, agape, or storge that you had in mind, so I shouldn't jump to conclusions. In alphabetical order, then:

• "Why Can't This Be Agape?": Because you aren't David Lee Roth.
• "Why Can't This Be Eros?": Because we're both heterosexual men.
• "Why Can't This Be Philia?": Well, I suppose it could be, in a fairly loose sense. All right, Sammy: this can be philia.
• "Why Can't This Be Storge?": What the hell is storge?

 The Jimi Hendrix Experience - "Are You Experienced?"

I'm sure you and your drug-fuddled hippie friends wouldn't think I was especially experienced, but yes, I suppose I've had a few experiences. What kind of thing do you have in mind?  Are we talking like in the résumé sense? I suppose if you count watching the sunrise from the bottom of the sea as an experience, then no, I'm not that experienced. How does that even work, from hundreds of fathoms down? The average ocean depth is almost a mile, Jimi. To see that kind of sunrise—well, I think you mean "Not necessarily beautiful, but stoned."

Elvis Costello - "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?"

*snicker* Oh, Elvis. You're so naive.

David Bowie - "Life on Mars?"

Not according to recent data, no. NASA stumbles on suggestive evidence from time to time, but Mars has a pretty thin atmosphere, so its environment can't really support liquid water. There's probably no life on Mars, Dave. And if there is, it's probably just microbes, and not mice, Ibizans, socialists, Beatles, or sailors fighting in dance halls.

Frank Zappa - "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?"

Considering the folks you hang around with, Frankie, I couldn't even begin to guess.

Ten years ago this fall, Marc Prensky announced a revolution in education. In his 2001 essay, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," he argued that as Western culture shifted to digital communication in the last years of the twentieth-century, a divide opened between the older "Digital Immigrants" newly arrived in the wired world, and the young "Digital Natives" born and raised in this new frontier. With the rise of the internet, Prensky argued, came a generation gap wider than the usual one that exists between the young and their befuddled parents; as technology, media culture, and the Internet ruled the day, young people who grew up in the new environment began to "think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors." According to Prensky, the Digital Natives are steeped in and perfectly adapted to life in the new world which for their parents, the Digital Immigrants, remains to some extent an unfamiliar environment. Prensky's famous essay is a call to educators to respond to the observation that "Digital-Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language"—and that education, as a consequence, is an "old-world" construct incapable of seizing the attention or stimulating the minds of a population reared in the "new world."

Whether it has been the sea change Prensky writes about is a point of some disagreement, of course. Some argue that it is in our nature to lack historical perspective, to enlarge what is immediately in front of us, and to believe that our own moment eclipses all that came before it. But what may be different in this case is that everybody seems to be saying this about the past twenty years, not just young people caught up in the excitement of their hour, and so in any case it might as well be true. As the story goes, the cultural landscape has been radically altered within a very short time, the standard generational twenty years having brought the Internet, smartphones, social networking, YouTube celebrity, etc. As a result, there is a wider gulf between the native environments of the high-school and university students of today and those of the late Baby Boomer and Generation X parents who raised them. It really does seem sometimes like a singularity, a revolutionary break from the old world and the sudden imposition of an unrecognizable new one.

Technological change is nothing new, of course (we have been here before, courtesy of the Gutenbergs, the Edisons, the Bells, etc.), and neither are revolutionary shifts in values and prevailing ideas. But the two together seem to have scrambled intergenerational communication a bit more than usual; Prensky's immigrants, especially when they are educators, often stare backward mournfully at the vanishing world of the past while the natives stare only forward, rejecting the lessons and value of history, emboldened in such singularly futurist thinking by a media and advertising culture desperate for their attention and their gadget dollar. There are exceptions to both of these rules, naturally, but by and large these two generations do sometimes seem to speak radically different languages, and they value entirely different things.

On closing the generation gaps of history and managing the death of "contemporary forms of social order," Aleksandr Herzen wrote in the nineteenth century that "what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass." With revolutionary change, then, comes not a clean, straightforward handoff of dominance from the overthrown to the inheritors of power, but an uneasy interregnum, a period of adaptation to the new order before it is quite fully in place. The call that Prensky made a decade ago to educators to end their "grousing" and accept and begin adapting to the new order was an attempt to close the gap Herzen describes, to induce labour in the pregnant widow and complete the shift to the ostensibly inevitable technological future.

The good news, however, is that in this case there are intermediaries, regents tending to the office as the heir is made ready for the post. In Herzen's terms, they function as midwives and nurses. In Prensky's terms, they work like immigration-officer go-betweens, smoothing the transition for new arrivals, and helping to dovetail old with new. In terms of technology itself, they operate like an interface, the device that can translate the movements of a hand into those of a mouse pointer on a screen.

I was born in 1976. The world at the time included computers, but they had only recently shrunk from great warehouse-sized beasts into things consumers could own, and most people didn't have one. I didn't spend my early childhood with a computer in front of me, and I had only a vague science-fiction sense of them. My father brought home a Commodore 64 when I was 9 or 10 years old, and this was the first computer I got to use myself. I played games on it, and I borrowed books on BASIC programming from the library to help me create primitive programs of my own. It was a thrilling new world for me, to be sure, but it was still a tiny one compared to the wired world a nine- or ten-year-old child encounters today:  this was an isolated machine (modems existed for them, but my family didn't have one, and there were only boring bulletin-board systems to access anyway), and it was anything but user-friendly. Turn on a Commodore 64 and all you see is a "READY" prompt and a blinking cursor—no icons, no tooltips, no help documentation, nothing to orient you. Prompt notwithstanding, it all made you feel quite unready indeed. To make any use of these machines was to be by contemporary standards something of a specialist, and most certainly to be on your own.

My first encounter with the internet was when I was seventeen years old, in 1993. I was at the home of an acquaintance whose affluent family were always early-adopters of new technologies, and their most recent adoption was a dial-up internet connection on a second telephone line. We looked at a couple of business websites and other things his father had bookmarked in Netscape Navigator, and while none of the information itself was especially interesting to me, the idea itself seemed momentous: to have a pandect of information just a few keystrokes away was a revelation. I didn't get my own regular access to the internet until a couple of years later at university, but in the meantime, like everybody else at the time, I was spellbound by the idea of an information commons, and of immediate exchange of ideas between the like-minded.

But I saw this advent with the strange combination of both youthfully giddy eyes and a print-culture mindset cultivated by my 1980s education. By the time I saw the internet for the first time in 1993, I'd only ever read a book in the original Book 1.0, Dead Trees Edition. I knew how to use a card catalogue in the library. My music collection was on CDs and a few lingering mixes on old TDK cassettes, and the whole lot certainly didn't fit in my pocket. I'd never owned a mobile phone, of course—in fact, nobody I'd ever met while I was growing up had one, and though they existed, they were either the laughable bricks still seen in 1980s period comedies, or they were permanently installed in rich people's cars. I was thus without cell phone or iPod, and apart from an hour here and there doing homework or playing games, I was almost never at a computer. If I was out with friends and wanted to know something, I had no way of looking it up. I had to make a mental note to look into it later, and wait not just until I got home, but until I could ask a teacher or someone else in the know, or else look it up in print sources in the library.

In short, then, I received the same education and ultimately the same values as Prensky's "Digital Immigrants," but the alignment of my date of birth and the rise of the internet meant that I was young and hungry just as the famous technological revolution was happening. I was part of an evanescent generation that had the benefit of both immersion in the new world and a firm grounding in the old one.

Now, I'm a thirty-five year old university instructor, and I'm confronted with Prensky's controversial challenge of a decade ago. My classroom is full of his Digital Natives, and it is my job to find ways to communicate with them, and to unite the old world and the new, adapting print-culture content for the consumption of net-culture minds so that it won't die on the e-altar. And indeed this isn't always simple and straightforward.

According to one recent study, my students spend, on average, seven and a half hours a day consuming media content—consuming, in the end, almost 11 hours of content when you consider "multitasked" channels of input separately. One in three of them sends and receives more than 100 text messages a day, and 75% of them have a cell phone. Most of their bedrooms contain a TV, and nearly all of them contain a computer or two.  They have turned out more or less exactly how Prensky imagined they would a decade ago, when today's first-year students were just eight years old. Their world is one that the designers of the traditional education system could not have imagined and certainly weren't prepared for, a submoronic hive-mind in which the presiding authority is not authority at all but, as Mark Bauerlein argued in The Dumbest Generation, the intense and inescapable presence of peerthink itself: the social panopticon, the media obsession and other centripetal tugs of youth consciousness, and above all the self-reinforcing obsession with and dependence upon what comes in ones and zeroes.

This is how the natives live in the new tech landscape. Now think about how the way the immigrants live in this world, the ones who designed the curricula in place in most schools, who raised the natives and in many cases the natives' parents. They're the fastest growing segment of the Facebook population, but just think of the way many of them use it. When they post comments on their children's status updates, they often start with "Hi sweetie," and end with "Love, Mom," just like they did when writing letters by hand. We wince as they SOMETIMES WRITE IN ALL-CAPS, JUST AS THEIR FIRST COMPUTERS IN THE 1980S ALWAYS DID. We cringe at their candour and guilelessness. We watch as they derail comment threads with interjected reminders to pick up milk on the way home from school. We hear in these immigrants' digital voices what Prensky described as the "accent," the vestiges of old-world language. Some immigrants have adapted rather well to the new speech, but they have all done so long after their own habits, worldview, and values have formed, and as Prensky says, "a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain."

But the Interface folks were still figuring themselves out when all of this began, and we learned both ways of speaking in parallel, on user-unfriendly computers and with stacks of old books piled on our desks beside them. All adolescents work at trying to integrate themselves into the world that surrounds them, but people born a few years on either side of me were tasked with integrating themselves into two worlds, and in engaging that task, we cultivated two sets of intuitions about language, communication and culture. Translation between the idioms of stone tablets and iPad tablets is more natural for this "Interface Generation" than it is for those on either side of them, and it shows. My students often find my world baffling, but I'm not baffled by theirs, and I'm still at home in the one I inherited myself—I'm as good on my iPhone as they are on theirs, and yet I'm as committed to the value of the traditional book as the most curmudgeonly antiquarian.

The students Prensky saw coming in 2001 have arrived, and so has the world of parallel processes, random access, instant gratification and reward that he predicted. The old social order lay on its deathbed, or at least so say many, and Herzen's long night of chaos and desolation has thus begun. It does look as if we need new ways of speaking and teaching, or at least to consider ways of honing the ones we have, as Prensky said we would a decade ago, and many of us are already well on our way to linking the wires. The people forming the Interface have a vital responsibility in this process, because they represent a bridge between the departing world and that of the unborn heir. There will never be another generation that was young when they were young and the game was changing, and that is info-bilingual in a world of info-monoglots. They will have to complete the act of translation and soon, before, for better or worse, the old world is taken offline completely.

1. Mistaken-identity situations that turn on the inability to see who is calling.
2. Picking up the house phone to make a call, only to discover that someone is already on the line on another extension, whereupon a portion of the conversation is overheard and misunderstood to comic or dramatic effect.
3. A stratagem: one roommate pretending to be the other when a boyfriend calls.
4. Teenage siblings intercepting calls from each other's love interests for the sake of cruel embarrassment.
5. Any uncontrollable spiral of events precipitated by a telephone message left on a piece of paper, with a concierge, etc., and never received.
6. Romantic tragedies involving missed encounters and the inability to make subsequent rearrangements (She thought it was for 3pm, and he thought it was for 4pm; she thought the meeting was in Portland, Oregon, and he thought it was in Portland, Maine; etc.)
7. Prank calls, pretty well altogether.

Plot elements introduced with the invention of the cell phone:

1. Accident victim struck by vehicle while staring down at cell phone.
2. Romantic tragedy: lovers fail to meet in line at the grocery store, as both are beguiling the tedious minutes of waiting by playing Angry Birds.
3. Deeper exploration of psychological interiority: long scenes of passive-aggressive silence, while two lovers sit at a table in a bar, texting others not present. Variation: texting one another.
4. Missing-person case solved shortly after disappearance by using "Find My iPhone" app.

I've been working on a few things lately—a couple of short-fiction pieces, some things for here, and of course the bill-paying gig. I'm also travelling again next week, this time to Ohio to visit family and store up energies before the next sortie in preparation for the fall semester. More to come soon, in other words. In the meantime, though, a little something.

I've been reading a lot of Saul Bellow this summer, with one of his novels in one hand and a copy of last year's magnificent edition of his letters in the other, dipping in and out of the latter as I plough through the former. Bellow's correspondence is charming and often itself quite literary, and as usual with this sort of thing, in addition to enchanting notes to his various ex-wives and business exchanges of literary-historical interest, there are loads of wonderful letters to other writers, and these I've found spellbinding.

I have a few old-fashioned qualities—ones that were more noteworthy when I was younger, since I think I'm growing into them as I get older. The zest for literature is one of these, probably the main one. I still read books in their original dead-tree editions, for example, and don't see that changing soon; I'd sooner read kindling than be Kindle-ing, if you like. I often think I'd do fairly well if I had to go back to pre-computerized ways of doing things. But in one way I'm very much a child of the modern world: nobody would ever hear from me if it weren't for electronic means of communication. I've tried with likeminded friends a few times over the years to keep up the habit of writing actual letters—not just writing on paper, but striving for some depth and intrinsic merit. It never takes. This is partly because the postal system isn't what it used to be (in late-19th-century England, for example, you could dispatch letters to your friends first thing in the morning to invite them to afternoon tea, and they'd all be on your doorstep at 3:00; mail someone a letter now and it might not actually arrive until years after your death, like the yellowed missive Doc sent Marty from 1885 in Back to the Future II). But I reluctantly admit that laziness and convenience are key factors too, even for those of us who are otherwise committed to spending all their time writing.

Anyway, as both a print-culture nerd and a woefully unsuccessful letter writer, I'm luxuriating in Bellow's correspondence with other American-lit titans (a couple of samples below—and, as I hope folks with good examples at hand will point out, these are not even especially remarkable examples of writers' letters, but rather just a few that have made me smile along the way), and lamenting that here as everywhere else, modernity has brought about the death of an old art. Don't hold your breath for a beautiful hardcover edition of the message history from Jonathan Lethem's Blackberry; I'm sure it isn't coming. You couldn't possibly get excited about reading someone's lols and oks and gtfos; it's a shame, too, that none of the participants in a BBM conversation can get as excited about any one of their messages as one used to feel on the way back from the mailbox carrying a long-anticipated letter from a good friend.

Anyway, I'll send you all postcards from Ohio. You should receive them sometime before your grandchildren finish college.

From Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor and published by Viking:

To John Cheever, November 10, 1976. Cheever had asked Bellow to review proofs of Falconer:

Dear John,

Will I read your book? Would I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? I am longing to read the galleys. Since I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in The Tempest, I shall get Harriet Wasserman at Russell and Volkening to obtain a set of galleys for me from Knopf. I would like to see you too, but I don't know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror [Bellow's Nobel Prize in Literature]. But I will write to you pronto about the book, which I'm sure to read with the greatest pleasure.

Yours,

To Bernard Malamud, May 10, 1959.

Dear Bern,

I shy away from all writers' organizations. The PEN is about my limit, and I have doubts about that. No doubt the [Authors] League is fine, but the publisher and the agent aren't the enemy. The enemy (and I'm not horribly hostile towards them, either) is a hundred sixty million people who read nothing. What's the League going to do about them, about Orville Prescott, about TV and Hollywood? It may increase my income by six hundred per annum. I don't care about increasing my income by six hundred per annum. It isn't worth joining an organization for. [...]

Best,

To Philip Roth, July 20, 1993. Roth had recently suffered both illness and separation from wife Claire Bloom; Bellow wrote the following: 

Dear Philip,

Curious how futile good intentions feel in a case like this. The whole of one's personal morality is on the line—a tug-of-war in which I am outweighed a million to one by the imponderables. If you were to ask I'd come down to see you, though I've never seen myself as a bearer of remedies. I can't think of a single cure I ever worked. My idea of a mitzvah was to tell you a joke, which was like offering to install a Ferris wheel in your basement. Certainly not a useful idea.

This may seem to be a greeting from the horizon but I'm really not all that far. I feel anything but distant.

Affectionately,

Turing acknowledged that such machines were still the stuff of science fiction, but he didn't think we were very far off from creating them—he put their arrival at before the end of the century. A couple of generations later, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted in 1990 that computers would pass the Turing test by 2020 (in 2005 he pushed it out to 2029). Most seem to agree that the ability of a computer to imitate human behaviour is still some way off, for one or the other of two different but related reasons: either the computer's capacity to match human traits (not just intelligence and sophisticated language, of course, but also the other things that make us human, such as emotion, error, inconsistency, and so on) is still relatively low, or human behaviour is somehow too "high," beyond the reach of imitative technologies.

Computers have come a long way since Turing died in 1954 (a tragic story well worth reading, by the way—what an embarrassment was the public mistreatment of the man whose cryptography skills helped crack the German Enigma machine in World War II, and all that mistreatment for nothing more than eccentricity and homosexuality). And while our computers have evolved and worked their way into the centre of our lives, we have evolved alongside them. They have attained much more of the sophistication necessary to imitate our language and thought patterns, and so pass the Turing test, and as we have hunkered down more or less permanently at their keyboards, our language and thought patterns themselves seem also to have changed a little: grown a bit more abbreviated, systematic, formulaic, and telegraph-like, simplified like a machine-language of subroutines. At our brave posts behind those keyboards, free from at least some of the complex and nuanced immediate social pressure that used to partly fill our days, we have nudged human nature a little more toward the mechanical extremities of hostility, partisanship, and stark binaries. Our computers have become increasingly capable of imitating us, and at the same time, to some extent, we have obligingly begun imitating them in little ways.

The talk of tests and machines calls to mind other such diagnostics, such as the fictional Voight-Kampff test from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for the 1982 film Blade Runner. The Voight-Kampff is a test for the presence of human empathy, which helps determine whether the subject is a human being or an android. Subjects are asked a series of questions designed to provoke empathetic emotional responses while those administering the test watch for the physiological signs of such responses. The test rests on the presumption that human empathy cannot be faked at this level; if a creature exhibits no signs of empathetic response, it must be a machine.

The trick in Dick's novel, of course, is that no faking is required: only the androids display any genuine human empathy anyway. Dick's postmodern, futuristic world is one in which such human traits are on the way out. The utility of the Voight-Kampff test is challenged partly by advances in android technology, and partly by the fact that the disappearance of human empathy ("flattening of affect") moves the bar down, so that it is a less remarkable achievement to display as much empathy as the average human being. Just about any machine can manage that, so the Voight-Kampff test gets easier to pass.

A computer that passes the Turing test is a victory for silicon and a defeat for flesh and blood, of course, since a passed test means a human failure to detect humanness. If we bring down the bar of human nature and make it easier for the computer to win, just as the "flattening of affect" makes it easier to pass the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner, then we lose twice, since we have been beaten by our creations and also by ourselves, having given up what made us marvellous and inimitable in the first place.

I think about tests of our nature like these sometimes when everyone takes to the internet after some tragic event, so naturally they came to mind this past week amidst news of explosions in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse. These are the moments, after all, when we glimpse ourselves at our most guileless and authentic, if not necessarily at our best.

One could easily have programmed a computer to produce the predictable responses that flooded people's Twitter feeds after these events—the hollow tributes, the jingoism, the geopolitical oversimplifications, the cynical cracks about the 27 Club, the tasteless too-soon humour, the excoriations of mourners of the latter tragedy for ignoring the greater enormity of the former. These tweeters had all clearly passed the reverse Turing test at least once when they filled in CAPTCHAs while signing up for their Twitter accounts; it wasn't at all clear where they stood with the regular Turing test, or whether they might rise out of the mechanical chatter of the site's equally predictable and formulaic spambot white-noise. Above all, and most disconcertingly, there was that "flattening of affect," the lowered bar of empathy against which all machines are suddenly judged as people, and all people suddenly machines. Rather than warmly demonstrating empathy—understanding and sharing the feelings of others—so many simply carried out the usual cold, pre-programmed scripts: Detached Internet Cynicism 1.0, Celebrity Judgment 2.0, Hairtearing & Teethgnashing 3.0, Bitter Recrimination Lite, Panic 2000.

That our computers might one day effortlessly pass the Turing test is an ambitious goal for artificial-intelligence research; if it happens, here's hoping it's because our machines managed to become more human, and not the other way around.

The first four tracks:

1. "Thunder on the Mountain" (from Modern Times, 2006)
2. "Cold Irons Bound" (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)
3. "Can't Wait" (from The Bootleg Series Vol. 8—Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006, 2008)
4. "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" (from Together Through Life, 2009)

Most people who have encouraged me to give Dylan a chance have suggested starting with his recent work, so it's not that surprising that we're starting there again this time around, as that's how my friend started too. It strikes me as an odd way to get into an artist with a large back-catalogue. It's counterintuitive, of course, to start at the end of anything, but it also just seems to make sense to begin with the work that created the legend rather than with what came later, when that legend was well established. Being famous, wealthy, popular, and influential doesn't do anywhere near as much for the quality of one's work as being a lean and hungry nobody does. Listen to the first couple of Beatles records and then give the "Revolution 9" filler on the White Album a spin; the band worked a lot harder when they were still winning over their audience than when they figured they had the punters forever, and the difference in the output is hard to ignore.

Anyway, I'm beginning here with the first four tracks on my friend's mix, all post-comeback material. Apart from the fact that they're all quite recent, the main thing these first few songs have in common is that they're all very bluesy. (This isn't the only thing Dylan is doing on his recent albums, of course, but it seems to be what caught my friend's attention as he was listening, and might've been what made him stick around.)

This kind of thing naturally appeals to my sensibilities, and for the first few bars, I like what I'm hearing. "Thunder on the Mountain" from Modern Times (2006) starts strong, and I'm thinking the same thing I always think when I'm first listening to a recent Dylan song:  this band sounds great.  He's Bob Dylan, of course, so he has the resources to hire the finest musical A-Team money can buy.  They're not asked to do much here—the song reminds me a lot of "Johnny B. Goode" with different lyrics, though with the blues, that kind of interchangeability is more a feature than a bug—but they do it with authority here, and I'm thinking that maybe this won't be so bad after all.

Enter the Dylan.

It's the usual croaking, but with this kind of straight-up blues, there's nothing really wrong with that. Of course, rasp and grumble aren't out of place in a song like this (the use of Alicia Keys as muse is the only truly bizarre aspect of the track, in the end; it's artistic inspiration in reverse, like finding out that Paul McCartney is a huge Glee fan—another bit of truth that's stranger than fiction). Sometimes, though, he tries for a reedy, soulful falsetto and the notes simply dissolve into empty, toneless breath. Shouldn't he be able to belt this with the same authority? He's playing the one kind of music that always gets better with age, the one kind of music in which being old is no handicap, but he sounds like he's too old for it:

I skip ahead, and "Cold Irons Bound" from Time Out of Mind (1997) starts. We head back a decade into the thinner, more compressed and processed aural texture of Daniel Lanois's controversial production. The beat is almost reggae this time, but it's still the blues, and I have the same thought as before: this band sounds great. Unlike "Thunder on the Mountain" with its cheerful Chuck-Berryish roots-rock orthodoxy, this one's darker, meaner, and more idiosyncratic; the chord progression includes a few unexpected moves, and the whole presentation seems to be about dissonance and percussive force, another aural texture within which Bob's nodular gurgles and wheezes should fit right in.

Enter the Dylan.

The band sounds like they know what they're doing, but with Dylan up front, they seem like a competent group of musicians auditioning a singer whom they will not be calling back. I can see a pattern forming, and I look ahead at the rest of the track list wondering if this is how all of it will go.

[Nothing to embed here for "Cold Irons Bound," alas. YouTube shoos Canadians from the door of this particular video; you might try it from wherever you are and see if it works for you.]

He still just sounds so out of place. What makes me cringe even more than the voice itself is that he seems to be shooting for a kind of cool that doesn't feel credible, a kind of fedora-wearing hipster-sage persona. It feels like something to be accepted on faith, like watching Woody Allen play the male lead in one of his own films; I'm not entirely buying it, but the presentation falls apart without it and I know it, so I obligingly play along even if it proves to be a lot of work.

Also: the songwriting. "I tried to love and protect you because I cared / I'm gonna remember forever the joy that we shared"?  Poet, spokesman of a generation, cultural hero? There's a reason for such simplistic moon-and-June lyrics in blues or jazz, a reason why there are fake-books and predictable structures and repetitive chord progressions. They're there to measure off a bit of regular musical space, to give a truly marvellous musician whom we can't get enough of a bit of space in which to do his or her thing, as when a great soloist riffs for ten minutes on a familiar old standard, or to make room for a character we can't help but watch with fascination. Dylan isn't the former and never has been, and he just doesn't seem to pull off the latter, and I find myself feeling like I always do when I'm listening to Dylan, staring down at my feet to avoid looking at the naked emperor.

It’s the same with Track 3. This is "Can't Wait," not the album version from Time Out of Mind, but an alternate version from 2008's The Bootleg Series Vol. 8—Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006.

[Nothing on YouTube for this one either, sadly.]

It's the blues again—and again, what's strongest here has nothing to do with Dylan and his rough voice and predictable lyrics. You could replace him and nothing that makes this work—the groove the band attains, that piano, the little guitar accents, the percussive chords, etc.—would be lost. The studio personnel on Time Out of Mind consists of fourteen musicians, including Dylan and producer Lanois, and most of them are heavyweights. Put a committee like that together and you're bound to make some solid music, at least some of the time. It just doesn't seem like they need Dylan.

Track 4 is "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," from Dylan's most recent album, Together Through Life (2009). At first the band starts, and I think, this wouldn't sound out of place on any of the albums Tom Waits has released in the last decade or so. And then the accordion begins, and I think, yes, this still wouldn't sound out of place on one of Waits' albums.

Enter the Dylan.

The voice is nastier than it's ever been, but this is from his latest record, so it's no surprise. I notice that Dylan's voice isn't declining pleasantly the way some singers with notably evolving voices are. Leonard Cohen is getting deeper; Tom Waits is getting coarser (though he helps it along with the way he sings). Dylan sounds rough as hell, but not like a Lord Buckley or a Louis Armstrong, or the kind of whiskey-voiced rasp that so fits the blues—it's just a phlegmy, throaty splutter.

These first four tracks are all blues songs—the perfect showcase for a complex, rough voice, the perfect place for a singer who's gotten old and coarse to still have a place. But again, what works here is all the band's doing, and while on Together Through Life Dylan himself has more to do with that (it's a six-man band rather than the great session committee of Time Out of Mind), his best contribution seems to be when he closes his mouth and sits back with the ensemble rather than standing alone in the twelve-bar spotlight.

It feels strange to encounter Dylan first in this form, in which he's already established as the great cultural icon, and yet his band seems miles ahead of him. I begin to wonder if we've all come to take the man's greatness for granted—if even Dylan himself has done so. It seems like anyone could have written these songs, and that it's the other people involved who have the most to do with any of it coming off. So far, I'm more inclined to dig into the other work by the session players than into the rest of the Dylan catalogue, but there's work still to be done trying to figure out Mr. Zimmerman, and I'm not done yet.

Despite the many recommendations that I start at the end, I can tell that it isn't the right place to begin after all, at least for me. Much of it is quite accessible, and the band sounds fantastic, but the energy of Dylan's contribution here is that of a fading red giant rather than a white-hot new star. I may have to look to his earlier stuff after all if I am going to have a shot at seeing what others see in the old baby-boomer supernova.

1. I am almost finished with the first Dylan post. I'm trying to keep an open mind, I promise. I'm at over a thousand words on the first four tracks alone, so it needs some paring down--there are more narrow-minded, uninformed things to say about listening to his work out of context than I thought. More to come soon, after I've returned from:

2. Vacation! I am skipping town for a week on Thursday morning, spending a week in Montreal and leaving my laptop behind. I'll only* have the iThings (-Phone and -Pad) with me, and depending on the whims of various gods in the travel pantheon (Coveragecoatl, Roamingfeesis, WiFiki, Cashtar), I may suddenly fall e-silent. If so, I'll be back and e-noisy again next week. I'll probably make you look at pictures, too, because of course:

3. Facebook is not just for playing Farmville, Pin the Photo Tag on the Embarrassing Public Event, and Ring Around the Enigmatic Song-Lyric Status Update. It's also a massively-multiplayer locked-in-a-room-looking-at-someone's-travel-slides simulator. One of the many marvels of our age.

* "Only." I'll be carrying two small devices capable of satellite transmission, each of which contains computing hardware whose power exceeds that of some of the systems used to put men on the moon. Roughing it, to be sure, but I'll manage.

In 2006, due to a resolution of the International Astronomical Union establishing the formal definition of the term, the Solar System lost a planet. The definition created a new criterion that tiny, distant Pluto failed to meet; the frozen sphere was promptly reclassified as a "dwarf planet," and the number of planets in the Solar System was reduced by one.

No actual cataclysm occurred. Pluto wasn't annihilated, or tugged from orbit and sent hurtling into space. There was a surprisingly passionate reaction, though, from many who felt that their world had been changed by the IAU's decision. Something had indeed been annihilated, as far as they were concerned; the Solar System they'd memorized as children in school, with all those diagrams and models featuring the familiar nine spheres, had been profoundly reshaped by the apparently arbitrary decision of a community of astronomers. A tiny and purely academic change had occurred, but it was consequential enough to spark contention both within and outside the scientific community. The Internet lit up with spirited debate; the Illinois senate passed a resolution declaring March 13 "Pluto Planet Day" (Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh was born in Illinois); the American Dialect Society selected the verb "to pluto" ("to demote or devalue someone or something") as the 2006 Word of the Year. And perhaps the most common reaction to the controversy was simply to deny the change altogether, as Pluto defenders insisted that it would always be a planet to them, no matter what anyone said.

Again, nothing in the physical world changed when the IAU made its decision, and it seemed like a minor controversy, a mere tempest in a teacup to some. But the reclassification drew new lines through the world that people had learned about when they were young, and it reorganized a tiny slice of that world for no obvious or accountable reason. In a sense, then, it's unsurprising that people bristled at the decision, even if many who reacted strongly were themselves surprised to discover that they had strong feelings about something like Pluto's status as a planet.

Today we're in the middle of another such tempest, as word has spread online that the University of Oxford Writing and Style Guide now officially discourages the use of the Oxford or serial comma. As the Style Guide puts it: "As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write 'a, b and c' not 'a, b, and c'. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used – especially where one of the items in the list is already joined by 'and.'"

I'm pretty well certain, by the way, that not one of my students has ever had a strong opinion either way on the Oxford comma. I've joked about this "controversy" in the classroom from time to time, characterizing it as the sort of nothing about which scholars often love making much ado—and I tell them this mostly to disarm them with a bit of chuckling academic self-deprecation. After explaining to them what the Oxford comma is and how it's used, I suggest that many have strong feelings about this point of punctuation usage, and they always think this is a sign that we're insane. How on earth can this be something people care about?  The nerdy supporters state their position (the comma helps eliminate ambiguity and maintain consistency, it preserves the cadence of spoken language, it just makes sense, etc.), and the nerdy critics state theirs (and it's tipping my hand here, I suppose, to admit that I can't think of a good reason to eliminate the serial comma off the top of my head—can anyone comment below and help me out with a strong point against it?). I present all this to my students and they look at me as though they think we're all mad. Who can get worked up about a comma? How can this possibly matter to anyone?

But when the news broke today, "Oxford comma" was almost immediately a trending topic on Twitter, right there beside "Teen Choice Awards" and Chris Brown and Tyga's "Snapbacks Back." Here is a small sample of the torrent of tweets from people chiming in on the official position of the University of Oxford:

• @AlgonquinBooks:  “I will never, ever, ever give up the Oxford comma.”
• @librarythingtim: “Being anti-ebook makes people to say I'm stodgy. But you Oxford-comma people are the true enemies of progress!”
• @tylercoates: “I will consistently, constantly, and incessantly use the Oxford comma.”
• @blurryyellow: “Are you people insane? The Oxford comma is what separates us from the animals.”
• @DavidAllenGreen: “Oxford University is dropping the 'Oxford Comma.' This is illiberal, misconceived, and just should not be allowed...”
• @kcscrawford: “VICTORY! Oxford comma dropped by Oxford University. I am surprised, happy and relieved : )”
• @thebestjasmine: “You will take the Oxford comma away from my cold, dead, and blue hands.”
• @bethrevis: “I'm so disgusted by the Oxford comma situation. YES IT IS A SITUATION. That's it. I'm going outside and ignoring the internets.”
• @stabitha: “Oxford University's style guide has killed the Oxford comma. Surprising myself with how strongly against this I'm feeling”

Once again, an intellectual authority has weighed in on an academic matter and, in drawing the lines separating correct and incorrect usage, it has shown how small changes can make a big difference.

To rewrite the rules governing the use of an element of language, even something as tiny and seemingly inconsequential as a comma, is in a sense to take it from the air and drive a pin through it, to mount it wriggling on a board. It is to undermine the idea that language is something vibrant and vital that we use and share as a community, and to suggest instead that it is something set in concrete, a part of the public works built by the state and offered for us to accept as given, whether we like it or not (though for some, eliminating the Oxford comma is progress for the language; your mileage may vary). And, perhaps most importantly, it is to take what we encountered in the classroom as reliable fact when we were small, and to reframe it as unsettlingly arbitrary and provisional.

These things might seem like tempests in a teacup, like much ado about nothing, like sound and fury signifying nothing. But they get us at our most fundamental, at the place where our understanding of the world meets the world itself, and it can be fascinating to watch how fiercely we will defend the things that we learned as we were making sense of that world. Planets and commas may seem insignificant, but they are the dots and marks with which we draw the lines around the world we know, and when they disappear, it seems, so do little pieces of us.

(By the way, Oxford: I'm with most of the tweeters above. If you don't want the comma, then give it to Chicago.)

(And Pluto is still a planet. Yes it is.)

I have never liked Bob Dylan.

I know, I know. You don't have to tell me. I've already been filled in many times on what this says about me. That I am a philistine (untrue, I like to think), that I am lured away from gritty artfulness by the distractions of sweet superficiality and pretty voices (definitely untrue, especially if you consider all the Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen in my collection), that I am a mere contrarian (this one has actually become a fair cop, at least on this point, as you'll see below, but it didn't start out that way).

Many cultish Zimmermaniacs have tried to rescue my immortal soul from what is obviously the Ninth Circle of Music Hell. Many have shaken their heads at what appears to them tragically benighted ignorance. I have been assured countless times that so dense and unenlightened a view clearly discredits any other remark I might make about music. I have been told as many times that I don't know an obviously marvellous thing when I see one because I don't enjoy the work of this tuneless, phlegmy, croaking bard.

(And, as you can tell, all this has tended to make me a bit peevish about the subject.)

The word "dislike" represents a negation, a vacancy—the simple absence of fondness. Over time, though, fuelled by all the resistance it has encountered, this particular dislike has given over to something more active and engaged, a concerted and committed antipathy. In that way, I've been turned into a contrarian, I suppose, because I eventually dug my heels in and maintained this perverse position more or less for its own sake. I've refused to give Dylan a chance for years, and rebuffed many suggestions from fans I know, for whom his legend and appeal are self-evident and universal, so that it becomes a matter of faulty approach rather than mere taste ("just try this album"; "let me make you a mix that'll change your mind"; "just start with his later / earlier / gospel / disco / acoustic / electric / grindcore / polka stuff and work from there, and you'll see. He's a genius, and you're just being stubborn. Just try. Believe."). Everyone loves the man's work so much, and seems to take such umbrage at the fact that anyone wouldn't, that I feel I have to stand my ground. If they all insist on zigging, then on this point I'll zag.

By now, then, disliking Dylan might simply have become a well-grooved habit—and that alone strikes me as a good enough reason to reconsider it.

So I've finally relented. I'm going to give Dylan a chance, sort of, but it's not because I've seen the light. A friend and I have had an idea, and I think it's interesting enough that it will be worth exploring regardless of whether it nets me a new musical interest. From his perspective as an enthusiastic but moderate Dylan fan, my friend is designing a sort of guided tour through Dylan for me to follow. But he's not going to try to do what Dylan nuts have done before him. He's not going to try to hook me with the most accessible stuff, or work chronologically like some Time-Life music history collection, or otherwise try to convince me to like Dylan, as though he's catching a fan with untried musical honey rather than the vinegar I've been getting all these years.

By the way, you might think I'm exaggerating, but it's true. Almost nobody has ever been able to quietly accept my dislike of Dylan. You'd never believe how many conversations I've had about this. You can dislike just about anything—anchovies, horror movies, bluegrass, other people, whatever—and at most, people will just shrug and leave to each his own. But not Dylan. This Emperor Has Lovely New Clothes, Thank You Very Much. The only thing I dislike that people have defended more vocally than Bob Dylan is pickles. (Make of that what you will.)

All the discussions I've ever had about Dylan have been marked by this same abiding passion, this same deeply felt conviction, and this, along with the personal character of many of the counterarguments I've heard, indicates strongly that the man's work is very private and intimate stuff indeed. So that's the angle. Instead of giving me the beginner's guide to Dylan, my friend is just going to give me the history of his own idiosyncratic personal encounter with Dylan, and have me follow it with what I have promised will be an open mind. We'll go through a few mixes, and I'll listen to it in the order that he originally encountered it as he developed his own taste for Dylan's work, and then I'll write about it indulgently and entertainingly here. We won't pay any attention to what is most likely to make me a fan, or what will help me make sense of him as legend, and we won't go the other way and try to make it random; there will be a thread throughout, but that thread will have nothing to do with Dylan. I'll walk in my friend's musical footsteps, and see where it takes me—and while it might end up being more about that path and about musical autobiography than about the grizzled old human kazoo himself, so be it. Either way, it might at least be interesting.

Anyway, stay tuned for more on this soon—and in the meantime, feel free to comment here or otherwise contact me with your suggestions, feedback, dismissals of my musical taste and sense, other assorted praise and blame, and general thoughts on ol' Lucky/Boo Wilbury... 

The ID may not have caused surprise, but it has raised alarm. I've just read two articles that both suggest that we have now clearly seen the end of anonymity. Brian Stelter writes in the New York Times that while the Internet used to be "a place where anonymity thrived . . . . Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies." Drew Grant at Salon.com considers whether the identification of the kissing couple is "an example of the Internet's desire [can the Internet have a desire?] to keep everyone in line via some Orwellian nightmare where we're all spying on each other and constantly outing private moments, messages and Twitpics."

Grant is surely right about the online panopticon and the eruption of private information into the public space. But I'm not sure that it actually amounts to the death of anonymity. The contemporary image, it seems, might even work the other way around.

We might think of last century as the Age of the Professional Image. After the late 19^th-century invention of halftone image reproduction and the early 20^th-century invention of the wirephoto, it became possible to quickly and easily include photographs in newspaper publications. The photojournalist was created, and the rest of the century is full of examples of iconic, prize-winning shots produced by these expert professionals working for major media organizations. Just a quick list of examples: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother", Joe Rosenthal's "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima", Eddie Adams' image of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, Steve McCurry's image of the "Afghan Girl" for the cover of National Geographic, Jeff Widener's image of the rebellious "Tank Man" in Tiananmen Square, among many more.

Let's use the "Afghan Girl" image as our example of a Professional Image, since her story, too, was all about the identification of the subject of a photograph.  National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry took the shot in 1984 at a refugee camp in Pakistan. It appeared on the cover of the June 1985 issue of the magazine, and has since become the most recognized image in the history of the magazine. After the issue appeared, and over the years, NG was deluged with mail inquiring about the young girl with the bright green eyes, including a number of marriage proposals. For seventeen years, the magazine, the photographer, and many readers searched for this "Afghan Girl," until she was identified at last in 2002.

The woman was a fine candidate for permanent anonymity and obscurity. Her identity wasn't known to McCurry when he photographed her. She was of an ethnicity remote from the daily life and experience of the average NG reader. She was in a country mostly inaccessible to western media in the 1980s and 1990s. And yet she was the object of a zealous and very public 20-year search, and the subject of a photograph that is the most famous in the history of a magazine that has been in the famous-photo business for a century. And this is because she was photographed in the 20^th century, in an age without the instantaneity or ubiquity of the Internet, and an age in which images are relatively rare and valuable, the stuff of focused attention.

We now live in the Age of the Amateur Image. Between cell-phone cameras, social media, and cheap computers, everyone is now a photojournalist and a media outlet. Everyone has the means to produce, duplicate and disseminate images, and as a result, they're everywhere all the time. There were thousands of photos and bits of video footage shot in Vancouver on June 15, and all of it was available to everyone in seconds.

With social media, it's been possible to use these images to identify rioters, and this has appeared to some like a kind of "Orwellian nightmare," a manipulative media intrusion into daily life. But these endless photos and YouTube videos seem like the CCTV feed on the security camera in your local convenience store: they might help catch a crook, and they may be momentarily useful or embarrassing, but despite the fact that they're part of a permanent record, they're streaming by in such a torrent that any one image is quickly forgotten.

In the Age of the Professional Image, before the Internet, when images were comparatively rare and of much higher value, it took seventeen years for people all over the world to finally identify the "Afghan Girl." The world should have forgotten Sharbat Gula and her image along the way, brilliant green eyes notwithstanding, but it didn't; she remains a world-famous image, and a quintessential icon of photojournalism.

In the Age of the Amateur Image, in the sea of DIY photographs and their endless duplication and circulation, it took less than 24 hours to identify the "kissing couple." But we'll all see a million more images by the end of this week, and even if Lam wins some publication's "image of the year" award as some believe he will, before long everyone will have forgotten about the people in his evanescent snapshot, and moved on to the next, and the next, and the next.

Anonymity is, in an odd way, still around. It arises not from the obscurity of the image but from its ever-presence. It's not because the anonymous are outside the frame; it's because everyone's in the frame, and so in the end, while one might be seen, one isn't really remembered. The contemporary media conditions are alarming in many ways, and in the short term they do produce brief explosions of invasion and surveillance, but these bursts are little squibs going off by the million every day. In the end, it seems, nobody is watching for very long before they're moving on and forgetting, and the subject of so much scrutiny is suddenly ignored.