Robert Frost (1874–1963)
From Mountain Interval, 1920.
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Setlist:John Henry/O Mary Don't You Weep/Johnny 99/Old Dan Tucker/Eyes on the Prize/Jesse James/Adam Raised a Cain/Erie Canal/My Oklahoma Home/Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)/Mrs. McGrath/How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?/Jacob's Ladder/We Shall Overcome/Open All Night/Pay Me My Money Down - Encore: My City of Ruins/Rag Mama Rag/You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)/When the Saints Go Marching In FromBackstreets.com: Report Form the Road
David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine, reviews Springsteen's Seeger Session's: We Shall Overcome Concert and Album. In his review of the concert he writes about Bruce's rendition of Pete Seeger's Bring Them Home
Penned by Pete Seeger during the Vietnam War, "Bring 'Em Home" quickly achieved anthem status in the anti-war movement. Springsteen first recorded the song in January 2006 and added a final lead vocal during his European tour, at a studio in Oslo, Norway. His poignant rendition, performed frequently on the Seeger Sessions tour, adds several new verses and connects the song to a much earlier topical song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." "Bring 'Em Home" was written in 1965 and originally released on Pete's 1971 Columbia album, "Young vs. Old."
"Bring Them Home" by Pete Seeger with Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco & Steve Earle
Video - young Pete Seeger singing "Bring 'em Home"
While Mr. Springsteen claims to have approached the material on "The Seeger Sessions" without a political agenda, he acknowledges that context can color things, and suggests that ideology is in the ear of the beholder. "What makes these songs vital, and catch fire now," he said, "is all the connections you're making, in your head, to this moment."
From Born to Strum
By WILL HERMES
NYTimes April 16, 2006
Introduced last November, the Intel/Fender Telecaster marries the features of the venerable solid-body electric guitar with a Hewlett-Packard TC1100 tablet PC. Equipped with 1.25GB of RAM, an Echo Indigo I/O sound card and Intel's Centrino wireless technology, the tablet allows the guitarist to play the instrument while listening privately through headphones, record a demo, e-mail the demo to friends, tap into online resources, and use the guitar-PC's Webcam.
On the singer's 60th birthday, a musician remembers the lessons his dad taught him about Bob Dylan, rebellion and following your heart.
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By Joey Sweeney
May 24, 2001
Salon.com
In 1984 my father and I were rotating on twin axes. At age 11, everything I'd started was something that I'd quit: baseball, soccer, drawing, comic book collecting, piano, choir. My father, who'd just turned 27, had never quit anything at all, and that was starting to wear on him and everyone he knew.
A Cubicle Is Not a Home
By Anna Quindlen
NewsweekMay 29, 2006 Creeping codgerism is an inevitable effect of getting older, a variation of memory loss. When I complain that my daughter's skirt looks more like a belt, or that my sons keep vampire hours, those are the churlish carpings of a woman years removed from the days when her own dresses were sky-high and her idea of a good time was sleeping until noon. "Turn down that music," I have been known to yell, and my only saving grace is that I hear the words through a filmy curtain of generational deja vu.
When Bob Dylan hit the snowy streets of New York in the winter of 1961, it seemed cameras were waiting for him, as if there%u2019d been news of his coming. In No Direction Home, director Martin Scorsese digs up early home-movie footage of Dylan clowning like Chaplin. The fresh-faced 20-year-old looks incredibly innocent; there's no indication that within a year he'll reinvent the Greenwich Village folk scene, or go on to blur forever the line between poetry and songwriting. Paste Magazine Feature - Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
Scan this book!
By KEVIN KELLY
NYTimes Magazine May 14, 2006
John Updike's response: The End of Authorship
By John Updike
NYTimes Book Review
June 25, 2006 In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant "Aw, shucks," disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.
In the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ferris frequently "breaks the fourth wall" - i.e., he addresses the audience directly. The fourth wall is the space separating the audience from the action of a theatrical performance, traditionally conceived of as an imaginary wall completing the enclosure of the stage.
Anecdote of the Jar
