I’m reading a beautiful book. A beautiful book.

‘You’ve internalized, Bob Dylan - his spirit comes right through and we all feel it,’ says a Dylan fan gesturing toward rows of chairs recently filled with hushed listeners AKA noisy clappers in Fairview Park’s Meeting Room A.

Libraries, we are told, are no longer meant to be quiet zones.

There's not enough value on the web for the artist to spend much precious time there. Information is useful in context, interpreted, magnified by understanding. Wouldn't a writer be better off in a wireless cottage, sequencing ideas dug out of mad interior play?

Michael Chabon. 

I pictured you a lumbering older man with wide, surprisingly nimble fingers I’ve seen on guitar players from time to time. I thought you’d be a little arrogant, just the kind who suffers no fool gladly but suffers the children to come unto him. I considered this a plus. 

by Chris Mosby, News Sun reporter

CLEVELAND (January 31, 2013) It’s a common experience. Most of us go through it. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, about half of all school-aged children reported feeling bullied at some point in their academic career. About ten percent of those kids said they were tormented regularly.

When Dad showed me the program from his brother Ted’s funeral, I was about to ask him if he had a favorite hymn or two he’d like us to sing at his memorial. But I brushed aside my curiosity and strong organizational bent because there never seems to be a good time to imagine a world where your dear father is no longer here in the flesh. 

What you say to your audience between songs is an art in itself. Walter and I don’t want to break the spell of Dylan’s lyrics with stray patter in our Muscle and Bone shows. So this story, though umbilically melded to Queen Jane Approximately for me, is better essay than segue.

By Scott Mahoney
Oberlin News-Tribune

I happened to catch a glimpse of Luka strolling down the hall on his way to lunch and his teacher, Mrs. Burton, with her intrepid watchfulness, several paces behind. Luka had been lucky enough to have another veteran teacher, Mrs. Garrett, last year for Kindergarten. That room had his teacher’s hand painted trees and sky and clouds on all the walls and window shades. And I was another lucky one, meeting them all last year when I was artist in residence at their school.

This is an article written by David Schiopota and Stacy Goldberg of Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio. It was originally published on Uniting Arts and Education.