<p>I like the second half of what Hitchens wrote, less the first half – people always remember how great events hit them personally, and the aggregate of those individualities creates a powerful community. I just watched Stalag 17 for the first time a few weeks ago – when they finally catch the German spy, it’s because he slips up about what he was doing when he first heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor (eating dinner – therefore he was in Germany). Nothing solipsistic or self-indulgent about that.</p>
<p>The comparison between Dylan and Cohen was a running theme this summer in my house. (Cohen – a Jewish, Buddhist, CANADIAN! ANGLOPHONE MONTREALER! Practically you, FountainSiren, except for about half a century and a Y chromosome.) My daughter and I were both on Cohen kicks, and I was listening to a lot of middle-period stuff I had never paid attention to. I am not certain I would regard Dylan, even during his religious period, as “spiritual” – he seems mainly to have been concerned with questions of justice and morality – but Cohen has always been spiritual, in a very concrete, fleshly way, appropriate, I suppose, for a proto-Buddhist. </p>
<p>Dylan, though, seems the least self-conscious of writers – he really lets his ideas write themselves, and goes with the flow – while Cohen is nothing if not a traditional poetic craftsman. I heard a (probably apocryphal) story that illustrates that. Cohen and Dylan met sometime in the early 80s, and were talking about recent songs the other had written that they admired. Cohen liked Dylan’s “I And I”, and asked how long it had taken him to write it. Dylan said about 15 or 20 minutes. Dylan then politely asked Cohen how long it had taken to write “Everybody Knows” (a somewhat Dylanesque song I had never heard until a few months ago, but which is fantastic). Cohen’s answer: he had worked on it every now and then for about five years before he decided it was finished.</p>