Non-Philosophy Interviews

When I began working on the book—which was before Dylan won the Nobel Prize, by the way--I wanted to think about Dylan as an artist, as a maker of songs. It seemed to me that, whereas Dylan is usually thought of as a very clever wordsmith, these songs were extraordinarily carefully crafted in ways that had not been explored seriously. So, what does Dylan do when he makes a song? How is it put together? What is its effect? These seem to me to be questions we have to ask of any artist, from Hitchcock to Jane Austen. Yet, because Dylan works in popular song, and because we live in an age obsessed with celebrity, many listeners have a hard time separating the art from some vision of the artist’s life or personality that they have invented for themselves. Richard Marshall interviews Timothy Hampton

Baba Yaga, in my mind, symbolizes female power, and she or other extraordinary elderly women, often ruthless and/or demanding. is especially important for testing young women to see if they can be industrious, honest, blunt,,brave, etc. In Germany, she is referred to as Mother Holle. You can find similar witchlike and powerful older women like her all over the world. Some can be brutal if not evil, but for the most part, I see her as an ambivalent “elderly” goddess who tests the character of young women and often helps them to become autonomous. Richard Marshall interviews Jack Zipes about the subversions of fairy tales