http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/bob-dylan-the-poet-sponge.html 2016-10-14 03:26:17 How Dylan Became Dylan The Nobel honors an artist who had the ability to absorb a world of music and add his own strange, inexplicable touch. === Bob Dylan The news offers something else, too, specifically for New Yorkers, for whom Mr. Dylan is close to a native-son, homegrown laureate. Mr. Dylan invented himself here, plugged into its creative artistic grid here, and here came face to face with his greatest early influence. Dylan becoming Dylan wasn’t going to happen in small-town Minnesota. It was on the narrow streets of Greenwich Village that he got his early gigs and press attention (a The hallmark of genius, of course, the kind the Nobel committee likes to reward, is creative immensity, the ability to absorb and contain multitudes. Mr. Shelton, impressed by a “bright new face” at Gerde’s Folk City on West Fourth Street, wrote: “Mr. Dylan’s highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge.” He added, “Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.” This was, in fact, the trajectory. Up and then out, and very far. Folk music did not contain him. The river Mr. Dylan tapped was deep and wide, encompassing folk, blues, gospel, “hillbilly” music and the stew of rock ’n’ roll, to which he added his own strange, inexplicable Dylan thing. “There’s nothing secret about it,” Mr. Dylan said in an eloquently revealing Well, maybe