A blood test that screens for multiple cancers at once promises to boost early detection

Detecting cancer early before it spreads throughout the body can be lifesaving. This is why doctors recommend regular screening for several common cancer types, using a variety of methods. Colonoscopies, for example, screen for colon cancer, while mammograms screen for breast cancer.

While important, getting all these tests done can be logistically challenging, expensive and sometimes uncomfortable for patients. But what if a single blood test could screen for most common cancer types all at once?

This is the promise of multicancer early detection tests, or MCEDs. This year, President Joe Biden identified developing MCED tests as a priority for the Cancer Moonshot, a US$1.8 billion federal effort to reduce the cancer death rate and improve the quality of life of cancer survivors and those living with cancer.

As a laboratory medicine physician and researcher who develops molecular tests for cancer, I believe MCED tests are likely to transform cancer screening in the near future, particularly if they receive strong federal support to enable rapid innovation.

How MCED tests work

All cells in the body, including tumor cells, shed DNA into the bloodstream when they die. MCED tests look for the trace amounts of tumor DNA in the bloodstream. This circulating “cell-free” DNA contains information about what type of tissue it came from and whether it is normal or cancerous.

Testing to look for circulating tumor DNA in the blood is not new. These liquid biopsies – a fancy way of saying blood tests – are already widely used for patients with advanced-stage cancer. Doctors use these blood tests to look for mutations in the tumor DNA that help guide treatment. Because patients with late-stage cancer tend to have a large amount of tumor DNA circulating in the blood, it’s relatively easy to detect the presence of these genetic changes.

MCED tests are different from existing liquid biopsies because they are trying to detect early-stage cancer, when there aren’t that many tumor cells yet. Detecting these cancer cells can be challenging early on because noncancer cells also shed DNA into the bloodstream. Since most of the circulating DNA in the bloodstream comes from noncancer cells, detecting the presence of a few molecules of cancer DNA is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Making things even more difficult, blood cells shed abnormal DNA naturally with aging, and these strands can be confused for circulating cancer DNA. This phenomenon, known as clonal hematopoiesis, confounded early attempts at developing MCED tests, with too many false positive results.

Fortunately, newer tests are able to avoid blood cell interference by focusing on a type of “molecular barcode” embedded in the cancer DNA that identifies the tissue it came from. These barcodes are a result of DNA methylation, naturally existing modifications to the surface of DNA that vary for each type of tissue in the body. For example, lung tissue has a different DNA methylation pattern than breast tissue. Furthermore, cancer cells have abnormal DNA methylation patterns that correlate with cancer type. By cataloging different DNA methylation patterns, MCED tests can focus on the sections of DNA that distinguish between cancerous and normal tissue and pinpoint the cancer’s origin site.

Testing options

There are currently several MCED tests in development and in clinical trials. No MCED test is currently FDA-approved or recommended by medical societies.

In 2021, the biotech company GRAIL launched the first commercially available MCED test in the U.S. Its Galleri test claims to detect over 50 different types of cancers. At least two other U.S.-based companies, Exact Sciences and Freenome, and one Chinese company, Singlera Genomics, have tests in development. Some of these tests use different cancer detection methods in addition to circulating tumor DNA, such as looking for cancer-associated proteins in blood.

MCED tests are not yet typically covered by insurance. GRAIL’s Galleri test is currently priced at $949, and the company offers a payment plan for people who have to pay out of pocket. Legislators have introduced a bill in Congress to provide Medicare coverage for MCED tests that obtain FDA approval. It is unusual for Congress to consider legislation devoted to a single lab test, and this highlights both the scale of the medical market for MCED and concerns about disparities in access without coverage for these expensive tests.

How should MCED tests be used?

Figuring out how MCED tests should be implemented in the clinic will take many years. Researchers and clinicians are just beginning to address questions on who should be tested, at what age, and how past medical and family history should be taken into account. Setting guidelines for how doctors will further evaluate positive MCED results is just as important.

There is also concern that MCED tests may result in overdiagnoses of low-risk, asymptomatic cancers better left undetected. This happened with prostate cancer screening. Previously, guidelines recommended that all men ages 55 to 69 regularly get blood tests to determine their levels of PSA, a protein produced by cancerous and noncancerous prostate tissue. But now the recommendation is more nuanced, with screening suggested on an individual basis that takes into account personal preferences.

Another concern is that further testing to confirm positive MCED results will be costly and a burden to the medical system, particularly if a full-body scan is required. The out-of-pocket cost for an MRI, for example, can run up to thousands of dollars. And patients who get a positive MCED result but are unable to confirm the presence of cancer after extensive imaging and other follow-up tests may develop lifelong anxiety about a potentially missed diagnosis and continue to take expensive tests in fruitless search for a tumor.

Despite these concerns, early clinical studies show promise. A 2020 study of over 10,000 previously undiagnosed women found 26 of 134 women with a positive MCED test were confirmed to have cancer. A 2021 study sponsored by GRAIL found that half of the over 2,800 patients with a known cancer diagnosis had a positive MCED test and only 0.5% of people confirmed to not have cancer had a false positive test. The test performed best for patients with more advanced cancers but did detect about 17% of the patients who had very-early-stage disease.

MCED tests may soon revolutionize the way clinicians approach cancer screening. The question is whether the health care system is ready for them.

-The Conversation, Colin Pritchard, Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Washington

 

 

"At issue is a 2015 state law that allows vote-by-mail ballots to be counted if they are received within 14 days after Election Day"

 

A pending federal lawsuit, brought by a downstate Republican congressman and two GOP officials, could invalidate potentially tens of thousands of mailed general election ballots that are cast by Illinois voters, including military members serving overseas, and postmarked on or before this coming Election Day but received by election authorities afterward.

The lawsuit, led by four-term U.S. Rep. Mike Bost of Murphysboro echoes some of the rejected court challenges filed by former President Donald Trump in other states in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election that he falsely contends was stolen. Bost is being assisted in the suit by a nonprofit conservative advocacy organization that has backed a number of Trump’s efforts.

At issue is a 2015 state law that allows vote-by-mail ballots to be counted if they are received within 14 days after Election Day if they were postmarked on or before the final day of voting.

Read the full story from the Tribune’s Rick Pearson.

ReAwakening To Insect Burgers, Deep-State Trash, Globalist Predators and Demonic Satellites, Praise God by Abby Zimet

 

Hell of a grim way to start off a shiny new week, we know, but we regret to inform you that a bewilderingly sizeable segment of our country has mutated into a horde of racist, crackpot, paranoid, Covid-denying, demon-obsessed, anti-trans-and-illuminati-and-quantum-physics "Army of God" warriors who, citing numerological prophesies and extremely select Scriptures, vow "the Angel of Death" will soon smite down their Satanic enemies - Hillary, Soros, Stacey Abrams, John Roberts (?) and other elites sex-trafficking children - in order to bestow upon us their devoutly-to-be-wished Christian nationalism, political executions, and God's "rightful president," with cow bells. Whew.

Even as that malignant clown of a "president" is still free, ranting, and "an unparalleled danger...drowning in himself," his deranged followers are flocking to the barn-storming, soul-saving, traveling roadshow of God, hate and crazy that is Michael Flynn's national ReAwaken America Tour, which made its 25th stop this weekend in Manheim, Pennsylvania at - wait for it - the Spooky Nook. Co-hosted by right-wing radio host Clay Clark, the event marked the latest step in Flynn's ongoing, hallucinatory "Holy War" wherein good battles evil to restore an America that prays in school, has only two genders and one religion, doesn't wear masks or teach the icky parts of history, and boasts smiling (white) wives greeting their (ditto) husbands each night with meat loaf.

The two-day event didn't fill the Spooky Nook - capacity 3,000 - but was crowded enough with older white people sporting "Trump Forever" hats, "All Rifles Matter" t-shirts, and Jesus-loves-QAnon hysteria to give one pause about the state of the nation. From the red, white and blue microphone to the "COVID-19 and the Globalist Predators: We Are the Prey" book handed out on arrival, the event's agenda was clear.

Insane, but clear. It was confirmed by many stalls hawking God, country and no vaccines. There were "anointing oils," "Constitution cards," Christian weight-lifting supplements, blankets to block 5G wireless signals, portraits of Jesus hugging an American flag, natural substances to keep us healthy for the coming war, booths displaying charts of fictional COVID vs. hospital/vaccine deaths, a "Save The Kids" shirt mapping out the tunnels across the country where liberal Jewish Hollywood Illuminati are harvesting adrenochrome from the blood of children they have sex-trafficked to make them immortal - another whew - and, at the end of the day, full immersion baptisms.

Things kicked off with a suitably vindictive prayer asking that Trump’s eyes be opened so he knows when to “implement divine intervention” to destroy enemies accusing him of crimes. Also, “You will surround him, Father, with none of this deep-state trash, none of this RINO trash,” which prompted yelled Amens and fervent hands thrust into the ugly air 'cause, c'mon, vengeance is mine saith the Lord.

Speakers included many of the usual frothing right-wing cabal: Roger Stone, Mike the Pillow Guy, demon sperm lady Dr. Stella Immanuel: "We need to pray and crush the demonic satellites"; Doug Mastriano was listed but didn't show - too bonkers even for him? Still, there was plenty of grievance to go around. Gender dysphoria is "the work of Satan," COVID vaccines cause brain damage, there's too many homeless people and Muslim babies. Pillow Guy whined about voting machines and the media. Eric Trump called his dad, who bewailed that "this country has never been in such bad shape as it is now" and promised, "We'll be back doing things that..." Stone, fresh from unearthed video calling Ivanka an “abortionist bitch daughter,” decried all the "harassment" against him when he's only "guilty of the crime of supporting President Donald Trump (sic), loving him for 40 years." "We are in an epic struggle in this election," he declaimed. "If we fail, this nation will step off into a thousand years of darkness."

Well, that could be true. Crowd fave Clay Clark charged Michelle Obama is a man, McDonald's is part of the deep state's "war on food" - that's kinda true too - and Socialists want to start feeding "insect burgers" to the masses. Like others, he also boasted he's now owning the "Christian Nationalist" moniker because "I would rather be labeled a Christian Nationalist than a godless globalist," even though real Christians denounce his beliefs as "toxic," "divisive," "contrary to the values of the Gospel," and "kissing cousins with White nationalism."

The crowd's "Christian" zealotry was, in fact, their most frenetic, jarring thread. Never mind Jesus' call for love, tolerance, forgiveness; deeply bellicose, they just want to "put on the armor of God" and call up the Angel of Death. Anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny allowed as how people who gullibly got a vaccine could "repent and go sin no more," but then they better grab their armor pronto. "Christian prophet" Julie Green got more specific:

She presented a massive banner of two dozen sinners - Biden, Trudeau, Rachel Maddow, yada yada - under the declaration, "An Angel of Death Is Coming for Them By Year's End"; below, it vowed, "TREASON will be written on them for all eternity." No forgiveness here, God told her: "My army is coming." God also told her, "You can't stop my son, who is the rightful president (cue wild applause, cowbells, co-opted shofars). He is on his way back...and I am with him." Bo Poiny, an "analyst" in crypto-currency who cites Biblical timelines, also bade the Angel of Death take on God's hit list; afterwards, because "God's kingdom comes in abundance," everyone's debts will be canceled, though that makes God sound a lot like the Dems, which is weird. Rounding out the lunacy was book-burning, Covid-denying "pastor" Greg Locke, who called the Pope "a pimp" in a very Catholic state and maniacally galloped around the stage. "JESUS IS COMING! JESUS IS COMING! JESUS IS COMING!" he shrieked. "God. Is. Not. Done. With. This. Nation." Well, damn. Then She better hustle and get on with it. 

-Abby Zimet, Common Dreams

 

The Illinois Policy Institute and Constitutional Amendment 1

To the editors:

The Illinois Policy Institute (IPI) takes to the pages of the Chicago Tribune once again to attack the idea of providing retired public-school teachers and other state employees with a decent pension when we retire. The focus of their complaint is the language in the Illinois constitution that protects our pension from any diminishment or impairment. Those words were put in the constitution in 1970 precisely because the constitution’s authors correctly assumed that without that specificity future legislators and governors would go after public pensions as their piggy bank.

The Illinois Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the pension protection clause against legislative attempts at diminishment.

Now the IPI is expanding their attack on Illinois’ working families by opposing Constitutional Amendment 1. This amendment would guarantee the right of workers in Illinois to engage in collective bargaining through union representation.

Union contracts cost money complains the IPI. But as someone who has bargained on behalf of my teacher union members for years, I can testify that collective bargaining is a process between two parties. It is not a money give away. Collective bargaining is a process of give and take.

Illinois is a union friendly state and for that we can be grateful. Unions and the right to collectively bargain contracts already exists on the books. The purpose of a constitutional amendment is to ensure we retain those rights, knowing that - as with public pensions - some future legislature or governor may not be so friendly towards working people and their union representatives.

Vote yes on Constitutional Amendment 1.

Fred Klonsky

Chicago

Retired teacher and former local teacher union president.

Re: 

It is well known what the Illinois Policy Institute means by “promoting personal freedom and prosperity in Illinois” on their website. Their focus is on free market principles which cater to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of other peoples’ lives, all the while promising so-called “personal freedom and prosperity.”

Free market principles advocate that the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; that, for example, education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized; that publicly-owned companies, services and their assets be auctioned off to private investors; that besides allocating vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership and the willingness to transfer private debts to the public sector while public ownership is systematically dismantled, the Illinois Policy Institute is also attacking a constitutional amendment that will guarantee the rights of workers to engage in collective bargaining.

Glen Brown

The First Letter I Wrote 12 Years Ago That Began My Research for Saving Illinois Pensions: There Are 644 Posts on Pensions Since Then

 

October 21, 2010

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

First, thank you, LT retirees, for your (non-LT) e-mail addresses.  It was delightful and nostalgic to reconnect with many of you.  Moreover, thank you for allowing me to share my solicitude about the state pension crisis as well.  I believe that the candidates we vote into office are crucial.

Thus, I have taken the initiative to mitigate my own anxiety and to unite my hope with yours.  With your permission, I will send you my thoughts and information about this so-called pension crisis. Some of you might receive duplicate communications from IEA, WLSU, IRTA, or other organizations.  In this case, perhaps repetition will help expedite and inspire the need for our action.  

Please send me your comments and questions, and please talk to other teachers and friends as well.  As teachers, you are communicative experts. You will be surprised at how many teachers and friends are indifferent or unaware of this manufactured pension crisis. 

I hope that you will write letters to your state legislators.  I have enclosed a copy of the letter I sent to one of our senators a few weeks ago that expresses both my bafflement and wishful thinking. Finally, please join IRTA/WLSU. “You do not have to be a teacher or retired to become a member.”

Mea culpa…

Glen Brown   

Dear Senator Kirk W. Dillard,

Do your parents or grandparents live with the assurance of a pension?  I believe that you would not steal that promise from them if they did.  I also believe that you understand the importance of trust among individuals and the pension systems into which they have elected to participate.   However, there are some ugly facts I would like to call to your attention.

I do not understand why the state of Illinois has underfunded its contribution to The Teachers’ Retirement System for decades and has used this money as if it were its own private savings account. 

I do not understand why our elected officials have not competently and responsibly managed the retirement systems to which they were entrusted but fund other special-interest and on-going programs and services instead. 

I do not understand how our past-and-present state officials have failed to generate enough revenue to meet the state’s fiscal obligations; nor do I understand how “pension borrowing” and “pension holidays” are moral and legal options, especially for retiring teachers who believed they would have a promised and sound financial future.

Is it true that “the level of [teacher] benefits are modest, comparable to national averages of public employee retirement systems…? The cost of benefits is not only in line with other states, it’s less than the private sector” (Anders Lindall, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31). 

Furthermore, I do not understand how public officials running for Illinois office can make promises that they do not keep once elected.  I do not understand how many of our public officials in both the House and Senate, and who have never taught in a school, can pass a bill for a Two-Tier Pension System without the input of Illinois educational leaders and discussion of the absurd, inevitable, and adverse effects it will have on Illinois students and teachers alike. 

“The $80 billion of debt the state owes for pension benefits already earned remains unchanged by this bill” (Steve Preckwinkle, The State Journal-Register, April 4, 2010).  Lastly, I do not understand why the teachers’ pension is being blamed for years of state fiscal irresponsibility, incompetence, and corruption. 

I taught in public schools for 35 years.  My pension is all I have to live on now.  Like other teachers, I never missed a contribution to my state retirement plan.  I never received any bonuses either, and my school district never matched my contributions to my 403b.  Furthermore, most teachers receive little or no Social Security. “Illinois taxpayers save more than $700 million per year by not paying Social Security payroll taxes for 78 percent of all active employees in the five state-managed plans, including all public-school teachers” (Preckwinkle).

I want to believe in a just system, in promises to keep, and in the integrity of our lawmakers.  I want to believe that teacher retirees and the state of Illinois have “an enforceable contractual relationship” (Article XIII, Section 5, The Constitution of the State of Illinois).

I want to believe that there will be no attempt to pass a “law impairing the obligations of contracts” (Article I, Section 16, The Constitution of the State of Illinois); I want to believe that Illinois cannot pass any law “impairing the obligations of contracts” (Article I, Section 10, The Constitution of the United States of America). 

I want to believe that the state of Illinois will make an ethical decision to create the needed revenue and meet its obligations without jeopardizing the futures of thousands of teachers.  I want to believe that the elected officials of Illinois will be competent, responsible, honorable, intrepid and just.

Sincerely,

Glen Brown  

 

P.S.      

Dear Teachers:                                                          

Please forward all or any part of this e-mail to other teachers and friends.   If you do not want to receive subsequent e-mail messages, please notify me. Thank you so much.

This e-mail has 77 recipients.    

Mickey Mantle (October 20, 1931 - August 13, 1995)

 

“Many argue that he was the greatest baseball player ever, and were it not for the almost constant menace of alcohol and health-related maladies during his long and successful career as a New York Yankee, chances are there would be no argument. Mickey Mantle played in twenty All-Star games, and he holds the record for most career World Series home runs, runs scored and runs batted in. He subscribed to the old adage that, ‘It is just as important to be lucky as it is to be good.’ But Mantle's luck would eventually run out. His body, hindered by alcoholism and physical afflictions, would eventually give up on him. Too weak to fight any longer, he would die of cancer in 1995 at the age of 63. In spite of his personal hardships, however, Mickey Mantle remains a hero in America…” (Encyclopedia.com).

"A kid painted a nice mural at her high school. Angry parents called it witchcraft and left her in tears at a 'hate fest' school board meeting" (by Rob Beschizza)

 

A mural painted by a high schooler in Grant, Michigan, is "under fire", as NBC News puts it, because it contains symbols from an anime show, the Hand of Mary, and characters wearing clothes in rainbow colors and the blue, pink and white bands associated with gay and trans pride.

At a school board meeting on Oct. 10, parents accused the student artist of promoting witchcraft by including the Hamsa hand as well as the video game character that bears the likeness of a demon. Parents also objected to the use of LGBTQ colors.

Witchcraft! Demons! Gays!

According to local news reports, the girl attended a school board meeting where she was hounded by dozens of angry parents, and left it in tears. "I put my art up there to make people feel welcome," the student artist said, her voice breaking, in footage captured at the meeting by WZZM-TV, a local news station based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The response from one local nasty: "I feel like she did a really good job finding excuses to defend the things she put on," says Katelyn Thompson. "None of us are that stupid."

Not everyone was against her: Tracey Hargreaves, who has two children in the Grant Public School system, came to the defense of the student artist.  "I am a conservative, right-wing, gun-loving American," Hargreaves declared at the meeting. "And I've never seen more bigoted people in my life." In an interview with TODAY.com, Hargreaves said, "The meeting turned into a hate fest. Usually there are 10 people at these meetings, 50 showed up. It wasn't even about the mural … People were talking about how we need to pray the gay away."

She's now being made to remove elements of the mural—which the school insists is something she wants to do. The narrative around this painting is pretty awful! A kid painted a nice mural for her high school, got screamed at by psychopaths, received minimum viable support from those who approved the design, and what do we get? "Hmmm, controversial art!" headlines, like it's Piss Christ or something.

I hope she gets into the Royal College of Art and never looks back.  

NBC News

 

How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time by Raphael Falco

 

Over the course of six decades, Bob Dylan steadily brought together popular music and poetic excellence. Yet the guardians of literary culture have only rarely accepted Dylan’s legitimacy. 

His 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature undermined his outsider status, challenging scholars, fans and critics to think of Dylan as an integral part of international literary heritage. My new book, “No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan,” takes this challenge seriously and places Dylan within a literary tradition that extends all the way back to the ancients.

I am a professor of early modern literature, with a special interest in the Renaissance. But I am also a longtime Dylan enthusiast and the co-editor of the open-access Dylan Review, the only scholarly journal on Bob Dylan. After teaching and writing about early modern poetry for 30 years, I couldn’t help but recognize a similarity between the way Dylan composes his songs and the ancient practice known as “imitatio.”

Poetic honey-making

Although the Latin word imitatio would translate to “imitation” in English, it doesn’t mean simply producing a mirror image of something. The term instead describes a practice or a methodology of composing poetry.

The classical author Seneca used bees as a metaphor for writing poetry using imitatio. Just as a bee samples and digests the nectar from a whole field of flowers to produce a new kind of honey – which is part flower and part bee – a poet produces a poem by sampling and digesting the best authors of the past. Dylan’s imitations follow this pattern: His best work is always part flower, part Dylan.

Consider a song like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” To write it, Dylan repurposed the familiar Old English ballad “Lord Randal,” retaining the call-and-response framework. In the original, a worried mother asks, “O where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son? / And where ha’ you been, my handsome young man?” and her son tells of being poisoned by his true love.

In Dylan’s version, the nominal son responds to the same questions with a brilliant mixture of public and private experiences, conjuring violent images such as a newborn baby surrounded by wolves, black branches dripping blood, the broken tongues of a thousand talkers and pellets poisoning the water. At the end, a young girl hands the speaker – a son in name only – a rainbow, and he promises to know his song well before he’ll stand on the mountain to sing it.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” resounds with the original Old English ballad, which would have been very familiar to Dylan’s original audiences of Greenwich Village folk singers. He first sang the song in 1962 at the Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street, a hangout of folk revival stalwarts. To their ears, Dylan’s indictment of American culture – its racism, militarism and reckless destruction of the environment – would have echoed that poisoning in the earlier poem and added force to the repurposed lyrics.

Drawing from the source

Because Dylan “samples and digests” songs from the past, he has been accused of plagiarism. This charge underestimates Dylan’s complex creative process, which closely resembles that of early modern poets who had a different concept of originality – a concept Dylan intuitively understands. For Renaissance authors, “originality” meant not creating something out of nothing, but going back to what had come before. They literally returned to the “origin.” 

Writers first searched outside themselves to find models to imitate, and then they transformed what they imitated – that is, what they found, sampled and digested – into something new. Achieving originality depended on the successful imitation and repurposing of an admired author from a much earlier era. They did not imitate each other, or contemporary authors from a different national tradition. Instead, they found their models among authors and works from earlier centuries.

In his book “The Light in Troy,” literary scholar Thomas Greene points to a 1513 letter written by poet Pietro Bembo to Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola. “Imitation,” Bembo writes, “since it is wholly concerned with a model, must be drawn from the model … the activity of imitating is nothing other than translating the likeness of some other’s style into one’s own writings.” The act of translation was largely stylistic and involved a transformation of the model.

Romantics devise a new definition of originality

However, the Romantics of the late 18th century wished to change, and supersede, that understanding of poetic originality. For them, and the writers who came after them, creative originality meant going inside oneself to find a connection to nature.

As scholar of Romantic literature M.H. Abrams explains in his renowned study “Natural Supernaturalism,” “the poet will proclaim how exquisitely an individual mind … is fitted to the external world, and the external world to the mind, and how the two in union are able to beget a new world.”

Instead of the world wrought by imitating the ancients, the new Romantic theories envisioned the union of nature and the mind as the ideal creative process. Abrams quotes the 18th-century German Romantic Novalis: “The higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind.”

The Romantics believed that through this connection of nature and mind, poets would discover something new and produce an original creation. To borrow from past “original” models, rather than producing a supposedly new work or “new world,” could seem like theft, despite the fact, obvious to anyone paging through an anthology, that poets have always responded to one another and to earlier works. Unfortunately – as Dylan’s critics too often demonstrate – this bias favoring supposedly “natural” originality over imitation continues to color views of the creative process today.

For six decades now, Dylan has turned that Romantic idea of originality on its head. With his own idiosyncratic method of composing songs and his creative reinvention of the Renaissance practice of imitatio, he has written and performed – yes, imitation functions in performance too – over 600 songs, many of which are the most significant and most significantly original songs of his time.

To me, there is a firm historical and theoretical rationale for what these audiences have long known – and the Nobel Prize committee made official in 2016 – that Bob Dylan is both a modern voice entirely unique and, at the same time, the product of ancient, time-honored ways of practicing and thinking about creativity.   

-Raphael Falco, Professor of English, University of Maryland

-The Conversation