HOW DOES IT FEEEEEEEELLLLL? Mark Steyn writes that “This week Bob Dylan became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature — to general acclamation. But not from me, and I’d feel the same way if they’d given it to Cole Porter or Oscar Hammerstein or W S Gilbert…At any rate, here’s what I had to say about the great man upon the occasion of his 60th birthday way back in May 2001:

Visiting America a few years ago, Dave Stewart, of the Eurythmics, said to Dylan that the next time he was in England he should drop by his recording studio in Crouch End, an undistinguished north London suburb. Dylan, at a loose end one afternoon, decided to take him up on it and asked a taxi-driver to take him to Crouch End Hill. Cruising the bewildering array of near-namesake streets — Crouch End Hill, Crouch End Road, Crouch Hill End, Crouch Hill Road and various other permutations of “Crouch,” “End” and “Hill” — the cabbie accidentally dropped him off at the right number but in an adjoining street of small row houses. Dylan knocked at the front door and asked the woman who answered if Dave was in.

“No,” she said, assuming he was referring to her husband, Dave, who was out on a plumbing job. “But he should be back soon.” Bob asked if she would mind if he waited. Twenty minutes later, Dave — the plumber, not the rock star — returned and asked the missus whether there were any messages. “No,” she said, “but Bob Dylan’s in the front room having a cup of tea.”

Read the whole thing.