Type the words Bob Dylan into Google and 16,800,000 entries will pop up. Delve deep into the entries and it soon becomes apparent that the ageing singer with the nasal voice inspires a level of devotion among some fans that puts train-spotters into the ha'penny place.
One website allows participants to "Analyse your relationships with Bob Dylan - in mathematical terms - for presence and strength of mutual commitment, intimacy, passion and synergy"; another is "devoted to studying and collecting trivia relating to the Jewish religious/cultural odyssey of Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham v'Rachel Riva, aka Bob Dylan".
For all that, those who grew up during the 1960s, when Dylan's writing was at its most powerful, were treated to a rare feast this week with the showing, on BBC 2 television, of Martin Scorsese's extraordinary four-hour documentary, No Direction Home, covering Dylan's life and music from 1961 to 1966. It was extraordinary for several reasons. First, there was Dylan's active participation. He is famously reticent and has long nursed a loathing for interviewers, as evidenced by his famous putdown of an incomprehending journalist - "Something is happening here/but you don't know what it is/Do you Mister Jones?" Yet here was Dylan relaxed and reminiscing about the most productive period of his long career, a period in which he produced the greatest concentration of memorable works, set against the backdrop of some of the most traumatic events in recent American history.
The Dylan who emerged was an ordinary man but an extraordinary artist with a rare talent for self-expression. While others sought to bracket him politically on the left, Dylan resisted, holding instead to an idealism and religiosity that transcended lazy adherence to ideology. He sees himself as a minstrel, a troubadour ("skipping reels of rhyme"?) or, as he put it himself in Don't Look Back, the 1967 documentary about his British tour, "a song and dance man".
According to www.nobelpreisboerse.de, a website run by Frankfurt University which seeks to match stock market nous with popular support for Nobel prize candidates, some smart money is being wagered on Dylan getting this year's Prize for Literature (not quite so smart, however, as punter support for Philip Roth, John Updike and Margaret Attwood). It may not be something he wants but Bob Dylan would be a worthy laureate. His words and phrases - "shards of crystal", as Liam Clancy put it this week - distilled the hopes and fears of a generation. Four decades on, they retain their capacity to excite and inspire. Dylan is doing it now for a new generation.