Things Happen

Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?

— Jill Ker Conway

Memoirs fascinate because the best ones read like novels. We all want our lives to have a through-line, and memoirs provide one. They also confirm how unseemly and accidental our lives are.

Things happen.

Critics dislike memoirs' exhibitionist quality; but not me. I love them.

I find reading a memoir much more rewarding than, say, sitting in a coffee shop and peeping at other people's laptops (the woman beside me is Googling "how to deal with a cheating husband") or eavesdropping on other people's phone calls (the guy behind me is going to quadruple his prices, but not tell customers).

Soldiers', statesmen's and victims' memoirs I could care less for; but artists' memoirs I find irresistible. I recommend those of Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Ernest Borgnine, Sammy Davis, Jr., Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Anne Truitt, Carrie Fisher, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Graham Nash, Woody Allen and Martin Short.

And then there are the memoirs of artisans: I recommend those of Alfred P. Sloan, Katherine Graham, David Ogilvy, Ed Catmull, Rick Gekoski, Maryalice Huggins, Terry McDonell and James Rebanks.

If you like heady, try writers' memoirs: those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Elie Wiesel, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Herman Wouk, William Styron, Willie Morris, Philip Roth, Pete Hamill, Frank McCourt, James Lord, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Richard Russo, Bill Bryson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephen King, A.E. Hotchner and Augusten Burroughs.

Novelist Richard Ford has just published a memoir and is completing a book tour (he recommends Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, by the way).

Ford said last week on The PBS News Hour the memoir's purpose is "to remind us that, in a world cloaked in supposition, in opinion, in misdirection, and often in outright untruth, things do actually happen."

Indeed.

That Old Black Magic

Whoever Americans elect as president next week, I hope she has a witch as her top aide, as does South Korea's president. We're going to need that old black magic to get well.

Writers need black magic, too; and editors are its source.

In his new memoir, The Accidental Life, Terry McDonell quotes Norman Cousins, the longtime editor of Saturday Review, on the art of editing:

Nothing is more ephemeral than words. Moving them from the mind of a writer to the mind of a reader is one of the most elusive and difficult undertakings ever to challenge the human intelligence. This is what being an editor is all about.

Editors are advisers, coaches, cheerleaders, therapists, parents, midwives and—as Cousins implies—sorcerers.

They're also missionaries, as Robin Lloyd, contributing editor for Scientific American, says:

My motivation as an editor is clear, compelling communication for the reader. Delivering that is my first job. Readers are looking at every word for an excuse to bail out—to stop reading a story. My job is to prevent that and to keep them reading this story by focusing on clarity, pacing, logic, arc, and sparkling prose.

Above all, editors are match-makers, pairing willing writers with willing audiences.

That means an editor must be conversant in many fields; sense which topics are ripe for coverage; and know which ideas, words and phrases will keep readers reading.

No mean feat.

Post-Competence

Pundits call ours the post-truth era.

I think it's the post-competence era.

In fewer than 10 days, we've seen:

• Mariah Carey botch lip-synching before 11.6 million viewers on live TV
  
  
• Walt Disney recall 15,000 Minnie Mouse infant sweatshirts due to a choking hazard
  
  
• Express (published by The Washington Post) illustrate its cover story on the Women's March on Washington with the male symbol
  
  
• Yahoo Finance Tweet "Trump Wants a Much Bigger Navy" using the "N word"

Dan Lyons' 2016 memoir, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, provides a strong clue for why we're engulfed in post-competence.

Taking his cue from Steve Jobs, Lyons calls it "the bozo explosion."

Bozos explode in companies when "B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players."

Of course, there's another, more powerful force in effect: companies' drive to profit at their customers' expense.

That drive manifests itself every day in companies' ready willingness to subject customers to post-competent employees—and to the fiascos they create.

Herdwick Shepherd Tips the Model

Q: Social media gurus talk in praise of the tribe. But who stands up for the herd?

A: James Rebanks, the "Herdwick Shepherd."

A self-proclaimed Luddite, Rebanks is a British farmer and author of the best-selling memoir The Shepherd's Life.

With 75,000 followers, he's also a Twitter phenomenon.

Writing for The Atlantic, Rebanks calls Tweeting about sheep "an act of resistance and defiance, a way of shouting to the sometimes disinterested world that you’re stubborn, proud, and not giving in."

What goes here?

Sheep have long symbolized the very opposite of "resistance and defiance."

"Fortunately, the world is not built solely to serve good natured herd animals their little happiness," the free-spirited philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said.

"I define 'sheepwalking' as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job," Seth Godin says.

Intentionally or not, Rebanks has flipped the model.

Or should I say, tipped?

Suddenly sheep are superbly chic.

SPEAKING OF TIPPED: Ann Ramsey tipped me off to the Herdwick Shepherd.

The King of Clockwork

I envy the grimacing joggers I pass on my way to work every weekday morning for their samurai discipline and inveterate svelteness (a quality I lack).

Leadership and personal productivity experts goad us to rise above mediocrity by forming useful habits.

Surpassing champs like Kant, Edison and Einstein, the king of the clockwork habit could well be Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.

He wrote with such regularity, that he produced 47 novels—plus 32 plays, short stories and nonfiction books—in his spare time.

Stephen King (with 60 novels and 200 short stories, no slouch either) describes Trollope's habit in his memoir, On Writing: 

"His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope's invention); he wrote for two an a half hours each morning before leaving for work. This schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-pound heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book."

How to Succeed in Business without Really Spying

Ninjas were 16th century James Bonds who were tapped by their samurai masters for the dirty work of spying, sabotage and assassination.

Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, thinks ninjas created the die from which today's business winners are cast.

He draws out that comparison entertainingly in his new 250-page book Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses.

"Ninja innovation is my catch-all phrase for what it takes to succeed," Shapiro writes in the introduction. 

"You have to display the qualities of the ancient Japanese ninja, whose only purpose was to complete the job. He wasn't bound by precedent; he had to invent new ways."

In defining ninja innovation, Shapiro offers a quasi-memoir that might have been titled My Life in Consumer Electronics. 

The stories are fun and the major characters—including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban and Mark Zuckerberg—mostly notable.

From the book we learn that business innovators, though not literally given to spying, like James Bond are particularly single-minded. They don't think twice about breaking the "rules of the game" to win.

Shapiro scatters among the lessons lengthy gripes about US immigration policy, government regulation and unions, leftovers from his first book, The Comeback.

But the fresh material—especially his inside look at lobbying and the history of the Consumer Electronics Show—makes Shapiro's new book worth reading.

In an interview, I asked him whether business success demands that you play the tough guy.

"Absolutely not," Shapiro replied. "In fact, that's a recipe for not being successful. Instead, you have to think like a ninja. You have to be clever, creative, and think outside the box. You have to set a goal and relentlessly pursue it. You have to have a plan and a strategy and you have to be focused."

Magic Beans

Nobody can "soldier" without coffee.

― Ebenezer Nelson Gilpin

Coffee fuels every worthwhile enterprise. It has for 500 years.

Voltaire drank 50 cups a day, despite his doctor's warnings. So did Balzac, who once said, "Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”

Kant, like clockwork, drank a cup after dinner every evening. L. Frank Baum drank five, every morning, loading each with cream and sugar. Kierkegaard preferred to add only sugar to his―30 cubes per cup.

Bach, Bacon, Franklin, Johnson, Proust, Mahler, Sartre and Camus guzzled coffee all day long. Bach wrote an opera about coffee-drinking. Franklin marketed his own line of beans.

Beethoven drank coffee as his breakfast, brewing it himself. His recipe called for 60 beans per cup, which he'd count out by hand meticulously.

Teddy Roosevelt drank a gallon of coffee a day, sweetened with a new invention, saccharine. His son said TR's favorite mug was “more in the nature of a bathtub” than a cup.

Gertrude Stein adored coffee nearly as much; she called it a "happening." Patti Smith reports in her memoir she can drink 14 cups with no effect on her sleep. And Margaret Atwood so loves coffee she has her own brand.

Cartoonist Flash Rosenberg understands coffee's pivotal role better than anyone: “I believe humans get a lot done, not because we’re smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee."

Shake Your Booty

The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

— Sen. Dick Durbin

The filibuster is a Senate procedure invoked by the minority party to "pirate" a popular bill.

This act of piracy used to be difficult, but no longer. 

Until 1975, senators could block a bill only through the “talking filibuster.” Today, they can call for a "virtual" one. No one need talk. 

Joe Biden wants Senators to filibuster like they did "in the old days," talking until they're exhausted. Republicans disagree.

Hard or easy, piracy lies at the very heart of the filibuster.

Filibuster derives from flibustier, the 17th century French word for "pirate." A 1684 memoir by buccaneer John Oexmelin popularized the word in America.

By the 1850s—when Manifest Destiny was on everyone's mind—militia leaders like William Walker were called filibusters. (If there's something strange in your neighborhood who you gonna call?) To filibuster meant to wage a private war; a filibuster was an insurrectionist.

Three decades later, the filibuster was formally introduced in the Senate. Southern obstructionists would use it to "pirate" debates over civil rights bills, spurring ruthless, minority-led "insurrections."

Filibuster is closely related to freebooter, derived from the 16th century Dutch vrijbuiter, meaning "plunderer." Vrijbuit meant "free booty." Booty derived from the 14th century French butin, meaning "plunder taken from an enemy in war." And boot derived from the 11th century German busse, meaning "penance."

Today we call pirates "freebooters."

Land of the Living

The basest of all things is to be afraid.

― William Faulkner

When he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature―the same year Russia exploded its first atom bomb―William Faulkner asked writers to put aside physical fear and choose life over death.

"There are no longer problems of the spirit," Faulkner said. "There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about."

Until the writer rediscovers "the old verities and truths of the heart," Faulkner said, he "will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man."

Last week―while terror reigned in London, Paris, Melbourne, Kabul and Tehran―Bob Dylan delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a biblio-memoir seven times longer than Faulkner's address.

Where Faulkner was brief, Dylan rambles, Kerouac-style.

But one chord sounds the same.

Midway through, Dylan describes reading All Quiet on the Western Front as a schoolboy:

"This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You're stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You're defending yourself from elimination. You're being wiped off the face of the map."

Dylan found the novel's depiction of war exhausting. "I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did."

He discovered the "old verities and truths of the heart" instead in an adventure tale, The Odyssey, where the hero determinedly chooses life over death.

Dylan describes Odysseus' visit with Achilles in the underworld. Odysseus is shocked to hear the condemned warrior say, "I traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory. I just died, that's all. There was no honor. No immortality."

Were he able, Achilles says, he'd return to the world, even if that meant he'd be some farmer's slave. "Whatever his struggles of life were," Dylan says, "they were preferable to being here in this dead place. That's what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living."

Songs may not be literature in the same sense novels are, Dylan says, but they come from the same neck of the woods, a country where physical fear is so base it's forgotten.

Or as the evangelist John said, "There is no fear in love."

Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— James Baldwin

My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

But Americans are blind to the past.

White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.

People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.

Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.

To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.

Last evening I saw the movie Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's auteurish childhood memoir.

Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.

In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.

Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.

"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.

If only Americans were more like the Irish.

We'd remember our debt to the past.

Mother of Muses

Sing of the heroes who stood alone,

whose names are engraved on tablets of stone.

— Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's "Mother of Muses," critics agree, is among the singer-songwriter's finest pieces. 

Released in 2020—seven decades after his arrival in New York as a fresh-faced folkie from Minnesota—the song represents a collage of archaic people and events that Dylan counts as sources of inspiration.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott,
Sing of Zhukov and Patton and the battles they fought,
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing, 

Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King,
Who did what they did and then went on their way,
Man, I could tell their stories all day.

Romping the "old, weird America," Dylan is like a vacuum cleaner whose bag never gets emptied.

He compiles, more than composes; derives, more than devises—pastiching from the sourcebook we call American History and hoping listeners never forget that "we stand on the shoulders of giants."

"All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources," Mark Twain said. "There is not a rag of originality about them."

That's certainly true of Dylan's murky lyrics. As a songwriter, he's is like a dealer at an antiques mall or a docent at a roadside attraction, ready to regale you with lore about obscure objects and eccentric people.

Listening to his words is like taking vacation with Sarah Vowell.

"When Bob Dylan performs, he channels a whole universe of time-weathered emotions, ideas, and legacies," says Giovanni Russonello, music critic for The New York Times. 

His rootedness makes him an "ambassador for the country's past and its indelible ideals."

In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan describes songwriting as inheritance, a process of "converting something that exists into something that didn't."

"Mother of Muses" acknowledges just a few of the dusty items in the cabinet.

There are thousands more in Dylan's catalog.

NOTE: Bob Dylan turned 81 May 24.

Time's Unkind to the Harried Mind

Time is unkind to the harried mind, filling it each passing day with the detritus of the moment.

— Richard Seaver

Book reading by Americans has nosedived in the past five years, according to a new Gallup poll.

While, on average, Americans read 12 books in 2021, that's three fewer than in 2016.

Pollsters attribute the drop to the ready availability of other entertainments.

Poor education doesn't factor into the decline: the steepest falloff in book reading was among college graduates.

Age doesn't either: Americans 55 and older—traditionally the most voracious book readers—read the same number of books, on average, as all other Americans.

Whether you point the finger at Netflix, Nintendo, or Facebook, the trend should worry you.

The fewer books we read, the poorer our worlds become.

The fewer books we read, the shorter our attention spans grow.

And the fewer books we read, the more hidebound we're apt to be.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies; the man who never reads lives only one," says fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin.

I get why TV, games and social media are crowding out books.

They're a fast-acting anesthesia.

Books, on the other hand, can burden you—especially if they're well written. They can tax your thought, shake your faith, wake you up, or give you nightmares.

And unlike the crap on this month's Netflix menu, there's no lack of good books to read.

Identifying good books is easy:

• Explore series. Great series abound. I love Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.
  
  
• Explore prize winners. I have never read a Pulitzer or Booker prize-winning book that wasn't great.
  
  
• Explore individual authors. Choose an exceptional author and read every book he or she has written. I've done that with William Faulkner, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford, and am doing it now with Erik Larson. You won't be disappointed.
  
  
• Explore subgenres. Pick a genre (sci-fi or history or memoir, for example) and then a subgenre (dystopian sci-fi or historical westerns or celebrity memoirs) and read the most popular book by each of the subgenre's foremost authors.   

• Explore classics. They're classics for a reason, so find out why. Just for starters, read Dracula, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Oil!, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Bleak House, Martin Eden, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Secret Agent, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Breakfast at Tiffany's, A Farewell to Arms, The Long Goodbye, Eye of the Needle, The Time Machine, Outerbridge Reach, Moby Dick, Catch-22, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Trout Fishing in America, The Moviegoer, Worlds' Fair, From the Terrace, The Wonder Boys, Nausea, White Noise, Amsterdam, Deliverance, The Killer Angels, A Flash of Green, The Razor's Edge, The Confessions of Nat Turner, On the Road, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, A River Runs Through It, Crossing to Safety, Slaughterhouse-Five, War and Remembrance, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

And good books are handy and cheap. Use your local library and check out online seller Thriftbooks.com, if you don't believe me.

Make it your goal to read at least three books every month.

Do so, and you can boast to your friends and family that you read three times more than the average American!

Above: Jug & Book by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board. 8 x 10 inches.

Writers on the Big Screen

Hollywood routinely returns to writers for characters because, unlike superheroes, they're observant, witty, flawed and vulnerable—qualities a main character must have to woo an audience.

While it's easier for Hollywood to realize other creatives (artists, musicians and dancers, for example), the absurd and scary nature of the writer's life never loses appeal.

My list of the top movies depicting writers (in chronological order) comprises:

Young and Innocent (1937). A short-story writer is on the run from the cops, who are convinced he's a murderer. An early Hitchcock thriller.

The Lost Weekend (1945). An alcoholic writer's weekend plans are dashed when he decides to drop into Nat's Bar.

In a Lonely Place (1950). Screenwriter "Dix" Steele can't manage his anger. His mean streak make him a murder suspect, when a pretty coat-check girl is found strangled. 

Beloved Infidel (1959). A gossip columnist falls for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who's working in Hollywood so he can afford the asylum where he's put his crazy wife.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Holly Golightly drags her neighbor, the writer Paul Varjak, into her crazy life.

Black Like Me (1964). A journalist investigates segregation from an unusual angle.

The Front (1976). Blacklisted TV screenwriter Alfred Miller persuades his bookie to sign his name to Miller's scripts in exchange for a percentage.

My Favorite Year (1982). TV scriptwriter Benjy Stone tells of the summer he met his idol, swashbuckling actor Allan Swann.

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). A foreign correspondent assigned to Indonesia gets caught up in a political coup.

Cross Creek (1983). Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings deals with rejection by buying a Florida orange grove.

The Ghost Writer (1983). An aging literary giant invites a young acolyte to dine at his secluded country home. Not to be confused with the 2010 thriller below.

Out of Africa (1986). Memoirist Karen Blixen discovers what matters, while she learns to run a coffee plantation.

Stand by Me (1986). Author Gordie Lachance recounts a trip with three childhood buddies over a Labor Day weekend.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). The family and romantic entanglements of three sisters, one a budding writer, unfold between two Thanksgivings.

Barton Fink (1991). A playwright's Broadway hit propels him into a $1,000 a week job in Hollywood.

Shakespeare in Love (1998). The Bard struggles with his new comedy, Romeo and Ethel, and falls for a wealthy merchant's daughter.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). A drug-addled journalist is assigned to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race.

Wonder Boys (2000). A drug-addled novelist attends a writer's conference with his agent and two students from the college where he teaches.

Adaptation (2002). A high-minded scriptwriter asks his twin brother to interview the author of the book he's desperate to adapt.

As Good As It Gets (2003). Best-selling novelist Melvin Udall discovers a waitress may be the only person in New York who can stand him. 

The Human Stain (2003). Novelist Nathan Zuckerman receives a visitor one dark night. The stranger, a down-on-his-luck college dean, wants him to write a book about his life.

Sideways (2004). An aspiring writer joins his soon-to-be-married former college roommate on a road trip through California wine country. 

Finding Neverland (2004). Scottish writer J.M. Barrie meets a widow and her four young sons in Kensington Gardens and a friendship begins. 

Capote (2005). A writer's masterpiece also proves his undoing.

The Squid and the Whale (2005). Husband and wife novelists decide to call it quits. Their divorce doesn't go over well with the kids.

Miss Potter (2006). Spinster Beatrix Potter becomes an international celebrity and falls in love with her publisher.

HOWL (2010). Poet Allen Ginsburg's colorful verses land his publisher in court, charged with selling obscene material.

The Ghost Writer (2010). A ghostwriter tries his hand at a politician's memoir after his predecessor—under suspicious circumstances—gives up the ghost.

Midnight in Paris (2011). An unfulfilled screenwriter vacations in Paris, where he discovers that a 1920 Peugeot lets him travel backwards in time. 

The Help (2011). An aspiring journalist decides to write a book about Southern housemaids.  

Hannah Arendt (2012). A high-profile New Yorker assignment teaches a German intellectual "the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies."

Saving Mr. Banks (2013). P.L. Travers resists the Disneyfication of her creation, Mary Poppins.

Big Sur (2013). Jack Kerouac retreats to the woods in hopes of drying out.   

Wodehouse in Exile (2013). In the leadup to world war, a famous British humorist is tapped by the Germans to appease Americans. 

Papa (2015). A young journalist goes to Havana to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution. 

Trumbo (2015). Hollywood's top screenwriter finds himself in deep kimchi for his pinko leanings.

The End of the Tour (2015). David Foster Wallace goes on a book tour with a Rolling Stone reporter. 

Genius (2016). Novelist Thomas Wolfe finds he desperately needs an editor; Max Perkins complies.

Paterson (2016). A bus driver records his responses to the beauty that surrounds him in poems he keeps secret.

Their Finest (2017). A scriptwriter adds "a woman's touch" to a teary propaganda film during the Battle of Britain.

Rebel in the Rye (2017). J.D. Salinger loses his mind, but finds his voice.

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2018). Desperate for cash, Charles Dickens tries his hand at a ghost story.

Mank (2020). A tippling screenwriter and a boy genius take on the powers that be.

Open for Inspiration?

Inspiration, says The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, means "a divine influence" or "the act of drawing in."

Divine influence lies all around us, all the time. But we're not always ready to draw it in.

That's because we're so self-reliant, we don't stay open to random events.

Consider the following.

In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan recounts the days leading up to his first recording session.

The sheepish 20-year old visited the office of a Columbia Records producer, John Hammond, to sign a recording contract with the company. At the end of the meeting, Hammond handed Dylan an unpublished album by a Mississippi singer-songwriter no one had ever heard of in 1961, Robert Johnson, and Dylan took it home with him.

Dylan describes how, in the weeks that followed, the record enchanted him. "Over the next few weeks, I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition."

Dylan transcribed all of Johnson's lyrics and studied them for hours. "I copied Johnson's words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease."

Dylan realized he'd found the key to his artistry in Johnson's offbeat worldview. "I didn't have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them."

Dylan wonders what might have been, had Hammond not given him that record. "If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write."

How about you?

Are you open for inspiration?

HISTORY BUFFS' NOTE: March 19 will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's first record.

Enthused

I thank God every day for keeping me enthused.

— Bobby Rush

Enthusiasm was borrowed by the English language in the 17th century from the Greek word enthousiasmos, which meant "divine possession."

The Ancient Greeks believed that music took possession of you and produced enthusiasm—especially the "manic" tunes attributed to the god of music, Dionysus. 

But age often dampens enthusiasm, as it dampens drive. People reach 60 or 70 and seem suddenly adrift and disengaged from the greater world. They spend their waking hours reminiscing about the past, grousing about the present, puttering about the house, and seeking leisurely distractions to fill the empty time.

So it's inspiring to learn there are enthusiastic folks like Bobby Rush around.

A "legendary" blues musician who won his first Grammy at 83 and today, at 88, still tours the world, Rush performs in front of large audiences at solo shows and festivals continuously.

Last year, Rush took home yet a second Grammy and even published a memoir, I Ain’t Studdin' Ya.

"I have 397 records," Rush told the Houston Press last year. "There's not another blues singer ever lived that has that many records. I'm the oldest blues singer that’s living in the world."

Rush, a Louisiana native who worked all through childhood as a sharecropper, is the product of 1950s-era juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas. Success on the stage quickly took him to Chicago, where he played guitar and harmonica alongside musical giants like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Etta James, John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy. He founded his own band in the 1960s, and scored his first hit, the funky single "Chicken Heads," in 1971.

Fifty-one years later, Rush's enthusiasm for the blues is as strong as ever. He spends over 200 days a year on the road. Like Bob Dylan's, his tour is "never ending," and Rolling Stone has respectfully nicknamed Rush "King of the Chitlin' Circuit." He has appeared recently on a slew of TV shows and in feature films and documentaries, and is a prominent voice in favor of voting rights.

In 2017, in tribute to his career, Rush received the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year Award, the most prestigious blues-music honor any performer can receive.

"I’m sitting on top of the blues," Rush told Glide Magazine two years ago.

"I’m a bluesman who’s sitting on the top of my game, proud of what I do and proud of who I am. I’m happy about what I’m doing and still enthused about what I’m doing."

How about you?

How's your tour going?

And—most importantly—are you enthused?

Dutch and the Donald

Nothing personal, just business.

— Dutch Schultz

A judge last week ruled that Donald Trump must testify in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation of his company.

With the decision, Trump can no longer avoid justice. 

"He's running out of the tricks that he used in the past," one journalist noted.

Not quite.

He can take a page from fellow New Yorker Dutch Schultz. 

He can kill Letitia James.

In 1935, the Jewish mobster Schultz found himself the target of New York City’s special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who'd pledged with his appointment to rid the city of racketeers.

Dewey was a crusader, with eyes set on higher office (he would run for US president three times between 1940 and 1948). He pursued Schultz with vigor, indicting him for tax evasion. As Dewey wrote in his 1974 memoir, Twenty Against the Underworld, "I regarded it as a matter of primary importance to get Dutch Schultz."

Schultz's reaction was true to form. 

"Dewey's gotta go," he told associates and put out a contract on the prosecutor's life worth $25,000 (over $500,000 in today's money).

When Schultz advised the New York syndicate of the contract, the other family bosses balked, insisting that to rub out Dewey would only bring more government prosecution. They refused to authorize Schultz's hit.

"I’m gonna hit him myself," Schultz told the syndicate.

But the hit never happened. 

Instead, the syndicate rubbed out Schultz, whom they considered a loose cannon.

But, flashing forward, Trump doesn't have a syndicate to answer to. He can rub out Letitia James with impunity.

Stay tuned.

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