rosalindbeatrice

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Choose Your Own Adventure: Bob Dylan Version

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Done

Finished The Patient. Apologies to any past and present real version of Bob Dylan.

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Wait, whaaaaaat?

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From Positively 4th Street by David Hadju. If someone did my big sister that way, you’d bet I’d react like Mimi.

One does wonder why Dylan got so cruel and dismissive toward Joan. My theory is he’d outgrown the relationship but didn’t know how to break up in a normal way + he’d started using drugs as a way to keep himself going.

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Update on The Patient: 10,000 words into part six. I don’t want to make any promises, but I could be done this time next week …

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Willem Gerard Hofker, Girl Writing.

I finished two poems this morning. They were mostly done, they just needed a bit of cutting and polishing. Haven't decided yet where I will ambitiously submit them. Like most of my poems, they're about the Anthropocene. I write poems to soothe myself and garden in warm weather, but anxiety about the changing climate is always a low burr in the background regardless of what I do. (And shouldn't it be? I ask myself.) The sixth part of The Patient is up to 8,200 words. I'd like to say I'm 3/4 done, but if I'm being honest with myself, it's probably more like 2/3 done, which would mean I still have about 4k words to go. That sounds about right.

I'm editing the first chapter of the book I'm shopping around to agents. I'm trying to get it into better shape before I resume sending queries.

I continue to spend more time reading. It's healthier than reading the news. I'm in the middle of three books now, Positively 4th Street by David Hadju, a quadruple biography of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña; Adrian McKinty's I Hear The Sirens in the Street; and Doug Tallamy's The Nature of Oaks.

That's my writing/reading update. What are you writing or reading at the moment?

P.S. I didn't know that "Reno Nevada," so beautifully and compellingly covered by Fairport Convention, was a Richard Fariña composition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vxG21Sv3H8&ab_channel=sbritt

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Just noticed the height. *snort*

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First and/or most memorable encounter with Bob Dylan's music? For me, it's the living room of the 19th-century farmhouse where I grew up. It's a sunny day in 1988 or 1989. My dad has "Tweeter and the Monkey Man" on the stereo. Just a toddler, maybe a little older, I'm captivated in particular by the lyrics, And the walls came down / All the way to Hell. I don't know what they mean, but they are abstract and foreboding. I can see a wall fall in my mind, throwing up a burst of dust. I'm sure I am also attracted to the song because it mentions a "monkey man" and that's a fun image for a little kid.

It was probably only a couple years ago that I realized, 'Hey, that's a Dylan song.'

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I don’t know what the kids are listening to these days, but this is all I’ve been singing today.

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Here's my username playlist. I really got into it and curated mostly folky-type songs. Thanks @afireinthesunfireinthesun.

R - “Reilly’s Daughter” - Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers

O - “Old King” - Neil Young

S - “Streams of Whiskey” - The Pogues

A - “Apple Suckling Tree” - Bob Dylan & The Band

L - “Last Night” - Traveling Wilburys 

I - “If She’s Gone” - Paul Clayton

N - “Nightengale” - The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem

D - “Dance Dance Dance” - Dave Edmunds

B - “Blue Sky” - Joan Baez

E - “Eastern Rain” - Fairport Convention

A - “Animal Farm” - The Kinks

T - “That Song about the Midway” - Joni Mitchell 

R - “Rose of England” - Nick Lowe

I - “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine” - Blind Willie Johnson

C - “Cam Ye O’er from France” - Steeleye Span 

E - “Everybody Knows” - Leonard Cohen

I'm not going to tag anyone, but join in if you're feeling adventurous. Bonus if they're slightly lesser known songs--I'm always looking for new music.

(Image is Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal, partial subject of "Cam Ye O'er from France," a song I discovered last year and that obsesses me.)

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Lucky enough to have a picture of me 'n' Bobby McGee together.

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New Short Story, or, Why I’m Going to Hell

The last part of The Patient is at 7,500 words, but I decided to do a kinky 360 instead of working on it yesterday. I’m half sorry, half not.

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Favorite song, January 25, 2025.

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Update on The Patient: When I'm writing a long-form piece, I'll go back and reread what I've already written to reorient myself. "Oh, aha. That's a thread you could pick up." I know some fiction writers are very opposed to going back and revisiting a first draft before it's all the way done--they think it's important to just bang out that first draft without worrying about what you've set down--but for me, it's grounding. It helps refocus me. Ugh, though. I just want to be Joyce right now and curl up on the couch with a fragile little 1966 Bobby Dylan in my arms.

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Thrift-store fash, 19 January 2025.

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On Writer's Ennui

It's more ennui than it is block. It's a chewing dissatisfaction, a sinking conviction that my most recent projects aren't as good as I think they are. This feeling is periodic and fortunately doesn't visit often. Mostly, I've been blessed with an overweening conceit in my own abilities. I believe in myself and in the excellence of what I write. But occasionally there's a trough in the nearly uninterrupted peaks. I've been in such a trough for the past couple of days.

Last night I read the poems I submitted for publication a few months ago and found them lacking. It's hard to describe, but they just didn't get all the way there--at least when I read them last night. They were missing that crowning sprinkle of magic dust that turns something fair into something excellent.

I'm also struggling with my non-fiction. I opened the document to write today and came up with all of three sentences before I abandoned it to write this Tumblr post. After receiving some rejections to queries I sent to agents for my narrative non-fiction book, I've been retooling my first chapter since the New Year. The most valuable feedback I received was that the book proposal was just a little too academic for one agent's tastes. That surprised me. I've never felt like my writing belonged in the rarified atmosphere of academia, where the arguments (a.k.a. the what's-the-point element) seem to come easily to other scholars. I've always struggled with arguments. For me, the most important quality of my academic publications has always been the "isn't this fucking neat?" You know, the unveiling of a new discovery. New details. The description of the thing. This thing was not known, but now it is. It's not enough in that world, though, to say, "Wow, isn't this cool?" Ugh. Also, I prided myself on bringing clear writing to my publications. No impenetrable academese for me, thanks. Just easy-to-read prose. [tips cowboy hat]

So having received that feedback—which I want to emphasize was tremendously valuable and by no means deflating—I'm left feeling a bit like my writing, at least when it comes to non-fiction, doesn't belong in either world. I can't speak theory (nor do I want to!) and I struggle with arguments when I write for an academic audience, so I don't belong there. Yet my writing was too academic for this one agent, so I'm not suited for trade publication either. I'm in a liminal space all my own.

Of course, I know that's all self-pitying bullshit. Truly. That said, even though I can readily and with good humor perceive that insecurity for what it is, it still nips at me from time to time. Mostly though, I'm just spurred to give it another go. I'll try, try again. I think once I'm done rewriting, the second draft of this chapter will be far superior to the first. I just need to take those onerous, plodding steps through the trough.

That brings me to my next musing, which is Stephen King's On Writing. Read it for the first time this January, loved it, and took away some good points. One was a piece of advice that one of King's earlier editors gave him; namely (to paraphrase) that the first draft is you telling the story to yourself. The second is you paring the story down to its fundamentals for your audience. So I've kept this in mind as I work on the chapter of the non-fiction book and it has resulted in some good cutting.

My current reads are The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, which I'm listening to as an audiobook read by Gerard Doyle whom I adore, and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.

* * *

The next musing is what my followers are really here for, which is to say Bob Dylan. Incidentally, as I entered a slump with my other writing, I found myself more galvanized by The Patient than I've been in a couple months and started happily writing away. I'm about 7,000 words into the sixth and final part and, readers, I don't know how it's going to end. That's another part of On Writing that made me feel relieved. From what Stephen King describes (if I understood it accurately, anyway) is that he begins with an idea and frequently not much more. The characters and the narrative unfold under his fingertips as he writes. With past works, even if he's had an ending in mind, sometimes the characters zigzag in an entirely different direction. So while I have a sense of how The Patient ends, it's like a glimpse out of my peripheral vision. I can't get it into my direct line of vision. And that's fine. It's just reassuring to hear that a master of literature operates in the same way.

Fiction-writing is my first and biggest love, even though I don't have any immediate plans to try to publish any. I think of myself as primarily a fiction-writer. For those reasons, writing fan fiction has never been hard. I always feel unencumbered when I write it. It's enjoyable. And as a rule, I'm just not dissatisfied with my fiction the way I can get dissatisfied with my non-fiction projects or poems. It doesn't bother me to set aside fan fiction writing for awhile, too. I don't think of the rest periods as writer's block. They're just natural lulls.

I'm sure I love fan fiction so much in part because I have the freedom of knowing that what I'm writing will never be published. I can be as free as I want to be. I don't have to go back and write a second draft (although with my biggest work, a Buster Keaton novel, I do wish I could do a good revision). I can experiment with stylistic elements or try out a phrase I've never tried before. It's a risk-free way to practice the craft, fun and freeing.

It's just icing on the cake that somehow, no matter how obscure I feel my fandoms are, the story always finds a reader who adores it. I hope to someday write a fiction book for publication that does the same thing.

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I've also been way too invested in the Neil Gaiman news this past week. I haven't read him in earnest since I was a teenager and positively enraptured by Neverwhere. (Never read Sandman, oddly.) I will say this knowing how arrogant it will sound, but I will say it because I am trying to be honest with this blog: his writing felt too goth-y, too teenage-y for my adult years. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Y'know? The last thing I read was Coraline when I was sick as a dog from Xanax withdrawal following my first semester of university. I stressed out so much about making straight As that I wore my body down. I had IBS, kept coming down with viruses, and was so anxious I could barely function. This was around the time I first realized that the things I'd been feeling since at least age 10 had a name: anxiety. I believe I had yet to be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. (Where my fellow GAD people at?) A doc-in-the-box prescribed Xanax to treat the anxiety, which I took twice a day at a lower-than-prescribed dose. It was two or three weeks before I made the connection that the uptick in my anxiety was "rebound anxiety" when the Xanax left my system. As soon as I realized I was chemically dependent on it, I went cold turkey and suffered through some of the worst anxiety of my life. The withdrawal also came with flu-like symptoms. I was so sensitive to light, noise, and smell. So I stretched out on my couch in my dank little basement apartment and read Coraline, which was weird enough that it made me feel sicker and I was kind of sorry I'd read it.

Anyway, because Neverwhere was one of my favorite books when I was a wean, I had a hard time dragging myself away from Reddit once I'd read Lila Shapiro's article for Vulture. I've checked it every day since, looking for other first-person accounts of interactions with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. (Was also obsessed with the Dresden Dolls' debut album when it came out in 2003 and went up to Madison to see them when I was 18.) I have no doubt that all of it is true and I don't have anything scintillating to add to the observations hundreds of others have already made.

What are your thoughts on the newest Neil Gaiman rape revelations? What have you been reading lately? What are your top favorite Bob Dylan songs?

Source: Flagging Down the Double E's

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Thought I'd dust off this 10-year-old Tumblr and invite A03 readers and any Bob Dylan fans to keep up with my writing here. Other unrelated content to maybe be added, maybe not. I really struggle with personal writing. I always think of it as looking at one's own excrement and then inviting others to gawk too. It feels strange and gross to write a blog and expect others to be interested in it. RE: The Patient. Part VI is in progress. I got blocked in late October--or maybe that's just a grand way of saying "busy." I have a personal life into which I'm forever cramming little interests in side projects, and then it was November 5, 2024, and then of course the unthinkable happened again, which I suppose makes it thinkable. And maybe that's why it wasn't as devastating this time around. I used the occasion to disconnect from the political news cycle and continue a recent left turn into poetry, which I haven't written in 15 odd years or so. Actually Bob Dylan was the reason for my foray back into it. I saw him live in September and was quite moved by the experience. I got to thinking about his legacy, all the interpretations and expectations people put on his lyrics and performances and public endeavors throughout the years, and the disappointment it seemed like 5/6 of the audience that night felt over the fact he's not attempting to play recognizable versions of his songs. Which is ridiculous, because you can go back to 1966 and he wasn't attempting to replicate the recorded versions. It seems ridiculous that anyone should expect an 83-year-old to try to mimic a 25-year-old. So a poem came pouring out and I sent out it for publication. I secretly hope it will be so good that the editors will have no choice to select it. I'm also realistic, since I've gotten my first rejections the past couple months. That's one of my other behind-the-scenes projects. I'm shopping around a book to an agent (not fiction) and I've gotten three or four rejections so far, and I'm just letting it "bake" for now, just like I've been letting The Patient bake, but more on that in a moment.

In November, Bob tweeted: "Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy.' I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.” I read Cave's response, and particularly loved this:

I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything.

The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent – that holy place where joy resides.

While I abhor the lazy line of thinking (and I'm not at all suggesting this is where Cave is coming from) that "both sides are at fault/just as bad/to blame" and have no intention of disengaging from politics, at least locally, Bob and Cave's reflections had me reflecting. Life is so short. Music, poetry, writing, and nature make it worth living. There's something to be said for tuning out of the hateful noise and tuning into those things, at least for select periods. So I wrote poetry and I drank in music and I finished the book I started that night at Bob's concert, Susan Hill's Strange Meeting. I'd never heard of Hill before but had picked up my 1970s paperback copy at a "donate what you can" book sale earlier that day because it was slim enough to carry around. This chance purchase ended up being my favorite book of the year. Not only is Hill an amazing writer, the whole experience of the book was just gutting. I realized midway through that it's a love story. There are no overt overtones of queerness, although I suppose you could read the book that way if you wanted. I kept thinking about the characters days after I read it. I've just bought three or four more of her books. So to get back to The Patient, I haven't written partly because I've been busy in my personal life and partly because I've been directing my creative energies elsewhere. I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge I was stuck on the story, though. I know how it ends, but I couldn't see the footpath there. It didn't bother me overtly. I don't know if I really believe in writer's block, at least for me. I've learned that I go through periods of fallowness and periods of intense growth. I was letting it percolate before I started pushing it along with pomodoros. At some point today, though, I started chewing over Bob and Joyce again, and things clicked. I know fan fiction is "only" fan fiction, but I still take it seriously. I want to do right by the characters.* They just weren't talking to me lately. I know what Joyce wants and what she thinks so wants, and I know what Bob thinks he wants and he's afraid of, but I didn't know what happens in the meantime. So anyway, I'm about 4k words into the chapter with 5k to 6k to go. Estimated completion date is January. The overachiever in me wanted to finish it before the Chalamet film was released yesterday, partly because I didn't want anyone to think the story had been influenced by the film, but the part of me that's gone to therapy said, 'Slow down and chill the fuck out.' I haven't seen the Chalamet film, but I'm cautiously optimistic. I might go catch it on Monday or Tuesday. I don't find Chalamet much of a heartthrob. It's the elder millennial in me I think. Also the me that just detests pop culture. I saw him in Little Women and completely forgot he'd been in it. The more checked out I am from pop culture the better. Anyway, enjoy this photo of Bob by the pool ca. 1965 that I stole off the Internet. You can find The Patient here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55283422?view_full_work=true

*Make no mistake, Joyce and Bob are characters. I have no pretense that I know Bob Dylan. I can make educated guesses about Bob Dylan. Plus writing is just fun, doubly so with real musical artists and writers because they're so multilayered. There's a lot of material to work with, but you get to fill in the interstitials too.