Ennyman's Territory

People and Places on Pedastals: The Zimmerman Effect

2026-07-18T22:03:31.662-05:00

Updated blog post from 2011

A couple weekends ago I learned there’s a graveyard not far from here where the parents of Bob Dylan, Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, were laid to rest. I decided to shoot a photo to accompany my blog entry about The Zimmermann Telegram, the book by Barbara Tuchman that I'd previously written about based on her research regarding how the U.S. got into World War One. Unfortunately, as I was writing about the book I realized the spelling was not the same, as you can see. So I slept on it.

The other night as I lay awake on my pillow, I found myself pondering how it is that places where celebrities have been, like our Duluth Armory where a young Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper do their nearly last concert, can become charged with such meaning. Places like the graveyard in Paris where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are purportedly disposed, or Woodstock because of the festival it hosted, perhaps against its will, have become shrines.

I also thought about the concept of six degrees of separation and how a tomb, in a sense, puts us in close proximity with a segment of history that has meaning to us in one way or another. Likewise art museums and history museums which let us stand at arm’s length from the bi-products of another's elevated life. By this I mean a life elevated in importance to a certain segment of society.

Examples abound. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Louvre. The museum at the Indianapolis Speedway where you can stand next to every winning car of the Indy 500. The countless art museums in major cities throughout the world housing paintings by Picasso, images by Warhol and other iconic ghosts of art history.

For those who find the objects of our interests fascinating, our proximity to these people and places in some ways impacts us much like a magnet transforms a pin, when stroked and floated on a film of water, into a compass. Maybe this already has another name but if not, today I call this magnetizing The Zimmerman Effect.

Though I've often been critical of the celebrity worship in our culture, maybe it's something innate in us, in our essence, in the way we're wired, that desires to place people, places and objects on pedestals. There is a sense in which maybe we are even wronging them to do so because they are really just people, places and objects, not gods. It's interesting how our hearts are restless in the pursuit of something higher than ourselves.

Reading this fifteen years later, another thought occurs to me. I can't help but think of a Bible passage that I believe speaks to this phenomenon, Isaiah 6:1-7, which begins, "In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord."

To appreciate this passage it helps to know that the history of Israel was pockmarked with good kings and bad kings, rulers who sought to do right and those who were committed to their idols and sought to kill God's prophets who attempted to bring light to their understanding.

Uzziah was not just a good king, he was a good king who ruled for 50 years. That's a half century. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the pedestal his people placed him on, he crossed an ethical boundary and undermined his legacy. Struck with leprosy, he became an object of shame, anathema.

Some have suggested that the death of Uzziah removed a human focal point, allowing Isaiah to see beyond the throne on earth to the throne in heaven. Whether that is exactly what the text intends, it is a provocative thought and I've spent most of my life looking at it that way.

Perhaps all of our modern shrines—the graves, museums, concert halls, and historic sites—are expressions of something deeper. We are creatures who long to connect with greatness. We visit places where remarkable people once stood because, in some mysterious way, we hope that a little of their significance might rub off on us.

But Isaiah reminds us that even the greatest human figures are only temporary. King Uzziah ruled for more than half a century. For Israel, he was a dominant figure of his age. Yet it was only after Uzziah died that Isaiah wrote, "I saw the Lord." The king on the pedestal had been blocking the Son.

That made me wonder whether this "Zimmerman Effect" points beyond itself. Maybe our fascination with famous people isn't merely celebrity worship. Maybe it reveals a longing for transcendence—a desire to encounter something lasting, something worthy of our admiration. The danger comes when we mistake the signpost for the destination. Graves, museums, and concert halls can remind us of greatness, but they cannot satisfy the deeper hunger that put us on the journey in the first place.

Perhaps the question every pedestal asks is this: Does it lift our eyes higher... or does it stop them there?

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House, a Poem by Billy Collins

2026-07-17T20:41:29.904-05:00

Billy Collins was born in New York City in March 1941, two months before Duluth-born Bob Dylan. Collins served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Renowned for his accessible, conversational style, Collins writes witty, observational poems that transform everyday moments—reading in a hammock, listening to jazz, or pondering ordinary objects—into profound, often humorous reflections.

Billy Collins by Marcelo Noah (Public Domain)

I was introduced to his work through his Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001). "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House" was so apt and so fun that I purchased the whole book.

It can be argued that his career breakthrough came with Questions About Angels (1991), followed by popular collections like Picnic, Lightning (1998), (2001), and Aimless Love (2013).

As Laureate, he launched Poetry 180, introducing contemporary poems to high school students. Collins’s clear language and gentle irony have made him one of America’s most popular poets, bridging literary tradition with broad appeal. Evidently he continues publishing, most recently Dog Show (2025).

* * *

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark

that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.

I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast

but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,

sitting there in the oboe section barking,

his eyes fixed on the conductor who is

entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful

silence to the famous barking dog solo,

that endless coda that first established

Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins

Related Links

The Trouble With Poetry

Aristotle (I love this poem

Some Days

Do you have a favorite poet or poem?

Please share it in the comments.

Goethe on Napoleon, Revisited

2026-07-16T21:23:32.594-05:00

Published in 2010, this was one of my most read blog posts this week.

Goethe on Napoleon

While driving about in Old Historic Bethlehem yesterday we discovered The New Street Book Shop on New Street with its collection of used and out of print books. Susie and I each found a few gems. One of mine was a slim volume by Anselm, an 11th century monk, as well as The Napoleonic Revolution by Robert B. Holtman.

Napoleon has been the subject of over 300,000 books which have analyzed the man and his life from a multitude of angles. What caught me here was the quote by Goethe in the introduction. "To make an epoch in the world two conditions are notoriously essential--a good head and a great inheritance. Napoleon inherited the French Revolution."

To some extent it is a variation on the opening line of U.S. Grant's autobiographical memoirs, "Man proposes, but God disposes." Our life situations are not always our own and we must play the hands we're dealt. Goethe notes here that Napoleon's achievements came to pass in part because the circumstances favored his rise. Or as the historian Hudson put it, "His powers were his own, but circumstances rendered them effective."

It is tempting to imagine that great leaders simply impose their will upon history, but history is rarely so simple. Every generation inherits its own revolution, its own crisis, or its own moment of upheaval. Some people are swept along by events, while a few recognize the opportunities hidden within the turbulence. Churchill inherited the rise of Nazi Germany. Lincoln inherited a nation coming apart at the seams. Steve Jobs inherited the digital revolution. None created the conditions they faced, but each responded in ways that altered history. Character may determine what a person can do, but circumstances often determine whether those gifts will find a stage. We do not choose the age into which we are born, but we do choose how we respond to it.

That thought feels especially relevant today. We live in another era of technological disruption, political polarization, geopolitical uncertainty, and cultural realignment.

I mentioned here how Goethe was a contemporary of Napoleon. As truly great men it should not be surprising that they met at some point in the course of their lives. And of Napoleon, the man of action, Goethe, the man of contemplation wrote, ”His life was a stride of the demigod. He was in a state of continual enlightenment. His destiny was more brilliant than any the world had seen before him or would see after him. The story of Napoleon produces on me an impression like that of the Revelations of St. John the Divine. We all feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know what.”*

Fascinating comparison, actually.

Equally fascinating are Goethe's own notes and summary of his meeting Napoleon at Erfurt after the sack of Weimar. For a fascinating read check out Goethe and Napoleon in the Governor's Palace. And if your interest has been peaked by these notes, you might also enjoy reading a brief summation of why I myself have found Napoleon inspirational.

The ball is in your court. Make a difference.

* Napoleon in Russian Poetry of the 19th Century, by Alexander Mikaberidze

Untitled (Pen and Ink, 1973) -- Analysis and Critique

2026-07-15T08:57:00.811-05:00

I've recently been submitting some of my paintings and drawings to ChatGPT for analysis. It has been a most interesting experience. This is one of my drawings from a sketchbook when I was in college.

Untitled (1973)

There is an energy in this drawing that immediately identifies it as the work of a young artist exploring ideas rather than recording appearances. It belongs to a long tradition of automatic drawing, where the line is allowed to discover rather than simply describe. At first the eye searches for recognizable forms, and gradually they emerge: a profile looking to the left, a prominent eye, an ear floating independently to the right, patterned textures that suggest hair, scales, architecture, and perhaps even fragments of written language. The drawing resists a single reading. Instead, it behaves like a visual stream of consciousness, where one image morphs into another before the viewer has fully grasped the first.

The economy of means is striking. Everything is accomplished with line alone. There is no modeling, no shading, no attempt at illusionistic depth. Yet the varying density of marks creates rhythm and movement across the page. The vertical hatch-like forms sweeping diagonally from the upper left pull the eye downward toward the face, while the patterned cheek and segmented forehead provide visual anchors. Large expanses of untouched paper become active participants in the composition. The empty space is not simply background; it allows the isolated symbols and forms to breathe, giving the drawing an openness that keeps it from feeling cluttered despite its abundance of ideas.

Perhaps the most compelling feature is the way the drawing negotiates the boundary between abstraction and representation. The profile is never fully established. Instead, it appears to assemble itself from unrelated visual fragments. The forehead becomes a mosaic of stone-like forms. The neck dissolves into rhythmic bands that resemble both musculature and topographical lines. Even the detached ear seems less anatomical than symbolic, as though hearing itself has become an independent faculty.

Viewed psychologically, the work suggests that identity is not singular but assembled from many competing elements. The face becomes a meeting place for memory, symbols, perception, and imagination. There is an affinity here with Paul Klee's visual language, in which playful symbols carry surprising emotional weight. There are also echoes of Picasso's fragmented portraiture, though your approach is lighter, less architectural, and more improvisational. The drawing seems closer to visual jazz than to formal composition.

The small symbols floating in the upper right are particularly intriguing because they resist explanation. They resemble ancient pictographs, alchemical signs, or invented alphabets. Whether intentionally or not, they imply that the portrait exists within a larger symbolic universe. Likewise, the detached ear functions almost like an afterthought—or perhaps a reminder that perception is selective. We hear only part of the world, just as we see only part of ourselves.

What impresses me most is the confidence of the line. Many young artists hesitate, correcting and retracing their marks. Here the line moves decisively. Even when exploratory, it feels assured. That confidence gives the drawing its vitality. It suggests an artist who trusted intuition enough to let discovery become part of the finished work.

Three Observations

The drawing already reveals an enduring artistic voice.
Having seen several of your later portraits, I'm struck by how many of your recurring concerns are already present in this 1973 piece. You have long been less interested in anatomical accuracy than in revealing the inner architecture of a person. Throughout your later work, faces are built from expressive shapes rather than photographic description. This drawing shows that impulse at a remarkably early stage.

The line functions almost like language.
Many artists use line to define form. Here, the line behaves more like handwriting or musical notation. It records a sequence of thoughts rather than outlining an object. That quality gives the drawing a narrative feel, as though we are watching consciousness map itself onto the page.

The work is optimistic despite its complexity.
Many surreal or symbolic drawings from the early 1970s carry an atmosphere of anxiety or alienation. This one feels different. Despite its fragmented imagery, the composition remains playful and curious. The eye is alert, the forms are inventive, and the overall impression is one of exploration rather than despair. It feels like the work of someone discovering how visual symbols can express ideas that ordinary language cannot.

One final thought. Knowing that this dates from 1973—when you were studying philosophy and fine arts—it feels almost prophetic. Many artists spend decades trying to discover what genuinely interests them. In this drawing, you can already see the seeds of themes that have continued to occupy you: identity, symbolism, ambiguity, expressive reduction, and the conviction that a portrait can reveal far more than a likeness. In that sense, this is more than an early drawing. It is the beginning of a visual vocabulary.

* * * * *

Taking a Moment to Linger Over Two Jean Biirkenstein Pieces

2026-07-13T22:22:18.779-05:00

Woman and Man with Books

Jean Birkenstein (1926–2003) was a Jewish artist and fearless Civil Rights activist who, in the 1950s and ’60s,opened her Chicago home as a neutral safe space for rival gang members (Vice Lords and Cobras) to meet, while working as a teacher and “ambassador” for them at Marshall High School. An officer with CORE and the NAACP, she led protests for open housing and against school segregation, and was celebrated in a 1961 Jet magazine feature for her powerful paintings and profound respect for human dignity.
Having recently shared some of her artwork here a couple weeks back, I wanted to take a deeper look at a few individual pieces. Besides the fact that her work is interesting, I am also attempting to teach art viewers that increased engagement with another's art can yield some interesting, and occasionally profound, ideas.

Woman and Man with Books
This painting fits comfortably within the tradition of mid-century expressionism, with echoes of Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, and even touches of Lyonel Feininger in the angular treatment of faces. Yet it doesn't feel derivative. It has its own visual vocabulary.

Here are some things that immediately stand out. There's a geometric aspect to their faces. The woman's triangular nose, simplified eye, and sharply outlined jaw reduce the face to a few decisive forms. She is recognizable without being individualized.

This suggests Birkenstein was searching for emotional truth rather than anatomical truth. The black contour lines don't imprison the figures—they hold them together, almost like stained glass leading.

There is a psychological aspect to the painting which depicts two people reading in a cramped space yet different emotional spaces, each lost in what they are reading. The woman dominates the foreground, yet her head is bowed. She appears introspective, perhaps withdrawn into the book she is holding. Behind her is the bearded man.

He leans in, but not aggressively, almot hovering. Though he almost occupies another plane of existence, he is simulataneously near.

Notice how restrained the palette is. Soft greens, muted pinks, warm browns. Almost no saturated color. The effect is contemplative rather than dramatic, like the characters themselves.

The watercolor is wonderfully free. Rather than carefully filling shapes, Birkenstein allows washes to bleed into one another. Some passages are almost accidental, allowing a spontaneity that gives the work life.

Vermont Farmers
This is an ambitious work that creates a world filled with symbolism while remaining rooted in ordinary life. The obvious subject appears to be two young farmers beside an old automobile or truck.

The title has to do with rural life, but its theme may be the human condition. The bull peering in from the upper right almost functions as a silent witness.

The drawing itself is technically fascinating.

The cross-hatching dominates the picture.

Almost every surface vibrates with directional marks, building atmosphere.

Notice how the darkest passages unify the composition. There is almost no empty space.

Everything participates.

The two young farmers wear serious, understated expressions. Neither smiles, neither seems posed. Birkenstein avoids telling us exactly what they are thinking. That ambiguity draws us in.

A dominant image here is the wheel, which anchors the lower left quadrant. As a symbol the wheel can have many meanings: progress, modernity, work and (esoterically) the wheel of life.

There's an emotional tone present in the story pictured here. It's not despair, nor does it convey sentimentality. It's not even resignationb exactly. Perhaps it's quiet endurance in the face of a conundrum. It makes you want to inquire further of the author. Something has happened. What preceded this moment? What follows?

That's the cool part of engaging a painting or drawing. Here are the clues, what's the story? Every work suggests a narrative. Birkenstein compresses a lot of clues into a finite space. If I may quote Marvin Gaye, "What's going on?"

* * *

PostScript
Regarding the first piece, Man and Woman with Books, this weekend our family discussed an article in The Atlantic titled "The End of Reading Is Here," which presented some disturbing stats regarding our national decline in literacy and reading for pleasure. Kids can graduate high school without ever having read a book. How can this be?

"There Must Be Some Way Out of Here": Isaiah, Dylan, and the Sixties' Apocalypse

2026-07-12T21:48:53.773-05:00

One of the joys of reading Scripture is discovering echoes where you least expect them. Sometimes they're intentional. Sometimes they're unconscious. Either way, they illuminate both the biblical text and the work that follows.

So it is with Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. The song has always sounded biblical, but its roots run deeper than a few borrowed images. Much of its atmosphere appears to arise from Isaiah 21:1-10, a passage that is itself an apocalyptic vision filled with dread, watchmen, horsemen, and the collapse of an empire. It also helps explain why Dylan's brief, enigmatic song became one of the defining statements of the late Sixties.

Isaiah's Vision

Isaiah's oracle begins with a storm. As whirlwinds in the Negeb sweep on, it comes from the wilderness, from a terrible land... (Isaiah 21:1) The prophet is overwhelmed by a terrifying vision.

My heart falters, fear makes me tremble; the twilight I longed for has become a horror to me.

Then comes the command: Go, post a lookout and have him report what he sees.

The watchman climbs his tower and waits. He scans the horizon. Finally he cries out: Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses...

And then comes the unforgettable announcement: "Babylon has fallen, has fallen!"

This isn't merely breaking political news. Rather, Isaiah is describing history reaching a breaking point. It is the collapse of a civilization.

Dylan's Watchtower

Now consider Dylan's opening.

There must be some way out of here,

Said the joker to the thief...

Immediately we're dropped into a world of confusion. There are no names, locations or explanations. Only two archetypal figures trying to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense.

Then comes the second verse.

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants too.

The watchtower is not a casual or haphazard image. In Scripture, the watchman occupies a sacred office. He stands between danger and the city. His responsibility is vigilance. He announces what others cannot yet see.

Dylan's watchtower feels like Isaiah's. Something is coming and everyone senses it. A few short years earlier Dylan sang, "The times, they are a-changin'" and there was a hopefulness there. Mr. Tambourine Man held up a torch for a new generation to light the way.

"Two Riders Were Approaching..."

The song's final verse almost directly recalls Isaiah.

Outside in the distance

A wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl.

Isaiah's watchman also sees riders approaching from the distance before announcing Babylon's fall. Whether Dylan consciously borrowed the imagery or absorbed it through years of biblical reading hardly matters. Dylan knew the Scriptures extraordinarily well. The Bible shaped his imagination long before his public conversion to 1979 Christianity. Dylan used the Bible as a resource. (See

That Thin Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders about the making Blonde On Blonde.)

In both Isaiah 21 and Dylan's Watchtower, the emotional landscape is the same. The watchman sees what others cannot. The world is unstable and judgment is approaching.

Apocalypse Before the Apocalypse

Today we tend to hear the word apocalypse as meaning "the end of the world." The Greek word actually means an unveiling—a revelation of what has been hidden. Isaiah unveils the fragility of empires. Dylan unveils the instability beneath modern civilization.

The Sixties were saturated with precisely this feeling.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

John F. Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy.

Malcolm X.

Vietnam.

Potential nuclear annihilation.

Race riots.

Burning cities.

Student revolts.

The Manson murders.

The optimism of the early Sixties slowly dissolved into something darker, as if history itself was becoming unmoored.

Heart of Darkness

In 1900 many intellectuals felt themselves on the threshold of a new era of enlightenment. Freud deliberately released The Interpretation of Dreams that year. Others rejoiced at the "liberation from Christian religion" spawned by Darwin's theory of natural selection and the elimination of any need for a God to explain how we got here. We were the product of time and chance.

As in the Sixties, and like every era of human history, there were other voices being raised to question this optimismn at the turn of the last century. One of these was Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, the story of a journey upriver into the Belgian Congo in the 1890s. Civilization, Conrad suggested, is a thin veneer. Strip it away, and something terrifying emerges.

When Conrad traveled to the Congo in 1890, he entered one of the darkest enterprises of the nineteenth century. The region was not yet a Belgian colony but the personal possession of King Leopold II, who had persuaded European powers at the Berlin Conference (1884–85) that his control of the Congo would promote commerce and humanitarian ideals. The reality was starkly different.

Leopold's Congo Free State became a vast commercial enterprise dedicated to extracting ivory and, later, wild rubber, commodities that generated enormous profits as European and American demand soared. To maximize production, indigenous communities were compelled into forced labor under the supervision of colonial agents and the notorious Force Publique, a mercenary army that enforced quotas through intimidation and violence.

The human cost was catastrophic. Villages that failed to meet rubber quotas were burned, hostages were taken, and mutilation—including the severing of hands—became a grim symbol of the regime's brutality. Disease, famine, exhaustion, displacement, and systematic violence claimed the lives of millions of Congolese during Leopold's rule. Conrad witnessed this reality firsthand while serving as captain of a Congo River steamboat in 1890. The contrast between Europe's lofty rhetoric about bringing civilization to Africa and the naked exploitation he encountered profoundly shaped his imagination. Those experiences became the moral foundation of Heart of Darkness, a novel that strips away the pretense of imperial benevolence to reveal greed, cruelty, colonial hypocrisy, and the unsettling capacity for darkness within the human heart.

Francis Ford Coppola understood this perfectly when he transformed Conrad's novel into Apocalypse Now. Vietnam became Conrad's Congo. Colonel Kurtz became the man who had crossed every moral boundary. The famous helicopter assault set to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries isn't merely spectacle, it's civilization announcing its own madness. The veil has been lifted.

Dylan's Landscape

All Along the Watchtower belongs to this same imaginative world with no heroes or moral center. Only princes keeping watch, servants passing through, predators growling in the distance and riders approaching. "And the wind begins to howl."

I think it's great that Dylan chooses to not explain his songs, especially this one which is famously enigmatic. He puts it out there and if we choose to engage, it's almost like a labyrinth full of rabbit holes.

Jimi Hendrix's legendary recording intensified this apocalyptic atmosphere. The electric guitar became a storm system more than an instrument. The swirling solos sound like civilization itself beginning to fracture. Dylan wrote the prophecy, Hendrix made it vivid.

Looking for the Watchman

What fascinates me is that Dylan's song never actually tells us what news the riders bring. Isaiah does: Babylon falls. Dylan, as I've noted, doesn't explain or interpret, which is a facet of his art.

Perhaps that's why All Along the Watchtower never grows old. Every generation imagines that the riders are approaching its horizon. Every generation feels that history is accelerating toward some undefined reckoning.

Isaiah reminds us that no empire is permanent. Conrad reminds us that darkness is not merely "out there" but within us. Apocalypse Now reminds us that technological sophistication does not guarantee moral progress. And Dylan reminds us that somewhere, on a lonely tower, someone is still watching the horizon listening for hoofbeats, waiting to announce what everyone else has been too distracted to see.

Related Links

All Along the Watchtower All Around the World... with Echoes

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2018/04/all-along-watchtower-all-around-world.html

All Along the Watchtower (2008)

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2008/08/all-along-watchtower.html

Dylan Often Sings About the Darkness He Sees: Trouble

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/03/dylan-often-sings-about-darkness-he.html

That Thin Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders Turns Readers into Blonde On Blonde Insiders

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/01/that-thin-wild-mercury-sound-by-daryl.html

Photo Caption: A Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, cooked, and cannibalized by members of the Force Publique in 1904.

Looking for America: Paul Simon's Quiet Masterpiece of Longing

2026-07-11T17:38:42.766-05:00

Inside the World Trade Center

Last week I listened to Paul Simon's "America" for the first time in a while. How interesting to hear it in conjunction with our nation's 250th anniversary. The song's deceptively simple narrative unfolds into profound reflection on the human condition.

In the 1960s Simon & Garfunkel recorded numerous songs that captured the angst of "my generation." Haunting songs like "Sounds of Silence" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" connected with young people living through that period of disruptions that included assassinations, race riots, burning cities, the Cold War and Vietnam.

The song is essentially a short story. It begins with the playful, "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together / I've got some real estate here in my bag." The "real estate" is nothing more than what's in his suitcase or sleeping bag. They're young, broke, and full of possibility. After purchasing a pack of smokes and Mrs. Wagner pies they simply "walk off to look for America." Optimistic Sixties youth.

In the second stanza we learn that the narrator's girl friend is Kathy as they board a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, something I myself have done twice in my life, both being personal turning points. Perhaps that's one reason this song has stayed with me. Certain songs attach themselves to the intersections of our lives and are never heard the same way again.

"Kathy", I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Their banter on the bus is lighthearted. Who hasn't had these moments with someone you enjoyed being with, playing games with the faces.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

Like children cloud-gazing, they entertain themselves by transforming ordinary life into adventure. After a while, though, the mood begins to change. I can imagine it as a movie soundtrack in which the first notes of a gloomier tune can be heard.

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"

"We smoked the last one an hour ago"

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

I've been in all these scenes before, night settling in, moving through time looking at scenery and retreating into the thoughts in my head, and she retreating into her magazine. This line says so much with such brevity: "So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine..." No external drama here as the song shifts to a darker place.

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all come to look for America

It's a heartbreaking confession. "Kathy, I'm lost. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

And perhaps the saddest part is how this kind of awareness, when it goes unshared, isolates us. We can sit beside someone we love, traveling the same road, and still find ourselves alone inside our own thoughts.

Simon avoids giving an answer as to why the narrator feels this way. Beneath the surface, he feels something he doesn't fully understand, an angst that is existential, not circumstantial. And the kicker, which is repeated at the end, is that this is something pervasive. While counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike he imagines that they are all in the same soup, lost but looking, yearning for something.

Thus, America is not a geographical destination but something much larger, an idea—a symbol of fulfillment, belonging, identity, perhaps even purpose itself. We're all searchers, seekers of a place where we belong, people striving to understand why we are here and what it means to be human.

Here we are, nearly sixty years later, with more technology, more entertainment, and more information than Simon's two travelers could have imagined. Yet the longing he captured has not disappeared.

Perhaps that's why America has endured. It's not really a song about highways or Greyhound buses or even the United States. It's about that quiet ache almost everyone experiences sooner or later—the feeling that there must be something more. Simon never tells us whether Kathy and her companion found what they were looking for. He simply reminds us that we are all fellow travelers, counting the cars on our own New Jersey Turnpikes, looking for a place to call home.

A 30-Year-Old Ad Copy Checklist That Still Works

2026-07-10T18:57:36.014-05:00

While doing a little spring cleaning I came across a folder with a sheet of paper in it titled “Tips for Writing Ad Copy.” It was a checklist that I created 30 years or so ago to orient my thinking when writing ad copy. For many of you (in advertising) these things may be obvious, but as Vince Lombardi famously said on the first day of training, “This is a football.” In other words, it never hurts to be reminded of the basics.

Here are some tips from that sheet, followed by a handful of tips from great ad men of the past.

1. The Headline Does the Heavy Lifting

David Ogilvy observed that five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. The headline determines whether anyone keeps reading.

In 1988 when Donn Larson of Westmoreland, Larson and Webster shared with me his three-page list of ad copywriting rules, the first rule was that the headline should make a promise.

There’s a maxim about writing that I think fits here: “Well begun is half done.” Getting your headline right is worth the effort.

2. Stop Talking About Yourself

One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is believing customers are fascinated by their business. They're not. People are interested in solving their own problems. That’s why “YOU” is one of the five most important words in advertising. (If you keep reading, you’ll find the other four.)

Every business owner wants to say, "We've been serving the community for 42 years with experienced professionals dedicated to quality service." The customer is thinking, "Can you fix my problem? How much will it cost? Can I trust you?"

3. The Writing Itself

Write as though you're writing a letter to a friend over coffee instead of making an announcement to a stadium full of strangers. I forget where I first heard this tip, but whenever I’ve been stuck regarding how to organize my thoughts and get started, I think of my brother. “Dear Ron, …”

Conversation beats proclamation every time.

4. Sell Benefits, Not Features

This is just a reminder of a tip we’ve all heard before and is worth repeating. Features describe what something is. Benefits explain why it matters.

A vacuum cleaner may have a 1,200-watt motor, but nobody lies awake at night wishing for more watts. They want a cleaner house in half the time. A bank doesn't simply offer online banking. It offers convenience. A contractor doesn't sell windows. He sells lower heating bills, quieter rooms and greater comfort.

Customers buy outcomes, not specifications.

5. Pictures Still Matter

There's an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. In advertising, that may be an understatement. People process images instantly. A great photograph can create engagement before the first sentence is read.

Choose images that reinforce your message instead of merely filling space. And don’t forget your logo. Your logo embodies your identity and reputation. I love the Apple logo not because I like apples, but because of what it represents.

6. Always Tell People What to Do Next

I've seen beautifully designed ads that forgot the most important step. They never asked for the sale. Advertising should always include a clear Call to Action.

Visit our showroom or website.

Call today for a free consultation. (Don’t forget the number.)

Schedule your appointment.

Download the guide.

The simpler and more specific the request, the better the response.

Going back to those five most important words, they are: You, New, Free, Save and Now. I don't know if they're magical, but they all have one thing in common. They focus on the customer's interests rather than the advertiser's ego.

Here are tips from five ad men whose work has stood the test of time.

David Ogilvy

Quote: "The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife."

Lesson: Respect your audience. Never talk down to people. Treat customers as intelligent individuals who simply want honest information to help them make a good decision.

Claude Hopkins

Quote: "Advertising is salesmanship in print."

Lesson: Every ad should do the work of a good salesperson. It should answer questions, overcome objections, and give the reader a reason to act.

Leo Burnett

Quote: "Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read."

Lesson: Clarity beats cleverness. If readers have to work to understand your message, you've probably lost them.

Bill Bernbach

Quote: "The most powerful element in advertising is the truth."

Lesson: Great advertising doesn't invent reasons to buy. It discovers the genuine strengths of a product or service and communicates them with honesty.

John Caples

Quote: "The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments that they forget to tell us why we should buy."

Lesson: Keep the spotlight on the customer, not yourself. Your reader is asking one question: "What's in it for me?"

Advertising has changed dramatically over the past century. Newspapers have been joined by websites, social media, podcasts, streaming services and AI-generated content. But human nature hasn't changed. People still respond to honesty, clarity, relevance and a compelling reason to act. Master those fundamentals and your advertising will always have an audience.

The tools of advertising will continue to evolve, but the fundamentals remain unchanged. Understand people. Tell the truth. Make a promise worth believing. Then invite your reader to take the next step.

This article originally appeared in the July issue of Business North

Related Links

Advertising Lessons from One of the Great Ones: David Ogilvy

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2013/09/advertising-lessons-from-one-of-great.html

A David Ogilvy Anecdote on Hiring

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-david-ogilvy-anecdote-on-hiring.html

An Anecdote about Claude Hopkins from Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/10/an-anecdote-about-claude-hopkins-from.html

Silver Bay Is Making Some Groovy Economic Moves

2026-07-09T22:29:07.884-05:00

See foto details at end of page below.

When I first moved to Duluth in 1986 I remember seeing a classified ad for a house in Siver Bay in the Duluth News Tribune (when it used to be a serious newspaper). It was a four-bedroom house with a full basement and garage for $14,000. We'd just inherited a house, but it sounded like a steal.

Over the course of many years our family travelled up the North Shore, picking up groceries in Two Harbors and doing the the cabin thing just beyond Gooseberry Falls. Silver Bay was an occasional stop, but there wasn't much there. Nestled just above Highway 61 it served as a mining town whose aims were modest.

Over the years, as new blood staked claims here, there came an awakening interest in being something more than what it had been. Through visionary leadership, some very interesting things have been happening here.

For the July issue of Business North I contributed a feature story about some of these new developments, using their "Music In The Park" series as a springboard into their broader efforts toward revitalization. The article begins:

Economic development is not just about factories, roads or tax incentives. It is about creating places where people want to gather, linger, invest and ultimately live.

Now entering its sixth summer, Silver Bay’s free concert series “Music in the Park” has quietly transformed Friday nights into a community gathering place, drawing nearly 17,000 attendees over its first five seasons while supporting local eateries, lodging and businesses. What began in 2015 as neighbors hosting house concerts has evolved into an economic development strategy rooted in a simple idea: people are attracted to places where life happens.

Silver Bay is intentionally reinventing itself from a company town into a destination community. Music is one manifestation of that larger transformation. The newly opened Trailhead Center, Black Beach, housing initiatives, Boathouse Bay and community volunteerism are all pieces of the same puzzle. The energy being displayed isn’t about a government program. It’s a story about people deciding that their community’s future can be different from its past.

Read the full article here: The upbeat sound of economic development

Related Link
2026 SILVER BAY MUSIC IN THE PARK CONCERT SERIES

PHOTO CAPTION: Scarlet Rivera and Fredy Argir receive Rocky Taconite bobblehead during their performance in Silver Bay. William Kelley High School Auditorium Stage, 2021 Silver Bay Music in the Park Concert Series, October 1, 2021.

Photo for Rocky Wall Entertainment by Michael Anderson.

DNA: The Discovery Darwin Never Saw Coming

2026-07-07T17:31:09.123-05:00

What keeps me reading extensively, and listening to lectures and audiobooks, is the world’s incredible ability to surprise us at every turn. There is still so much to discover. New insights about the origins of life are but one example. And the implications are truly mind-blowing

For much of the twentieth century, many people assumed that new discoveries in biology would steadily reinforce Darwin's explanation for the origin of species. Instead, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the modern era raised an entirely different question. That discovery was DNA.

Stephen Meyer recently summarized this story in a lecture at Cambridge University. His point wasn't merely that Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. The larger discovery came a few years later when Francis Crick realized that DNA functions much like a digital code.

DNA isn't simply a remarkable chemical. It contains instructions and stores information. Bill Gates once compared DNA to a computer program, only far more sophisticated than anything humans have ever written. That's an analogy, of course, but it captures something vital: living cells don't merely contain chemistry; they contain coded information that directs the construction of proteins, the molecular machinery that makes life possible.

This is where Meyer believes the discussion changes. Chemistry can explain many things. It can explain how molecules interact. But where does meaningful information come from? In our everyday experience, codes, software, languages, and written messages always originate with minds. They don't arise simply because chemicals happen to bump into one another.

Meyer argues that this presents a significant challenge for theories that attempt to explain life's origin solely through undirected material processes. Rather than asking only, "How did the chemicals get here?" he asks another question: "Where did the information come from?"

Darwin & his ilk believe everything is possible with enough time and chance. It takes a lot of faith to believe 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters could ever produce Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, or Cervantes' Don Quixote. This itself would be easier than creating life out of goo, or a universe out of nothing (though the latter is a different discussion.)

Science has always advanced by following the evidence wherever it leads. Ironically, Watson and Crick themselves were not looking for evidence of intelligent design. They were searching for the material basis of life. Yet what they uncovered was something that looked remarkably like a language—an information system residing within every living cell. To me, that's one of the fascinating twists in the history of science.

Darwin gave us a powerful theory that appeared to explain many aspects of biological change. Molecular biology in the twentieth century, however, revealed levels of complexity he could never have imagined. Instead of making the question of life's origin simpler, DNA has made it deeper.

Where there is information, we naturally ask about its source. Where there is a message, we ask about the messenger. DNA may not settle the debate for everyone, but it certainly reminds us that life is far more astonishing than anyone imagined a century ago.

The most amazing (and convincing) feature of DNA to me (according to Meyer in another talk) is that for a species to be designed the code must precede it. This contradicts the "survival of the fittest" notions that chameleons changed the colors to blend in to an environment as a matter of survival. Other examples get cited in biology textbooks, but how did the code get altered after the fact when it must precede the species' designs beforehand. It doesn't make sense.

Bottom Line:
The molecular revolution of the twentieth century introduced questions about the origin of biological information that Darwin himself never addressed and that remain the subject of ongoing debate. The appeal of thinkers like Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski is that contemporary scientists would remain committed to honest inquiry, not dogmatism, cherry-picking or confirmation bias.

* * * * *

FWIW Dept.
According to the latest research, on average, a human gene contains about 10,000 to 30,000 "letters" (base pairs). Because the cellular machinery reads the code in three-letter "words" (called codons), this translates to roughly 3,330 to 10,000 amino acids per gene. Overall, the entire human genome across all 23 pairs of chromosomes contains about 3 billion base pairs of information.

Jethro Tull and His Views on Manure

2026-07-05T20:54:52.772-05:00

While reading the list of Top 100 Ebooks downloaded from Project Gutenberg on July 4, 2026 I noticed that number 60 was Charles Morton Aikman's Manures and the principles of manuring. In a list that begins with Moby Dick and includes classics by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, Chesterton and Sir Walter Scott, a book about manure seemed quite surprising, especially when it has reached #60 on the chart.

Jehtro Tull in 1973, the year I saw them.

So I decided to peruse its contents. Early on I found an entry about a fellow named Jethro Tull. My only connection with this name had been through the popular British rock band that emerged in the late 60's and whom I later saw at Ohio U on their Thick as a Brick Tour.

Did the group take its name from the character in Aikman's manure compendium? As it turns out, the answer is yes. Rock band Jethro Tull took its name from the 18th-century English agronimist Jethro Tull (1674–1741), who pioneered innovations like the seed drill that helped spark the British Agricultural Revolution.

Trivia: When Ian Anderson's band was starting out they weren't that good yet so they kept changing the name of the band in order to get re-booked at places they'd already played. Someone on the staff of their booking agent, who was a historian, suggested. the name Jethro Tull at this time because it was the name they were using when they landed a Thursday night residency at London's famous Marquee Club.

The original Jethro Tull developed a theory about the importance of tilling. The more thoroughly one tilled the soil, the more luxurient the crops would be.

He believed plant food consisted of the particles of the soil. These particles, however, had to be rendered very tiny before they become available for the plant, which would absorb them by means of its rootlets. This pulverisation of the soil goes on in nature independently of the farmer, but only very slowly, and the farmer has therefore to hasten it on by means of tillage operations. The more efficiently these operations are carried on, the more abundant will the supply.

According to Aikman, Tull introduced and advocated the system of horse-hoe husbandry. This theory was suggested to him by the custom, which he had noticed on the Continent, of growing vines in rows, and hoeing the intervals between these rows from time to time. The excellent results which followed this mode of cultivation induced him to adopt it in England for his farm crops.

While Tull's theory was based on principles at heart thoroughly sound, he was carried away by his personal success into drawing unwarrantable deductions. Thus he came to the conclusion that crop rotation was unnecessary, provided that a thorough system of tillage was carried out. He was also persuaded that manures could be entirely dispensed with under his new system of cultivation, for the true function of all manures is to aid in the pulverization of the soil by fermentation. We later learned this was a mistaken notion.

Another thing Tull did was drill holes into the soil and plant at a specific depth. This approach yielded better results than the popular method called broadcasting, that is, flinging the seeds out in all directions. How interesting that today we still use this term, but apply it to media instead of farming. Of course the word still applies to seeds of a different nature.

It strikes me that writers and farmers have more in common than we sometimes realize. Both spend much of their lives preparing the ground. The farmer tills the soil, plants carefully, and waits. The writer cultivates minds, sows ideas, and waits. Not every seed germinates. Not every field produces an abundant harvest. But every now and then an idea takes root, grows quietly beneath the surface, and changes someone's life.

Whether we're farmers, musicians, teachers, or writers, we're all in the seed-sowing business. We don't control the weather or the harvest. We simply do our best to plant something worth growing.

Jethro Tull was wrong about manure, but he was right about one thing: the condition of the soil matters. Whether we're growing wheat or wisdom, fertile ground is still where the harvest begins.

Happy 250th USA

2026-07-04T04:54:07.796-05:00

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

— Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776)

On this Independence Day, that bold promise still echoes as the beating heart of what makes America exceptional: a nation founded on timeless ideals: freedom, self-government, and the dignity of every individual.

God bless the United States of America.

A Note from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"I became an American not by birth or by right, but by choice. Like many immigrants, I came to this country from a world in which I’d had no right to speak freely; no right to choose whom I would marry, or where or how I would live; no hope for the kind of life and career with which I am blessed today. I came from a culture in which my station was assigned at birth, by virtue of my sex, and could never be appealed. Looking back today, I can hardly find words to express how grateful I am, every day, to call this country my own."

Largest American flag in the world with mural of whales.

Mural and flag by Wyland, the Marine Michelangelo

All photos courtesy Gary Firstenberg, America's Photographer

Related Link

Spotlight on Wyland, the Marine Michaelangelo

Is Recycling a Waste of Time and Money?

2026-07-03T09:12:17.559-05:00

I have been a fan of journalist John Stossel for decades. His latest video short is titled, "Even Greenpeace Says “Most Plastic Simply Cannot Be Recycled.” Here are some of his key points.

For decades we've been encouraged to recycle as though it were a moral obligation. The message has been simple: separate your trash, rinse your containers, and you're helping save the planet.

But what if the story is more complicated? Or even bunk.

John Stossel recently revisited the economics and realities of recycling, and many of his findings are surprising. While recycling aluminum, cardboard, and some paper products generally makes good economic and environmental sense, much of what Americans dutifully place in recycling bins—especially plastics—never gets recycled at all. Some ends up in landfills, some is shipped overseas, and some is ultimately burned or discarded.

Stossel also challenges long-held assumptions about landfill shortages and argues that modern landfills are far cleaner and more abundant than many people realize. His larger point isn't that we should stop caring about the environment. Rather, it is that good intentions don't automatically produce good results. Before spending billions of dollars and millions of hours pursuing any environmental policy, we ought to ask a simple question: Does it actually accomplish what we think it does?

That seems like a reasonable place to begin any honest conversation. In most cases, as Stossel's sources within the industry point out, the answer is "no."

Photo at top of page by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

501 Great Writers—and Why the Classics Still Matter

2026-06-29T20:55:14.101-05:00

This weekend I wrote about one of my favorite reference books, Sir J. A. Hammerton's Outline of Great Books. It's a volume I've dipped into for more than forty years, ever since I rescued it from a yard sale for ten cents.

Sitting just below it on my shelf is another book that has served me equally well when I was expanding my reading of serious literature: 501 Great Writers.

Like Hammerton's masterwork, it isn't a book you read straight through. It's a book you browse. Open it almost anywhere and you'll encounter someone you've always meant to read—or someone you've never heard of but suddenly want to discover. That's one of the great pleasures of reference books. They don't simply answer questions, they create curiosity.

I've often heard people dismiss the classics as old, difficult, or irrelevant. Yet I've found the opposite to be true. The classics are the books and authors that have survived fashions, politics, literary movements, and changing tastes. Thousands of writers have faded into obscurity while Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Orwell continue finding new readers.

This doesn't happen by accident.

They continue to speak because they continue to tell us truths about ourselves and our human predicament. Technology changes. Governments rise and fall. Languages evolve. But human nature changes very little. We still love and envy. We still hope and despair. We still wrestle with pride, ambition, betrayal, forgiveness, and the search for meaning. The great writers understood this, and that's why they still feel surprisingly contemporary.

One of the unexpected benefits of books like 501 Great Writers is that it continually introduces us to authors we've somehow overlooked. Some become lifelong companions. Others simply remind us that the world of literature is much larger than my own reading history.

The structure of 501 Great Writers is different from Outline, which is primary excerpts and summaries. 501 features writer bios accompanied by their signature titles, and photos, pointings or illustrations of the authors themselves. For Robert Louis Stevenson, the first three "signature titles" listed are Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1889). He also wrote poetry and did some travel writing.

The book is useful for introducing readers to authors with whom we're often unfamiliar such as Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Noel Prize for literature. Occasionally there's a little sidebar briefly describing one of the author's most significant work. For Lagerlöf there's a callout on The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

Every writer needs teachers. Some teach us through personal friendship. Others mentor us across centuries. I've frequently mentioned how a mentor, the late John Prin, helped jumpstart my writing career.

The value of a book like this is that it introduces us to writers who have already stood the test of time. They remind me that clarity outlasts cleverness, substance survives fashion, and honest observations about the human condition never become obsolete.

Books are conversations across generations. Every time we open a classic, we're listening to someone whose voice has refused to disappear.

* * *

PostScript: Yesterday I wrote about Thomas Carlyle. I find it interesting that Carlyle's name didn't appear in this volume. I'm curious whether he appears in this publisher's companion volume 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I just took a peek at the first books listed and see that I've read nine of the first twelve. So many (great) books, so little time!

What recent book have you read that you'd like to recommend to more readers?

A Very Brief Introduction to Thomas Carlyle and 27 Thought-Provoking Quotes

2026-06-28T10:34:10.504-05:00

Over the course of 40 years of writing, I've lost track of how many times I unearthed a pointed, pithy quote by Thomas Carlyle. Even so, I never really knew who he was. Last week I found (in a folder on my laptop) a Word doc with ten pages of quotes by Carlyle. Today I was aiming to share a portion of those, but thought maybe it's time to find out a little more who he was.

Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a prominent Scottish essayist, historian, philosopher, and satirical writer. He was a major intellectual figure in the Victorian era, often called the "Sage of Chelsea" and regarded by contemporaries as the "undoubted head of English letters" and a secular prophet.

He was born in Scotland, into a strict Calvinist family, and died in London at the age of 85. Carlyle's writings influenced literature, history, and social thought with a passionate, idiosyncratic style that blended philosophy, history, and moral critique.

I only knew him for his one sentence zingers, but learned this weekend that he wrote volumes. His three-volume The French Revolution: A History has been called a "a masterpiece of historical writing." Carlyle's work directly influenced Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

In 1841 he published a collection of his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in which he argued that great individuals (heroes) shape history. In our post-modern era, we tend to focus on their feet of clay. His six-volume bio of Friedrich II of Prussia was published in 1858-65, who must have evidently been a hero of his.

Carlyle's satrical, philosophic novel Sartor Resartus is so strikingly original that I'm thinking of writing a blog post about it. It's full title: Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books. The novel is a hybrid of fiction, autobiography, and social commentary. Its Latin title translates to "The Tailor Re-tailored" (or "The Tailor Patched"). The premise actually sounds hilarious. It's available at Project Gutenberg.

I was only intending to write a very brief intro to a boatload of quotes, but thought you may find him worth knowing better. Carlyle criticized the "machinery" of modern industrial society, laissez-faire economics, and what he saw as moral decay. He championed strong leadership, work ethic, and spiritual renewal. He profoundly shaped Victorian culture, with admirers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and remains studied for his prose style and role in Romanticism-to-Victorian transitions.

Though Carlyle is included in Hammerton's Outline of Great Books, he is not covered in 501 Great Writers, edited by Julian Patrck.

Without further adieu, a small collection of quotes from Carlyle.

Bust of Carlyle in Chelsea Library

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years. (EdNote: Especially now with Polymarket.)

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.

Silence is as deep as eternity; speech, shallow as time.

The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

* * *

Do you find Carlyle stimulating? Leave a note in the comments.

An Outline of Great Books: The Best Ten Cents I Ever Spent

2026-06-27T12:59:15.307-05:00

This past week I was triggered by a New York Times article titled, The Books Times Readers Are Most Excited About This Summer. The subhead reiterates. "As summer kicks off, here are the new books that our readers say they’re most eager to dive into."

When I see articles like this, my first thought is, "How many of these books will stand the test of time?" It seems to me that since there are so many truly great books from the world's great writers that most of us have never read, why not spent your summer reading a few of the great works from the past that have shaped our minds and our world? It's just so "modern" to ever be chasing "the latest shiny new toys."

The Best Ten Cents I Ever Spent

In 1982 or '83 I stopped at the yard sale of someone who was clearly educated. This was in the vicinty of Hamline Unversity in St. Paul. They were selling books by the bag, ten books for a dollar.

One of the the books I acquired was a battered copy of the 1936 Outline of Great Books, edited by Sir J. A. Hammerton, an ambitious attempt to make the world's classic literature accessible to ordinary readers. Rather than reproducing the complete texts, it provides substantial outlines, summaries, and excerpts from approximately 250 of the Western world's most important works in history, philosophy, science, religion, poetry, biography, travel, and criticism.

Hammerton's project was an attempt to give readers a guided tour of civilization's intellectual heritage. These were the days before television and long before the internet.

Click to enlarge

For me, it was a useful tool for broadening my education. In Sherwood Wirt's You Can Tell the World, he begins by emphasizing our need (he is addressing Christian writers, but his admonition applies to all writers) to understand the great minds and read the great books if we are aiming to influence the world. Outline of Great Books is thus a tool for becoming aware of the important players in the various scholarly disciplines. It's more than a Cliff's Notes version of the great ideas and themes of Western literature. It is comprised of excerpts from their actual writings. A person living in a small farming town might never have access to Aristotle, Dante, Gibbon, Goethe, Cervantes, or Tolstoy, but they could obtain a familiarity with their ideas and writings here.

What I find especially interesting is that the book no doubt inspired people to read the originals. Many families owned only a few dozen books. Outline of Great Books functioned almost like a literary map. You could read a 10–20 page condensation of a work and decide whether you wanted to pursue the full text.

The work belongs to a larger "outline" movement of the early twentieth century, alongside books like The Outline of History and other educational compendia that sought to democratize knowledge. Will and Ariel Durant released the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization around this same time, a history in more layman's terms than academic.

Outline of Great Books reflects a worldview that was common among educators of the era: An educated person should possess at least a working acquaintance with the great books that shaped Western civilization. Sadly, that assumption has largely disappeared today.

I won't deny that the book has limitations. It's focus is primarily on the great books of Western civilization, and even the section on religion omits the religions of other regions of the world. Nevertheless, it's an impressive compendium and I've pulled it off the shelf more than a few times over the years. (In fact, just two weeks ago I pulled it out to see what scientists were covered, and specifically to check out which of Sir Isaac Newton's works were cited.

It's interesting who is included and excluded in a volume such as this. Also, I'm curious if books like this will ever be published again. Everything people want can be found somewhere on the Internet now, it seems. If you can't find it, you ask Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT or some other LLM.

What interests people today seems to be podcasts of contemporaries talking about their contemporary writing and contemporary history, so that Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Carlyle, Hume, Schopenhauer, Goethe and the like are now relics. Who reads Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire any more? We've been told we are now living it, but what really happened in Rome 1600-1700 years ago that resulted in its downfall?

The real point I want to make, though, is how I found this gem for 10 cents. It was a treasure at a bargain price. If your eyes are open, there are probably countless overlooked treasures all around us. When it comes to books, library sales and used book stores are repositories of riches. Open your eyes.

Whispers of Grief and Independence: Nahar Trina on Toni Morrison, Flash Fiction, and Rooted Displacement

2026-06-26T09:37:06.239-05:00

This is a Part 2 of my interview with Nahar Trina.

On Toni Morrison's Sula
EN: You translated Toni Morrison’s novel Sula into Bengali. What drew you to this particular book, and what challenges did you face in carrying Morrison’s rich, poetic language, cultural nuances, and emotional depth from English into Bengali? How did the process of translating her work influence your own writing, especially in terms of voice, rhythm, or exploring themes like friendship, grief, and Black womanhood?

Nahar Trina: Before translating Toni Morrison’s Sula, I was a devoted reader of her work, and I still am. By the time I began translating Sula , I had already published four translated books. Among them were two collections of children's stories featuring tales from home and abroad, and a translation of a short story collection for adults comprising works by some of the most celebrated authors in world literature. Another significant project was translating ‘Death to Life, Bangladesh’, a book by Jim McKinley based on the 1971 Liberation War of my motherland. The modest confidence I gained from translating these diverse books largely gave me the audacity to take on this particular novel by Toni Morrison.

Truth be told, I encountered obstacles at almost every turn while translating Sula. It is a reality that proficiency in the English language alone does not guarantee a successful literary translation. This is because language is intrinsically bound to culture. While it might be possible to break down linguistic barriers, scaling cultural walls often proves to be far more daunting. Added to this was Morrison's highly distinctive and peculiar prose style.

In any translation, I generally strive to prioritize the contextual essence first and then focus on the literal words. I strictly adhered to this approach for this novel as well. To readers of world literature, Toni Morrison is a deeply revered figure. She possesses a narrative style entirely her own—one that is simultaneously intricate and mesmerizing. The more adept a translator is at dissecting the spellbinding nature of Morrison's language, the more lucid the core narrative becomes in translation. Personally, I believe attempting to translate her work is an act of sheer audacity, as her writing demands immense effort. When dealing with such challenging texts, a piece of advice from Gabriel García Márquez serves as a brilliant strategy: he noted that the easiest way to truly understand a foreign book is to translate it. My desire to comprehend Morrison's writing on a deeper level, combined with my growing fascination with her work, encouraged me to display this audacity. Furthermore, I felt that introducing the readers of my native language to the creation of such a rare and monumental literary figure would be immensely enriching. This thought also fueled my courage to translate Sula.

Moreover, as a translator, I felt that Sula had the power to create a profound impact on Bengali readers in various ways. Although published around 1973, its appeal remains timeless —especially for women in a society like ours, where women are still compelled to live within patriarchal structures. Here, a woman's personal freedom is often subjected to ridicule, and speaking of sexual autonomy is considered almost sacrilegious. Among the four central women in Sula, except for Nel Wright, the other three were remarkably advanced in terms of personal independence—especially Sula herself. The way Sula voiced her longing to live as an independent entity in such a hostile, prejudice-ridden era decades ago makes her journey even more deserving of recognition today. Through Sula, perhaps the seeds can be sown for readers to aspire to—not lawlessness—but a truthful, independent existence. This vision heavily influenced my decision to translate the book.

Another compelling reason was the novel's depiction of good versus evil. The tension between these two elements revolves around the core narrative. Yet, there is no overt attempt to explicitly label what is good or what is bad. None of the major characters bother to justify their actions or engage in rigorous self-defense. Their lives simply unfold like flowing water or the passage of time. Morrison leaves the judgment of good and evil, sin and virtue, entirely to the readers. Furthermore, it is impossible not to fall in love with the profound friendship between two individuals evolving from girlhood to womanhood that lies at the very heart of the book. The temptation to share my own profound admiration for this work with Bengali-speaking readers played a definitive role in translating Sula. Ultimately, as to how much her work has influenced me as an author, I believe that is for my readers to judge.

Your English-Language Debut

EN: Your recent English-language debut, Fleeting Impressions, is a collection of flash fiction exploring grief, belonging, and the quiet power of language. What inspired you to move into flash fiction for this book, and how does it connect to or differ from the stories in your Bengali collections like Studio Apartment (which won the Ekushey Book Fair award)?

Nahar Trina: The biggest inspiration behind writing the flash fiction pieces in Fleeting Impressions was the desire to capture the profound depth hidden within transient, momentary emotions. In this genre, the unwritten rule of “show, don't tell” deeply attracts me. This form allows the narrative of an entire lifetime to be distilled into just a few lines. A fleeting image, a sudden silence, or an unfinished sentence—each becomes as powerful as a full-length story. Due to displacement and geographical relocation, the fragmentation that seeps into life, the sudden stirrings of memory, or the soft shadows of grief—these emotions often materialize more vividly through brief, sharp, and silent prose rather than lengthy descriptions. Flash fiction has taught me to harness the power of that silence. This minimalist form has instilled a sense of discipline in me; here, the weight of every single word and the quietness of every pause matters. It feels like a distillation of emotions through language.

There is both a bridge and a distinction between this work and my Bengali stories. The stories in ‘Studio Apartment’, which was selected as the best short story collection in the Pencil Publications Talent Hunt Competition at the Ekushey Book Fair in 2020, are comparatively longer, character-driven, and allowed me the time to carefully craft the atmosphere. (On a side note regarding my other works, the children's story collection ‘Vindeshi Goppo’ (2023) was published after winning an award in the Ekushey Book Fair manuscript competition, and my first prose book, ‘GoddoCollage’ (2026), was published after being selected in a manuscript competition organized by Kitab-e Publications of West Bengal, India). In my Bengali books, I could seamlessly utilize the intimacy and comfort that our mother tongue naturally provides.

On the other hand, since English is an acquired language for me—a process that is still very much ongoing—writing in it requires a high degree of conscious effort and caution, which is never the case with Bengali. Spontaneity possesses a unique strength of its own, which is quite evident in my Bengali stories, and I am consistently striving to bring that same fluidity into my English writing. I hope readers will notice that very effort to find a rhythm within the English language in Fleeting Impressions.

Yet, a deep thread connects both books—they both attempt to explore the quiet, internal landscapes of human beings. Grief, loneliness, the tug-of-war of memories, and the experience of changing homes—all of these themes return in both languages, albeit in different forms. Alongside presenting narratives in elaborate detail, flash fiction has taught me that not all stories need to be spoken aloud; many stories can be whispered. And sometimes, it is within those whispers that the truest emotions are captured.

On Legacy, Bridges, and the Future

EN: Looking at your journey—from editing Golpopath to publishing in both Bengal and international platforms—what do you hope your body of work contributes to Bengali literature and to the broader South Asian diasporic conversation? What are you working on or dreaming about next?

Nahar Trina: My journey from editing to my own creative writing—has been a continuous process of learning and exploration. My involvement in the Bengali literary world is not just as an author; for a long time, I served as both an editor and a writer for three literary webzines: Porua, Shishukagoj, and Golpopath, (though the publications for Porua and Shishukagoj have now ceased). This experience taught me that editing is not merely about selecting texts or proofreading spellings; it is about carefully nurturing a writer's voice, clarifying their vision, and building a bridge of dialogue with the reader.

Conversely, my role in the English medium is different—there, I am primarily an author. When writing in English, I find that the language provides a certain necessary distance, opening up opportunities for analysis, structure, and connection with a global audience. Furthermore, working in English allows me to regularly learn from international editors. They evaluate a piece of writing based strictly on its literary merit rather than personal acquaintance, which I find immensely inspiring. When an article or story requires edits prior to publication, the warmth, sincerity, and professionalism they display not only help me grow but also leave me deeply impressed. The experience in the Bengali literary circle is often quite different, where a writer’s familiarity or personal network sometimes takes precedence over the actual quality of the text. This occasionally confronts me with ethical questions as a writer. Nevertheless, both contrasting environments have taught me invaluable lessons and have positively shaped my literary journey.

Flag of Bangladesh

When it comes to the broader discourse of Bengali literature and the South Asian diaspora, there are countless talented Bengali writers making significant contributions. I do not know how far my own voice will resonate in that grand space. However, as an author, my only desire is that whatever I write should serve as a harmonious bridge between these two worlds. I want the memories, the soil, the complex relationships, and the lived experiences of Bangladesh to reach global readers; at the same time, I wish for the isolation, the wordlessness, and the identity crises of diasporic life to be translated back to Bengali-speaking audiences. For me, the dialogue between these two realities is paramount.

Currently, I am working on a few short stories, translations, and long-form essays where the boundaries of language, memory, and identity blur into one another. My dream is to create a body of work in both Bengali and English that offers readers not just a narrative, but an immersive experience—where roots and displacement, home and exile, memory and the present moment coexist. Additionally, one of my primary goals next is to translate my debut Bengali novel, which is set against a historical backdrop, into English. There are still so many stories waiting to be penned; writing is an endless, continuous journey. My only wish is to remain on this path as long as it brings me joy.

EN: May it ever be so. Thank you, Nahar, for sharing your story.

Read Nahar Trina's A Shoreless Abyss.

An Interview with Nahar Trina on Roots, Migration, and the Writer’s Soul--Part 1

2026-06-25T21:45:36.572-05:00

You might say I "discovered" Nahar Trina quite by accident. One morning I received an email asking for permission to translate my Imaginary Interview with Leo Tolstory into Bengali, the language of Bangladesh. I said yes, of course. It's one more example of how interconnected the global community has become in this technological era of wonders.

In her email signature she included three links, the first leading to books on Goodreads and the second to a Bengali collection of stories intriguingly titled Whispers of Fireflies. The third link carried me to Galpopath.com, the Bengali publication where my fictional Tolstoy interview now resides.

Interested in learning more, I Googled and found her painfully beautiful story A Shoreless Abyss, which left me breathless.

Nahar Trina is a bilingual writer, literary translator, and book artist whose work bridges Bengali and English, memory and migration. Born in Bangladesh and now based in the U.S., she has authored seven books in Bengali and recently published her English-language debut, Fleeting Impressions, a flash fiction collection exploring grief, belonging, and the quiet power of language. Her work has appeared in both print and digital platforms, including international literary magazines.

On Beginnings and Early Influences

EN: Born in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and starting your writing journey around 2008 through community blogs and forums, what initially drew you to writing? Were there particular books, writers, or life experiences in Bangladesh that shaped your voice early on?

Nahar Trina: The chapter of my writing that began on community blogs and forums actually traces its roots back to my childhood and school days. Along with writing for school wall magazines and annual periodicals, I regularly participated in yearly essay competitions. My initiation into the world of writing was fueled by the immense encouragement of my parents and my elder sister. My family always inspired us to pursue extracurricular activities alongside our school studies. Among my siblings, some excelled in dance, some in music, and others in recitation. While dance and music were not my cup of tea, I did a lot of poetry recitation during my school years, and I wasn't too bad at it. The rewards for these achievements came in the form of books. Moreover, as we excelled academically, a steady stream of books entered our house as prizes. My siblings and I received so many books that we had a dedicated bookshelf just for them.

My parents played a monumental role in fostering this love for reading. My father, in particular, had an extraordinary passion for books. He spent a significant amount of time in Europe for his teaching profession. When returning to Bangladesh, instead of bringing back materialistic luxuries, he would bring heaps of rare books. I share a very fond memory from my childhood: when my father returned home after completing his PhD, two trucks loaded with goods arrived in front of our house a few days later. Many curious neighbors gathered at our doorstep to see what my father had brought in such massive quantities. To their utter amazement, what unloaded from the trucks were mountains of books! And it wasn’t just literature on hydrology, the subject of his research; there were rare gems of world literature.

Our most valuable asset was a house filled with books. Thinking about the authors of those books filled me with a sense of profound wonder. It struck me how books could be infinitely more valuable than any luxury item, and I used to think that the people who wrote them must belong to some ethereal, mystical world. Perhaps it was the magnetic pull of that very world that eventually drew me into the realm of writing. Thus, it wasn’t a single event, a specific book, or a lone author that shaped me; rather, it was the entire familial environment, the abundance of books, and countless authors who subtly influenced me behind the scenes. And when it comes to my emergence as a writer and the publication of my books, the person whose encouragement has been the greatest is my brother, Dr. Moniruzzaman.

On Migration and Diasporic Experience

EN: You’ve lived between Bangladesh and the United States. What are the primary themes that run through your work? How has your own experience of moving to the U.S. and building a life in Illinois changed or deepened your writing?

Nahar Trina: The deeper a tree's roots penetrate the soil, the stronger its bond with the earth becomes. Human beings are much like trees; the land where one is born, and where childhood and adolescence unfold, establishes a profound connection with the soul. I moved to the United States in my youth, having already spent a significant portion of my formative years in Bangladesh. Had I come here as a young child, perhaps the homeland I left behind would not constantly envelop me the way it does now. In my thoughts, my birthplace naturally surfaces, with or without reason, and its imprint is inevitably left upon my writing. This is an invisible pull of a thread that seems to reside, more or less, within almost all diaspora writers. If I may be so bold—as they are revered literary figures, and mentioning them as an obscure, emerging writer might seem audacious—I would like to look at Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, or Jhumpa Lahiri. They are all diasporic writers, even though their specific experiences and positions differ. Yet, if you notice, their native lands frequently peek through their work. The execution may vary, but the signs of cultural duality are clear. No matter where we settle after moving away from our roots, that primal pull remains, whether loudly or in whispers. My own writing bears that distinct mark.

That being said, it is not as though living in the United States has left no impression on my work. It certainly has. If the absolute prerequisites for writing are freedom of expression and peace, the United States offers them to me in full measure. Here, I have the liberty to write candidly whatever I wish to write. In my homeland, that was often not possible. Especially with the kind of writing I do lately, various obstacles, ideological constraints, and taboos might have turned into barriers. Here, I can write without having to worry about those constraints, which creates a peaceful environment—and as everyone knows, 'peace' is a vital component for a writer. This flow of free speech and peace helps me immerse myself in my work.

Back home, even when I could write something in my own way, the chances of seeing it published were often uncertain. Various ideological sensitivities and institutional hesitations sometimes made publication more difficult than writing itself. Here, in the United States, the freedom to write is accompanied by the freedom to publish—and that combination has had a profound impact on my creative life.

At the same time, the experience of living in this country and interacting with the locals teaches me to focus deeply on the subtleties and psychological depth of my writing.

On Bilingual Writing and Translation

EN: As a bilingual writer who works in both Bengali and English, and as a literary translator (including your translation of Toni Morrison’s Sula), how do you navigate the two languages? Are there things you can express more easily in Bengali than in English, or vice versa, and what has translation taught you about your own creative process?

Nahar Trina: There are many bilingual writers in the world who are immensely successful. My journey as a bilingual writer, however, is relatively recent. Most of my previous writing in English was confined to the pages of my personal diaries. Personally, I like to think that if the Bengali language is my maternal home, English is like my in-laws' home. Both homes are dear to me, and both are essential. Therefore, my movement between Bengali and English is not a conscious effort to maintain a balance; rather, you could call it an attempt to capture the natural rhythm of my current life through my writing.

I think, feel, and write in both languages. It is as if the two languages open different doors within me. Bengali offers me the warmth of a mother’s womb, memories, and the raw scent of the soil and its people. On the other hand, English extends its hand as a bridge to close the gap of distance, providing analysis, structure, and sometimes, a necessary detachment. Which emotion flows more easily into which language depends entirely on the very nature of that feeling.

There are certain things that feel incomplete if not expressed in Bengali—such as the bond with one's mother and motherland, the village, childhood, deep wounds, and nostalgia. In these realms, Bengali feels much more tangible and visceral to me. Conversely, certain thoughts, especially abstract ideas, philosophical musings, or the subtle layers of complex emotions, sometimes attain a sharper clarity in English. Both languages grant me distinct depths, and I continue my pursuit of writing within these two dimensions.

More than anything, translation has taught me humility in my creative process. While translating a novel like Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula’, I realized that language is not merely a collection of words; it is history, the repository of a community's culture and lifestyle, their pain, their shadows, their silence, and occasionally, their resistance. Re-creating a sentence in another language makes you realize that to carry the original author's voice, you must step back and quiet your own voice as a translator. This experience helps me become more cautious, attentive, and restrained in my own original writing.

Translation has shown me that every language possesses its own inherent ethics, and writing has taught me that standing between two languages means carrying the light of two different worlds simultaneously. Furthermore, when my original writing faces a creative drought, translation serves as a vital exit route, keeping my momentum alive. This is precisely why I rarely have to grapple with the dreaded ‘writer's block.’

TO BE CONTINUED

Getting Kicks on Route 66

2026-06-24T21:38:31.137-05:00

Officially decommissioned in 1985. old Route 66 (the "Mother Road") is no longer a single, continuous highway. However, roughly 85% of its 2,448-mile original alignment—running from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California—is still drivable today, preserved via state highways and local roads. The photos here are courtesy of America's Photographer Gary Firstenberg, who is travelling the Mother Road as we celebrate America's 250th birthday.

The first portion of this historic road was paved with cobblestones the day after the Colonies attained their independence in September 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Once subservience to Britain was in the rearview mirror, their eyes turned West.

OK, that last paragraph was fiction, but Route 66 is not. Here's proof.

One of America's great highways.

Another is Highway 61, the Blues Highway.

Sometime soon we'll take a little trip down that one as well.

Thank you, Gary.

See more by Gary Firstenberg:

www.firstinphoto.smugmug.com

Want to Know Your Dad Better? Ask Him Questions.

2026-06-22T06:18:54.654-05:00

Final resting place for my father's ashes.

A FATHER'S DAY REFLECTION

My father's passing 20 years ago is still very fresh in my mind. A Father's Day NYTimes article brought these memories to mind.

The call came at three in the morning. Calls at three a.m. are seldom packed with good news. My mom wanted each of us, the four sons, to know that dad was in the Bradenton Hospital and was dying. Miraculously, three of us arrived at the Tampa Airport within a half hour of one another, having flown in from three different airports.

As I remember it (memory is always subject to being a little unreliable) Dad's heart had gone into a-fib, quivering at 300 beats per minute. Though we'd been told he was unconscious, when we arrived, he was actually awake, though intubated and couldn't talk initially.

Robert, my youngest brother, was there for the first few days but had to leave on Friday. On Saturday my brother Ron had a cold, and because Dad was vulnerable, Ron didn't come to the hospital that day. So it was Mom and I, taking turns being with Dad who at this point was quite exhausted.

I'd bought a Mad magazine that morning, in part because of a very early connection with my father. Mapletown, a suburb of Cleveland, was having a sidewalk sale and we'd all gone together to see what bargans we could find. Dad bought me my first bike, for $20, and we also got a whole box of back issues of Mad magazines for a dollar.

That Saturday in Bradenton Dad was weary, sometimes awake and sometimes sleeping, my mind grappling with things to say when he was half alert. At one point he initiated a conversation about the time he and Mom visited Susie and I in Mexico.

In the early summer of 1981 my parents visited us when we were working at an orphanage south of Monterrey. On one occasion the four of us took an afternoon to visit Horsetail Falls nearby. Dad and I went for a walk to explore a trail that ran along a creek below the falls. I was a little ahead him. I jumped off a wall of rocks down to the creek bed and continued along the path when I heard a loud thump and a groan. Where Dad jumped down, the path was slippery below. His feet slid forward out from under him and he slammed to the ground, knocking the wind out of him. As I leaned over him, he regained his breath and I helped him to his feet. He was in pain, rubbing his lower back, but no broken bones. He mentioned that a rock must have been sticking out of the ground which struck his lower back muscles, producing a deep muscle bruise.

25 years later, at the Bradenton Hospital, Dad said that the place where that rock bruised him still hurt.

I loved my dad, but in retrospect I wish I'd seen the following article from the New York Times before that day. There are a lot of questions I wish I'd asked. I'm sharing this with the hope that you'll take advantage of the opportunity to get to know your own dad better while you can. When he's on the "other side" it's too late. This goes for your mom, too.

Want to Know Your Dad Better? Ask Him These 25 Questions.
This Father’s Day, open up a new channel of communication.

Follow this link and copy all the questions that may be useful for you:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/18/well/family/fathers-day-questions.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20260622&instance_id=177573&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=123953394&segment_id=221885&user_id=c5de7e4b28d36066d31878b87617b3c2

Burnout

2026-06-21T20:44:58.823-05:00

This is something I wrote to someone who went through a very hard experience which, for lack of a better word, has been labelled burnout.

Sounds like you went through a major crash and burn. Glad you found your way through.

I think burnout can have a range of dynamics at play. My brother, who is a psychologist, would probably say that burnout occurs when we get our work/life balance out of balance.

I like Richard Nelson Bolles' Three Boxes of Life model. Many people separate school, work and play in this manner: They go to school/college first, then work hard so they can play when they retire. Bolles recommends an alternative. He says we learn for life, work for life and play for life simultaneously.

I believe the Judeo/Christian concept of Sabbath is, among other things, specifically designed to keep us from getting burned out. Perhaps part of the problem for some could be their consumerism convictions. I need one more boat, one more ATV, one more car, a bigger house, which all creates extra stress when you have to moonlight to pay for it all.

In 1993 I worked full time, wrote a book and a Hollywood screenplay for a Disney producer. My wife wanted me to go house hunting with her and it literally made me suicidal for a weekend (Eastertime). I said my deadline for the book was August 1 and I would look then, but she could house hunt with a friend. I was aware of my limits. We signed paperwork for the house on Aug 7 and yes, moved before winter. I finished the screenplay in Oct but never repeated that year again. Just because we CAN accomplish more doesn't mean we SHOULD always push the speed limit. (I'm talking to my self here.)

Perhaps this is one reason God included the Fourth Commandment among the Ten. The Sabbath was not intended as a burden but as a gift. The God who made us knows our limits. He understands that machines can run continuously, but people cannot. Rest is not a sign of weakness. It is an acknowledgment that we are creatures, not the Creator. The Sabbath reminds us that life is sustained not merely by our labor, but by God's provision.

Burnout often comes from believing that everything depends on us. The Sabbath reminds us that it doesn't. For one day each week, we are invited to stop striving, stop producing, and remember that God is still God while we rest. The Fourth Commandment is not a restriction on our freedom. It is a protection against our tendency to drive ourselves into the ground.

Related Link

Richard Bolles' Three Boxes of Life

The Official 2022 Duluth Dylan Fest Trivia Contest: Let's Play 40 Questions

2026-06-20T15:50:13.035-05:00

The Official 2022 Duluth Dylan Fest Trivia Contest
For a number of years we included a trivia night as part of Duluth Dylan Fest. For those events we always created multiple choice tests so the general public would have at least a small chance of a getting batch of correct answers. Not so with this trivia contest. This a test for the diehards, and not an SAT.

For the record, I stumbled across this in my Dylan folder and realize I'd never shared it. In retrospect, it could have been a lot harder. I'm sure many of you will find most of this pretty easy. Have fun traipsing down memory lane.

ROUND ONE

1. Who is the bass player who has become Bob Dylan's longest running sideman? [Bonus: What year did he begin playing on the Never Ending Tour?]

2. What year did Robert Zimmerman graduate from Hibbing High School?

3. Who was the Duluth Disc Jockey that Bob Dylan mentions in his book Chronicles, Vol. 1?

4. Which Duluth hospital was Bob Dylan born in and on what date?

5. Which Dylan album featured Scarlet Rivera with her sizzling violin work?

6. What Dylan album was released on 9/11, the day the Twin Towers fell?

7. When the album Tempest came out, many people thought it would be his last studio album because its title was the same as what?

8. During the pandemic, Dylan released a 17-minute song about the assassination of JFK. What was the title of that song?

9. What Hibbing sweetheart is most likely the one Bob refers to in his song "Girl from the North Country."

10. Where did young Robert Zimmerman attend kindergarten?

ROUND TWO

11. According to a Fond-du-Luth security guard who used to play Monopoly with him at Louis Kemp's house, what was Bobby Zimmerman’s favorite Monopoly piece?

12. The line “But even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” is from what song?

13. Woody Guthrie was one of Bob Dylan’s early influences and a hero to him. What was the name of the Woodie Guthrie book Bob used to carry around with him when he first went to New York?

14. Bob Dylan lived in Woodstock for a while. What was he doing while the Woodstock music festival was taking place in 1969? [No, he was not watching the moon landing.]

15. Dylan originally signed with Columbia Records and produced most of his studio albums with this label. Two of his albums in the mid-70's, however, were with another label. What was that label?

16. Who was the New York Times music critic credited with giving Bob Dylan his first major career boost?

17. Which album was the first to have one of Dylan’s own paintings on the cover?

18. Mick Jagger once called this Dylan’s greatest song. The opening lines make reference to the lynchings that took place here in Duluth just over a century ago. Name the song.

19. The song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" is about the assassination of what civil rights leader in 1963?

20. In 2022 the BBC censored this great civil rights song because it has the N-word in it. What was the name of the song?

ROUND THREE

21. What childhood friend did Dylan ask to head up his unconventional 1970’s concert tour known as the Rolling Thunder Revue?

22. Dylan’s song "All Along the Watchtower" was made famous by Jimi Hendrix. What Dylan album did the song originally appear on?

23. For several years after his motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan stopped touring or doing big concerts. In 1971, his friend George Harrison invited him to perform in a benefit concert for what country?

24. The Live Aid concert was one of the largest productions ever to use the influence of rock stars for fund raising purposes. The two guitarists who performed with Dylan were from what famous rock group?

25. In 1979 Bob Dylan announced that he had become a follower of Jesus. His first album as a Christian was titled what?

26. Dylan won an Oscar for this song. It was written for the movie Wonder Boys. What is the name of the song?

27. What year did Dylan win his Nobel Prize for literature?

28. Sometime Bob has been called a jokerman. The song "Jokerman" is the opening track on what 1980s album?

29. Half the tracks on this gold album were recorded in Minneapolis because Dylan didn’t like the results of some of the recordings in New York. What was the name of the album?

30. The Minnesota musicians were not credited on the album cover for their work on the record because the album sleeves had been printed already. It wasn’t till more than 40 years later they got recognized when the Bootleg outtakes of this album were released. What was the name of this Bootleg set?

ROUND FOUR

31. Who was the Grateful Dead songwriter whom Bob Dylan collaboratd with on Dylan’s 2009 album Together Through Life?

32. What is the name of the only Dylan song that begins with a V?

33. What song does the line, “I’m not the one you need” appear in?

34. This album is comprised of songs written and recorded during Dylan’s reclusive period in Woodstock. Members of The Band were invited there and over a period of time created/recorded seemingly countless songs, both whimsical and serious. What year was their double album The Basement Tapes officially released?

35. Levon Helm, drummer for The Band, wrote an autobiographical account of his life growing up and performing with the band. The title of his memoir was taken from the last track on disc 2 of the Basement Tapes. What was the name of that song and his book?

36. This album was Dylan’s first to hit #1 on the Billboard charts. What was the name of the album?

37. Bob Dylan is an artist and an author as well as singer/songwriter. What was the title of his first book?

38. What is the brand name for Bob Dylan’s whiskey company?

39. Bob Dylan’s uncles owned theaters in Hibbing. When he was growing up he enjoyed going to movies. What’s the name of the song that mentions Gregory Peck? The song appeared originally on Knocked Out Loaded and later appeared on his Greatest Hits, Volume 3.

40. The Answer, my friend, is what?

ANSWERS AT THE BOTTOM AFTER THESE DYLAN PAINTINGS

"Don't Look Back" -- Limited edition giclee print.

Blonde On Blonde (NFS)

* * * * *

1. Tony Garnier, 1999. 2. 1959 3. Pat Cadigan 4. St. Mary’s – May 24, 1941 5. Desire 6. Love and Theft 7. Shakespeare’s last play 8. Murder Most Foul 9. Echo Helstrom 10. Nettleton School, Duluth 11. Scottish Terrier 12. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) 13. Bound for Glory 14. Packing his bags to perform at the Isle of Wight concert the following week. 15. Asylum Records 16. Robert Shelton 17. Self Portrait 18. Desolation Row 19. Medgar Evers 20. Hurricane. 21. Louis Kemp 22. John Wesley Harding. 23. Bangladesh 24. The Rolling Stones. (Keith Richards, Ron Wood) 25. Slow Train Coming 26. Things Have Changed 27. 2016 28. Infidels 29. Blood on the Tracks 30. More Blood, More Tracks 31. Robert Hunter 32. Visions of Johanna 33. It Ain’t Me, Babe 34. 1975 35. This Wheel’s On Fire 36. Planet Waves. 37. Tarantula 38. Heaven’s Door 39. Brownsville Girl 40. Blowin’ in the Wind

* * * * *

Illustrations by the author.
Top of page: Famous mid-60s shot projected onto background of a 1970s illustrated ink on illustration board mandala by Ed Newman inspired by Mark Tobey.

"Don't Look Back" painting, 36" x 24" acrylic and latex pigment on panel.

"Dylan II" by the author. One of my personal favorites.

"Blonde On Blonde", 12" x 24"

Flashback Friday: The Art of Jean Birkenstein

2026-06-19T20:01:51.446-05:00

This is a little late, but I’m still coming up for air after a whirlwind of activities this month. Jean Birkenstein (1926–2003) was a Jewish artist who, in the 1950s and ’60s, threw herself into the Civil Rights movement with courage and creativity. Married to a Black poet and living at the only non-white household on their block, she already stood out. But she went further: she opened her home as a safe, neutral space where members of Chicago’s leading gangs—the Vice Lords and the Cobras—could meet. While a teacher at Marshall High School on the city’s west side, she became an “ambassador” to the schools for those same gangs; the Vice Lords even made her a card-carrying member. She turned her house into a community center for them, an activity noted in a 1961 Jet magazine feature illustrated with her powerful paintings of African American and Native American slaves.

As an officer for CORE and the NAACP, Jean led numerous protests and sit-ins for open housing and against de facto segregation in Chicago’s public schools. Jet described her as “an artist with a profound respect for human dignity.” She was also a passionate animal lover who, when she passed, was buried in a pet cemetery.

The artist, a peer of Joan Mitchell and Edward Gorey, was mother to journalist Robin Washington. Her work is currently on display at a Chicago arts center and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth till the end of June.

The paintings on this page were originally presented in a 2019 Jean Birkestein exhibition at the Duluth Art Institute and shared on this blog.

To fully appreciate this show, and by extension Robin Washington, Birkenstein's son and a former editor of the Duluth News Tribune, it's helpful to understand the context of Jean's work.

The1961 Jet magazine feature article about her was illustrated with her paintings of African American and Native American slaves.

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth meets at 835 W. College Street--a hop, skip and a jump from UMD.

Part of the exhibit includes clippings of Jean's activities outside the studio.

Robin Washington as a youth. (I wasn't the first artist
to paint my children.)

In some ways the DAI show was more of a love tribute to a mom who was more than a mom, a remarkable woman who sought to make a difference in the broken world she saw around her. Washington remembers being five and six years old going to sit-ins with his mother.

Jean's paintings reflect her passions, Robin himself being one of them.

Much more can be said, but I will let some of the paintings do some talking.

* * * *
Related Links
My Mother’s Fight for Education Rights: The Story of Jean Birkenstein Washington
A brief bio As Remembered by Robin Washington

Throwback Thursday: How to Write Like Bob Dylan

2026-06-18T07:59:34.057-05:00

June 2016

Every once in a while you need to organize your files so you can find documents when you want them, otherwise you'll be overwhelmed by the clutter. It takes time we usually don't have, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

While sorting files from my desktop this weekend (June 2016) I came across a document titled how to write like an expert. I wasn't sure if these were notes of my own making or notes scribbled down from another source, so I was hesitant to post them. It did, however, stir in me a desire to tackle the challenge of creating a blog post on how to write like Bob Dylan.

First, though, I thought I'd check to see if the topic had already been covered, by Googling it. Lo and behold, ScribblePreach has a post on this very theme, and after I read it the case was closed. I didn't think I'd top it, so I've decided to share it.

The blog's creator is Nicholas McDonald, author of the book Faker. What he's done is assemble quotes about writing from various Dylan interviews or writings. In short, it's a selection of observations drawn from Dylan's own words. The examples (comments in blue) are my additions to Mr. McDonald's 2013 post.

Bob Dylan: 11 Writing Tips
1. “It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.”
eg.: "Farewell Angelina."

2. “You can go anywhere in daily life and have your ears open and hear something, either something someone says to you or something you hear across the room. If it has resonance, you can use it in a song.”
e.g.: "The judge is comin' in, everybody rise" from Nettie Moore.

3. “That’s another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody who ain’t there. That’s the best way. That’s the truest way.”
e.g.: "Blowin' in the Wind"

4. “Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect… you’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.”
e.g.; "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry."

5. “Let’s face it. You’re either serious about what you’re doing or you’re not serious about what you’re doing. And you can’t mix the two.”
e.g.: "Million Dollar Bash"

6. “The environment to write the song is extremely important. It has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing.”
e.g. "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

7. “It’s not a good idea and it’s bad luck to look for life’s guidance to popular entertainers. It’s bad luck to do that. No one should do that. Popular entertainers are fine, there’s nothing the matter with that but as long as you know where you’re standing and what ground you’re on, many of them, they don’t know what they’re doing either.”
Examples abound.

8. “The best songs to me — my best songs — are songs which were written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.”
Some good stuff in this Bob Dylan Song Talk Interview.

9. “In my mind it’s never really been seriously a profession… It’s been more confessional than professional.”
e.g.: "Every Grain Of Sand."

10. “It is the first line that gives the inspiration and then it’s like riding a bull. Either you just stick with it, or you don’t.”
e.g.: Simple Twist of Fate; Where Are You Tonight? -- This is similar to the advice Paul Simon gave about song writing on the documentary about making Graceland. Begin with one true statement and follow it forward.

11. I couldn’t find the quote, but my writing professor in Oxford once told me Dylan always tried to take a classical story and add something totally unexpected to it. For example, in his song “As I went out one morning” Dylan takes the “Damsel in Distress” tale and adds his own twist – the Damsel is a prostitute. I’ll give 10 cents to whoever can track that quote down.
e.g.: "Seven Curses."

Source: Scribble Preach. <<This link is no longer active.>>

My Thoughts

The best advice is found in the first admonition. Find your own voice. Don't try to write like Dylan. If you were to succeed, you'll be known as "the guy who can write like Dylan." Wouldn't you rather be known as you? Picasso could paint like Rembrandt as a teen, but had he only painted like Rembrandt, would he have broken the new terrain that liberated art from its moorings?

Study, listen, learn... and discover what you're capable of by doing it.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Celebrate it while you can.

When Leo Tolstoy Went to Bangladesh

2026-06-17T20:45:44.998-05:00

One of the unexpected pleasures of writing is discovering that words have a life of their own.

You put them on paper (or more likely a computer screen), press "Publish," and they quietly disappear into the digital universe. Most of the time you never know where they go or whose eyeballs will encounter them.

A few months ago I received an email from Bangladesh.

Nahar Trina, an author, translator and editor of the Bengali literary webzine Golpopath, had stumbled across an old post on Ennyman's Territory: Imaginary Interviews: My Visit with Leo Tolstoy. She asked if she might translate it into Bengali so it could be shared with her readers.

How could I say no?

Her note was gracious:

"I thoroughly enjoyed reading 'Imaginary Interviews: My Visit with Leo Tolstoy' on your blog, Ennyman's Territory. I would love to share this wonderful piece with Bengali readers by translating it into my mother tongue, Bengali."

She explained that Golpopath is a completely non-commercial literary publication with a devoted readership and assured me the translation would be offered simply for the love of literature.

Recently she sent another message. The 98th issue of Golpopath had been published, and somewhere halfway around the world my imaginary conversation with the great Russian novelist had found a new audience—this time in Bengali.

There's something beautifully circular about that journey.

The publication included this photo of our "visit."

A Russian writer, imagined by an American blogger in Minnesota, translated by a Bengali author for readers in Bangladesh.

It's a reminder that stories ignore borders. They travel farther than passports, politics, and maps. They move from one language into another because someone recognizes an idea, a question, or a moment of humanity worth sharing.

For me, it actually takes me back to my very frst published story, "How Important Is Prayer?" After it was published in a paper called Youth, I received letters from three continents thanking me for the insights I shared, and how what I'd written touched their lives.

When the World Wide Web emerged in the 1990s, I created a website where I shared art and stories on my website. Before long my story Duel of the Poets was translated into Croatian. Other stories were translated into Russian and French. And two stories by my daughter, who was 12 at the time, were published in California and New Zealand.

As writers, we rarely know where our words will end up. Sometimes they stay close to home. Sometimes they wander farther than we ever will. An example of this idea is the heart of my story A Poem About Truth.

I'm grateful to Nahar Trina and the editors of Golpopath for giving my little literary experiment a second life in another language. And I'm reminded once again that the community of readers is much larger than we imagine.

Somewhere tonight, someone I will never meet may be reading an imaginary interview with Leo Tolstoy—in Bengali. Because words have wings.

I think Leo would smile.

Link to the Bengali version:

https://www.galpopath.com/2026/06/blog-post_257.html

Link to the original imagnary interview:

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/08/imaginary-interviews-my-visit-with-leo.html

Nahar Trina on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/20229982.Nahar_Trina