but wait, there's more

The delight of this self-selected circle of friends is that the most relevant comments come, each one contributing from his or her own perspective. And thus are some of our defects of understanding repaired, in part, by the sweet-tempered or caustic corrections of others.

I realized in retrospect how much I left out of yesterday's post...it occurred to me, driving home, that I left work singing "Visions of Johanna" (which I had not yet encountered in the website quotation) because the lyrics, probably brought to mind by the earlier "Blonde on Blonde" reference, had rhymed with my thoughts about the New York Times review of Dubus' novel The Garden of Last Things (which the Times, in its own deliberate art of juxtaposition, had put next to the photograph of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum of San Francisco, based on the shape of the Hebrew word for "paradise").

I had also begun the day looking up the lyrics to Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" (which I just now mistyped "A Chance Is Gonna Come") because the song had been on my mind since last Wednesday and was quoted at the end of the news story about Bob Dylan's remarks re Obama.

That in turn reminded me of the lyrics "Cupid don't draw back your bow / Sam Cooke didn't know what I know," which I soon enough learned were from the Wallflowers' song "Sleepwalker," written by Bob Dylan's son Jakob.

A most curious set of lyrics, which I recommend highly, though the tune is pretty good also or I wouldn't have remembered that catchy two-line hook.

After I had written yesterday's coincidence post, I checked my e-mail one last time before shutting down the laptop, to find the day's final e-mail, from the Live Nation subscription list, had the subject line "Jakob Dylan: hear new album before it goes on sale!"

Then I went home and opened Geert Mak's In Europe at random, only to find I had opened to the two pages devoted to the V-2 rocket. (Those who came in late will just have to have someone else gloss that for them.) As I had on finding the new e-mail from the self-promoter replacing the ancient e-mail I had just victoriously deleted from the same person, I actually did lol.

To borrow André Gregory's observation regarding the dwindling audiences for traditional theatre, the reason I read few novels is that I am doing such a good job of living a reasonably interesting piece of fiction. Every day I write the book.

and we'll throw in the ginsu knives free if you buy the Pocket Fisherman

What are today's late-night infomercial lines that have passed into the language? I have heard "But wait, there's more" and the product names from people who couldn't possibly have seen the original ubiquitous ads after midnight except on YouTube.

Anyway, I welcome a new Friend (albeit a longtime friend), valatree, whose inaugural post is actually a comment on my coincidence post, so I copy it here forthwith:

"I'd rather have a soothsayer or aboriginal grandma to interpret my coincidences for me. It'd give me something to work with. Something to ponder and reinterpret. Because there's no way I'm going to just accept someone else's interpretation. But yeah, coincidences used to happen to me several times a day but come to think of it, I'm in a dry spell.

The crop circles really are from spaceships setting down. Why do all these alien races have such boring designs on the bottoms of their flying saucers? Can't they do an Irish knot or something? I guess it's supposed to look mechanical. I like what you said about genial skepticism. I actually do like to think maybe non-earthlings have been stopping by."

two citations

and though these four-posts-a-day days guarantee that no one will read the longer ones (which might be part of the plan...) it occurs to me again that readers of this blog might enjoy Robert Cheatham + Public Domain's online magazine Perforations which can be navigated to with difficulty at www.pd.org/ (click "text" and then "perforations"...you probably wouldn't discover it if you didn't already know what you were looking for....)

and a very different group of you (with a few significant overlaps) will really like Erik Davis' report on the "Visionary Hollywood Tour" he conducted on my birthday, which would have been the best birthday present ever if somebody had bought me a ticket to the West Coast, which no one did. Davis' previous post on Antero Alli was probably part of what got me to thinking about the many hard-to-believe interpretations of similar phenomena, in this case by someone who also engages in the sort of theatre espoused by Jerzy Grotowski. As always, Davis' extraordinary stuff is at www.techgnosis.com.