August 1 Friday roundup

In this week’s podcast episode, I looked at one of the strangest coincidences ever to happen to me, and what it means about how we might halt then undo the damage unfolding around us right now. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead of watching or listening, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

Given that the Tuesday post was about last week’s highly improbable and lovely synchronicity, I’ve decided to make this whole week Coincidence Week and tell you about another reunion, this one from 2017.

As I’ve mentioned on here before, midway through my undergraduate college career (1985-89, RIP), I needed to get a second job and work full-time to have any hope of finishing my degree. Everything still wound up a disaster anyway, in terms of money. But I did get that second job, and it was at the Georgetown Kemp Mill Records, part of a DC chain of now-vanished music stores.

I’d started going into that particular store in the fall of 1987, because they were selling tickets to Tom Waits’ Frank’s Wild Years tour, coming to Warner Theatre that October. And even though I was poor as dirt, that was a show I would’ve sold my shoes to see. (Reader, it was worth every penny.)

I kept stopping in at other times and wound up talking to one of the clerks, a guy named Andy, who liked both Dylan and Waits. It was rare for me to buy anything, but Andy and I became pals.

When we met, I was a nineteen-year-old unpublished aspiring writer. Just a few years older than me, he was a gifted pianist. He was also in a band that had once opened for the Ramones, which impressed me deeply at the time. Mostly we talked about music, movies, and literature. He lived to argue, and delighted in picking small fights, sometimes just for the sake of doing it. If I happened to say something he agreed with, he would argue with that, too.

We were clerks together until around the time I finished college, at which point he took off for Los Angeles. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1989 or 1990, before everyone was online. Long-distance telephone calls were expensive, and we were both broke. We lost touch. We had a chance to talk once a few years later, when he came to town on tour, playing keyboards for a blues guy whose name I’ve forgotten.

Some of my poetry got published in a literary journal, and I spent a year doing music criticism for a DC alt-weekly. But mostly, I just scrambled to make ends meet and to pay off my debts. In 1994, I finally zeroed out the balance I owed to the university and got my diploma, which left me with only medical debt and student loans.

My writing professors had generously encouraged me to keep writing. But at the time, I internalized it as me letting them down because I hadn’t already become famous. I wasn’t in New York; I didn’t know how to become anointed as a writer. The publishing world seemed very mysterious.

Though I’d wanted to be an author since elementary school, my dream of becoming a writer pretty much died. I spent the next decade doing other things.

But I still missed writing and eventually gave it another shot. I’ll tell you about that another day. Suffice it to say for now that I started doing journalism, and my first book came out in 2013. My second one, a history of concentration camps, was slated to come out in October 2017.

That was the year after Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature—an award that made some people very happy and others pretty angry. As a Dylan fan, I didn’t really have an opinion. I was mostly amused.

A minor kerfuffle unfolded when Dylan submitted his Nobel Prize speech in 2017 (he hadn’t attended the ceremony in person). The lecture was about novels that had influenced him as a child, one of which was Moby-Dick. Ben Greenman noted on Twitter that in the lecture, Dylan seemed to have invented a quote that didn’t appear in the book at all. His comment led me down a rabbit hole, in which it became apparent (to me, at least) that Dylan had cribbed most of the material about Moby-Dick in his Nobel Prize lecture from SparkNotes.

I made a chart comparing the references Dylan made to the novel with the SparkNotes summaries of it, and wound up writing an essay about it for Slate. (The chart is still visible in an archive.org version of the piece, but not, for some reason, in the version posted on Slate today.) It might be the most viral single piece I’ve ever written, though as it ricocheted around the world, publications quickly lost track of exactly who had pointed out what Dylan was up to.

The next day, I got an email from my publicist at Little, Brown. She passed along a note from someone who had seen the Dylan article and was looking for me. It was Andy, from the record store, more than 25 years after we’d worked there together. I wrote him back the same day.

He was still out in LA and running a music label, ANTI- Records. I’d heard of it—it’s home to some of my favorite artists, including Tom Waits. But Andy keeps a low profile, so I’d had no idea he was running it.

We’ve been in touch ever since, for almost a decade now. During those years, I began doing some music writing again, including essays for his label to use when introducing new albums.

And now, after a couple months of interviews and listening, I just this week finished writing about the new Mavis Staples record coming out on ANTI- this November. I think you’ll like it. (The album, not necessarily the essay.)

All of which is to say—continuing the theme of Coincidence Week—you never know how people will move in and out of your life, or how you might connect or reconnect with others. In 1987, when I first met Andy, I wanted to be a writer but had no understanding of how to proceed. And the idea that someone I was clerking with in the store would run a label that would put out records by Booker T., Nick Cave, Bettye LaVette, Joe Strummer, and Tom Waits himself would have seemed impossible. But do the things you love, keep one eye on the world, and in time, strange events might find you. Life loves a leitmotif.

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