Blood on the Tracks, David Lynch Still Being Remembered - Saturday Turns Into Sunday

Saturday was just like the past many weeks of Saturdays - nothing went as planned. I was up at 6, meant to do my laundry and maybe get some groceries. 

 The first song I heard from Bob Dylan was off of Blood on the Tracks. Now, it is a half-century old. Mathew Lyons's Blood on the Tracks turns 50 (Englesberg Ideas) gives the background.

Meaghan Garvey writes of cigarettes and fire in David Lynch’s Cigarette Cinema (GQ):

Earth, Lynch once suggested, is “a learning world,” in which love and suffering are twin sides of the coin. Late last fall, in the same profile where he revealed his 2020 emphysema diagnosis, Lynch offered his advice to readers: “You can quit these things that are going to end up killing you,” he said. “I owe it to them, and to myself, to say that.” Although, he added, he didn’t regret it. “It was important to me,” he said. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”

Englesberg Ideas also published Muriel Zagha's The upside-down world of David Lynch.

Mel Brooks memorably described David Lynch as ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’: the archetypal American nice guy, but from another planet. In Lynch’s universe both Bedford Falls and Pottersville, Oz and Kansas exist alongside one another, always capable of bleeding into each other. From this originate Lynch’s films-as-waking-dreams and his Heaven-and-Hell vision of America.

 I also learned a bit of history from Englesberg Ideas and Samuel Rubinstein's The Kaiser and the Nazis. What feels the most relevant for us dealing with Trump 2.0 is that the Nazis wanted neither monarchy nor monarchy.

It is 10 AM, and I do not have the energy to finish off the email right now. Laundry needs to be done, which means catching the bus in 35 minutes.

I decided I could make do with the laundry, and my neck got too stiff. A 90-minute nap turned into 2 and half hours. I missed a deputy coming by to see if this danger to the good people of Muncie was still in residence. I did walk down to the convenience store for smokes and RC Cola. The email and this blog were what wiped out my morning. Hungry, I ordered a pizza from Domino's. That and a breakfast of smoked pork jowl, fried potatoes, and scrambled eggs were all I ate yesterday. I started scanning documents and that lasted until around 9 pm. I managed to get in Maharaja and the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix; two birds, one stone.

The Aeon newsletter had several pieces I read, but the one I include here is Psychodynamic nonsense. Some parts I found personally comforted by - I really did not have childhood trauma, except for my parents' divorce. It does reinforce my bias against psychotherapy as lacking in scientific vigor. Could it be that just talking out one's problems with another human being is necessary for us? That it reinforces social bonding?

Up a half hour earlier than expected, I attacked the email and finished this post. No liturgy today. Off to the races.

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