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Writing is a communal art

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Writing well means different things to different people. For me, good writing is like that famous quote of Justice Potter Stewart in reference to obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Writer Colum McCann has a delightful take as he notes that “On occasion we write a sentence that isn’t, in fact, correct, but it sings.  And the question is:  Would you rather be the ornithologist or the bird?”

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. This particular one is devoted to singing like the bird.

In her classic writing manual Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg suggests that writing is 90% listening. “If you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things,” she advises. “Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot.”

And, she adds, don’t think too much.

Reading the book over my summer break while on a Natalie Goldberg reading binge, it was clear I was late to the party. Writing Down the Bones has been around for 30 years and is credited with changing the way writing is taught and understood. In a series of short, informal chapters, Goldberg speaks to how to uneducate yourself from what you’ve been taught (stop obsessing about those transitional sentences) and immerse yourself in writing what’s in front of your nose. Name things, because names matter. Focus on verbs, which provide energy to a sentence. Write in restaurants and laundromats to get out of your lonely writer mindset.

In one especially helpful chapter, she notes that writing is a communal art.

“Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That’s what being a lover is: stepping outside yourself, stepping into someone’s skin. Your ability to love another’s writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won’t make you a copy cat.”

In the grace and simplicity of those sentences, one understands the power of this book. If you know someone who likes to write or wants to write, or wants to understand the value of writers, you might ask them if they have read Writing Down the Bones. Many will reply, “Of course.” But on the off chance that they do not know Goldberg’s work, introduce them as I recently did to a friend who came for a visit. After a few short pages, she was enthralled and will perhaps become inspired, as millions of others have been before her.

One Sentence is a new project by the writer Ben Dolnick. It’s a free newsletter that takes one interesting sentence a week and analyzes what makes it so compelling. In just a few short weeks, I’m hooked.

If you like Edith Warton, check out this post. Or Beverly Cleary fans should click on that link. But because I’m a sucker for biographies, I’m going to encourage you to the edition where Dolnick parses the following sentence from the legendary biographer Robert Caro:

“How could they know about the grass?”

Dolnick writes:

“I usually hate biographies. This will, I know, make me sound like a moron, but: they seem as a form almost built to be dull….

However! Robert Caro’s biographies are astonishing.…

This unassuming sentence comes in the very first chapter, the little-is-known-about-his-great-great-grandfather part of a biography that is usually as far as I get. But what Caro does, ingeniously, is to tell this story — of the Buntons and the Johnsons, the two sides of Lyndon’s family tree — not as a story of antiquated names begetting other slightly less antiquated names but as a story of place. And that place, the Hill Country, turns out to be fascinating. Fascinating because it is awful. Almost willfully so, in Caro’s telling — it baits people, it traps them, it destroys them. And the way it does so is with its high and luscious grass.“

Even before Jeopardy! came to its senses and realized that they had made a colossal blunder, The Angry Grammarian, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, wanted to talk about Jeopardy!’s awkward and horrible choice. Yes. Another one.*

“I don’t like shouting, and I didn’t want to emphasize that sentence with an exclamation point. I really didn’t. But you had a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and you blew it with a disastrous decision.

While changing the host, you kept Jeopardy!’s exclamation point. That means I just had to ram an innocent, hardworking apostrophe with an italicized exclamation point — something no one should be forced to do.…

…you could have made everyone happy — and softened the blow of picking a totally forgettable dude-burger to host the most vaunted franchise on television — by doinking that unnecessary punctuation mark off your logo.“

Enjoy your reading (and writing) this week.

More to come…

DJB

*Bonus points if you knew which clip was coming before you clicked through.

Image: Writing by free photos from Pixabay.

Uncharted: How to navigate the future

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Following the tumult of the past 18 months, this summer has been exhilarating and unnerving. Krista Tippett speaks of this transition when we’ve taken steps toward reengagement as “a liminal space emotionally, psychologically, physically, institutionally, relationally.” We have experienced and learned so much; now we have to determine how to live into our futures.

The future was on my mind when Margaret Heffernan recently skewered one of my sacred cows. Rather than be dismissive, I decided to open up and listen. Her article on Jim Collins’s Good to Great was my first encounter with this Texas-born, Holland-raised, English-educated entrepreneur, CEO, and author. Having long championed Collins’s book, I was unsettled by how much in Heffernan’s analysis rang true. The linear nature of Collins’s work did not account for the complex and changing world we inhabit. Before finishing the article, I knew I had to read more.

Thankfully, Heffernan had recently published Uncharted: How to navigate the future. Released just before the pandemic lockdown, it nonetheless spoke presciently and wisely as to the uncertain world which came to full fruition in 2020.

Given her background and widely popular You Tube videos, Uncharted could have easily been limited to issues of business management and leadership. And there is plenty to consider for the business, nonprofit, and government sectors. But as I read Heffernan, I was struck by how much her thoughts on what we need to do — and what we need to be — to navigate the future were focused on the personal.

She begins with a section on our “prediction addiction,” where we look to business forecasting, history, even genetics to try and create certainty in an uncertain world. Mentally we are all “time travelers,” she asserts. While we talk about living in the moment, Heffernan maintains that “we can’t, we don’t — and wouldn’t want to. What gives life meaning is the rich and constant interplay between past, present, and future.” That requires our attention as humans. We give up that interplay, for instance, when we turn on our GPS and turn off our surroundings, our memories, and our plans all to focus on our phones.

With examples ranging through business, government, taxi drivers, war, science, even friendships, she examines the characteristics that allow some to successfully navigate the uncertainty of life. Just as her article skewered the prediction addiction of Good to Great, in Uncharted she takes on the bogus Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which has no basis in clinical psychology, as just one out of many examples of the silly and shallow ways we seek to predict future performance.

Instead, she calls for us to recognize that we all inhabit complex systems, only parts of which we can see or influence. Heffernan encourages her readers to think like an artist, with a mind that is “febrile, alert, receptive.” She points to “cathedral projects” as those containing experimentation to navigate uncertainty, but also a clear vision of what one wants to achieve. We are not “condemned to short-term, atomized work just because we can’t see far into the future.” Looking ahead allows us to use the uncertainty as a motivator and to build on generations past for work to be completed by and for future generations. Who wants to live forever anyway, as Heffernan titles one chapter.

If we are to navigate the future we must be able to live with paradox and “reconcile opposites — efficiency and robustness, adaptability and long-term focus, just-in-time and just-in-case.”

“What do we need to do, and what do we need to be, to navigate the future? What we need to do is to hold fast to the gifts we have, and to develop them together. What we need to be is human. The future will always be uncharted but it is made by those active enough to explore it, with the stamina and imagination not to give up on themselves or each other.”

Heffernan has created a masterful book that calls out our humanity and creativity. “There is nothing predictable or predetermined about what we will produce with the ingredients of our minds,” she writes. “We neither forsake our past nor are we mired in it.”

Highly recommended.

More to come…

DJB

Image by marandap from Pixabay.

Kyshona: The music therapist gone rogue

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Kyshona (pronounced Kuh-Shauna) Armstrong began her career as a musical therapist, writing her first songs with the students and inmates under her care. As she began to write independently, she lent “her voice and music to those that feel they have been silenced or forgotten,” making her a unique figure in Nashville’s creative community and songwriting culture. As she explains in a Tedx Nashville talk, her background led her to “abandon the idea of writing to a ‘hook'” and, instead, she “leans into her therapeutic training to write to a mantra.” We look at her work in this week’s Saturday Soundtrack.

Kyshona’s album Listen — released in 2020 — blends “roots, rock, R&B, and folk with lyrical prowess to uplift the marginalized…It’s for every silent scream, every heavy load, every fearful thought, and the simmering sense of anger that the silenced, the lost, and the forgotten try to hide from the world.”

The title track makes it clear where her sentiments lie.

“Why you gotta interrupt / When I’m done talking / I need you to keep it shut / This ain’t up for discussion...

I’m standing right in front of you / Trying to tell you my truth / The only thing I ask of you / Is listen.”

In describing her thoughts about the album, she told an interviewer,

“What I tried to set forth in this album is just: Listen. From every corner that you look at it, we’re all just screaming at each other. Nobody’s really listening. The thing about ‘Listen.’ is that it’s a whole sentence. It’s the most difficult thing to do. When we’re listening to someone share their story we automatically want to relate to them, ‘I have a story similar to that!’ Or, ‘I know what I can do to help them!’ That takes us out the moment with another person.“

An early album from 2010 — Home Again — included the song Time, performed here live in 2012. It shows the promise of this young “music therapist gone rogue.”

Kyshona…has a natural gift for using music to tap into emotion. I first explored her music through The Bluegrass Situation. I wanted to know more when I read,

“Everyone is making political records. Everyone is making albums that speak to ‘this moment.’ Too few of them are making music that speaks to the people who inhabit this moment.“

Burdens Down — included here in a powerful live version — is from the 2017 album The Ride 2.0. “I’ve hit rock bottom…but I’m gonna take that rock / Throw it in the river / And lay my burdens down.”

Another song from the Listen album is Fallen People. She writes about it in the liner notes to the music video,

“In a time when we are all so divided, this song was written as a reminder that each and every one of us has an obstacle we’re trying to overcome, an emotional wound we are living with and a struggle that we’re walking with everyday. THAT is where we can all be united… in the hurting.“

Over the last few years, Kyshona has shared the stage with a host of top-flight performers. I especially enjoy her collaboration — alongside Adia Victoria*, Allison Russell, and Kam Franklin — with the talented alt-country singer Margo Price in this spell-binding version of Hey Child from Price’s That’s How Rumors Get Started. When you go past the mass market in Nashville, you will discover some unexpected performances.

Near the end of her interview “The gospel according to Kyshona” in The Bluegrass Situation, she says the following:

“I have faith in a higher power. That’s what gets me through. But I also know that that’s not how everybody comes at life. Not everybody has the foundation that I do. I’m just here to let people know: I see you. You’re not alone. I know it doesn’t feel good right now, but somebody is out here. You might not even know them, but they get it. And let someone else know that you see them, too.“

We could all do better at letting someone else know that we see them.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Cover of Kyshona CD “The Ride 2.0” credit Kyshona.com

*Look for a Adia Victoria Soundtrack in October.

So long, summer

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With the arrival of fall, let’s catch up with recent Observations from the road that don’t merit a full post.

Why use an old-fashioned blog

I am not on social media. I like to write and the blog format seems to work best for me. But over the summer I came across data that reinforced my decision. Social media posts have a shelf life.* In ascending order, the shelf lives are:

  • Twitter – 18 minutes
  • Facebook – 5 hours
  • Instagram – 21 hours
  • LinkedIn– 24 hours
  • Videos – 3 months
  • Blog post – 2 years

The July and August trending posts on MTC tell me that many of the older pieces still attract readers. I’ll stick to blogging.

Small surprises

This little signpost, with a saying from Brian Andreas, is a moment of grace along my morning walk.

Driving down 16th Street one morning, Andrew asked, “Dad, have you ever seen Washington’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral?” Why no. We took a turn and over on 17th was this sublime brick church topped with the familiar onion domes characteristic of Russian churches. St. John the Baptist was certainly a small, and welcomed, surprise.

St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Church, Washington, DC

Speaking of churches, while we were in Parkersburg, our hosts said, “Let’s drive by Frank Wade‘s old church.” Frank — our long-time and much beloved rector at St. Albans parish — was a native West Virginian who served in Parkersburg before moving to Washington. After a few turns, up pops this pink Episcopal Church in the heart of West Virginia!

Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd in Parkerstown, WV

I took a picture and immediately sent it to Frank, who responded:

“I know that place! There are not many pink Spanish style churches in West Virginia.

The architecture reflects the fact that WV’s first bishop William Peterkin had visited South America.…we were always glad the good man never visited Tibet. Hard to tell what it might have looked like. The pink color came many years later at the hands of a painter who misunderstood his directions. The mistake flourished and the parish takes great pride in it. When I left the paper announced I was leaving the town’s Pink Church.“

Cemeteries are cool. Really!

Cemeteries don’t get much love. While many see them as places full of sadness and longing, they can also be places of history, beauty, and celebration. Take the Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark in the heart of Brooklyn, for instance.

Henry Chadwick grave at Green-Wood Cemetery

Former colleague Tom Cassidy was in the city over the summer while his son Sean — a minor league umpire — was calling games in Brooklyn. Tom visited Henry Chadwick’s grave and sent along a picture showing more than a dozen baseballs left as memorials from fans. Why baseballs?

“No man did more to popularize baseball than Henry Chadwick (1824–1908). A British-born newspaperman, Chadwick immigrated to America as a youth, and made Brooklyn his home. In 1847, at Elysian Fields in New Jersey, Chadwick played his first baseball game, then dedicated the rest of his life to the promotion of the sport which he helped to become the national pastime. . . . He persuaded The New York Times and other dailies that baseball was news fit to print…

Chadwick assigned numbers to positions, creating the game’s scoring system, and introduced the box score.

He coined many of baseball’s most-enduring phrases, including ‘assist,’ ‘base hit,’ ‘base on balls,’ ‘cut off,’ ‘chin music,’ ‘fungo,’ ‘white wash,’ ‘double play,’ ‘error,’ ‘goose egg,’ ‘left on base,’ and ‘single.’ He…chaired the Rules Committee of the National Association of Base Ball Players and supervised the annual game, at the beginning of every baseball season…where rules changes were demonstrated.“

Green-Wood.com

In Marietta, Ohio, we visited The Mound Cemetery — also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. At the center stands a 2,000-year-old burial mound of the Adena culture, surrounded by graves where it is believed more Revolutionary War officers are buried than at any other cemetery in the country. Marietta was part of a land grant given to soldiers in lieu of pay by the new nation, explaining how so many ended up in this beautiful Ohio-river community.

Stairs to the top of the mound.

The blossoms have been exceptional this summer…as have the bugs

Finally, we have seen a profusion of beautiful blossoms in the region, but also an invasion of oak leaf itch mites, which find the billions of recently laid cicada eggs very tasty. When they aren’t eating cicada juveniles, however, they are biting people. Like me! Where did I put that cortizone?

More to come…

DJB

*Most sources credit an IT services company, Mamsys, for these stats.

Image: One of the beauties from nature in downtown Silver Spring

The Outlier: Jimmy Carter’s unfinished presidency

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A deeply divided America is grappling with issues that have vexed the nation for decades: environmental degradation, national healthcare, the racial divide, income inequality, Middle East wars, and unchecked presidential powers. While most politicians have sidestepped the hard choices required for meaningful change, one often overlooked president actively worked to seriously address these challenges on a daily basis.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books or articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.

Not everyone felt Jimmy Carter had the intellect, world view, and social status to rise to meet the need. When asked during the 1976 campaign about his personal eccentricities and love of beer, his brother famously responded, “I’ve got one sister who spends all her time on a motorcycle, another who is a Holy-Rolly preacher, a mother who was in the Peace Corps when she was seventy years old, and my brother thinks he’s going to be President of the United States. Which one of our family do you think is normal? Hell” he declared, “I’m the only sane one in the bunch.”

Billy may not have seen his brother as sane, but Jimmy Carter nonetheless attempted to take on those vexing national issues and more. And the attempt made his presidency highly consequential — and unfinished — writes Kai Bird in his important new presidential biography The Outlier.

Bird states upfront that Carter’s “distinctive southern sensibilities and his Southern Baptist religiosity” made possible the “revelation that America was hobbled by its myths.” He saw an America that was in need of serious healing. But as Ronald Reagan’s overwhelming victory in 1980 demonstrated, Americans like to portray themselves as “drenched” with a sense of destiny and exceptionalism. We don’t like tough love any more that we enjoy being told there are limits or that historical forces are sometimes beyond our control. We hang on to the myths to avoid the truth.

Bird’s book is part of the reevaluation of the Carter presidency coming as conservativism in America devolves into authoritarianism. It is wide-ranging, thoughtful, and does not shy away from difficult assessments. Carter’s rigidity, for instance, comes in for serious criticism. But Bird also looks with some sympathy through the lens of two of Carter’s intellectual influences — southern novelist William Faulkner and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — to examine his presidency and its attempts to approach a world that desperately needed fixing.

I spent two years of the Carter presidency living ten miles from Plains. Bird’s descriptions of South Georgia’s racial inequality, the poverty, the patriarchy, the over-the-top religious piety that was part of the atmosphere but that could also serve up deep hatred towards the interracial Christian Koinonia community all rang true. Jimmy Carter was shaped by those forces and also reacted against them.

We often forget the many and varied accomplishments of the Carter administration. On the domestic side Carter began the deregulation of American business that brought everything from lower airline prices to the emergence of craft beer. His energy policies saw a decline in foreign oil imports and led to investments in solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. Consumer regulations from automobiles to pharmaceuticals led to the saving of thousands of American lives each year. We ended his administration with cleaner water and air along with the protection of valuable parts of the country’s wilderness. Inflation was whipped at a steep political cost and the judiciary saw its first large influx of women and minorities. Foreign policy achievements included the ratification of the Panama Canal and SALT II treaties, normalization of relations with China, and the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt.

Too often, however, Carter could not get out of his own way. He would believe he was right and the consequences be damned. “To the consternation of many liberals,” Bird writes, “Carter seemed to be governing more as a Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Republican than a Franklin Roosevelt New Deal Democrat.” And therein lies a big part of the political problem with Carter’s presidency.

Bird does not shy away from the challenges and defeats of the Carter years, the Iranian revolution being at the top of the list. He was unable to work with the liberals in his own party to bring about health care reform, which led to thirty additional years of disfunction. Bird clearly believes that Carter’s inability to control and ultimately fire his hawkish National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, resulted in numerous crises that were avoidable. Bird is also harsh on the Washington media, including Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn, for the seeming inability to focus on issues that mattered and the unceasing insistence on pointing out that the Georgians in Carter’s world were “just plain tacky.” Republican dirty tricksters — from Roy Cohn, to Roger Stone, to William Casey — were very present and overwhelmed an administration unprepared to deal with day-to-day political warfare. Bird also understands the difficulty of the challenges, and how the issues Carter faced still resonate today.

The 1970s were a tipping point in America, the first time the people would have a voice after the upheavals of Watergate. Change was in the air. In casting my first vote for president for Jimmy Carter, I would soon be a part of what Abraham Lincoln noted was the ongoing fight to see if a nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” can long endure.

Democracy is a never-ending battle and, as a southern liberal, Carter was pragmatic in that fight. He called us to our better natures, but in a way that recognized limits to American power, limits to what we could inflict on the environment, and — most importantly — limits to our unilateralism. Carter’s presidency, writes Bird, was ahead of its time with its hopes for reconciliation and healing. As we navigate through the harsh partisanship, political division, and extremism that began with Reagan’s ascension and came crashing down on the country on January 6th amidst Donald Trump’s authoritarian lies, it is that pragmatic yet hopeful belief in the ideal of America that we must seek to regain.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Jimmy Carter official presidential portrait

Peeling away the labels

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How often do we focus — really focus — on what individuals say and do and believe? Our better natures would like to think that’s our default setting. Yet too often we look at someone’s group affiliation or outward appearance and label them with a snap judgement. Our mental shortcuts — what psychologists call “heuristics” — help our brains navigate the world. But as these heuristics layer themselves in our brains, they can also lead us to make potentially damaging assumptions about others.

We create labels for a variety of reasons, but the result is they often prevent us from seeing each other as human beings. In the “Beyond Labels” meditation in Thich Nhat Hanh‘s Your True Home, the Buddhist monk notes that as human beings, we’re exactly the same. But,

“Thinking of yourself as or calling yourself a ‘Buddhist’ can be a disadvantage, because if you wear the title of ‘Buddhist’ this may be an obstacle that prevents others from discovering the human being in you. The same is true whether you are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.”

I’ve turned this observation over in my head in recent weeks, reading some of the science behind our move to stereotype others even when it goes against our values. Labels can be intentional, innocuous, identifying, or injurious. Or some combination of all four. Labels — like any number of heuristics — are not always bad. But if they push us to overlook or deny the humanity of others, they can be destructive.

We label someone as our boss and — if our immediate thought turns to the power they hold over us — what is an accurate descriptor becomes instead a barrier to recognizing their humanity. Labeling another by race or class can be a way to separate ourselves from others. Even if I self-identify as conscientious, pragmatic, and loving — all admirable traits — the labeling can be a way of diminishing the humanity of others who I may not place in those same categories.

The destructive nature of labels can be seen most clearly in our political life. We label others or self identify as right or left wing, and a whole host of defining characteristics and beliefs come to mind that tend to hide the complexity of the humans behind those labels.

While mulling over Thich Nhat Hanh’s observation, I came upon a blog that spoke about the work of a pop up action for voting rights. Those involved made signs that spelled out “Your Vote is Your Voice.” They got some thumbs up and supportive horn honking. Along the way, a white man in a pick up truck pulls over to the side of the road and the blog writer thinks “here it goes.” His negative thoughts quickly evaporated, however, when the truck driver applauded and shouted out encouragement. The comment that followed?

“As Freud might have said, ‘sometimes a pickup truck is a right wing version of ‘virtue signaling’… and sometimes it’s just a pickup truck.’”

I almost spit out my coffee.

We have two systems for thinking — one fast, highly intuitive, and emotional, and the other slower and more logical. We use the first system for most of our decisions and, I would suggest, in making labels about ourselves and others. Like about what kind of men drive pickup trucks or what kind of men pass us in a group on a city street. Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated how our unwillingness to push ourselves to the more systematic — but harder — system of thinking drives bad decisions.

Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that labels such as Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim can be an important part of our identity,

“…but it is not the whole of who we are. People are caught up in the notions and images, and they cannot recognize each other as human beings. The practice of peeling away all the labels so that the human being can be revealed is truly a practice for peace.”

We can begin to see more of the uniqueness and humanity when we slow down and work systematically to peel away the layers of labels we’ve built up over time.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Anthony Wright from Pixabay

Bela Fleck finds his way back to his roots

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15-time Grammy winner Bela Fleck is one of the most influential musicians of his generation, ranking alongside Earl Scruggs in his work to define the possibilities for the five-string banjo. Theirs was a mutual admiration society, and we’ll explore why on this week’s Saturday Soundtrack.

Where Scruggs defined the instrument and the musical style of bluegrass beginning in the 1940s, Fleck, beginning in the late 1970s, opened up the myriad possibilities of banjo by both looking back to its history in Africa and forward to its future with jazz and symphonic collaborations. In partnerships with his wife and clawhammer banjoist Abigail Washburn, tabla master Zakair Hussain, jazz pianist Chick Corea, bassist Edgar Meyer and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and his groundbreaking quartet The Flecktones, Bela Fleck has reinvented the image and sound of the banjo.

Along the way, he would check back on his bluegrass roots, the style that first drew him to the instrument. He came to prominence in the late 1970s and by 1981 was playing with Sam Bush in the seminal New Grass Revival. Following the breakup of that band, he released the first of what is now a trilogy of solo bluegrass albums Drive, perhaps best known for the rollicking tune Whitewater. In 1999 he followed that up with The Bluegrass Sessions, which featured the banjo duet Home Sweet Home as shown above with Earl Scruggs.

Fleck recently told The Bluegrass Situation (BGS),

“As much as I may pretend to be something else, I am bluegrass at heart and that’s okay. It’s something I’m proud of and have come to embrace more as time goes on. Part of that is aging — do something when you’re young and you may not want that to be what defines you. Bluegrass just seemed like too obvious a pigeonhole for a banjo player when I was starting out and there was so much other music I loved, too. But after a lot of exploring, it’s clear to me that bluegrass is still my defining element.”

On September 10th of this year, Bela’s first bluegrass album in more than 20 years was released, rounding out the trilogy. With this Saturday Soundtrack, we celebrate My Bluegrass Heart.

These first two albums, as Bela explains on his website,

“…featured a core band that included Sam Bush, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, and Mark Schatz.

As the years since Bluegrass Sessions began to pile on top of each other and grow into decades, I began to amass compositions that were consciously and unconsciously designed for that band. Tony Rice became less available due to his health issues, I began to wonder if that chapter of my bluegrass life had now closed. If I may be selfish for a moment here, this left me in a bit of a pickle. You see, Tony Rice was the only guitarist I had met who could make it possible for me to play bluegrass in the way I wanted to.

Time passed and other interesting changes had been happening on our bluegrass scene. A whole slew of new players had emerged, highly influenced by the movement that John Hartford, Sam Bush, Tony Rice, David Grisman, Jerry Douglas, Tony Trischka, Bill Keith, and so many other great players had pioneered. There were a whole lot more amazing cats of all ages that I never remember there being, in all my years of bluegrass awareness.“

To cut to the chase, Fleck decided that it was time to bring the young cats in and play together for much of 2019 and 2020. As an example of what he means, give a listen to this performance with one of the brightest of the young cats — Chris Thile — on Bela’s Metric Lips.

“Pretty soon I started to see this project as an exploration of the current bluegrass world, and a gathering of a certain segment of the tribe. I must say that there are many fantastic players who I love that I just couldn’t include this time, for space considerations.“

Bela goes into more detail on his website about his association with the various players, but the album…

“…features a who’s who of some of the greatest instrumentalists in bluegrass music’s history alongside some of the best of the new generation of players: mandolinists Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, and Chris Thile; fiddlers Michael Cleveland and Stuart Duncan; celebrated multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses; bassists Edgar Meyer and Mark Schatz; and the amazing Bryan Sutton, Billy Strings, and Molly Tuttle on guitar.“

Let’s jump in and hear Sierra Hull, Michael Cleveland, Justin Moses, Mark Schatz, and Bryan Sutton join Bela to perform the tune Wheels Up.

“The album title of My Bluegrass Heart is actually a riff on an unexpected source, the late jazz pianist Chick Corea, a sometime collaborator of Fleck’s. One of Fleck’s favorite Corea albums was 1976’s My Spanish Heart, an ironic title because Corea was of Italian rather than Spanish descent,” notes the BGS article.

“He was a guy from Boston with a natural affinity for Latin music, which was central to who he was even though he did not have legit entry in terms of ethnicity,” Fleck says. “That resonates for me. I’m from New York, of Eastern European and Russian descent with no natural connection to folk or bluegrass. So I’m defining myself with music that’s not necessarily my heritage, but being an outsider helps you bring new things to the idiom. When I go off to study Indian music, I can come back and write this album’s ‘Vertigo,’ which has very Indian rhythmic devices. Finding a way to insert Indian music or jazz or classical into bluegrass is very satisfying.”

Speaking of Vertigo, here Bela, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Brian Sutton shine on the album cut of the tune, while the Hull, Cleveland, Schatz, Sutton, Fleck combination play it live a few weeks ago at RockyGrass.

My Bluegrass Heart is dedicated to two of Bela’s friends and collaborators — Tony Rice and Chick Corea — who both passed away in the past year.

Thankfully, the next generation is alright. Slippery Eel is the first-ever studio work featuring the pairing of Billy Strings and Chris Thile. Fleck told BGS that he did his best to come up with something that would challenge those two, but notes that, “Of course they made it look easy.”

Fleck is playing several dates in our area, beginning tonight (the 18th) in Berryville, Virginia, and next Wednesday (the 22nd) at Strathmore here in the DC region. As noted on his website and in a teaser in The Bluegrass Situation,

“This month, Fleck will be touring in support of the album with Michael Cleveland, Sierra Hull, Justin Moses, Mark Schatz, and Bryan Sutton…He’ll resume roadwork in late November and December joined by Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Bryan Sutton. And it’s not too early to circle the calendar for January 7, 2022, when he’s headlining the Ryman alongside nearly every musician who makes an appearance on My Bluegrass Heart.

UPDATE: Bela (banjo) with Justin Moses (dobro), Sierra Hull (mandolin), Mark Schatz (bass), Bryan Sutton (guitar), and Michael Cleveland (fiddle) as seen from my pandemic-distancing seat at Strathmore Music Hall on September 22. A show of astounding musicianship and amazing music!

Here’s the band practicing Round Rock for the upcoming show. Jump in and enjoy. Progressive bluegrass doesn’t get any better.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Bela Fleck at Merlefest 2012 by DJB

This will not end well

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Baseball is becoming unwatchable.

Not because the Washington Nationals traded away all their stars (we miss you Max!) to get prospects and begin to rebuild. This has become the new way of doing business, and has been done, by the way, without any mention of a rebate to season ticket holders who paid prices based on having a real major league team to watch. The Nats games now include recreations of plays one sees in Little League. It wasn’t until the new-look Nationals allowed a Brewers runner to score on a “sacrifice fly” hit all the way to the on-deck circle that I had seen such a play at the major league level. Priceless, in its own way.

Yes, baseball is becoming harder to stomach because there is too big a gulf between the good and bad teams, which MLB doesn’t seem interested in fixing. But baseball has always had that problem.

And one can make the case that contests consisting only of home runs and strikeouts are boring, but that’s not at the heart of my problem with the game.

No, the real reason I’m increasingly choosing other viewing options rather than baseball is those awful gambling ads that now dominate any sports broadcast.

Yes, Major League Baseball and virtually every other professional and major college sports league has decided to go all-in on betting. Before the games, during the games, during the at-bats, after the games. Bet $1 on anything and get $100 free. Seriously. How naïve can one be to spend your hard-earned money with that come-on? If you know they will give you $100 to bet for free, you can put your money down on the fact that you will lose more than you win if you play for any length of time.

Casinos are practically a license for their owners to print money. I only know of one person dumb enough to bankrupt a casino, which should tell you all you need to know about that individual’s so-called business acumen.

Chelsea Janes wrote about this issue for the Washington Post in MLB re-created “Field of Dreams” for a night, but it can’t escape the sports tough realities.

“Like questions about blackouts, the cornfield buffer couldn’t keep all the awkwardness out. Aaron Boone was asked for his perspective on Shoeless Joe Jackson, a central character in “Field of Dreams,” who was banned from baseball for his role in the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

Boone dodged deftly, something MLB will not be able to do forever, having recently made a push to introduce betting into stadiums and the general baseball consciousness. Just this week in Chicago, a proposal to add betting space at Wrigley Field, one of the game’s most sacred landmarks, was a source of controversy.“

Why is baseball doing this? Follow the money. And the gobs of money — and the people it brings out — will affect the game in ways known and unknown. I suspect it won’t be good and will drive away long-time fans of the game who know the history. But the powers-that-be in baseball seem intent on changing the game in ways that hurt fans and potentially hurt players.

Anyone who wanted to bet on games could always find a way to do so. But there was a bright line between gambling interests and the game itself. It should have stayed that way. Go to any horse-racing track other than for a Triple Crown race or the very short summer season at Saratoga and look at the “crowd.” Those few that are in attendance aren’t watching the race in front of them. They are down in the betting parlors, taking chances on races around the world. Baseball seems intent on pushing betting into stadiums, and driving away long-time fans who, like me, attend multiple games during home stands and watch the team on television.* All for the lure of “easy” money.

A. Bartlett Giamatti is rolling over in his grave. Pete Rose is wondering why he couldn’t have played in 2021.

America today is a country where baseball and other sports have sold out to the gambling interests and the thrill of securing undeserved riches. My bet is that it will not end well.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Greg Montani from Pixabay

*I attended two games in person this week at Nats stadium, so my perspective is fresh.

Pauli Murray Mural

My name is Pauli Murray

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Perhaps Pauli Murray is finally getting her due.

Murray’s story — that of an African American member of the LGBTQ community, Civil Rights and Women’s Rights activist, the lawyer responsible for producing what Justice Thurgood Marshall called “the Bible of Civil Rights law,” a poet and writer, the first female African American Episcopal priest, and an Episcopal saint — has fascinated me ever since my late colleague Karen Nickless brought the campaign to preserve Pauli Murray’s childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, to our attention while I was at the National Trust. 

Early in 2015 the Trust named the house a National Treasure, which helped inspire the first major gift to support the house’s restoration later that year. The Trust also worked with groups as diverse as the the Pauli Murray Project, the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, the National Park Service, and the Episcopal Church to support its 2017 listing as a National Historic Landmark. It ranks high among my preservation memories.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.

In June, we attended a viewing of a new film on Pauli Murray as part of the 2021 AFI Docs Festival. That documentary — My name is Pauli Murray — is being released in general theatres this Friday, September 17th, and will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on October 1st.

I had learned important pieces about Murray’s life and influence since my introduction back in 2014. But I was struck by how the filmmakers found new material to fill in the portrait of someone who is one of the most consequential — and least known — people of the 20th century.

As Kelsey Ables writes in a September 11th review of the film for The Washington Post,

“Murray paved the paths that the civil and women’s rights movements would march on and built the legal frameworks we exist inside today. And yet Murray was so ahead of the curve that when history was eventually written, it was often written without mention of Murray.“

Ables notes that Murray’s story is a portrait of U.S. history, with all its omissions.

“Murray’s achievements weren’t the sort of clean victories history gloms onto but a lifelong process of starts and stops. Black in a White-dominated women’s movement and a woman in a male-dominated civil rights movement, Murray slid through the cracks of both. A mixed-race person who was attracted to women and struggled with what we would now call gender dysphoria, Murray’s very existence defied the categories racism and sexism rely on. Murray’s ideas about the arbitrary nature of those categories were so far ahead of the times, they were dismissed or ignored.

The movie’s trailer hints at what the viewer of this masterful film will learn.

Among the previously unknown sources the filmmakers uncovered were audio recordings of Murray reading the posthumously published Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage aloud for a friend.

In effect, Murray is able to tell us her own story, in her own voice.

Song in a Weary Throat is a powerful memoir, told with wit and energy. Murray begins in the floor of her kitchen in Baltimore, entangled in her mother’s billowing white skirts. Her memories of her parents are thin because her beloved mother died when she was four, and she went to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her Aunt Pauline. It moves through her life as a self-described “rebel, instigator, and survivor, at times a nettle in the body politic, an opener-of-doors, and always a devout child of God and friend of mankind.”

As Patricia Scott-Bell writes in a new introduction to the 2018 edition, Murray tried out more than a dozen titles for her work before she settled on a line from her epic poem “Dark Testament.”

“Hope is a song in a weary throat.”

This is autobiography about living with the audacity of hope. She was rejected for admission by the University of North Carolina because of her race, and four years later by Harvard Law School because of her gender. But the audacity of hope led Murray, whose personal motto was “Don’t get mad, get smart” to enter Howard Law School in 1941. She later added degrees from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and Yale Law School. Yale named their newest residential college for Murray in 2016.

Murray notes more than halfway through the memoir that moments of despair were offset with the sustaining knowledge “that the quest for human dignity is part of a continuous movement through time and history linked to a higher force.” She quotes The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., expressing the same concept when he said “that in the struggle for justice one has ‘cosmic companionship.'”

Pauli Murray

Murray’s autobiography is just one of several important books to be written or republished in recent years that deal with different aspects of the life of this remarkable American. In 2016 I wrote a review on this blog of Scott-Bell’s The Firebrand and the First Lady, which chronicles the unlikely friendship of Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Rich in detail of the relationship built between Murray and ER (as the First Lady is referred to throughout the book), it is also an excellent read. The Firebrand and the First Lady speaks to how we can challenge and support each other in our work toward social justice and human wholeness.  

These three works will help one gain a better portrait of one of America’s most enigmatic heroes. Because her legal, civil rights, and gender-equality work is consequential on so many fronts and levels, we may be tempted to downplay her move, later in life, into the priesthood. But Murray’s words when she left the practice of law in the early 1970s to become an Episcopal priest, describe the stakes.

She noted that most of the questions around inequality that we face as a nation are at their core moral issues that require reconciliation among all people. It is in community where we should affirm “the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together.”

More to come…

DJB

We won’t last forever

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Some of the best memoirs are meditations.

In recent weeks I’ve been on a Natalie Goldberg reading binge. What started me down the path of taking in the thoughts of this longtime Zen practitioner and world-renowned writing teacher was her powerful 2018 memoir-as-meditation Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home. I had picked it up on a whim at Berkeley’s Pegasus Books but only recently pulled it out to read. It was a revelation.

This is Goldberg’s story of a cancer diagnosis that forever changes the way she looks at life. And death. She was sixty-three and, she writes,

“This cannot be. This is not the way the world is.

And what way, exactly, is the world? The way I wanted it to be. Death a long-distance call. I wanted to deal with death at the proper time — in my eighties or nineties.”

The Stoics suggest that we meditate on our mortality every day. Goldberg’s Zen training helped, in a similar fashion, because it “harped on death. We won’t last forever. Wake up. Don’t waste your life.” But that urging too often seemed “artistic, remote.”

Until she was face-to-face with death.

I read this short but gripping memoir in a day. On page-after-page Goldberg shows how she and her partner — who along the way is diagnosed with breast cancer — grapple with their battles (with the cancers, with their bodies, with the cancer-industrial complex, with their emotions) separately and together. The cancer twins, she calls them. They both have to face the unknown, the void. Cancer forces that type of focus.

In her telling of this story, there is laughter. She hears the name of the medication she is taking at one point — ofatumumab — and decides that it sounds like “Oh Fat Tuna Man.”

There is food, more than one person can eat, thanks to their friends. But her lithe partner chows down with the best of them.

There are new perceptions, such as the following about those friends.

“I did notice, when friends visited, subtle differences. Yes, they had more energy, more mobility than I did. They were still busy in the world with the routines…But there was something much more subtle, something I don’t often catch until after they left: They don’t know they will die. It was constantly with me now, my mortality. It hung out on my right shoulder like an animal, patient yet hungry. It wanted me, and I knew that eventually it would have me.”

There is despair, when she realizes that Oh Fat Tuna Man hasn’t worked, and all the while the cancer has, worming its way into her bones. This person who for years has used natural medicines now, in desperation, shifts to an experimental drug…which works, beating the cancer.

And there is some sort of elation. “I was supposedly normal again, as if no hole had been blown through the center of my life.”

Goldberg’s path through is based on a commitment to embrace the suffering directly. She ends with a moving poem and thoughts on a favorite painting. The poem is from her visit to a remarkable place — the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome — where she visits John Keats’ grave and meets “not only Keats but young Natalie again.” But the poem she quotes is from the grave of Gregory Corso.

Spirit

is Life

it flows thru

the death of me

endlessly

like a river

unafraid

of becoming

the sea

This is a meditation on finding a path, finding a place, “to set one foot after another. To come inside out; to show your guts, everything that you are made of.” And the path brings her to a painting by Pierre Bonnard, who “silently grieves” about the emotional absence of human fulfillment through the medium of paint.

“I viewed the last piece he painted, a week before his death in 1947. Almond Tree in Blossom. Full of light. The tree in white takes over most of the canvas, and it feels as though it were about to ascend….

When Japanese Zen masters approach death, they write a poem to reveal their mind at the final moment. In this final painting, Bonnard does something similar, displays his lightening heart. Before the great question — How is it to live with eternity at your door? — Bonnard answers: In full bloom.”

More to come…

DJB

Image of almond blossoms by Beverly Buckley from Pixabay