The Last Hand

I hang around in the space  between the low art of popular music, not even what is considered the high art of the low art, such as Broadway or Cabaret song, but country, folk and Americana,  commercial stuff, and the high art of top shelf literature.  It's been always this way and I won't change it.

And so, I'm looking forward to the new/old album of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait, heretofore unreleased recordings from 1969-71.   This release tells me that Dylan, who unlike many artists, retains complete control over his catalog, must be going through another period of writer's block, and has no new material  to show us (his last album Spirit was a collaboration with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.)

A writer I've read before is having a novel published in two weeks, its title "The Last Hand", as in a card game, you won't see it on a bestseller list, so stop looking, and he has some interesting things to say in a recent interview.

He argues that there is no present and no future, that only past exists for us, or at least for him.  He writes in pencil, and erases, doesn't cross out, because by crossing out a sentence, he says, he couldn't write the sentence any better.  Why does he writes so little?  Because, he says, after he finishes a novel, he has to throw its weight off, has to stop liking it, to avoid repeating himself.  And when he starts thinking of a new novel, he has to think of it as a beginner who doesn't know how to write. Because being convinced that one knows how to write, he tells the interviewer, is the first step toward defeat.