If you sing "John Henry" as many times as Bob Dylan did, you'd have written "Blowin' in the Wind."

I'm reading the full transcript of Bob Dylan's long, rambling speech at that MusiCares event).

[My] songs didn't come out of thin air. I didn't just make them up out of whole cloth.... It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock 'n' roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music.

I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.

For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once.

If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."

If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.

And if you'd've sung Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway" — "I've got a key to the highway / I'm booked and I'm bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin' because walking is most too slow" — you'd have written "Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose/Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes/He asked poor Howard where can I go/Howard said there’s only one place I know/Sam said tell me quick man I got to run/Howard just pointed with his gun/And said that way down on Highway 61."

And "Sail Away Ladies" — "Ain't no use sit 'n cry / You'll be an angel by and by / Sail away, ladies, sail away" — would get you to "Boots of Spanish Leather" — "I'm sailing away my own true love...." And "Roll the Cotton Down" — "Ten dollars a day is a white man's pay / A dollar a day is the black man's pay" — "If you sang that song as many times as me, you'd be writing 'I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more,' too."

So there's the formula. Sing a lot of folk songs, sing enough, until they take a new form and you've got your songs, your Bob Dylan songs. Or, I take it, sing enough Bob Dylan songs, over and over, and out of those will emerge your songs.

Only songs work that way, where you internalize someone else's words so deeply that you develop an instinct for words that yields up new words that count as your words. You can't do that with writing, can you? Maybe with poetry, memorizing it and reciting it over and over. But if you want to write prose, what can you do? You could try the Hunter S. Thompson method:

He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”....

"You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books," Bob Dylan sang much more than once, but I don't see how you could ever catch onto an instinct to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald by reading all his books (like The Thin Man) or typing out particular pages (like Hunter S. Thompson) or fixating on individual sentences (as we did here on the blog in the old Gatsby project). I think the language you use to write prose is the language of speech, and you picked that up in a way that was even more fundamental and tradition-based than all those folk songs Bob Dylan had to sing to get to his own songs.

You used to be so amused/At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used...

"NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography."

"They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division."

Some surprising background, from Maureen Dowd.

By contrast, I'm utterly uninterested in the news that Williams is stepping away from his job for a few days.

"There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life..."

".. for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them."

Just when the eyes trained on Bruce Jenner were turning gooey and oh-so-sympathetic...

... he's gone and killed a woman.

Eyewitnesses say Bruce rear ended the white car and that car went into oncoming traffic and was struck by the Hummer.... The woman driving the white car died.

At the link: photos of the impassive face of the athlete/reality TV star/transgender icon alongside the horrifically wrecked car.

Is this, too, grist for reality television?

"the thing that gets me is why anyone would allow the NYT to report on their search for the perfect airy 1.5 million dollar Wburg 1-bedroom"

"wouldn't it be simpler to just march down the street handing out pamphlets that say 'I'm terrible, AMA'"

"The prohibition on physician‑assisted dying infringes the right to life, liberty and security of the person in a manner that is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."

"The object of the prohibition is not, broadly, to preserve life whatever the circumstances, but more specifically to protect vulnerable persons from being induced to commit suicide at a time of weakness. Since a total ban on assisted suicide clearly helps achieve this object, individuals’ rights are not deprived arbitrarily. However, the prohibition catches people outside the class of protected persons. It follows that the limitation on their rights is in at least some cases not connected to the objective and that the prohibition is thus overbroad."

Says the Supreme Court of Canada, unanimously.

"The full house was made up largely of upper-middle-class young ladies, stylishly dressed, carefully made up, brought into town by private cars or suburban buses..."

"... for their night to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist and clutch themselves ecstatically out there in the floodlights for everyone to see; and with the full blessings of all Authority: indulgent parents, profiteering businessmen, gleeful national media, even the police.... The spectacle of all those anguished young girls at Carnegie Hall, trying to follow 'I Want To Hold Your Hand,' seems awfully vapid compared to the young men and women who sing 'I Woke Up This Mornin’ With My Mind (…Stayed on Freedom).' The Beatles themselves are lively and not without charm. Perhaps their greatest virtue is their sense of humor and self-caricature. But Beatlemania as a phenomenon is manna for dull minds."

Such was the opinion in The Nation magazine in March 1964.

Podcasting gets results.

"The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has granted an appeal for Adnan Syed, the man whose murder conviction was investigated on the popular 'Serial' podcast."

"I believe Gov. Walker would prefer if this became another red vs. blue fight because polarization will make him look strong in Iowa, and polarized fights are fights he knows he can win."

"If he didn't want protests, why else would he actively talk about getting rid of shared governance; why else would his staff attempt to remove the Wisconsin Idea from the UW's mission? Both of those are throwing gasoline on a fire, an attempt to stop Democrats and Republicans from talking because talking just might lead to a better solution."

Paranoia strikes deep.

"Althouse can analyze anything, anything, for untested assumptions and bullshit."

Said commenter John Lynch, after reading my analysis of the Katy Perry video "Roar."

Bob Dylan says thanks.

At the MusiCares Person of the Year event:

He thanked people who had played a key role in his early career, ranging from talent scout John Hammond to music publisher Lou Levy, as well as artists who recorded his songs early on, such as Peter, Paul & Mary. “They took a song of mine that was buried,” he said, alluding to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “They straightened it out. It’s not the way I would have recorded it (but they made it a smash).”

He also thanked the Byrds, the Turtles, and Sonny & Cher. “Their versions of my songs were like commercials,” he said. He also singled out the Staple Singers, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez. (“She was the queen of folk music then, and she’s the queen of folk music now,” he said of Baez. “…I learned a lot from her.”)

Dylan says "Sonny & Cher," but if you look closely at that video, you'll see Cher is singing the "Sonny" voice too.

ADDED: More from Bob's speech here.  Don't miss the part about Tom T. Hall's song "I Love" being "a little over-cooked." As for what he said about Merle Haggard, well, Merle Haggard responds here: "Bob Dylan I've admired your songs since 1964. 'Don't Think Twice' Bob, Willie and I just recorded it on our new album."

Grill'n for Peace.

We went out this morning for a round of ice skating on the Wingra lagoon, and as we drove up we saw people out on Lake Wingra in some kind of circular formation from which plumes of smoke arose. Some kind of ice barbeque? A winter tailgate party? I called it "ice-gating" — pronounced almost exactly like "ice skating." After our ice skating, we drove by and I took a few pictures.



We saw the signs: "Grill 4 ☮." Here's the website for the event. "The fun: create a giant peace sign using 'old school' Weber grills on frozen Lake Wingra. While in this awesome formation, we will grill meats, enjoy friends and have fun in the great outdoors."

"People say I should appreciate my inheritance, and I do, but it is an inheritance without love," says the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso, Marina.

She has 10,000 works of Picasso art, and she's about to sell them off, one by one, to turn them into money "to redistribute to humanitarian causes." The first work she will sell is "a 1935 work called La Famille which depicts a family in an arid landscape."

“It’s symbolic because I was born in a great family, but it was a family that was not a family,” she said.

That is possibly an understatement of her true feelings. In her 2001 memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather, she describes a man who was “incapable of love”. How her father died two years after the artist under the “yoke of his tyranny … betrayed, disappointed, demeaned. Destroyed.” And the tragedy of her brother, Pablito, “the plaything of Picasso’s sadism and indifference”, who later killed himself. She also wrote disparagingly of the people who granted him power and “raised him to the level of God: the experts, art historians, curators, critics, not to mention courtiers, parasites, bootlickers."

The author of the books "Art as an Investment," Melanie Gerlis, commented on the effect Marina's sales might have on the market: "I don’t think auctions and dealers are going to say this is a disaster, it won’t take a ton of business away from them, they may see it as just a shame."

There are different kinds of shame.

Old pictures: "Casual T-ease."

This is another one of my scans of photographs I took in 1980/81 of the plastered-over walls in or around SoHo in NYC.

Feel free to treat the comments section as a "café" — that is, an open thread.

And, please, if you've got some on-line shopping to do, consider entering Amazon through The Althouse Portal.

"But Lublin hated 'everything [about law school] from nine-point font in thick textbooks to the Socratic method to classmates who were really..."

"...just fighting for the right to be on law review, which was looking up your professor’s footnotes for an article that was going to appear in a journal that maybe twelve people would read."

From a New Yorker article by Alice Gregory titled "R U There?/A new counselling service harnesses the power of the text message." Lublin is Nancy Lublin, who dropped out of NYU School of Law after 4 semesters and who is involved in a crisis hotline that communicates with teenagers solely through the medium of texting.

The whole article is interesting, but I wanted to pull that quote because I knew the words "a journal that maybe twelve people would read" would cause heartache to the smug and I'm cruel like that.

Hey, everybody! Let's have shaming culture. Because shame works.

Gizmodo: "The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works."

So... because it works, we should do it? Forcibly vaccinating all the children would work too. It would work better, in fact. So why the enthusiasm for shame... and where would it stop? The Gizmodo writer falls all over himself by the end of the column:

Let me be clear that I'm not advocating that individuals on street corners be shamed for not vaccinating their kids.... I'm arguing that we need to do something much more radical and difficult: we need to support a culture that shames its members for not vaccinating their kids — and by extension, for endangering their communities.

So shame, but only from a distance? No one should individually feel it? This seems like a recommendation of precision generality.

But changing our culture means taking aim at the powerful and those profiting from the anti-vaccination movement. 

Yeah, let's be sure only to hurt the big bad corporations. Make that happen. Why would shame work on the profit-makers? That's where shame doesn't work.

We also must also [sic] draw a distinction between shame and humiliation... I don't want to advocate humiliating or bullying individuals. Shame is about regulating social norms, not screaming at powerless people on Twitter.

It's absurd to think you could get a shame culture rolling and then make sure it doesn't do any of the bad things you can already foresee!