Kenneth Womack's dinner party with Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath and John Lennon.
Who is it? Who is it?
In 2018 The Beatles and Dylan appear commercially and culturally as hot as they have ever been, since the sixties. Dylan is immortalized in the 'Bob Dylan Center', which is the public-facing home of The Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He also offers new verses and drawings with 'Mondo Scripto'1, he still produces paintings and ironworks and is on the road. This November a slightly flawed2 [2]'superdeluxe' edition of Dylan's Anton-Chekhov-inspired divorce album 'Blood On The Tracks', appears as 'The Bootleg Series Volume 14'3. The Beatles have released 'super-de-de-luxe-luxe' 50thanniversary editions of remixed 'Sgt.Pepper' and the 'White Album'. The insatiable craving for monetary success meeting the 'we want more' desire of fans promises there will be another one down Abbey Road in 2019. 'Love', the Cirque de Soleil show based on Beatles' music, is still running hot. John Lennon and Paul McCartney release ultimate and archival versions of their Beatles solo recorded music output. Yoko gave us two beautifully restored Lennono movies and a reasonably priced, well-designed informative book about the Imagine album.
In the next few days, Monmouth University will organize a White Album conference on the New Jersey shore, with an extensive program of fun, love for music, fan talk, academic-level presentations, and some of the best-known deep-thinkers, investigators, and academics discussing, talking and enjoying The Beatles White Album.
Against this background, I like to introduce to you Kenneth Womack, a well-respected man.
He is currently Dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University and professor of English. He is an industrious editor and writer, with more than 25 books to his credit, e.g. ‘Mapping the Ethical Turn – A Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary Theory’ (2001). Kenneth Womack wrote “The Eighth Wonder of the World: The Life of Houston’s Iconic Astrodome”, with Robert C. Trumpbour. The book received a prestigious national accolade. The 'Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal' from the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) was given as a token of appreciation.
He is also the author and editor of Beatles books, everybody should read: essay-collections, an encyclopedia, and a magnificent two-volume George Martin biography. The latter is a game-changer, as it modifies the image and character of the Beatles music producer for any reader inevitably and forever. Now, Kenneth Womack is organizing and presiding the Monmouth White Album Conference, in between you may find him writing and reading. He loves writing.
Our conversation is about literature, writing, and The Beatles.
Which books are on your nightstand? All of them. I’m being quite serious here: my favorite thing about our digital age is the simple fact that nearly everything I want to read is at my fingertips. My virtual bookstack is always brimming with new opportunities. And right now, those opportunities look like a lot of contemporary fiction: Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Andrew Sean Greer’s Less are leading the pack at the moment.
What’s the last great book you read? I recently reread Thomas Thompson’s Blood and Money, one of the great true crime novels. Published in 1976, the book details a notorious Houston doctor accused of killing his socialite wife. But what makes the book so memorable is Thompson’s incomparable nonfiction style. He possesses that rare knack for bringing history to life in the vein of our finest novels. Before that, I read Marcia Batusiak’s Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, which traces the story of the Nobel laureate’s postulation of gravitational waves and their recent discovery by twenty-first-century scientists.
Which classic novel did you recently read for the first time? I’m not sure if it qualified, but last summer I read Peter Benchley’s Jaws. After having watched the film dozens of times since the mid-1970s, I thought it was high time that I read the novel!
When and how do you read? Unless there isn’t an e-book edition, I read almost entirely in electronic form at this point. As Dean of a large School, it is difficult to find time to read, and like most folks, I value the ability to slip into breaking a book or newspaper on a moment’s notice. E-reading makes that possible.
What do you read when you are writing? To be perfectly candid, I am nearly always in the middle of one writing project or another. As a writer, I thrive on inspiration, so I typically seek out writers whose style and subject bring out the best in me as a reader. While my virtual nightstand is dominated by unread works of fiction, I find that dense works of nonfiction keep me humming away at the keyboard. An example would be Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, which provides readers with all the hallmarks of a great novel wrapped around the real-life story of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Works like Larson's book possess all of the trappings of a page-turning whodunnit, lifting history to even more inspiring, incredible heights of story-telling power.
How do you organize your writing process? When I’m working on nonfiction, so much of the ideation occurs up front, when I am working on the book proposal with my agent. Those are the times when it’s best to get things right and to create a storyline for your project. Once I have the contract, the research process begins immediately. As a writer, I am a big believer in goal-setting. I always maintain a spreadsheet to track my progress. My goal is typically to compose at least 500 words per day—preferably, 1,000. I learned this process during my grad courses many years ago. The regular production of text helps you observ real progress from your labors, and morale is an essential ingredient in the mental life of any working writer.
When you fantasize about people reading or using your books, what is it you project? This is an intriguing question. As a long-time writer, I am simply grateful that anyone is reading my books. I haven’t allowed myself the luxury of imagining how they do it! What I like best, though, is when readers email me about their experiences with my books— whether good or bad. I have learned a lot from the good folks who have shared their precious time reading my books, and over the years, I have benefited from their feedback, which is almost always well-intentioned and constructive.
What is your favorite fictional hero/heroine or antihero/villain? My favorite literary character is John Dowell, the mentally dense narrator at the heart of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solider: A Tale of Passion. For me, Dowell is not merely a narrator, but a kind of anti-hero in the sense that he is like all of us—just trying to live our lives the best we can without being conned. Of course, at the same time, he is mega-rich and unambitious—so it’s not like many of us at all. But he intrigues me, nonetheless, because of his vacant emptiness.
What moves you most in a work of literature? I adore great works of style—novels, especially, with dense, well-crafted and evocative sentences. I love the sound of language and discovering how other writers deploy it as its own sort of work of art.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? I’d invite Vladimir Nabokov first, hoping that he’d be willing to leave his penthouse in Montreux and share his brilliance with us. And then I would fill out our table with Sylvia Plath, who left us too soon and still had plenty to say, and John Lennon. Ironically, John’s famous band came to fame with the “Please Please Me” single in almost the same moment that Plath killed herself in Yeats’s house in London.
Towards the end of his own life, Lennon was beginning to explore his literary self again, and I think he would enjoy spending time with brainy, bona fide writers like Vladimir and Sylvia. Right before he left the Dakota for the last time, Lennon spoke about how much he loved writers and their books. Hanging with Nabokov, Plath, and Lennon would make for an unforgettable dinner party. It would be quite a time, indeed.
What's the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. My mother gave it to me in December 1983, and reading that exemplary work of style started me on a journey that I am still traveling to these many years later. The book’s epigraph, from Borges, is a moment of inspiring creative power in itself: “We have shared out like thieves the amazing treasure of nights and days.”
How do you decide what to read next? I tend to aggregate my reading from a wide array of sources—The New York Times, The New Yorker, and writers I like, to name a few. Once I have the titles in hand, I typically jet over to Amazon to “look inside” and see if there’s more to admire.
Is this different from Beatles’ related books? How do you decide which Beatles-related books you want to read? It’s very different, actually. Like many Beatles folks, I have a pretty wide a varied library. At this point, like everyone else, I am typically looking for something new and different. Failing that, I like to hear a well-told story that brings their achievements vividly to life.
Which book about the Beatles did you enjoy reading the most? The books I reflect upon the most are some of the early titles that inspired me to explore the group—Mark Lewisohn’s Recording Sessions, first and foremost, followed by Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head and Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why.
You are a professor of English. Which books from a literary point of view do you consider are the best among the huge catalog of Beatles' related books? At this point, the most literary Beatles book, to my mind, is Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. He approaches Beatles’ study in an astutely circular way, shifting in a radial fashion from one “character” to another. Better still, he narrates their story with great reverence and well-timed moments of exuberance. Watching him evolve as a storyteller over the years has been one of my great pleasures as a reader.
If you were asked to select a Beatles topic (song, album, concert, person, event, etc.) to write an essay about, which would it be and why? If my goal were to inspire folks to thing artistically about themselves and their own work, I would write about “A Day in the Life”. The story of that song’s pastiche-like construction never fails to rouse the passions and quick the intellect. It’s a masterful, timeless work of art.
If you could invite people from the Beatles circle, dead or alive, to an evening dinner, who would you invite, and why? I would go right to George Martin. And I would ensure that he was my only guest. I would want to create a situation where he was truly unguarded, more likely to share his innermost thoughts and regrets. Too often in life, he was under the spotlight, expected to respond, raconteur-like and as good-naturedly as possible to some basic Beatles question. Unfortunately, so much of his inner life died with him in March 2016, and I would endeavor to give him enough free space to open up and tell us just a little bit more.
In a recent ‘Talk More Talk' videocast you mentioned you like the outtakes and remixes of the anniversary editions of Sgt. Pepper and the White Album, because you get the hi-fi audio quality, of what is usually very lo-fi stuff on bootlegs. Why do you want to hear these remixes and outtakes? To my ears, the Beatles are a band of moments. Take “A Hard Day’s Night,” a song with the famous opening chord, a beautiful arpeggiated guitar figure at the end, and the exquisite varispeed piano/guitar solo—not to mention, that it’s a great pop song, to boot! With the outtakes especially, I enjoy hearing how those moments came into being and how they were refined in the studio. It makes the artistic process come to life in new and illuminating ways, as do the remixes, which tend to open up the Beatles’ sonic palette and let their exuberance and artistry really shine.
What would you like to know or understand about the creative processes of writers and musicians like the Beatles? I adore learning about the germ of creation—that moment of artistic discovery when a writer flashes upon a great story or a songwriter happens upon a magical string of notes. There’s simply nothing like it. So much has already been concocted in our world of music and letters, and the idea of finding something new never ceases to inspire me and quicken my senses. It’s really, to my mind, what makes life supremely beautiful and worth living.
If you could go back, which Beatles event would you like to attend, in whatever capacity? August 7, 1969, without question. It was one of the most amazing days in the Beatles’ production history. That afternoon, while the bandmates were sitting in the control booth listening to playbacks of “Come Together,” they could see Yoko Ono down in the studio below, where she tiptoed across the room to George Harrison’s Leslie speaker cabinet and stole one of the guitarist’s digestive biscuits. At that point, all hell broke loose as Harrison exploded in anger at Lennon over what he saw as a breach of friendship. But just as quickly, the war of words blew over, and Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison recorded the famous trio of guitar solos for Abbey Road’s “The End.” In a matter of hours, they had gone from all-out tempest to sublimity. What a day that must have been.
The copyright and use of this text are limited to the author (Rob Geurtsen) and the interviewee Kenneth Womack. Sharing is fine, linking is superb, but please only use this text or parts of, WITH written permission from the author, Rob Geurtsen, or the interviewee: Kenneth Womack. You may contact Rob Geurtsen.
'Mondo Scripto - Lyrics and drawings, an exhibition by Bob Dylan', at the Halcyon Gallery in London. Mondo Scripto features handwritten lyrics to appr. 60 songs, Dylan took the care to rewrite, change words, sometimes changing the phraseology and doing graphite drawings, that serve as illustrations to the words, more than allowing the viewer or reader to make their own interpretation. New verse by a poet, whose work I can lose myself in, is a blessing. However this time in disguise, the exhibition catalogue is a must—for the new lyrics, only. Dylan has tinkered with his lyrics over the years, some of them at Halcyon are subtly different from earlier variations. Others have been substantially rewritten. Dylan's drawings are pleasant, sometimes moving. Actually, the imagery appears quite ordinary, not striking, and very much unoriginal and there is hardly ambiguity or deeper levels of meaning. In drawing comes across as above average in terms of skill, as from a good amateur artist, whatever salesman Paul Green, president of Halcyon Gallery suggests. Dylan is much more honest in the interview 'Bob Dylan on Mondo Scripto' that comes with the exhibition catalog: "I went mainly with the song titles, and maybe the first line".
- Leung, Bo (2018). Bob Dylan exhibition heads for China. In the China Daily, October 12th 2018. Assessed November 2018: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201810/12/WS5bbfecbca310eff303281eed.html.
The Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol.14 has some serious flaws, because all of the Minnesota outtakes are missing and in the reproduction of Dylan's red notebook four pages are omitted by accident, the other notebook is completely ignored. I'll save my money for now, even though Steve Berkowitz makes a convincing case for the sound and music in this box-set, here.
Once upon a time, people were excited about bootleg albums.
"They were forbidden gems, something you heard whispers about at parties" and sourced on some stall in a local market. You could get it in a record shop nobody knows but the in-crowd, or under the counter of the best record shop in town. Bootlegging is theft as artists lose out on royalties, and the sound quality, well mostly just bad. “They were also slabs of vinyl that somehow linked you to the band, and to other fans, in a way no commercial recording could; that possessed an intimacy all too rare in official recordings.”
Those albums belong to a different time. For, just as with everything from football to photography, big business has reached out and pressed its grubby fingerprints all over. Bootlegs have become official business.For music companies, they’re often just a way of making money from outtakes and releases to maintain copyright. The 'deluxe' four, six or 36-CD versions costs a trifling $ 99.99 to $ 150.- bucks. That’s bootlegging for the prawn sandwich brigade. The different versions give one a sense of any artist's creative journey. I’m more than happy to be able to listen to them. But it’s no bootleg.
- Malik, Kenan (2018). Bob Dylan’s deluxe ‘bootlegs’? They’re just corporate spin. In The Guardian, November 4th2018. Assessed November 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/bob-dylan-deluxe-bootlegs-just-corporate-spin.