Month: July 2007

It’s almost as if this was some kind of weekly thing…

  1. “Can’t Get it Out of My Head” by Electric Light Orchestra
    Robin Hood and William Tell and Ivanhoe and Lancelot, they don’t envy me
  2. “How Do You Do It” by the Stool Pigeons, guessed by Kim
    You give me a feeling in my heart, like an arrow passing through it
  3. “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, guessed by Kim
    And there’s doctors and lawyers and business executives
  4. “Donna the Prima Donna” by Dion & the Belmonts
    She buys them at the 5 and 10 cent store
  5. “Spark” by Tori Amos, guessed by marisa
    But she couldn’t keep Baby alive
  6. “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” by John Lee Hooker, guessed by Kim
    I ain’t seen my baby since night before last
  7. “Don’t Fence Me In” by David Byrne, guessed by Eric
    I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
  8. “Down the Highway” by Bob Dylan
    Lord, I really miss my baby
  9. “Dirt Road Blues” by Bob Dylan
    If I can’t find my baby, I’m gonna run away and hide
  10. “I’m So Sick of You” by Weird Al Yankovic, guessed by Betty
    I hate your whiny loser girlfriends too

Guess the lyric, win no prize — it’s just that easy! Here are last week’s answers. Good luck!

A brief mention in today’s Writer’s Almanac led me to the Wikipedia page on Joseph Mitchell’s book, Joe Gould’s Secret:

Gould suffered from writer’s block and hypergraphia…

What a horrible combination!

It’s possible that Mitchell also suffered from much the same:

Mitchell’s account of Gould’s extravagantly disguised case of writer’s block, published as Joe Gould’s Secret (1964), presaged the last decades of Mitchell’s own life. From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything significant again. In a remembrance of Mitchell printed in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, his colleague Roger Angell wrote: “Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained.”

Thirty-two years of writer’s block. I don’t even want to imagine what that must be like.

I’m almost disappointed there wasn’t a single “he said darkly” in the book.

There’s more I could probably say about it, good and bad, but overall I genuinely liked it.