By Stuart Mitchner
Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol…
Allen Ginsberg called “Idiot Wind” one of Bob Dylan’s “great great prophetic national songs,” with “one rhyme that took in the whole nation.” Dylan wrote it 50 years ago this summer, first recorded it in New York that September around the time Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, and recorded it again in December before releasing the final version in January 1975 on the album Blood On the Tracks, which I’ve been listening to ever since Dylan’s 83rd birthday on Friday, May 24.
That same day, with election year winds blowing the word trial trial trial like “a circle around my skull,” I began rereading Franz Kafka’s The Trial, looking ahead to the centenary of Kafka’s death, June 3, 1924, the day Max Brod took charge of the unpublished work that delivered a great writer to the reading world. more
I’m beginning my journey through 20th-century New York City with a 21st-century boost from Taylor Swift ahead of a dose of “ninety-six-story-needle” reality from Rebecca Solnit’s introduction to Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (University of California Press 2016), edited by Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.
The line I’ve quoted is from an August 1991 interview Patricia Highsmith granted the International Herald Tribune shortly before publishing the last novel in the Ripley series, Ripley Under Water (Knopf 1992), which I read in a day, swept along in a fever of morbid anticipation. Whenever that most civilized of psychopaths Tom Ripley is involved, it’s not what happens next that carries you along but the need to know when it will happen and to whom and how, and then how Ripley will get away with it, which he always does. There’s no denying you’re in the grip of the writer Graham Greene called “the poet of apprehension.”
By Stuart Mitchner