JMW Wow that worked great huh?
WG Yeah with “Blowing in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice”. Grossman was a very smart man; apparently he was not a very likeable man but he was certainly smart at what he did. He managed Dylan perfectly; he kept him appropriate for the times and didn’t try to make him too accessible. He never tried to make him be more congenial to the press or anything like that, he just let him be who he was. Of course Dylan would be who he was anyway.
I know a record I would like to play for you, my daughter drove me up to Columbia to go to the Doctor for a check up. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I said to take me over to the sound shop and I was looking for this record called “I’m Not There” and they had it on sale. It is the soundtrack to the movie and boy is it good. I figured it would be a bunch of really crappy covers of Dylan songs but not so, it was good versions of the songs with a bunch of relatively famous people and then it had more obscure people that you don’t hear all that often. It must have twenty-five songs, plus it has Bob Dylan’s version of “I’m Not There” which has heretofore been available only on bootlegs on the Basement Tapes.
I don’t think I get it. I read a book by Greil Marcus one time, you probably read it, called Invisible Republic where he talks about that song and goes on and on about it. So I listened closely to that song to try to hear what Greil Marcus heard and I like the song, it is an ok song but I don’t hear all the significance, which is not to say that it’s not there.
When we go by Barnes and Nobles I want to pick up a copy of Best Mystery Stories of 2009. It might have a Joyce Carol Oates story in it. It seems like forever since I bought any magazines, I subscribe to some magazines but I am hardly ever where they sell magazines, I want a copy of No Depression and see what kinds of CD’s are with the magazines. My subscription to Fortean Times is out but I won’t buy one of those, they cost over $11 on the newsstand and they aren’t that big anyway.
Mark Smirnoff of Oxford American is making noises about me writing something. We had a little falling out over my Dylan piece. (Smirnoff wanted him to cut the piece significantly and he refused and instead sold it to Paste who made it the cover article and printed it in full.) He has been calling every now and then. Sonny Brewer told him I was sick and his girlfriend called and then he called from Little Rock. He wants me to do something and I want to do it. I like being in there, they still have me as a continuing writer. Anyhow Sonny is coming up for a reading next month. He will stay over and then carry me up to the reading and then stay over again that night. He is on a never-ending tour.
He told me a story about his dog. I’ve been down there a lot and had seen the dog so he has written a memoir of the dog and he calls it Cormac, which of course is the dog’s name. He really thought the world of that dog and the dog comes up missing and he goes to all kinds of efforts to find it; he even hired a private eye, and the private eye discovered that the dog had been kidnapped and to make a long story short the dog eventually turned up in Connecticut and he tracked him down and he had a lawyer to get the dog back and prove that it was his dog. The dog had been neutered but it was still his dog.
He told me this long story and I said “Damn Sonny, you ought to write about your dog.” So he wrote a whole book about it. I’ve seen it in bookstores. There’s one called A Sound Like Thunder and I tried it. He has been everything and no telling what he may do; he may be a movie producer or director or anything.
JMW Is there any news about your movie?
WG You know No Country for Old Men is being released as a movie. Paste magazine had a big review and it is a rave. I haven’t seen a bad review and everything is saying that the Coen Brothers are at the top of their game. This is the first movie for a long time that I have actually considered going to the theater to see. When it opens in Columbia we might drive up there and watch it. We went and saw Shrek III not too long ago.
My least favorite actor in the world is Adam Sandler. I don’t like Jim Carrey much either but I like him better than Adam Sandler. There is something weird about that guy. I kind of like that movie Dumb and Dumber. Tommy Franklin, down in Oxford, had all these guys hanging around together and they started going over to each others’ house on Sunday night and it would be movie night and all these guys were semi-intellectuals and they were showing arty type independent films and when they came over to Tommy’s house he showed Dumb and Dumber but they didn’t really get into it. I think there are some really funny scenes in that movie.
JMW I have never seen it.
WG It was made by these two brothers and they were good when they started out. Something About Mary, was their movie, but it (Dumb and Dumber) is really crude.
JMW Can the kids watch it.
WG Well it has bad language in it. But most of my grandkids they get to watch anything they want to watch except when they are over at my house and I won’t let them watch anything with an R rating, but that is just me. I never let my kids watch everything that anybody else got to watch.
JMW I just saw you are going to be a fellow with the United States Artists foundation this year.
WG They are making the announcement later this month and they have been calling me wanting me to fly out there and they are having an award ceremony at Paramount Studios. They wanted a picture so I took care of that but I don’t want to fly out there.
I need to quit smoking like I quit drinking. That would be really good. I’ve got patches but I just haven’t used them yet. I should have checked into this stuff, I’ve never had any interest in disease or health for that matter. I have always been healthy and I never went to doctors. I have never been seriously sick; it is a little disquieting to have to face all that. I knew I was feeling really rotten all last year. I probably had high blood pressure for months before this deal happened. (He recently had a heart pacemaker installed.) It was probably an accumulation of things like a lot of stress over the kids’ situations and worry about that dog. Then my heart just said, “Fuck it, I’m not putting up with this crap no more”. It was time to go to the house.
JMW Yep, the long home.
WG When I heard that phrase used I knew that would be a book title. I heard it at my Uncle’s funeral; it’s a quote from Ecclesiastes. My editor didn’t like the title and we fought over that. That was one of the few fights I won. He wanted to call it The Pit.
JMW Sure glad you won that one.
WG One time I was with this guy who runs a writers program over at MTSU and he was trying to get a program going for Tennessee writers and I said that I hoped Tennessee would treat its writers like Mississippi or Georgia. Alabama and Mississippi have these awards like Writer of the Year and as far as I could see Tennessee doesn’t have anything. (William became the first recipient of the Tennessee Writer of the Year in 2009.)
JMW I got a grant once from the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities. I set up a program called Prehistory of the Cumberland Valley. They gave me $3,000 in a grant and I got the state archaeologist and the leading archaeologist from the University of Tennessee and gave them a stipend and travel expenses and they agreed to come and then I got the High School gym and advertised in the paper and invited everyone in the local counties to bring their artifacts in and the archaeologist would talk to them about it. It was really popular. I couldn’t believe it.