It was a charming, almost quaint time in the history of the company. We were a dozen employees strong, the underdogs of the industry. Almost no one had heard of Substack back then, outside of a smattering of media-world obsessives. On each writer call, I would begin by describing the concept in as simple terms as possible: a platform where you could publish whatever you wish, own your work, have a direct line to your audience, be your own boss, and earn revenue through subscriptions.

I rang up friends and former collaborators to pitch them the idea. wondered if she could serialize a memoir. thought he might form a community of people who wanted to nerd out on the craft of short fiction. was sitting on more than a hundred essays, completed or in draft, the ingredients for what would become The Honest Broker. decided to launch his Substack on the first day of a Wilco tour, creating a place where he could share songs, audio memos, and stories. had a piece about the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and wanted to publish it independently, rather than hand it over to a media outlet.

Along with those era-defining artists and writers, a crop of homegrown stars began to emerge, such as , who arrived with an excess of talent and vision, soon rising from relative obscurity into the biggest food writer on the platform and a legitimate presence in the broader culinary world. Every sort of writer, artist, musician, and creator could soon be found on Substack, doing their thing, from hobbyists to journalists, illustrators to politicians, fashionistas to market analysts, novelists to scientists. The platform evolved to include audio, video, podcasts, community tools, and livestreaming, but everything remained anchored to that same foundational ethos.

As time passed, we hired more people for Partnerships, forming the core of a team that included some of the most gifted and passionate people I’d encountered, colleagues who came from creative backgrounds themselves and truly cared about what we were trying to build. Any one of them could have been successful as a writer or creator on the platform, but instead we banded together to pour our energy and love into serving other writers and artists, helping to forge a new path for independent culture. It was the greatest pleasure to see the model take hold and flourish, to celebrate alongside a creator as they grew their audience and revenue from zero to a hundred thousand to a million and beyond.

That feeling hasn’t gone away for me. The Kool-Aid still courses through my veins. I fully believe in Substack and other platforms that are at the center of this revolution in media, this shift towards ownership and autonomy.

But despite the conviction of my belief, and despite my affection for so many coworkers and for the writers and artists I’ve gotten to work with over five and a half years, I’ve decided to leave the company. Today is my last day.

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A friend of mine recently watched Jerry Maguire on a flight. Over coffee, he reminded me of the basic story. Jerry, a successful sports agent at a large firm, finds himself facing down an identity crisis. In the middle of the night, he dashes off a manifesto, a mission statement. Before he thinks better of it, he drops a copy in the mailbox of each of his colleagues, making a case for fewer clients, less money, more attention. He nervously walks into the office the next morning, and his coworkers stand to applaud his virtue but snicker behind his back. He soon finds himself ousted from the agency.

This is not exactly my Jerry Maguire moment, but I sat down to rewatch the film, and so much in there resonated with me.

One symptom of success, of multiplying in size the way that Substack has, is that some level of intimacy and depth is often sacrificed, by necessity. There was a time in which I would take every call that came my way and would spend long hours dreaming with a writer or artist about what they could build, and then I’d help them do it. But eventually that became impossible. I found myself sprinting from one Zoom to the next, often losing the ability to spend adequate time with each writer or artist. I felt less like a creative partner and more like a sunbaked shepherd overseeing a vast flock.

I guess I’ve reached an age in which I’m susceptible to nostalgia. But I’m also a realist. I understand that success means scaling and that scaling requires a shift of approach. My job had to develop in the way that it did. It’s just no longer the right approach for me. So I’m starting over, dashing off a mission statement and dropping it in all your inboxes. My decision to go independent is less about show me the money and more about help me help you. And hopefully a bit of you had me at hello.

Tomorrow I’m launching a new company, Amplifier, that’ll allow me to dig in with only a handful of clients, to get back to collaborating on making things of value and consequence and putting them out into the world. A lot of that work will happen here on Substack but also across a constellation of other platforms. I’ll partner with media companies, agencies, and brands that are trying to navigate the evolving media world, to find their place and expand their reach. And I’ll work with individual culture stars, to help them figure out how to succeed in this new landscape, how to create something that will resonate and endure.

Fewer clients, more attention. I’m trading scale for depth.

Over the past years, I’ve had relationships and conversations with thousands of you across the platform—writers, artists, thinkers, musicians, podcasters, filmmakers, and of course my wonderful colleagues at Substack. It’s been one of the most fulfilling and rewarding jobs of my life, to build this alongside all of you. Thanks for working with me and helping to make Substack the kindest, smartest, most creative corner of the internet.

This platform is still relatively small, but somehow it has become the red-hot center of cultural energy in our modern world, punching way above its weight. I know there’s much more brilliance to come. I’m so excited to see what you all make next, and I’m thrilled to hop over to the other side to join you.

If you have an idea for how we might work together to make something great, I’d love to hear from you.

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The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

—Elizabeth Bishop

Someone stole my laptop in New York a few weeks ago. It either happened as I navigated the crowds in Grand Central, or on the sidewalk as I lowered my head against a blustery and rainy day, or on the subway platform. I was headed to meet a friend for lunch, arrived early and got a coffee, stationing myself at the counter for a few minutes of work. But when I reached for my computer, I found that the side zipper of my backpack had been slid open, and the laptop was gone.

I ran outside to track it with my phone, but it had already been taken offline. The thieves knew what they were doing.

I returned to the cafe and sat stunned. There seemed to be no recourse. No sense in alerting the police, who had more pressing concerns. It wasn’t the machine I mourned—it’s painful to replace, but it’s replaceable. My real worry was the decades-worth of writing and photos and music and other documents that I hadn’t remembered backing up in the cloud. Was it up there? I looked skyward from a window. The rain whipping and swirling over Central Park suggested that even the cloud had broken. My work was likely lost out there, dissipated, sinking into the dirty grass, trickling down the street drains.

While I’m always trying to improve my reactions to minor daily frustrations, I’m quite good at facing bigger losses that are out of my control. I fairly quickly reached a zen state over the matter, knowing I would need to spend the afternoon buying a new computer and starting to hunt for years of work. That was that. I either had all those story drafts, and the novel-in-progress, and photos of my kids when they were babies, and the letters and poems, or I didn’t. But honestly, would I have ever really done anything with all that stuff? I hadn’t yet, so maybe losing it would be no great disaster. Perhaps it could feel freeing, a sort of artistic reincarnation, a chance to start fresh. I drained the last of my coffee and went about my day, trying to be at peace with the loss.

That wasn’t the first time I’d had something stolen. I used to drive a small maroon pick-up truck around Oakland—except when someone else was driving it, because it got stolen with alarming regularity. Sure, you didn’t need a key to get it started. But the truck also just may have been cursed.

Once it was gone for a month. I was a middle school teacher then, and my students would frequently report having seen my truck speeding along some interstate, like a ghostship cruising the freeways of the Bay Area. I walked a lot that month and memorized the bus schedules, and then the truck reappeared, recovered down in the warehouse district of East Oakland, not far from where the Warriors played before Oakland lost them to San Francisco, and where the Raiders played before Oakland lost them to Vegas, and where the A’s played before… when is it they’re leaving Oakland? The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

One morning my truck was stolen from in front of my house while I ate breakfast, and on that same day, just before sundown, I found it myself, abandoned a dozen blocks away. They’d taken the equipment for the middle school basketball team I coached, but otherwise everything was as I left it. I hopped in and drove it home.

It had somehow become the people’s truck, operating under its own set of rules, owned by Oakland. It seemed filled with the intent to be lost. I eventually accepted its unique situation in the world, and when I moved from California to DC a couple years later, I gave the truck to a friend as a gift. I didn’t feel like it was mine to sell.

The first time something was stolen from me, I was 19, traveling through Ecuador by bus. My girlfriend and I had a backpack filled with our valuables—passports, cash, a camera, and a roll of toilet paper. (You don’t travel across Ecuador without carrying your own toilet paper.) The ride from Cuenca to Quito took ten hours, through the rainforest on a narrowing mountain road from which buses sometimes slipped off the side and vanished into the green abyss. We survived that jungle stretch and continued north through a series of villages, and in one of them, two men boarded and sat directly behind us. I registered their arrival but didn’t pay much attention to them.

Soon we hit a military checkpoint. A pair of uniformed teenage soldiers climbed onto the bus with their machine guns, making their way up the aisle to check each passenger’s documents. I lifted the backpack from between my feet to retrieve our passports, and even before I unzipped the main compartment, I could see that the toilet paper roll had been shredded. Little bits of white paper fell from the bag like confetti as I opened it. Someone had rifled through our things. I wanted to investigate, but one of the armed teenagers was waiting impatiently to see our papers, so I dug out the passports and handed them over. The soldiers left the bus, and we turned to our backpack. The camera was gone. It was a vintage Canon my dad had given me, and I was in Ecuador mostly to take photos, so this was not something I wanted to lose.

I stood up and turned to the two men behind us. They were speaking loudly and pointing out the window at nothing in particular, clearly trying to avoid my stare. One of them had a torn scrap of toilet paper sticking out of his shirt pocket like a handkerchief. He saw me notice it, and he tried to tuck it into the pocket nonchalantly. There were other bits of paper in their laps and on the floor at their feet.

We’d been in Ecuador for a couple months at this point, and my Spanish had become conversational but not fluent. “Where is my camera?” I asked them in Spanish.

They both started shouting at once, feigning outrage at the implied accusation. They spoke at roughly ten times the speed of mine, and at a much higher volume, and there were two of them, so it was difficult to get a word in. But I did my best to say that my camera had been taken from my bag, and the remnants of toilet paper served as proof that they were responsible.

With all the commotion, the driver stopped the bus and swiveled in his seat. Many of the passengers turned to see what was happening. One of the thieves pretended to be particularly insulted, ranting and raving up the aisle, decrying the injustice, and then he fled the bus, running across a plaza. I watched him disappear into the village, knowing he had the camera, while the other man dropped his tote bag onto the seat and raised his arms, offering to let me or anyone else look through his things.

An especially helpful passenger encouraged me to inspect the guy’s tote, but there was no point. We let him leave, and my girlfriend and I sank back into our seats and began removing each thing from our backpack to take inventory. 

Our cash was gone too, a couple hundred dollars in Ecuadorian sucre. 

At age 19 I still harbored a naive worldview that people were generally good and kind and that luck protected me. Yes, I read and watched the news, but the transgressions and tragedies covered there felt distant from my own life. I guess that’s the definition of privilege. Yet my dismay wasn’t really over material possessions. I’d lost a camera and some money, but the violation felt much bigger at that moment. It felt like my perception of the world had crashed, that my unshaken trust in humankind had mudslided off into the jungle.

And then things unexpectedly shifted again. That passenger who’d been most helpful and sympathetic had been rooting around in the seats vacated by the thieves, brushing aside the shredded toilet paper. Stuck between the two seats, he came up with a wallet. “Is this yours?” he asked. It wasn’t. We looked through it with him and found that it was the wallet of the second thief, the one who had stayed behind to let his comrade dart off with the goods. The wallet had roughly the same amount of cash that we’d lost, along with a bunch of strange business cards, photos of his kids, and his identification papers. He was Colombian—here was his name and birthdate and home address—and he wouldn’t be able to cross another border or get through a checkpoint without these documents.

“Take this,” the nice man said. “Maybe it can help you.”

We arrived some hours later in Quito and went to the apartment of my girlfriend’s dad, Patrick, who was Ecuadorian. After we told him our story, he carefully laid out the contents of the wallet on the table, thinking through each item as we stood by. The business cards didn’t make sense to me. They represented all sorts of small businesses with which no self-respecting thief would ever associate. Some of the businesses were Colombian, some were Ecuadorian, some were from other South American countries. Patrick put his finger on one and slid it to an empty space on the table. “This is the one we call,” he said. It was for a poodle-grooming establishment.

It had to be a front, Patrick explained. We stood by while he placed the call and asked for the thief by name. When the person on the other end claimed to have never heard of the guy, Patrick told him, “We have all his documents here. He has five minutes to call me back at this number before we contact the police.”

The phone rang two minutes later. It was the thief. Patrick instructed him to deliver the camera to the front desk of his apartment building by 7pm. Once it was delivered, the receptionist would call Patrick to inspect it, and if everything appeared in working order, the thief would be able to pick up his wallet by noon the next day. The thief asked if there was any money in his billfold. Patrick repeated the question for us, and we shook our heads. “No money,” he reported.

While we waited for the camera to be delivered, we sat down for a little art project, drawing fake currency on rectangles of paper with the Colombian’s caricature in the center, labeled with the Spanish words for thief and asshole in script below each portrait. We created currency for the exact amount of money he’d had and then stuffed these new bills into his wallet.

While we were decorating the money, the thief called again to ask the make and model of our camera. He had an entire bagful and so didn’t know which one was ours.

And so my camera was returned to us only a handful of hours after it had been stolen in a tiny village in the middle of Ecuador, our lost cash restored by what we found in his wallet, and a strange kind of justice seemed to have been meted out. I almost felt guilty, but I couldn’t get past the utter improbability of the whole thing. Karma, people would say with a smile when I told the tale at dinner parties.

It was much later, several years, that the story began to feel less fun. I kept thinking about the photos of the man’s kids tucked into his wallet. Here was someone acting in desperation, probably in order to support his family. I can’t imagine he expected he would spend his 40s away from home, in a foreign country, swiping cameras from young tourists. I’m not justifying his actions, but I do feel a pang of regret for having taken his money and replaced it with a small stack of fuck-yous. Perhaps I could have reacted in a way that might’ve helped both him and me grow from our encounter, rather than having gloated in victory. I was the 19-year-old American, traveling abroad with a vintage camera and riding a lifelong lucky streak. He was the father stealing things on buses. I could’ve handled the situation with compassion.

I felt particularly regretful when I told the story to my kids and they asked, Wait, you kept the guy’s money? Kids reveal you to yourself, through their purity and directness. I could see their calculations as they converted the story’s details into a rough guide for how they might approach similar circumstances in the future. All we can hope is that our children grow up to be better than we are.

There’s always part of me that wants to be a Leonard Cohen-style ascetic, to vanish to a mountain retreat and divest myself of all possessions, living silently for stretches of time. But of course that’s impractical and impossible for my current station in life: a father of two, a husband, a person with a job and a mortgage, someone who desires love and friendship and who wants to go on dates with my wife, spend days with my kids, hunt for adventure and drink too much wine and have nice things.

And so maybe these items—my camera, my pickup truck—that disappeared and then unexpectedly boomeranged back, serve as reminders that possession itself is ephemeral, uncertain, and overvalued, that I should aim to keep myself balanced in the way that Cohen did as he aged. He was both a monk and a rock star. He could surrender to every worldly pleasure, yet he could set it all aside and devote himself for years to the quiet pursuit of deeper wisdom.

In a bizarre coda to the laptop incident, I just got a call from the security office at Grand Central Station. Three weeks after I lost it, they recovered my computer, undamaged. The officer didn’t know where it came from or when exactly it was found; apparently it just showed up on his desk. What to make of that?

Friends, I got shoulder surgery 3 weeks ago, and I expected that my period of convalescence would offer a fertile stretch of creativity, in which I’d be dashing off posts, reading stacks of books, and producing podcast episodes to share here on Hey Pop. Instead I’ve basically been a couch cushion—running the ice machine all day, munching on xmas cookies, and bingeing episodes of Fargo. Oh well.

I have some stuff in the works for after the holiday break, but before we go, two things.

The R.E.M lyric in the post title has been rattling around in my head since I read the excellent NYT magazine cover story from a couple weeks back, written by my good friend Jon Mooallem. It’s a profile of Michael Stipe and very much worth your time.

I’m aware that “Man on the Moon”—the song that includes the lyric, “Here’s a truck stop instead of Saint Peter’s”—is about Andy Kaufman. But as I’ve been stewing on that line, it occurred to me that, taken out of context, it’s a perfect metaphor for the often frustrating practice of art. We sit down each day in an attempt to make something beautiful and meaningful, to create St. Peter’s Basilica—channeling Bernini, Michelangelo, Bramante, and Maderno—but most days we end up with a truck stop. Today is one of those days. This month is one of those months.

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Finally, before we pause, below is a poem by Michael Donaghy, one of my favorites. Michael was born in the South Bronx to Northern Irish immigrants. Once addressing a conference of librarians, he said this: “I owe everything I know about poetry to the public library system and not to my miseducation at university… The Bronx, who knows, now it may be full of cappuccino bars and bookshops, but back in those days it wasn’t. My parents would say something like ‘go out and play in the burning wreckage until dinnertime,’ and I’d make a beeline for the library."

Michael was a musician, worked for a time as a doorman in New York, and eventually decamped for London, where he spent much of his adult life as a central figure in the poetry world. He died at age 50 of a brain hemorrhage, leaving behind his wife and young son, a devastating loss to literature and to all who had encountered him.

Jon Mooallem and I got to know him during his last handful of years. We were young poets hanging around the fringes of the poetry-conference scene (sort of like desperate gigolos hanging around truck stops, now that I think about it), and we got to study a bit with Michael, bask in his presence over beers at the pub, and record him reading his work. He was a deeply original talent and generous friend. Here’s a poem for New Year’s.

Refusals
by Michael Donaghy

Shooting their horses and setting their houses alight,
The faithful struck out for a hillside in Sussex
To wait for the prophesied rapture to take them
At midnight, New Year’s Eve, 1899.

But they knelt in the slow, drifting snow singing hymns,
Hushing their children and watching the stars,
Until the sky brightened and the cold sun rose white
Over the plain where their houses still smouldered.

Some froze there all day, some straggled back sobbing
To salvage what little remained of their lives.
Others went mad and refused, till the end of their days,
To believe that the world was still there.

Here, ten seconds to midnight, they join in the count
Over tin horns squealing in the bright drunk rooms.

Michael’s Collected Poems is out of print and has gotten pretty expensive, but his volume, Conjure, is still somewhat affordable and my favorite of his.

Enjoy the holidays, and see you in 2024.

I find in this piece a deep hope many parents share—that our children will be curious and open and bright enough to recognize great art when they encounter it, to connect with and appreciate those timeless works of genius that bind us through the generations.

-DS

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Thanksgiving, 1990. I was driving my family from upstate New York to my brother’s place in Rhode Island. We had done this many times before, and of all occasions of the year it was the one I looked forward to most, but I was brooding over some professional difficulty. To distract myself I rummaged in the tape box and came up with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’d been knocking around in there for months, but playing it always seemed more of a project than I was ready for. And even now there was something perverse in my choice. I expected my boys, ten and eleven, to complain in favor of something hipper or at least shorter, and I was resolved to make them listen anyway for their own damned good.

No one said anything for a while. We were driving along the Mohawk River. The day was cold and clear. The light glittered on the water, in the windows of the old brick factories in the towns we passed. The baby slept in the back, my wife dozing between her and my son Michael. My youngest boy, Patrick, was up front with me. He had strong opinions; he would be the first to object. I was ready for him.

We’d gotten through the first movement and were well into the second when he finally turned and said, “What is this? This is really great.”

And Michael said, “Yeah, this is great,” and leaned forward over his brother’s shoulder and hung there, listening.

Now this was pleasure, to watch their pleasure, so true and uncomplicated. Some twenty years earlier a clever girl had needled me about my taste for Beethoven. “He’s so bombastic,” she said. “So grandiose. Do you really like that stuff?”

I did, but she made me wonder why — because it was Beethoven, and I was a hick? I went on listening to Beethoven, but at certain moments some small doubt soured my ears.

But these boys of mine were listening without prejudice or reverence, and the purity of their attention somehow refreshed my own, so that I was hearing the music as it deserved, without that whisper from the corner.

To describe Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is to doom yourself to fatuity. Beauty, great-heartedness, endless surprise — these words don’t get you there. The hardest things to explain are those that move us to praise. There will be trouble, there will be pain, the music knows all this, but knows too that sometimes it is insanity not to sing to the heavens with thanks for friendship and brotherhood and the love of husband and wife; insanity not to be mindful of these things and grateful, as a man surrounded by his family is already grateful, on a cold sunny day, for good food waiting at the end of the road, in his brother’s house.

Years back I ran a magazine called Radio Silence with a handful of friends. The focus was literature and rock & roll, and we invited writers and musicians to contribute. A highlight of those years was flying to LA with our contributing editor, Ben Hedin, to interview Lucinda Williams in her home at the edge of the San Fernando Valley. Her dad, Miller Williams, had long been one of my favorite poets, and of course I loved Lucinda’s music.

Ben was pals with Lucinda and her husband/manager Tom Overby, so really all the credit for this goes to Ben. He’s a terrific interviewer and writer, and I basically sat there holding the mic, soaking up the amazing stories Lucinda told about her father and her path to becoming an artist, and draining glass after glass of wine as we worked our way through most of a case, very late at night.

Lucinda was disarmingly intimate and vulnerable, crying when the emotions tipped over the edge and sometimes getting up from her place at the table to hug each of us before sitting back down to continue.

While Lucinda really did chase Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks when she was a child, that’s not really what the conversation was about. (Yet what a gorgeous metaphor for a budding artist; I still feel like I’m always just chasing Flannery’s peacocks every time I sit down at the desk.)

This piece is essentially about artistic inheritance—what we glean from our elders, what we pass down to our kids, how Lucinda’s father both protected and encouraged her as she pursued a creative life.

In Radio Silence, we ran the piece as a sort of memoir, straight from Lucinda’s mouth to the page. Below is the result.

-DS

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My dad, when he was a younger writer, always had a mentor. Flannery O’Connor was one. We lived in Macon, Georgia, and she was in Milledgeville. So my dad took me. And this is what’s so beautiful about the story: O’Connor—unlike me—was very disciplined. She had a certain time that she would write. She would get up at eight in the morning and write till three in the afternoon, and if the shades were down, that meant she was writing and you couldn’t come in. We showed up, well, she was still writing, so we had to sit out on the front porch until she was done. And she raised peacocks; my memory is of chasing her peacocks around the yard.

When I was about fifteen and sixteen I discovered her writing and read everything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t that much. But I read everything, and I also devoured Eudora Welty’s stuff. But for me, Flannery O’Connor was to writing what Robert Johnson was to blues. That might be the best way to say it. There was something about her stuff that was just a little more crooked, a little more weird, a little more out there. My song “Get Right With God” and my song “Atonement,” I got a lot from her novel Wise Blood. I was sleeping on a bed of nails. Wise Blood is about this guy who befriends this preacher who pretends to be blind. He’s a total con man, and this kid befriends him. At the end, the kid decides he’s got to be like Jesus Christ and suffer. He fits this barbed wire on his bed.

I have fond memories of the sound of my dad’s typewriter, which you don’t really hear anymore. I always knew when my dad was on the typewriter, something good was going on. As soon as I could read and write, I started writing little poems and short stories. I was six years old. I was always one of those kids who could entertain myself for hours sitting and writing or drawing.

I don’t know if it happened that I became a writer because I wanted to please my dad, or if it just came naturally to me. Maybe it was a combination. I just remember enjoying creating—writing and creating—from a young age, and eventually that spilled over into music and wanting to learn some kind of instrument. My mother is a musician, and there was always a piano in the house. Probably most of it was genetic, or part of it was genetic. We don’t really know why we’re drawn to certain things, you know?

I had all these heroes when I started out, like Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, all these traditional folk singers. And later Judy Collins and Bob Dylan. Highway 61 Revisited was the first Bob Dylan album I heard. A student of my dad’s came over to the house one day with a copy of that album, just raving about it, and I put it on the turntable and started listening. I was only twelve, so I didn’t understand everything on it, but I went, wow, this is a culmination of the two different worlds that I’ve come out of, the literary world and the traditional folk-music world. I just fell in love, then and there; I fell in love with Bob Dylan. There was some part of my twelve-and-a-half year-old brain that went: This is what I want to do.

In college—my dad wanted me to get a degree so I would have something to fall back on—when they asked me to put down what I was going to major in, I put cultural anthropology. I didn’t put music. I wasn’t interested in studying music formally. And then my parents split up. My mom was still living in New Orleans and it was the summer, and I went to stay with her, and I ended up getting this job on Bourbon Street at a little folk club. Smack in the middle of Bourbon Street. At the time it was a big deal. It was just for tips, but you could do pretty well back then in tips. And I remember calling my dad and I said, “Instead of going back to school, I want to stay here and do this.” And he said okay. To me, I felt like that was the turning point, because I wanted to please my dad. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I don’t know what would have happened if he had said, “No, I want you to come back.” But because he had been a struggling young poet, he understood the need to follow that path, so he supported me.

During the seventies, I was hanging around Houston and Austin, Texas, playing gigs in clubs. It was a different time than it is now. I wasn’t like, “Oh my god, I’ve got to get a record deal.” I didn’t know anything about the music business. It was just me and my guitar, playing in clubs. There was no music business mentality. I think that proved to be a good thing. Some people might go, “Well, you could have made it sooner,” but I had this group of other musicians, like a support group, and no one was thinking about record deals or the music business. We were just writing songs.

I went out to L.A. at the urging of a friend, late 1984. He said, “Come out and I can get you some gigs.” And I remember when I left Austin everybody said, “Oh, they’ll eat you alive out there. You’ll come back to Texas with your tail between your legs.” And I said, “We’ll see.”

I came out here with this guy I was living with at the time, and in the back of my mind, I think I knew I was going to stay. I wasn’t going back. We ended up breaking up, and I found this place in Silver Lake for like four hundred bucks a month. Cute little duplex. I started playing, and eventually this guy who was the head of A&R for the West Coast for Sony said, “I want to try to convince everybody else at the label.” They gave me what they used to call a development deal. They would give you enough money to live on for six months, and you would write songs, and then the label would listen to it and decide if they wanted to sign you or not.

Well, I’m in seventh heaven at this point. I don’t have to work a day job. I was free to sit and write. I did a demo tape, and they passed on it. Sony in L.A. said I was too country for rock, and Sony in Nashville said I was too rock for country. This is before alternative-country, alternative-rock, Americana, all that stuff. None of that had happened yet. I fell in the cracks. It took this European punk label, Rough Trade Records; they weren’t worried about marketing like the American labels were.

I never got bitter. There’s no place for bitterness. That’s a waste of energy. I always figure, okay, if it’s not going to happen now, it’s going to happen at a certain point. I always had this thing that was pushing me and driving me, and I don’t know what that thing was. People ask all the time, “Do you feel bitter because you didn’t make it sooner?”—and the answer is always no. When I was in my twenties, I was not ready. Happy Woman Blues [Williams’ first album to feature original material], I was getting a taste of being a songwriter. Although there’s songs off Happy Woman Blues that people still want me to play; there’s a certain innocence in all of it. I guess I’m saying is the older I get, the better I get. I identify more with the jazz world and the blues world and the poetry world. My dad once said to me, “In the poetry world, nobody’s even considered until they get into their fifties and sixties.”

All the classic poets were older. There are very few younger famous poets, or younger famous writers for that matter. Kerouac was kind of younger. A lot of the jazz artists didn’t look perfect. They weren’t beautiful. The rock world, on the other hand, is youth obsessed. The blues world, nobody worries about the age thing. Look at Honeyboy Edwards. Tom and I went to see him at Cozy’s in Sherman Oaks. I was sitting there at the table going, This is a living link to Robert Johnson. The guy was unbelievable, like a young rock guy. When was the last time you saw a fucking rock musician playing at the age of, what, he was ninety-what? It blows my fucking mind.

He does two long sets, takes a break. I go up to the bar and introduce myself. He’s drinking a big glass of beer and a shot of whiskey. He’s got these incredibly beautiful hands. And I said something like, “Are you married or….”

And he goes, “I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s forty-five.”

“Really?”

“Yep. And you know what?”

“What?”

“She treats me just like a baby child.”

To him, forty-five is young. So that’s what he was saying: “I got a younger woman and she treats me like a baby child.” I’ll never forget that. He was fucking sexy. I’m serious. This guy was hot. He’s like ninety-something years old and, you know, sowin’ his oats! And I went back and told Tom and I never forgot that. That was something I wrote down in my notebook. I’ve been trying to fit it in a song ever since.

My mind’s always going, just like my dad’s was. He had these index cards in his pocket and would write something down, then put it back in his pocket. I can remember him mumbling to himself, and I do that. When Tom and I go out and I think of something, I grab a napkin. I should probably put out a book called Cocktail Napkin because I have all these napkins with lines of things, something somebody will say or I think about. And when I feel compelled, I sit down and get all those notes out.

I don’t work at it every day. I’m not really disciplined, but I’m definitely not lacking in inspiration. To me, that’s the secret. It’s not about the discipline of getting up every day and writing, it’s about staying inspired. When I feel like it, I feel like it, and work. It’s not a mathematical thing. If I knew how to explain it then I probably wouldn’t be the artist I am. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I think a lot of it, maybe, is having listened to all the right people when I was growing up. Like Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn and Ray Charles and Bob Dylan and all his wonderful melodies, like “Ramona.”

That song, you know: “Ramona, come closer, shut softly your watery eyes.” That to me is one of the greatest lines. “Shut softly your watery eyes.” Not just shut your eyes, but shut softly your watery eyes. And that melody. What about Leonard Cohen and “Suzanne”? And Nick Drake. The Doors. “Come on, baby, light my fire.” It doesn’t even have to be a complicated line. It could just be the right melody sung in the right way.

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to branch out and take on different characters, like writing a short story. “Memphis Pearl,” that song, I wrote about this woman I saw digging through a garbage can, and I kind of imagined who she might have been. Writing about myself came naturally to me. My fans are concerned because my songs are so autobiographical that when Tom and I got engaged—I’m serious—I did interviews and they would ask, “What are you going to write about now? You’re not searching for Mr. Right anymore. Now you’re in a relationship and you’re happy.” Well, here’s the thing about misery. I had a lot of misery when I was growing up. I have enough misery to last me for the rest of my lifetime. The misery is like a well, and I just dig into the thing and pull it out anytime I want. I have misery and then some. I don’t need to create any more. I can write about other stuff, other stories, other peoples’ lives. A lot of the songs on Blessed are like that, like “Born to Be Loved”: They’re not necessarily about me, even though everything I write has some of me in it. The hardest thing is not looking like you’re pointing the finger and blaming someone, like, “You fuck-up, you piece-of-shit fucking drunk fuck-up!” Not making it sound like that. Being empathetic but also pointing out a flaw in the character at the same time. “Lake Charles” was like that, about a guy, Woodward, who was basically a total fuck-up. He was a beautiful person—soulful and all the rest, but doomed.

This involves my dad, and it’s a true story. When I was about four years old I had befriended this little caterpillar in the backyard. I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night to go see about it. My dad heard me get up and followed me outside. The caterpillar had died. I was quite distraught, and my dad tried to console me, so he wrote this poem called “The Caterpillar”:

Today on the lip of a bowl in the backyard
we watched a caterpillar caught in the circle
of his larval assumptions
My daughter counted
half a dozen times he went around
before rolling back and laughing
I’m a caterpillar, look
she left him
measuring out his slow green way to some place
there must have been a picture of inside him
After supper
coming from putting the car up
we stopped to look
figured he crossed the yard
once every hour
and left him
when we went to bed
wrinkling no closer to my landlord’s leaves
than when he somehow fell to his private circle
Later I followed
bare feet and door clicks of my daughter
to the yard the bowl
a milk-white moonlight eye
in the black grass
It died
I said Honey they don’t live very long
In bed again
re-covered and re-kissed
she locked her arms and mumbling love to mine
until turning she slipped
into the deep bone-bottomed dish
of sleep
Stumbling drunk around the rim
I hold
the words she said to me across the dark
I think he thought he was going
in a straight line

That should explain to you why and how I became a writer, because my dad always credited me with that line. He has Alzheimer’s now, and he told me he couldn’t write anymore. It just crushed me, because that was my whole connection with him. We were sitting in the sunroom drinking wine, and very matter-of-factly he goes, “I can’t write poetry anymore.” I said, “What?” He goes, “I can’t write poetry anymore.” Can you imagine? It was like somebody said “I can’t walk anymore” or “I can’t talk anymore.” And I just sobbed and sobbed. I still can’t believe he said that. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, since I was fucking born. I love my dad so much.

Final note from Dan:

Miller Williams died in 2015. If you haven’t encountered his work, you should pick up a copy of his collected poems, and you can start by sampling some via the Poetry Foundation.

We used a line from one of his poems as the title for this Radio Silence piece (and then, incidentally, Lucinda used it for the name of the album she’d been working on in the studio on the day we visited, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone).

At times when I’m present enough in my life to practice mediation, I always finish a session by whispering this short poem to myself, a reminder of the sort of person I want to be as I step out into the world:

Compassion
by Miller Willams

Have compassion for everyone you meet
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.

Lucinda set her dad’s poem as a song for that same record:

You already know there’ll be a gun. This is Florida—and not just Florida, but the Panhandle, a hotbed of evangelical conservatives—so there’s always a gun. Even here in this relatively tranquil expanse of crabgrass and palm trees, there will be a gun. But whose? And why, and why, and why?

We were visiting North Florida for the funeral of my mom’s eldest brother, who had died at 66 of cancer. He’d been full of youth and fire right to the end, a sailor and restaurateur. There was a lot to commemorate and celebrate and a lot to mourn. As a brief reprieve from the intensity of it all, and knowing our dog would be cooped up while we were at the service later that afternoon, my dad and I decamped for an hour at a local dog park.

We passed through the chainlink double-entrance and joined 30 or so dogs and owners spread across the football field-sized park. The Florida humidity draped over us like a hospital gown, awkward and ill-fitting. Our boxer explored as my dad and I strolled and talked about the weekend—plans for my uncle’s funeral, relatives who’d arrived in town, how my mom was holding up. It had been a heavy couple of days and only getting heavier.

From halfway across the field, I spotted an early-twenties guy slink through the entrance gates. He held up his baggy, beltless jeans with one hand, a cigarette dangling from his lip, as he leaned down to unhook the leash of his pitbull. Immediately the pit set off in a sort of hunting trot, belly low to the ground, seeming to survey the other dogs as he wove a shark’s path through the center of the field. I pointed this out to my dad when I spotted it, and we quickly called our boxer back to our side.

The pitbull shot past several dogs before it zeroed in on a docile cocker spaniel, then it leapt from behind, catching the cocker by surprise, teeth to the throat, and the pair fell together in a pile. The cocker spaniel kicked his legs and writhed but couldn’t get any purchase, as the pit had a precise hold on his jugular. This occurred at roughly the center of the park. My dad and I were close enough that we arrived within seconds of the attack. The few dozen other dogs raced to the scene, barking and yelping as their owners snatched their collars.

I understood that the cocker spaniel would soon be dead if no one intervened, and I’d learned somewhere that if you choked a pitbull whose jaw was locked—essentially closing off its air supply—that was the only way to get it to release. 

I found myself astride the two dogs, throttling the pitbull. The cocker spaniel emitted a high-pitched scream, a sound I’d never heard before or since, the panicked cry of an animal facing imminent death. I tuned out the frenzied noise coming from the pack of dogs and owners surrounding us, trying only to hear my dad. He held back our boxer and shouted instructions or encouragement or warnings. I momentarily worried about the pitbull releasing the cocker and attacking me instead, but since I’d already committed, it seemed riskier to let go. I had to keep hold until the scene played out, one way or another. The incredible muscles of the pit’s neck rippled under my fingers, and I redoubled my grip, sensing that there wasn’t much time left.

And then the owner of the cocker spaniel burst into the circle. He was around 60, wearing a tucked-in golf shirt, khaki shorts, and white socks and sneakers; I was eye-level with the lower half of him as I straddled the dogs. From my vantage, I was the first to see him reach for the handgun strapped to his belt.

He drew the weapon, aimed it toward me and the dogs, and he yelled over the cacophony of the scene, his voice crackling with emotion, “I’m gonna shoot it.” The cocker’s high-pitched wail grew more desperate and strained, his eyes bulging. 

I screamed back, “Do not shoot. Do not fucking shoot. Do not shoot.” Part of me thought I still might get the pitbull to release, while another part knew that if he fired the gun, I could be be hit. The dogs and I weren’t exactly a stationary target.

The man compromised. “I’m shooting in ten seconds.” And he started counting down.

Apart from the horror of what was happening, there was a fleeting moment in which I saw the whole thing as a sort of twisted Greek tragedy that we were performing. I was in the center of the ring in a mortal struggle with these two beasts, as the chorus jeered and lunged at us. And suddenly a new force had entered the circle, a terrifying deus ex machina in khaki shorts, come to resolve our deadlock with a bullet. The countdown began.

10.

No one in the crowd dared touch the man. I had his eyes on mine, trying to get through to him, pleading with him as he called out the numbers in an unsteady yawp, the gun cocked and aimed at where I still held fast to the pitbulI’s throat.

9. —Do not fucking shoot.

8. —Listen to me. Please.

7. —Do not fucking shoot.

6. —Do not fucking shoot.

5. —

The pitbull released its jaws at the very second its baggy-jeaned owner arrived. I fell back when the dog let go, not knowing if the pit had unclamped from the cocker with the intention of turning on me. The owner grabbed the collar and, holding up his pants with the other hand, started dragging the pit to the exit, both of them crouched low to the ground as they moved across the field. The pit’s owner spoke not a word to any of us. 

I sat on the grass for a moment. I didn’t know if the cocker would survive, but he sprung right up and went to his owner, who holstered the weapon as he knelt down to comfort his dog. My dad and our boxer came over to me, the dog nuzzling my face.

In the aftermath, everyone seemed to stay there at the park for a while, winding down, letting the dogs recover and run together. Our boxer wouldn’t leave the side of the cocker spaniel; she was like a therapy dog, staying shoulder-to-shoulder with the cocker until he stopped trembling and seemed to get comfortable again. They trotted over to a water bowl and took turns drinking.

I can’t recall what my dad and I spoke about as we walked and decompressed. All the ingredients had collided for something awful to occur, but then it had abruptly concluded, and everyone hobbled away in one piece. We’d encountered death in several forms that afternoon—the cocker spaniel on the brink, a live gun waved in my direction, and a few hours later, we’d be wearing dark suits at my uncle’s funeral. We took a few minutes to get our heads straight, then drove back to join the family. I don’t think we told them about what happened until much later.

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When I‘ve returned to this memory over the years, its meaning keeps shifting. At times it feels weighty and instructive, at other times simply an amusing story for a dinner party. But more often now it has come to remind me of my luck—not just the luck to have survived that moment intact, but my larger, existential luck on a planet that seems increasingly to have lost its way. All in all, the dog park incident was minor and inconsequential, nothing akin to the steady tide of bloodshed and grief that comprise the daily bulletins, both domestic and abroad.

My kids, of course, share in my luck. At the end of each day, they don’t come home to a neighborhood destroyed by violence or to a barren dinner table or to missing parents. How do I help them recognize and make sense of that good fortune? A different roll of the dice could have placed them elsewhere, in this world in which tragedies flare up with agonizing constancy, a world in which children their age are woken by air-raid sirens and explosions.

They could be resting in a hospital bed when a rocket reduces the building to rubble. They could be dancing with friends and family at a music festival when everything turns to carnage.

What can each of us do in such a world? Everywhere a clash of darkness and light, beauty alongside turmoil, and whatever dose we receive on any given day is beyond our control.

These past few weeks have put me in mind of my favorite Auden stanza, the closing of “September 1, 1939.” On that day Germany invaded Poland, signaling the start of WWII. The poem’s speaker receives the news while sitting in a midtown New York dive bar, thousands of miles from the atrocities that were just underway in Europe. I don’t know if this provides any sort of answer for our current moment, but it’s something.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

My son has finally found his confidence as a reader. He’s comfortable in so many other aspects of childhood. He can handle himself on the pitcher’s mound, for instance, staring down a batter while facing a full count with the game on the line. He’ll slurp a plateful of oysters or any other unusual food we put in front of him, without hesitation. He’s sure of himself socially, able to hang with adults or kids of all ages. But when it came to reading, he’d been full of frustration and defeat, giving up at the first moment of struggle. Then over the past couple months, he discovered a book series he loves, and my wife gently and consistently encouraged him, and now he begs to read to us each morning. I hope it lasts.

My wife and I are book lovers and collectors, so our son’s resistance had been particularly dispiriting. We have a house filled with books, lining the walls, taking up space, reminding us of their presence each time we pass through a room. We want our kids to love reading as much as we do, and we’re still in that golden moment in which our children shape themselves in our image, but that won’t last long. Soon our kids will push away anything we slide in front of them, and so persuasion may not be the best approach. Every parent knows that for your kid to truly want something, that thing needs to be against the rules and off-limits.

Many years ago, I traveled to Santa Barbara to interview the writer Thom Steinbeck, eldest son of the great author, for a documentary I was producing about The Grapes of Wrath. Thom gave a generous and intimate interview, sharing personal stories about his dad alongside shrewd literary insights.

I didn’t yet have kids of my own, but Thom told a story that day that has stuck with me, and I promised myself I would steal this trick if I ever became a father. My kids are still a bit young for it, but someday I’ll do it.

Here’s Thom telling the story in all his raspy charm, followed by the transcript, if you’d prefer to read it (slightly edited for clarity).

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[My father] actually once bought this lowboy cabinet and locked all the books he wanted us to read in it with this gigantic key and hid it on top. We went through that in about two years. We’d sneak down every night with flashlights and unlock this thing. We were about eight and nine. And my father said, “Don’t ever let me catch you touching anything in that cabinet.”

Every night he'd make a big deal of it. It had a door on it with this massive brass lock and a key. And there were chairs on either side of this big chest, and it had grates on the front of it. It looked like a priory door, you know, it looked like a prison.

And there was, you know, Twain and Coleridge; I mean, everybody was in there that he thought that everybody should read, that young people should read.

Every night he'd lock this thing, and it made an incredible noise. And he'd stand on the chair, and he was tall, and he'd put the key on top, making sure that we saw that.

I should have caught on. We were being had. We were just being totally had.

So my brother and I would sneak down the squeaky stairs. We lived on the fourth floor; his bedroom was on the third; and the second floor was the library, the library and the living room. And between the two—it was a brownstone in New York City—was this gigantic chest. We’d sneak down with our pillows, and I’d get my brother on my shoulders, he'd get the key, and I'd come sneak down and put the pillow over the lock, so you could take it out, got our flashlights going.

Because my father said there was a secret in there that we weren't supposed to know. That was the other sucker trick: He said several of the books in there have got secrets that I don't think that you should know. That just hammered down the lid, as far as I was concerned.

We did this for months. And I was always amazed that my father always made sure there were plenty of batteries in the house, and I could never figure out that one. Those old D batteries and D flashlights, and my Boy Scout flashlight, olive drab, with a clipped-head flashlight. I was trying to figure out what the secret was, and reading these things.

And since my father knew where every book was, we would have to sneak down the same night and put them back. So we got very little sleep for the longest period of time.

Years later, I'm sitting at a dinner party—my father gave a dinner party—and the conversation came around, we were just talking about really esoteric people out there, esoteric writers that no one ever reads anymore but that had a lot of impact. And this conversation came up about Farquhar who was a humorist, an English humorist of, I think, the 14th century—I don’t know; I've forgotten now. At any rate, I sort of put in my two cents about Farquhar.

My father looked at me, and he said, “What do you know about Farquhar? They don't teach Farquhar in school.”

I said, “Oh, I remember there was a book around here.”

My father knew exactly where the book was. He'd locked it up, right? And he gave me this look, and suddenly I found I'd been caught in the middle of something because I suddenly remembered where I'd gotten the book of Farquhar. It was in this cabinet.

And my father looked over at me, and like this inside joke—there were eight other people at the table—he said, “You know, son, if you'd oiled that lock on that damn door, a lot of us would have gotten a lot more sleep.”

My kids, at 6 and 8, haven’t truly experienced death yet. For that I'm grateful. Our cat died two springs ago, and the kids loved her in a way, but she had already existed for them as a sort of phantom, never letting them get too close. One moment she was napping in an adjoining room, and the next she was napping underground in the backyard. Her departure didn’t register for them as a major catastrophe; it was more of a curiosity. On the morning we buried her, I saw how closely they studied my wife’s and my sadness, trying to emulate and make sense of it.

I learned something important from each death of my own childhood. In navigating those events, I began to understand the hidden depths of the people around me. Each death allowed me to witness, if not fully comprehend, the grief of others, my own grief, illness and how it can change a person, what a dead body looks and feels like, how to say goodbye to someone you love, as they lay in their final moments, how to cope with sudden, unexpected loss. In many ways I was incredibly fortunate: I didn’t lose a parent or sibling, I didn’t encounter war or famine or disaster during my formative years, but still death was all around me.

Yet none of this made me worry that I myself would ever die. The illusion of immortality, that feeling of being unconquerable, is one of the most magical things about being young. I remained certain that death was something that happened to other people.

My early teenage years were marked by an obsession with the Doors. My first heartbreak, around that time, produced a stack of notebooks scrawled with dark teenage poetry, Morrison-esque in the extreme. If I could stand to peek at those pages now (I can’t), they would reveal what appeared to be an infatuation with death—reptiles, skulls, car crashes, candles, and all the other overworked metaphors.

I started collecting Dia de los Muertos art around that time. I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, debating with friends about religion and the concept of afterlife. Death became a central component of my identity. 

Part of this was posturing—I likely thought it added a sheen of mystique to my persona, however forced and calculated. Another part of it was trying to manufacture a kind of comfort over the recurring mystery of friends and relatives exiting the world. And finally, I probably was pretending that I’d come to terms with my own mortality and was cool with it. The Grim Reaper was my homey. And yet I awoke each day feeling invincible.

As I got deeper into music and broadened my altar of worship to include more rock stars who had flashed out in their primes, as I read their biographies and memorized their lyrics and wore their t-shirts—even then, 27 years old seemed like a lifetime away.

That all changed in high school when a close friend’s little brother died in a freak accident. I’ll call him Tommy. He was part of our coterie, only a couple years younger, a beautiful kid, funny and smart and kind, seemingly always there with us, and quite suddenly he was dead. 

Of the deaths of my childhood, this was the most difficult to make sense of. Tommy wasn’t sick; he wasn’t bad; all in all, he’d lived a charmed life. He was younger than us. It was the first moment that I truly grasped that death was not, on an individual level, about order or justice or reason. Death was a falling leaf that might land anywhere, an expression of the chaos of the natural world. Any one of us could be struck down, in an instant.

At least, in my selfish adolescence, that’s how Tommy’s death touched me. For his family, of course, the event devastated them in a way that I won’t try to describe, since it wasn’t and isn’t mine. I can only imagine—now that I’m a father, worrying through the nights while my kids sleep upstairs—the horror of such a loss.

On the day of Tommy’s funeral, once the service concluded, I filed out of the church with my sisters and parents. We were close with the bereaved, so we turned to attend to the other solemn ceremonies of the day.

I don’t recall if I saw them myself, but five of my friends packed into a Nissan and pulled out of the church parking lot, music blaring from the open windows. I learned later that they drove around all that afternoon and evening, smoking cigarettes and blasting “Alive” by Pearl Jam on repeat. This upset me for years, though I never said anything to them about it. It seemed the ultimate disrespect to the deceased and to the mourners, to play this anthem to life on a day meant to honor the death of another kid, a friend of ours. It felt, at the time, almost like bragging.

But of course that’s not what it was. I finally came to recognize something that’s so obvious to me now: that “Alive” was their way of coping with the terrible epiphany that they were not immortal.

And I’d bet that Nissan is exactly where Tommy would’ve wanted to be. Not in a suit and tie in the sad, tragic rooms of hors d’oeuvres and tissues, but more than anything he would have wanted to be in that car, speeding along country roads with all four windows down, going nowhere in particular, shouldered in among a pack of friends lighting each cigarette off the last, singing until their voices were raw and their faces windburned and the cassette tape started to distort and the gas-tank light blinked in warning. They were alive for the moment. They were the lucky ones. And they weren’t gonna squander it.

Is something wrong, she said
Well of course there is
You're still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be
Is that the question
And if so… if so… who answers… who answers… 

I, I'm still alive
Hey I, I'm still alive

I first met Pico Iyer nearly 20 years ago, when I was producing documentaries about great books for the NEA, and he agreed to be interviewed. As evidence of his eloquence, here’s something he rattled off in our conversation about Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea:

The book has for me the silver light of the Pacific Northwest where Ursula Le Guin lives, and I feel that I'm almost looking out on the sharp and steely maritime skies that you see in places like Portland and Seattle. But the fabric of it is very Eastern and, in that sense, very ancient.

That’s just Pico in casual conversation.

He and I collaborated on other projects over the years—he wrote for a literature and rock-and-roll magazine I used to edit, Radio Silence, and he curated a shelf of books for my bar in Oakland. And here I’ve come begging at his doorstep once again in asking him to contribute a piece to Hey Pop. Now that I’m listing all the generosities he has sent my way over the years, I wish he’d ask me over to mow his lawn or wash his car, to polish his silverware or cook him dinner. I’ll do anything.

Pico Iyer is certifiably the Nicest Man Alive. Any occasion in which I’ve been fortunate enough to cross his path has inspired me to look inward and promise myself that I’ll be more present, thoughtful, and compassionate. I’ve learned so much from him, even from—or especially from—the briefest and simplest exchanges.

He has written broadly and brilliantly about traveling the globe as well as staying put, about figures as disparate (and similar) as Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama. Every couple of years, I reread The Art Of Stillness, Pico’s perfect slim volume about the importance of unplugging and the gifts of silence. He has written 16 books to date, which have been translated into 23 languages, most recently The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise. I interviewed him onstage for City Arts & Lectures in 2019, on the occasion of his publishing a pair of remarkable books about his adopted country—A Beginner’s Guide to Japan and Autumn Light. (You can listen to that conversation on Apple Podcasts here.)

In today’s piece, Pico offers a deeply personal reflection on his father, Raghavan N. Iyer, who, at a startlingly young age, became one of the most admired orators and thinkers of his time and went on to have a long and celebrated career.

-DS

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A Riddle Beyond Reckoning
by Pico Iyer

The deepest gift my father passed on to me was a sense of mystery; I could never figure him out. Nor even discern how much he, lifelong master of confidence, could figure himself out. He bestowed on me the most priceless of lessons: All of us, alone and together, remain riddles beyond the reach of reckoning.

My father radiated such effortless charisma that I was determined to move in the opposite direction, when it came to  temperament and calling and even lifestyle; I determined, at a very young age, that I would craft my own destiny, down to the last letter. But as the years propel me through my autumn, I register the way I organize my books in tidy piles all around me. Him to the last degree. The way I read in every direction, and very fast, with glee. The way my feet stick up when I’m lying flat-out. Not many years ago, I caught sight of an inscription my father had written in a friend’s book and I couldn’t help but shudder: the fast black scribble, the tiny letters, the length of the message, the almost suspect fluency—it was all me to a T (or I was it).

The mystery of inheritance and of where exactly we come from; the mystery of how my father, growing up in a two-room suburban flat far from privilege, became the lone Rhodes Scholar among 600 million very bright and competitive Indians in his year, able to speak for hours (on Shakespeare, Plato, Perry Mason, or the C.I.A.) without notes. A professor by the age of eighteen, though none of his six siblings, nor his parents, belonged to the academic world.

For me he was an absent figure, on the map, but always present in some deeper way; and the more he gleamed and spoke, the more he danced across the room, the farther he was from being grasped.

I dance around the room myself these days, singing nonsense verses just the way he used to do: I seem to have become precisely what I spent years rebelling against. My wife of thirty-five years never met my father, but I assure her that she’s keeping him company every hour of the day. Perhaps the years have opened up to me the folly of running from one’s blood.

Just before my mother turned eighty, a friend of hers suggested I interview her for a few minutes at a birthday party. Against my better instincts, I said yes. At the end of our public conversation, I asked her what surprising lesson she had most profoundly absorbed in her eight decades on our planet.

“You can never know another person,” she replied without a moment’s hesitation.

I hadn’t expected such an answer from my mother; clearly, I didn’t know her well enough. And when I reflected, season after season, upon her answer, I realized she might have been thinking explicitly of her husband of forty years, or even of her son. As a boy, I had such a yearning to know it all; now, as I near the coming of winter, I bow in gratitude before the fact that I can barely know a thing.

Below, listen to Pico read this piece. Thank you for supporting Hey Pop.

My wife and I can’t shake the desire to move elsewhere. Even during times when we’re living somewhere great, surrounded by friends and culture and beauty, we’ll unroll a map and start dreaming of other places where we might pitch our camp. For the most part we want to move abroad, despite the challenges and impracticalities of making such a move with children. We’ll dive down every rabbit hole—researching the schools and demographics, imagining which neighborhoods we would live in and the restaurants we would frequent. And as we begin to obsess over the possibility of transplanting, we’ll grow temporarily blind to the wonderful things about our current home. We can’t quit the habit. We left the Bay Area during the pandemic, abandoning a mostly perfect place for us, but at the time, the move was easy to justify—we’d grown distraught with the Bay Area’s environmental issues and the cost of living, while drawn away by a wish to be closer to family and a hunger for new experiences—and the pandemic provided a license to shake things up.

So two years ago, we left Oakland and landed in the Hudson Valley in a town on the river. We bought an old farmhouse, walking-distance to hiking trails, a charming Main Street, and an art museum; the creek across the street cascades into waterfalls a block away; we have much easier access to the grandparents’ houses; and we’re only 90 minutes by train to New York. It’s an ideal place for us in so many ways. In choosing Beacon, we basically threw a dart at a map; we’d only briefly visited once prior to moving here, and we didn’t know anyone in town. Getting established took many months, but finally we started to find a community.

The kids settled in much more quickly. They seemed to have collected a pack of friends by the end of their first day of school who would shout to them from passing cars and say hello at the farmers’ market. How the hell do you know these people? we’d ask, doing a pretty poor job of hiding our envy.

A friend recently reminded me, You’re only as happy as your least happy child. So I guess we should put away the maps and settle in, having landed in a good place for the kids. And yet…

Kids are also pretty damn skilled at adapting, especially when they’re young. So if we were to decide to pack up for a new frontier, they would most likely adjust and be okay. Would moving somewhere new be the best thing for them? I truly don’t know. It’s a matter of weighing stability against experience, easy contentment against adventure. My wife and I probably discuss and debate this topic more than any other.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been visiting friends in Sweden on the southern edge of Stockholm. It was a magnificent trip, with daily jaunts into the city, great food and company, a couple days biking around Copenhagen, and some nights in the star-filled countryside, where we had a summer crayfish party and foraged for chanterelles in the forest.

Inevitably: Should we move with the kids to Scandinavia? I sat sipping a coffee in a park in Copenhagen on a perfect August afternoon, watching a hundred kids running and laughing and chasing one another, and I imagined our children among them. An hour later, I sat down for an interview with the great chef René Redzepi (coming soon here on Hey Pop) and asked him what it was like to raise a family there. Basically I wanted him to persuade me to move to Copenhagen. And man, he made a strong case. So now that’s one more entry on the growing list of places where we dream of living.

But I’m not sure all this dreaming is healthy. There’s something wonderful about spending years anchored to a single spot, whether it’s your birthplace or an adopted home.

And I should take a minute here to recognize the privilege of even being able to dream about moving around the globe or to visit friends in Sweden. We’re lucky, and we have nothing to complain about. And yet we can’t seem to sit still.

One autumn afternoon when I was 20, I’d returned east from college and was staying in a small cabin on the western bank of Lake George in the Adirondacks. My family had gathered there for some occasion, and I sat beside the lake looking across the water at peak foliage, the reds, golds, and oranges reflected in the lake’s surface. A feeling struck me that could only be described as epiphany. I felt as if I’d just uncovered the key to my future happiness. This is my landscape, I understood, more than anywhere in the world. I knew that no matter where I traveled and lived from that point on, I would someday need to return to the lake country of the Northeast in order to feel like I was home.

I was born in the Arizona desert, an opposite landscape in every way, but we moved to Upstate New York when I was ten, and my most significant formative years were spent running through the woods of the Northeast.

I don’t recall if I’d read the great California poet Robinson Jeffers by the time of that epiphany in the Adirondacks, but his idea of inevitable place has always resonated with me, the notion that for each of us, there exists a location or landscape that will make us feel complete. It may be where we were born, or it may be somewhere we discover in our wanderings, and suddenly we’re home.

Jeffers’ boyhood was spent bouncing between the steel capital of Pittsburgh and boarding schools in Europe. In his mid 20s he decamped for the central California coast with his new bride, Una, and they never left.

“When the stagecoach topped the hill,” Jeffers wrote of their arrival in 1914, “and we looked down through pines and sea fogs on Carmel Bay, it was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.”

Jeffers built a house and tower from the granite stones of the shore. His residence, called Tor House, is now a museum which I highly recommend visiting if you find yourself near Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Robinson and Una raised their twin sons there. His volumes of short lyrics and his long, strange novels-in-verse contain all the violence and beauty found in the natural world of his adopted home.

He died in Carmel nearly a half century after his stagecoach topped the hill. And Jeffers saw his inevitable place change in many ways during those decades, as more people arrived, erecting their neighborhoods and planting their lawns over the wilds around him.

Carmel Point
by Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

I previously wrote of a day when I met with Anthony Hopkins in a Santa Monica hotel room to record him reading poems. A few moments from that session were especially memorable.

To start, Hopkins read to me from his own tattered volume of Yeats, and as I sat holding the mic, I noticed that he’d scrawled columns of mysterious symbols in the margins. They resembled circled asterisks, and there were twenty or more of these runic symbols filling the space beside many of the poems. I asked about them, and he said that each time he recited a poem, he would scratch a line, then cross it when he read the poem a second time, cross it again, and so on, circling the symbol on the fifth reading. He found that once he’d read a poem a dozen times or so, he had committed it to memory. These symbols revealed that he’d revisited many of the poems with astonishing dedication, a hundred times or more.

Hopkins told me on that afternoon in Santa Monica—this was around 2005, so he was in his late sixties—that that day was the first time he’d ever read a poem aloud to another person. I’ve had a hard time believing that could be true, considering his long career on the stage and screen, but there was a certain shyness about him, and poetry clearly occupied a very private and special place for him.

Anthony Hopkins’ boyhood and teenage years were spent beside Swansea Bay in Wales, a place immortalized by Dylan Thomas’ rhapsodic poem, “Fern Hill.” The two great artists were born there only ten miles apart. In the hotel room that day, Hopkins pulled out his own worn edition of Thomas and asked if we could record “Fern Hill.” He arranged the book in front of him at our small rectangular table, nodded to me when he was ready, and then began to perform the poem. His pace was quick at first, like a boy running through a field. And then something remarkable happened. Hopkins’ voice snagged on a line; he paused, and then began to cry. He stopped reciting and paced the room, mumbling an apology. When he sat back down, he asked if we could start over. We did, and then it happened again—Hopkins reached a particularly moving turn in the poem, and he was overcome by emotion and stood up from his chair. The third time this occurred, he sat back down and looked up at me. “I’m very sorry,” he said, tapping the page with a finger. “This is my childhood.”

We finally got a full take of the poem, and since then, I can only hear it his voice. Lines from “Fern Hill” frequently float back to my ear, brought on by a scene or a color or a shift in climate—passing horses in a field, for instance, or walking in the Hudson Valley during apple season, or driving in Sweden through fresh drizzle toward a friend’s warm home.

My day with Anthony Hopkins was five years or so after that moment in the Adirondacks. The power of what I felt on the shore of the lake hadn’t dimmed, and so as I sat with Hopkins and saw him overtaken by memory and longing, as he was transported by “Fern Hill” back to the lush and verdant Wales of his youth, I understood in some small way what he was feeling. There we sat in Santa Monica, talking into a microphone, with the endless golden Pacific sun igniting our hotel room, so many worlds away from his beloved Wales, where he’d been green and carefree.

It’s that tension that I keep troubling over as my wife and I continue to settle into our new home while still itching to get back out into the world, thinking about our own inevitable places and considering the same for our children.

Here is Hopkins reciting “Fern Hill” on that afternoon. The poem was first published in October 1945, only a month after the end of the war, when Dylan Thomas was 31, and young Tony Hopkins, at age 7, was running around the yard of that grammar school you see in the photo above.

Fern Hill
by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Next up on the Hey Pop podcast will be Patti Smith, and I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversation, which we recorded last month at her house in the Village. At one point, she recounts her first transformative experience with art, the teenage epiphanic moment that illuminated her path, that made her understand that she would someday need to leave New Jersey for New York City and dedicate her life to making art.

I wonder how much common ground we all share in this regard, even if we didn’t end up pursuing a career as an artist: Did you have such an experience? How and when did it happen?

I don’t necessarily mean early obsessions like listening to John Denver in the station wagon with your parents, learning all the words, singing along, and falling in love with the melodies. Although it could be that. But rather I mean encountering a work of art, high or low—a book, performance, painting, photo, poem, song, film—that shifted the ground under you, that utterly changed how you saw the world and your place in it, that rearranged how you envisioned the rest of your life.

If you’re so inclined, tell us more about your experience in the comments.

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Here was that moment for me:

I attended a large public high school outside of Syracuse, New York that was populated with all the classic cliques, like in a John Hughes film—goths, punks, nerds, drama kids, band kids, chess kids, cheerleaders, artists, jocks, and so on. I tried to move among them, but, early on, I found myself most often piled in with the jocks. I was tall and played a few sports, none of them very well, and while I did love basketball, I grew increasingly uneasy with the keg-party culture that was taking hold among that group during freshman year. It was as if we were auditioning for fraternities and sororities, and I personally didn’t want any part of it.

A wonderful teacher must have recognized that I was looking for a way out, and at the start of my sophomore year, she encouraged me to enroll in her introductory poetry writing class. I showed up on the first day with a flat-top haircut and basketball sneakers, and over the coming weeks, I distinctly remember my defenses breaking down as I gave way to her gentle instruction, opened up creatively, and came to trust my dozen classmates. At the right moment, she handed me a worn slim copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the poem turned me inside out. Eliot’s poem conjured a mysterious, seductive, and melancholy atmosphere that wonderfully articulated the angst of those mid-teen years.

Fast forward to my senior year, and I’d become a cliché of another sort—I walked through the halls of the school barefoot, with long hair, a notebook tucked under my arm, probably wearing a vest I’d picked up at a thrift store. I’d quit sports and now spent most of my time with the musician crowd and whomever had a serious interest in poetry. I was perfectly ridiculous and probably more than a bit precious, but I’d found my calling. I wanted to be a poet, and the watershed moment had been when my teacher, Nan Faraday, handed me Prufrock. I was eager to escape Syracuse and get far out into the world, so I graduated from school a semester early, was voted “most changed” in the yearbook, skipped the commencement ceremonies, and headed for college in Colorado to study literature and creative writing.

I can’t overstate the importance of that teacher, who I’ll write about at another time, nor of that poem landing in my hands at the moment I needed it.

Years later, while helping create the Poetry Out Loud program for the National Endowment for the Arts, I met with Anthony Hopkins in a Santa Monica hotel room to record him reciting his favorite poems. I hadn’t cracked the spine of Prufrock for a long while by then, but sitting in that room with Hopkins and hearing him recite it across the table from me, the etherial quality of the verse that had first captivated me came swirling back into the room, especially as Hopkins slowed down for the final lines, and you could hear a bit of a choke enter his voice, like someone who had lived Prufrock’s experience firsthand.

Here’s Anthony Hopkins’ rendition of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from that afternoon in the hotel room, circa 2005.

Prufrock was first published in Poetry Magazine in 1915 when Eliot was only 26, even though the poem seems as if it were written by an old man.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.1

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
               So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
               And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
               And should I then presume?
               And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
               That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
               “That is not it at all,
               That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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By many contemporary measures, I’m a bad parent. Let me illustrate with a playground moment from when my son was two. 

We lived in Oakland, California, during my kids’ early years, in a neighborhood just south of upscale Rockridge. From our house, we could walk 15 minutes to a redwood-shaded playground where the majority of the Rockridge parents there, almost all moms, arrived dressed for the gym or the yoga studio. I don’t mention this as a judgment on them, but rather to say that I, an unshaven six-foot-four man who probably hadn’t bathed in a few days and certainly hadn’t practiced yoga, felt quite out of place.

On the day in question, my son scrambled around the sprawling playground structure among the trees, and he eventually climbed to the very top of the dome, where he perched in a sort of crow’s nest and sat stirring a dirt-filled pie dish with a wooden spoon. He pretended to try a bite. “Hey Papa!” he shouted across the playground, loudly enough to snag the attention of the gang of moms. “This pie is gonna be fucking yummy!”

I laughed reflexively and flashed him a thumbs-up. I couldn’t help it. Sure, I was probably alone in my amusement. I imagine the other parents didn’t want their kids strolling home trying out their new word-of-the-day, and I definitely felt a number of glares burning in my direction. Fair enough. But my boy was too far away for me to deliver instruction on playground etiquette and the appropriate use of language without doing so in a performative way. And I’ve never had much interest in performative parenting.

The awful truth is, I don’t care if my kids swear. I myself love bad words; I admire their power and humor. I understand that many readers here will disagree, and that’s completely fine. But me? I don’t give a good goddamn if my kids pop off with some profanities in the comfort of their own home.

That’s not to say, of course, that I taught my kid to announce that his make-believe pie promised to be fucking yummy, nor do my wife and I especially encourage the use of blue language, but we also don’t instill in our kids the notion that run-of-the-mill profanity is inherently taboo, or that their mouths might be washed out with soap. (I distinctly remember receiving that threat when I was a kid, but mainly for talking back.)

Our six-year-old daughter has a particular affinity for wordplay and rhymes. The other day she said, “Hey Mom, I think I need to blast some ass. And when I say ass, I mean poop.” Who could punish such adorableness?

Of course there are limits to what we allow: Some words are just plain hateful (more on that below). We also make sure our kids know that it isn’t acceptable to hurl F-bombs in school or at a friend’s house or in the wrong settings—including playgrounds—but for the most part, if they use salty language at home, and they use it well, we don’t mind. 

Before I explain why, a short, anonymous poll:

Q: How do you deal with your kids and bad words? (Click your answer in the box below.)

1. I strictly forbid curse words and never swear in front of my kids.

2. I rarely swear in front of them, only by accident, then apologize and firmly instruct them that bad words are not to be uttered.

3. I swear in front of them but don’t allow them to join in the fun, explaining that swearing is an adult privilege.

4. I swear like a motherfucker but mostly ignore it when they do, hoping that if I don’t give it any attention, they’ll quit.

5. I don’t give a fuck! Let it rip.

It’s impossible to write any sort of ode to profanity without evoking two of our great philosophers, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. 

Lenny was a free-speech advocate as much as he was a comedian. Toward the end of his career and until his overdose death in 1966, he may have spent more time in handcuffs than he did on stage, frequently arrested for obscenity and blacklisted by most clubs. One of many classic lines that got him in trouble: “Take away the right to say fuck, and you take away the right to say fuck the government.” Lenny had a lot of reasons to say fuck the government.

A 25-year-old George Carlin was in attendance one night in Chicago in 1962 when Lenny Bruce was arrested onstage. It’s worth clicking this link to hear Carlin, who was just getting his start as a comedian, describe that night’s police raid and his own arrest for disobeying the cops. When he was tossed into the paddy wagon alongside his hero, Lenny asked him what he was in for. George said, “Ah, I didn’t give them my I.D.” Lenny replied with, “Don’t be a schmuck.” 

But a decade later, George Carlin would get arrested for non-schmucky reasons when he performed the bit for which he would be best remembered, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”—a list originally comprised of shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, though it evolved over time. Here are the best 10 minutes of the routine.

My favorite linguist, , describes the three main historical eras of profanity in his fun and excellent little book, Nine Nasty Words. The first era of dirty words was religious in nature: damn, hell, and the like. The worst thing one could do back then was blaspheme our delicate Christian sensibilities. The next wave of obscenities—plug your ears and cover your privates—was based on the human body: shit, ass, fuck, etc. The third and most recent era of nasty words is focused on slandering groups of people—such as slurs aimed at race and sexual orientation. See how we’ve evolved?

Lenny Bruce had a famous bit in which he battered the crowd with every racial slur imaginable, over and over again, auctioneer-style. He performed it with the house lights up, pointing to people in the audience and leveling those unutterable terms at them. Then he said, “Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.” Carlin said something similar years later: “These words have no power. We give them this power by refusing to be free and easy with them. We give them great power over us. They really, in themselves, have no power.”

This sentiment, I have to say—even as a parent who runs pretty loose with rules—is a lot of bullshit. I respect it intellectually but disagree with it in reality. Words have enormous power, which George Carlin and Lenny Bruce surely understood and believed, and as the criminal charges against them demonstrated. Lenny Bruce finished that bit by asking the audience to imagine if President Kennedy would go on TV and repeat the n-word so many times that finally it “didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a n— at school.”

A world without hate is a nice dream, and I know that’s what Lenny Bruce aimed to conjure with the bit, but that’s not our world. It brings to mind an interview I recently read with the artist and teacher Latoya Lovely; she related this story in The Creators Forum about an encounter at school not long after the civil rights protests of 2020, sparked by the killing of George Floyd:

One of the kindergarten classes I was in, a little brown boy in a school that was mostly white was arguing with a couple of his classmates. And I just came over to listen, to just be a safe adult. I let them continue to argue so that I could see what they were talking about. The little boy was like, “They’re telling me that I’m lying because I’m telling them that a cop killed a man.” And the little kids were like, “Well, my parents have never told me that.” And I almost cried because I’m thinking in my head, it’s probably because you’re white. And this little brown boy cannot live in this world the way that you do. And his parents are talking to him just like I talk to my son. But it’s not fair that he carries that burden and that these poor babies are calling him a liar because they’ve never heard anything so wild in their life. It is our responsibility—white folks, everybody—in some manner, in the best way that you can to tell your children the damn truth. That’s how our world is going to change. 

Latoya Lovely and Lenny Bruce want the same thing, but Latoya has lived the experience of a Black person in America in the modern day and is bringing up a son in this country. While Lenny’s bit intends to shock us and make us think, Latoya offers a real way forward, one that is both simple and difficult: Tell your children the damn truth.

I know it might seem that we’ve strayed from our discussion of children and swearing, but I believe it’s all related. I respect my kids enough to give them access to the full and powerful range of our language, to trust that they’ll understand the boundaries and the ways that language can be deployed for good and for evil. I want them to be able to distinguish between the truly hateful words of McWhorter’s third category—slurs against groups of people, which only intend to inflict pain on others—and silly PG cusses like shit or ass. And along the way, I try, each day, to tell my kids the damn truth.

* Apologies to John McWhorter for the title of this post, which I stole directly from a chapter title of Nine Nasty Words.

Ted Gioia is one of our most penetrating and important writers on jazz and culture. When I started working at Substack in the summer of 2020, Ted was one of the very first people I called to suggest that he might consider writing on the platform. I’d read and reread his great books—The History of Jazz among many others—and I’d published him years before when I ran a small music and literature magazine called Radio Silence. When I called Ted to discuss Substack, he was intrigued but hesitant, though we kept talking about it over the next many months, and finally he launched what has emerged as one of the great publications on the platform, .

Ted and I met almost a quarter-century ago on Thanksgiving. His older brother, Dana, had been my poetry professor and soon became a close friend and mentor, and I was invited to spend the holiday with the Gioia clan at Dana’s hilltop house in Sonoma County, since my own family lived thousands of miles away in Upstate New York and I couldn’t afford the plane ticket home. The Gioia family is big and rambunctious, of Mexican and Sicilian origins, and the house was filled that day with all the delicious food, engaging debate, and familial love that I would come to enjoy whenever I was lucky enough to be among them.

I was only 22 then, not long out of college and new to the West Coast, and I’d never been around a family that was so accomplished, so thoroughly Californian, and so electrically intelligent. Amid the whirling energy of the room, their father, Michael, exuded a calm and kind presence from the head of the table.

The passage below is an extract from Ted’s unpublished essay “Authenticity in Music,” which he hopes to share in the future on The Honest Broker.

-DS

The most important thing I inherited from my dad

by Ted Gioia

After my father died, I took on the melancholy responsibility of organizing the objects he left behind. I dreaded the moment, but it proved to be a much simpler job than I expected. 

My dad, as it turned out, owned almost nothing. 

The closet in his bedroom, where he stored most of his personal possessions, was tiny—especially in comparison to the huge walk-in storage areas (really more rooms than actual closets) of my home. Yet even this small space he failed to fill.

Living in an unprecedented age of conspicuous consumption, Dad barely lived up to the status of entry-level consumer. The only expensive heirloom I inherited from him, a gold watch, was actually a gift he had received from me a few years before his death—I can’t recall a single lavish expenditure he made on himself during his 84 years on the planet.

The way I look at it, I ended up giving myself this gold watch. It’s somehow fitting that the pricey gift came back to me as his heir—almost as if Dad couldn’t keep something so ostentatious. It wasn’t the right style for such a simple man. But having it returned in this way gave me no joy, as you can imagine.

I’ve now owned this glistening Rolex for more years than my father did. But I don’t wear it—somehow I’m shamed by the thought of doing so when I contrast my own possession-filled life with his austere one. I will give that family heirloom to my oldest son (who was named after my father) in a few years’ time. Maybe he will make better use of it than I have or Dad ever did. I hope he does.

In any event, that timepiece isn’t the most important thing I inherited from Dad. Not even close.

In fact, when I recall my father’s simplicity, I don’t think of any of these matters first. Instead there was something intangible in his character, hard to describe, that stood out even more sharply, a certain translucent quality to his actions and demeanor. This was where his true simplicity resided, not in his half-filled closet.

At first glance, it almost seemed like a character defect, because it was most easily defined by the long list of skills my father lacked. The most obvious was Dad’s complete and total incapacity for irony. He couldn’t make an ironic comment if his life depended on it. Nor did he ever show awareness of the irony others used, no matter how thickly they laid it on. In the kingdom of words, he lived on the surface level, refusing to take even the most cursory peek at submerged meanings that might reside in the basement.

This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but especially in the context of our household. My siblings and I gave an ironic twist to everything that came our way, and Mom joined in happily in this wry banter. Like my father, she had grown up in poverty and never attended college, but had a sharp wit and enjoyed the equalizing power of irony.

Our social betters were knocked down a few rungs by the sly twists we imparted to our critiques. Elites weren’t quite so elite after one of our rejoinders hit the mark—rarely delivered to their face but imagined in vivid detail in the course of our sharp repartee around the dinner table. My father may have presided, in some symbolic manner, as head of the household at these repasts, but in reality it seemed as if he was an oblivious onlooker at a performance he never quite comprehended.

Ah, but irony rarely shows up alone at any conversation. It usually is accompanied by its close associates—sarcasm, smugness, and cynicism. And somehow my father managed to avoid these bad boys as well. I look back on all my various interactions with him over the years, and can’t recall a single sarcastic or smug remark. In his universe, things were what they were, and it would never have occurred to him to reframe his narrative (as we might say nowadays) with these potent tools that serve as both protective layers and assault weapons for the rest of us. 

I rarely thought about all this back in those days—in our early home life, we tend to accept the quirks and quiddities of parents as basic facts of the natural world—but if someone had asked me point-blank during my teen years, I would have admitted that these huge gaps in my father’s toolkit were serious deficiencies. Not only was he defenseless, at least from a verbal standpoint, in a hostile world, but he was also missing out on much of the fun.

I’m not so sure anymore. Nowadays I often envy my father’s obliviousness to the ironic postures of the rest of his family. It’s almost as if he had been born with immunity to a disorder that was infecting everyone else. Thinking back to those times I am reminded of that charged family moment in Hamlet when the protagonist’s mother asks why he seems so upset—and he responds, “Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not seems.”

There are certain people incapable of adopting the roles and poses prevalent in their time and place. They are, not seem. It’s not that they have renounced the advantages of ironic distance; rather they don’t know how to make the trek there—in the case of my father, he sometimes appeared unaware that there was even a journey that might be made.

I think about these things more often nowadays, and oddly enough in the context of considering music and the arts, and especially that fraught term authenticity that keeps recurring in our discussions of artists. I’ve come to wonder whether the true benchmark of the authentic isn’t precisely this same kind of obliviousness my father demonstrated again and again. The musicians who strike me as most authentic never realized that inauthenticity was even a choice—they wouldn’t know how to arrive at that destination, even if you gave them a map and GPS coordinates.

Discovering this kind of authenticity is a gift, but it’s an unusual kind of gift—defined as much by what you relinquish as by what you gain. Most people in the music world find about it from some old blues singer or an antiquated folk song or in so-called world music from far, far away.

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Hey Pop, a podcast about the intersection of family life, work, and creativity. In Hey Pop, I’ll talk with some of the most fascinating and unusual parents in the world—musicians, writers, athletes, painters, chefs, and so on. First up is Shea Serrano: dad of three boys, husband of photographer Larami Serrano, bestselling author, and beloved man of the internet.

Shea has a new Amazon Prime TV show based on his teenage years, called Primo, which he created with Mike Schur (Parks and Rec, The Office, Master of None). It’s a fun, well-made show and worth your time.

The New York Times recently profiled Shea, upon the release of Primo. His rocket seems to be especially blasting off lately.

But despite all this attention, as Mike Schur puts it in the Times piece, “He’s not thirsty for fame or success…. He’s the most laid back guy I think I’ve ever met in my life.” That’s not to say, of course, that Shea is lazy. The dude is a worker. There was a time in his life, as we discuss in the show, when he was teaching middle school, coaching several sports, helping take care of infant twin sons, and starting to make his career as a writer late at night, picking up whatever assignments he could get. He barely slept for a while. But all that work and sleep-deprivation paid off: The books pictured below were #1 New York Times bestsellers. Shea has even started his own book imprint and started publishing fiction.

Shea’s just someone you want to hang out with, and his writing often makes you feel like that's exactly what you're doing—debating who the greatest dunker is in NBA history, or talking about the overlooked virtue of the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park franchise, or deconstructing the lyrics to Tupac’s “Dear Mama.” But it’s not just surface-level fun; Shea’s work is built on a foundation of humility, intelligence, and wit.

The photo below is from one of Shea’s most moving and personal stories. I won’t spoil it; you gotta listen to the episode to know what it’s about.

Shea and Larami have three boys—a 10-year-old nicknamed The Baby, and twin high school-aged sons, whom he calls Boy A and Boy B.

When Shea and I first got in touch more than a year ago, we were supposed to discuss some Substack things, and we did, but we probably spent more time talking about favorite jazz records. Much of our correspondence since then has been about hard-to-find vinyl that we’re hunting for. He’s become a trusted source of good leads…

Or we chat about basketball…

In our conversation for Hey Pop, we talk about a bunch of dad and work stuff—funny things our kids say, Shea’s prior life as a middle school teacher, how he learned to coach sports from playing video games, the importance of balancing parenting duties with your partner, the most unexpected way to become a successful writer, Shea’s thoughts on what makes for a good dad, and other topics. Hope you dig it.

(Thanks to Shea and Larami for permission to use these family photos.)

The summer I was six, my dad loaded his frame pack with just enough supplies for an overnight in the Southern Colorado wilderness and filled a pocket with M-80 firecrackers. Grizzly bears still ruled this country, even in their dwindling numbers, and he hoped the M-80s might thwart an attack. As he strode out of the campsite, I followed at his heel with my walking stick, as did my sister Kerrigan, who was nine. My mom stayed behind with our infant sister.

My dad had a rebellious streak that most clearly manifested in his t-shirt choice—namely, that he would choose to wear the same white v-neck for multiple days while camping, flipping it inside-out whenever my mom would complain about its filth. He did this partly for laughs, a gentle tease for my mom who feigned disgust, and partly to instill in us kids the thriftiness with which he grew up in the milltown of North Adams, Massachusetts. When I was a boy, we didn’t have the luxury of wearing a fresh v-neck undershirt each day, seemed to be the intent behind the joke. We wore what we had, goddamn it.

Each summer, we set out on our big annual trip from our home in Arizona, escaping the Tucson inferno for the forests and cool waters of Vallecito Reservoir, 10 hours north. We’d crank up our Coleman camper in a favorite site on the lakeshore, drag our rowboat and five-horse motor to the water’s edge, and spend two or three weeks fishing for trout, cooking them over a fire, singing along as my dad strummed folk songs on his 12-string, riding horses, playing bingo at the rec center, and hopping the train up to Silverton Mine for their famed cowboy spaghetti dinners. It was our perfect place. We had favorite fishing spots, horses whose names we knew, rock outcroppings where we constructed our imaginary worlds. We would run wild and get dirty and then gather for supper and marshmallows and songs under a million stars and the towering Ponderosa pines. Those weeks in the mountains, year after year, came to epitomize our family’s happiness and closeness. 

And then the summer I was six, my dad decided to mix things up with a night in the  backcountry. So off we went, Kerrigan and I following him like spotted fawns up a steep ridge, off-trail as I remember it, finally leveling out on a high mesa, far above the shimmering reservoir. We hiked for a while through meadows, in and out of woods, and hopped a couple streams. Finally my dad dropped his pack and declared that we’d arrived at our spot for the night. Darkening mountains rimmed the horizon, framing an expanse of aspen. An alpine pond lapped against tall grass. Kerrigan and I gathered firewood while my dad pitched our army-green pup tent, a thin nylon affair just big enough to fit the three of us.

A storm came through in the night, rain and lightning, thunder growling between the Rockies for hundreds of miles. My sister and I slept through it, but my dad stayed alert, watching the tent for leaks, waiting for the lightning strike that would roast us up on that highland meadow. 

At some point he became aware of a large beast outside the tent. He heard heavy footfalls, ominous breathing. He looked at his six- and nine-year-old kids bundled beside him, small and untroubled, probably dreaming of s’mores. The tempest still lashed and whipped the nylon. He listened, anticipating the bear attack that was sure to come, and thought he glimpsed horror-movie silhouettes projected against the siding. He surveyed his few tools. Igniting an M-80 in our tiny space would be a last resort. His buck knife might give him a fighting chance, but he knew that grizzly bears could stand seven feet tall and weigh 600 pounds. We were a midnight snack to such an animal.

After a few awful hours, the storm subsided and the sky grew light, and we remained uneaten. My dad climbed cautiously from the tent, still expecting a battle, but he encountered no grizzly. Instead he saw a cow munching grass at the edge of the pond. There must have been a ranch nearby that set its herd free on the range to be gathered in late summer. This cow had apparently been our tormentor, our terrifying predator, probably just looking for something to huddle against in the rain and wind. She glanced at my dad for a couple of chews, registered her indifference, and returned to her breakfast.

Decades later, I now have children the same age as my sister and I were on that trip. And it occurs to me that that tumultuous night on the highland meadow provides a fitting definition of parenthood. We set off into the world with our kids, supplies on our back and a pocketful of firecrackers, hunting for adventure and beauty and wisdom. And then in a flash, we find ourselves huddled together in a flimsy pup tent as a storm rages around us and a ferocious beast prepares to tear us limb from limb. We grip our buck knives, ready to fight to the death for our children, yet we never feel prepared enough. But each storm passes, and the beast outside is most likely a wandering cow, anyway.

Happy Father’s Day to my own dad and to all the pops out there. Make yourself a drink, sharpen your knife, and don’t change your t-shirt until you’re good and ready. 

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I’m excited to kick off Hey Pop today, and I’m grateful that you’re here to check it out. I’ll have a podcast episode with Shea Serrano ready for you on Wednesday. If you want to know more about our plans for Hey Pop, click here.

Last thing: I loved this little Father’s Day story from NPR’s Morning Edition, featuring retired Army sergeant major Duane Jolly.