Welcome to Monday’s News on the March – The week that was in my digital world.
Bob Dylan Performs, Positively 4th Street, at Outlaw Festival, Saratoga Springs 2 August 2025
Concert video at Music Legend
Two blogger friends – Max (PowerPop) and Christian (@Music Musings), had the good fortune to see Bob Dylan recently at the 10th anniversary Outlaw Music Festival. So naturally, I have been paying closer attention to performances from Dylan on the tour. Lo and behold, this fantastic performance of Positively 4th Street turned up – a song I wrote about here back in February last year. Max and I agreed this rendition comes pretty close to the original. Also, he pulls off some magic with his vocal intonations. Two other performances I love from the tour, both from the same show (20/6/25) which I added to my Music Library Project are the following:
- Desolation Row I love his jangly saloon-bar piano playing. Just a fantastic sound from a bygone era. Despite being 84 years old he can always find a way to get something new out of a song, and
- Under The Red Sky Bob’s vocals here are great. Wonderful performance of a very underrated song.
Emotional support alligator helps man with deep depression
News interview at CBS Evening News
I’m not usually fond of clickbait news snippets of strange stories, but I found myself chuckling and downright baffled, wondering how this was legal in the first place.
Story description: When you think of emotional support animals, you may think of dogs or cats. But one Pennsylvania man has an alligator named Wally. Steve Hartman shares more in “On the Road.”
Someone wrote in response: How ironic that his alligator helps him with depression but causes anxiety to everyone who walks by.
Hemingway – “The Blank Page” (1944-1961): Episode Three (2021) | Full Documentary
PBS America Documentary
I have always been fascinated by anything related to the legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway. In 2019, I wrote a four-part series about my favourite of his books, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure that his biography – captured in this PBS America documentary – is as engrossing and audacious as reading one of his novels. Not so uncanny, considering that much of his fiction drew directly from his own experiences in World War I, Paris and Spain (1920’s) as well as his time covering conflicts like the Spanish Civil War and World War II, where he reported from the front lines and often blurred the boundary between observer and participant.
Documentary Description: Hemingway, reeling from his split with Martha, attaches himself to the U.S. Army as it moves through Normandy and liberates Paris. After the war he tries to start a new life with Mary Welsh but is beset with personal tragedies and professional mishaps. He publishes The Old Man and the Sea and wins the Nobel Prize but eventually is overcome by addiction, physical trauma and depression.
That is all. Thank you for reading.
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
Ever see the movie “Hemingway & Gelhorn”? With Clive Owen as Hemingway (no shit) & Nicole Kidman as Gelhorn? & a bunch of other actors you’ll recognize.
It made me realize that if the last major love of my life (Billy), a great outdoorsman, had been a writer, he would have been Hemingway. Alas, he was just a beautiful jerk, sure of his own righteousness in everything.
I haven’t seen it Polly, but it sounds cool. I see why you compared your ‘larger than life’ – outdoorsman love to Hemingway. ‘A beautiful jerk’ – Haha I love that phrase.
One thing that has always impressed me about both Hemingway and Bukowski is how they managed to achieve such mastery as writers while being raging alcoholics. I no longer drink, but when I did, any attempt at writing always turned out to be absolute shite when I reread it the next day.
Ah, alas AI just told me Hemingway famously disciplined himself to write in the mornings before drinking, keeping his craft separate from the bottle. Bukowski, on the other hand, often claimed alcohol fueled his raw, unfiltered voice — though in truth, he still relied on long hours of solitary work to shape his poems and novels. So there you have it.
I almost never drink anymore, either. I just lost all desire to take any alcohol whatsoever.
I have notebooks filled with notes for poems, written when I was wasted. Almost impossible to read, that drunken scrawl.
Sometimes I’ll be reading something I wrote when I was just “buzzed” ~ a few drinks in. I was writing on the laptop. & the typos are just astounding. It takes forever to fix everything.
& the other thing, of course ~ no hangovers. I really like waking up & feeling good. As good as I can feel at age 65 & wicked arthritic. But drinking doesn’t help arthritis ~ it makes it worse.
See ya tomorrow morning. Have a great Tuesday Polly.
You too, honey.
I quit (cold turkey – cigarettes and alcohol) on the 10th of July. A few days later I had to go Emergency for Delirium tremens. It wasn’t pretty.
That’s wonderful you hardly drink.
I attempted to write an autobiography in my early 30s, back when I was drunk most of the time. Looking back years later, I realized only about 10% of it was even remotely worthy of publication. From that small portion, I ended up releasing bits and pieces here on my blog as “reflection posts.” As you’ve alluded to in your own experiences, alcohol is the ultimate one-stop killer of effective writing for us mere mortals. Haha.
These days, I really like waking up and actually feeling good too. I’m sleeping better than I can remember. Not since I was 17 has my body been 100% free of toxins, and it honestly makes me feel like a teenager again. Now I’m learning to live without vices — it’s strange, but also very liberating. I’m grateful to have been given another chance, and I won’t forget the amazing grace of it.
absolutely, positively…