Mystics with 'Practical Feet'

A germ, a bug, got the better of me. My energy totally escaped me. Yesterday, I barely hung on, going through the motions of my job. By mid-afternoon, I was laying on the back porch, in a fetal position, listening to the birds, trying to soak in some of the sunshine of a beautiful fall afternoon. I ate two Tuna steaks (power/brain food) and two containers of frozen yogurt (chocolate and vanilla), and tried to fill myself up with a new strength.

I rented John Boorman's 'Deliverance,' a great movie that still holds up, it's a dream/event that I lived through many years ago (1970?) and started reading my new book, 'Will in the World, How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.' I first read about this book in a review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. Adam is a great writer who always has something new to say, he never falls into cliche. The book 'speculates' on Shakespeare's life (there isn't much hard evidence, except for the plays and sonnets) and proposes how the life informed the work.

My first impression is that Shakespeare, much like Bob Dylan, was/is a man open, aware of the world, able to soak up everything, and willing and able to transform the raw materials of a life into art. High and low art the same. A magician (the art is almost inconceivable, looks like magic) who uses the things of the world as they are, and recombines them to create new configurations, for example: 'Hamlet,' and 'Mr. Tamborine Man.'

Two poets, magicians, mystics, men with 'practical feet,' who can make words sing, but who never forget the ground, the humor, the common story of the human and all the things men do.