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Happy Spring!

With the arrival of each new season, it’s my habit to conduct a mental inventory of songs featuring that season.

Of late, I’ve been thinking of May songs. There are so many. “The Lusty Month of May” from Camelot. Dion’s “My Girl the Month of May.” The Bee Gees’ nostalgic “First of May.” The Blue Öyster Cult’s vaguely ominous “Then Came the Last Days of May.” “Waitin’ for the May” by Nick Cave. Arcade Fire’s “Month of May.” The list goes on.

I think my favorite spring song is Fran Landesman’s “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” Carolyn Casady, a now-deceased friend of mine, was close to Fran; they were near neighbors in London. Carolyn talked of Fran often. Maybe that association contributes to my love of the song, I’m not sure.

In any case, the song’s brilliance is attested to by the many artists who have covered it: Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Julie London, Betty Carter, Barbra Streisand, Dianne Reeves, Norah Jones, and many others. For interested readers, here’s a link to the Ella Fitzgerald version.

How can you not love a song that begins: “Once I was a sentimental thing,” then eases into “Spring this year has got me feeling like a horse that never left the post”? That’s the thing. “Spring can really hang you up the most.” Not only can it hang you up, it can make you feel like you’re collecting dust “on the shelf with last year’s Easter bonnets.” All the while, “college boys are writing sonnets, engrossed in the Tender passion.” Yikes.

At its core, it’s a song about broken dreams of romance: “Spring came along, a season of sun/Full of sweet promise but something went wrong.” You won’t find a more poignant, more affecting song about the spring season.

Here’s a photograph of the late, great Fran Landesman.

Speaking of spring, about a month ago I had a special spring evening with my daughter Lacey. I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan for more than six decades, but I’d never seen him live. I figured it was high time, especially since Dylan was about to turn 85 and I’m not getting any younger myself.

The show was at the Palace Theater here in Columbus. For many different reasons, it was a night I’ll never forget. Dylan performed brilliantly. Ever the word-man, he dazzled with his unmatched phrasing, often hilarious intonations, and croaky declarations about his long search for truth, connectedness, satisfaction, and love. We loved the show.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

From “All Along the Watchtower” — “Outside in the distance/A wildcat did growl/Two riders were approaching/The wind began to howl.“

From “When I Paint My Masterpiece” — “Newspapermen eating candy/Had to be held down by big police/Someday everything is gonna be different/When I paint my masterpiece.“

From “I Contain Multitudes” — “Got a tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe/Got skeletons in the walls of people you know/I’ll drink to the truth and the things we said/I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed/I paint landscapes, and I paint nudes/I contain multitudes.“

From “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” — “I’m giving myself to you, I am/From Salt Lake City to Birmingham/From East L.A. to San Antone/I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone.“

From “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” — “Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed indeed/Give me that old time religion/It’s just what I need.“

From “Crossing the Rubicon” — “I can feel the bones beneath my skin/And they’re tremblin’ with rage/I’ll make your wife a widow/You’ll never see old age/Show me one good man in sight/That the sun shines down upon/I pawned my watch, I paid my debts/And I crossed the Rubicon.“

From “False Prophet” — “Well I’m the enemy of reason/Enemy of strife/I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life/I ain’t no false prophet/I just know what I know/I go where only the lonely can go.“

And from his deadpan cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown” — “I’m having a nerrrrrvous breakdown/A mental shaaaaaakedown.“

Imagine Dylan singing that last song just a month before his 85th birthday. I couldn’t stop thinking about the words of another Dylan song, “Not Dark Yet,” which was written almost 20 years ago: “It’s not dark yet/But it’s gettin’ there.”

Changing the subject, I want to use this opportunity to congratulate three of my writer friends. This spring, they’re each publishing new, much-anticipated works.

First, Karen Kukil. Some readers will be aware that Karen is the world’s foremost Sylvia Plath textual scholar. She edited Plath’s unabridged journals and co-edited — with Peter Steinberg — the two massive volumes of Plath’s collected letters.

This month, she and her co-editor Amanda Golden published The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber). The product of fifteen years of research and careful editing, it contains 542 poems altogether, more than 200 previously unpublished poems, and 300 pages of annotations. Heather Clark, author of the magisterial Plath biography Red Comet, has said of the Golden/Kukil collaboration, “With the publication of this book Plath scholarship will never be the same.”

Second, Gail Crowther. Gail resides in Cumbria, England (which includes the Lake District). Previously, she’s written extensively about female luminaries like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Dorothy Parker.

Just published in England and soon to be published in America by Simon and Schuster, her newest book is titled Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe. It’s sure to be just as engrossing and informative as all her other books have been. Her goal at the outset was to cut through all the Monroe stereotypes and show Marilyn as the intellectually curious, voracious reader she was when she wasn’t posing in front of a camera. The book’s publication is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Monroe’s birth.

And third, Andrew Welsh-Huggins. Andrew has just published The Delivery, the second book in his acclaimed Mercury Carter series. Carter is the poised, empathetic, and unendingly resourceful private mail carrier who has never once missed a delivery. Things get in his way, though, in this case a tangled human trafficking web and a cast of unsavory characters who couldn’t care less about him completing the delivery he’d set out to accomplish before encountering their foul stew of lawlessness and depravity. Andrew’s a witty, inventive, and highly entertaining writer. Like The Mailman before it, The Delivery stands out because of the author’s deft handling of dialogue and close attention to careful, intricate plotting.

Congratulations to Karen, Gail, and Andrew! I encourage everyone to check out their books!!

• On March 12, I spoke about That Beast Was Not Me to members of Congregation Beth Tikvah in Columbus. The event was well-attended, and members of the audience asked probing questions, not just about my book but about the different ways in which my personal and professional experiences with extremely violent men affected me when I left work and headed for home. Here are a few photographs of the event, which took place in the congregation’s beautiful synagogue.

• On March 26, I was the guest of a group of old lawyer-friends and others who meet periodically for dinner, and who had some questions they wanted to ask me about That Beast Was Not Me. At one point during our informal, freewheeling discussion, one of the participants asked a question that caused me to look askance.

• The week after Easter, I was the guest on Erik Rivenes’ podcast called Most Notorious. Interested readers can access the interview on my YouTube channel.

• On April 16, I participated in what was a first for me: a podcast broadcast from Australia. The podcast is called I Catch Killers and it reaches a large audience in that country. The podcast’s host is Gary Jubelin, a retired homicide detective with more than 20 years of experience. He asked particularly penetrating and thought-provoking questions. The podcast posted the two-part interview to its own YouTube channel, and to mine as well. If you’re interested, you can watch/listen to it there (part 1 and part 2).

• On April 23, I appeared as the guest speaker at a meeting of the Carnegie-Collier Rotary Club near Pittsburgh. I hope the attendees enjoyed themselves as much as I did. Some of them seemed particularly interested in the provenance of my several John Wayne Gacy paintings — so we talked about that and a wide variety of other issues.

• During May, filmmaker Grey Everett Smith published on YouTube and Instagram the first 2 parts of the 3-part interview he conducted with me earlier this year. They can be viewed on my YouTube channel (part 1 and part 2).

• On May 16, I was a participating author at the Newark Bookfest, which benefits tremendously from Stephanie Loughman’s organizational efforts. The weather wasn’t perfect, but it was still a fun and productive day. I took a photo before the event officially got underway. There was an equally long corridor of writers stretching in the opposite direction.

Readers beware: This is an angry book.

Although there’s still debate about the exact meaning of the phrase “Christian nationalism,” the majority of Americans consider it an ideology that is based on the belief that the United States was founded to be an exclusively Protestant nation. In the face of the deep and widespread social and cultural changes that have occurred in recent decades, Christian nationalists speak and write of the need to reclaim the United States for Christ.

Josiah Hesse would like a word.

He was raised in the small town of Clear Lake, Iowa. Throughout his childhood, he was a member of Agapé Christian Family Church, a fundamentalist congregation. For many years he listened to nothing but Christian music. A voice in his head — he names the voice “Caldonia” — mocked him and shamed him and insisted that he was on a fast track to Hell every time he deviated even a little from the path he was supposed to be traveling.

He was terrified of being exposed to information that ran counter to the claims of his religion. He was tormented by thoughts of his confused sexuality and highly dysfunctional family. Eventually, his parents obtained a divorce and he was forced to find his own way forward without much in the way of parental guidance. Looking back, he came to view the cultural/religious crucible where he spent his formative years as “a perfect breeding ground for self-loathing, isolation, and addiction.”

He reminds readers of the toxic influence of evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson — and Ronald Reagan. They all endorsed “purity culture” as an alternative to a secular culture that they judged inimical to their concerns and aspirations.

To illustrate his point, Hesse quotes from a Christian Coalition fundraising letter that Pat Robertson mailed out in 1992. The letter read, in part, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”

Woven throughout Hesse’s account of his personal journey — which includes serious addiction issues, a turn to long-distance running, a devotion to punk rock, and a career as an independent journalist — are trenchant observations about the ways in which rural Americans, especially farmers, were left feeling alienated and abandoned by a federal government that paid little attention to their lives and livelihoods, especially during the last decades of the 20th century.

In the final pages of his book, Hesse adopts the role of documentarian. He returns to Clear Lake from his adopted hometown of Denver and interviews many of the people who played important roles throughout his childhood, including his parents, his two siblings, and his long-time best friend. Let’s just say that he finds satisfaction to be an elusive commodity.

I recommend this book. It’s thick with references to sociology and a variety of secondary texts, but it’s a clear and useful window on the culture of Christian nationalism. It should terrify every one of its readers — but it won’t.

Paul Morley is an English writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic. He’s also a Dylan fan. An extreme Dylan fan.

The subtitle of his book — “Bob Dylan and the Voices of a Lifetime” — points to his obsessive interest in the different voices Dylan has used throughout his decades-long career as a songwriter and performer. In the first chapter, Morley refers to Dylan’s “one-of-a-kind” voice, and to the “shifting, accumulative Dylan voice” — but by the end of the second chapter, which is called “Nothing but a Voice,” he’s identified at least thirteen different Dylan voices. For the reader, learning of his efforts to document these voices can be a bit exhausting.

Speaking of exhausting, Morley seems to be obsessed with lists of every kind. On pgs. 20–21, he sets out to remind readers of the artists in whose work one can hear “the essence of Dylan, a voice of greatness.” To make the point, Morley lists 70 different artists.

Elsewhere, he suggests Dylan was “seeing undulations in the world that no one else was seeing and giving us a chance to see things through his eyes and hear things he was hearing.” He goes on to cite songs “motivated by the falling in and out of love, songs of light and dark, rows and romance, blame and counter-blame, symptom and cause, self-estrangement and powerlessness, voices answering voices…” — and on it goes. I could cite many more examples. Like I said, pretty exhausting.

On the other hand, Morley has a knack for vivid, memorable phrases. To cite just one example, he references Dylan’s aging voice “made up of scorched fragments and menacing creature croaks, the sound of a cracked 78, a vortex of crazy brushstrokes, crackling through the air.“

Dylan enthusiasts are likely to find much of interest in this quirky take on Dylan’s life and influence — but they’ll probably reach the finish line, if they ever get there, feeling frustrated and annoyed in equal measure.

The book could have used a more discerning copy editor. “Dylan made alienating and illuminating with language, not limiting himself to reality….” Was that really the clearest way of saying whatever it was Morley was trying to say? Elsewhere in the book, typographical errors and syntactical irregularities add to the challenges facing the intrepid reader.

Readers willing to give Morley’s book a chance are likely to find their stamina tested.

Patti Smith’s first memoir, Just Kids, won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2010. It focused on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were both struggling artists in the bohemian quarters of New York City.

Bread of Angels, published in 2025, is a different kind of memoir. It tells of Smith’s childhood as a sickly, itinerant, rambunctious loner, always dreaming, always reading, always pressing outward against limits, and always longing for some kind of “mystical world.” Most of her early years were spent in Philadelphia and the southern part of New Jersey. A foreshadowing of things to come, her childhood was “an endless gallery of trespasses.” Her mother was preoccupied by the thought that she might one day be kidnapped, like the Lindberg baby.

Of interest to readers wanting to learn more about Smith’s influences are the sections devoted to writers and friends like Arthur Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Allen Lanier, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jim Carroll, Lenny Kaye, Jim Morrison, Tom Verlaine, Sandy Bull, and Richard Hell.

For me, by far the most affecting parts of the story are those that pertain to Patti’s courtship with and marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, who’d played guitar for the groundbreaking MC5 (as in “Motor City 5”). Remember lead singer Rob Tyner screaming “Kick out the jams mother—ckers!” at the start of the group’s 1969 garage anthem, “Kick Out the Jams”?

Turns out Fred Smith was a gentle, artistic soul who loved sailing, collaborating with Patti on her Dream of Life album, and sitting with her in their house on the shore of Lake St. Clair, listening to Detroit Tigers games on the radio. Patti’s writing about her life with Fred is tender and poignant. She’s outlived him now by more than thirty years.

I strongly recommend this book. It vividly documents Smith’s life during the years after she retreated from her role as one of punk’s most literate provocateurs.

At the moment, Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers is ranked #1 on the New York Times list of bestselling non-fiction books. It tells the heartbreaking, confounding story of how her twenty-year marriage to the father of her three children ended suddenly when she received a phone call from a man who said Burden’s husband was having an affair with his wife.

When confronted, the husband, who Burden calls James, admits to the affair, says he wants out of the marriage, and expresses no interest at all in being awarded custody of the children.

Obviously, many readers have been enthralled by Burden’s telling of her sad story. Critics have been enthralled, too. Graydon Carter called Strangers “a beautifully written instant classic.” A Washington Post critic described it as “a hypnotic nail-biter.” It was selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times. Joyce Carol Oates wrote of Burden’s “heartbreaking candor” and called her book “a beautifully written eulogy for the loss of a relationship that had been loving…and trusting.”

However, not all readers have been so impressed. Some critics have described Burden as an entitled, highly privileged socialite whose experience has limited relevance for people from other walks of life. After all, Burden is Babe Paley’s granddaughter. Paley was an uber-wealthy woman of whom Truman Capote wrote, “Babe Paley had only one fault. She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect.” Some called her the most beautiful woman of the 20th century.

Burden avoids providing a pat ending to her harrowing tale. In the final pages of Strangers, she writes, “I don’t know why [my husband] left. I don’t think I ever will,” then adds, “ He is someone I don’t know. He is someone who doesn’t know me.”

Strangers is a compelling, at times emotionally wrenching read. I recommend it.

Slowly, I find myself transitioning away from the subject of murder.

I’ve begun work on a second memoir. The new one has little to do with crime, murder, or forensic psychology.

The working title? We’ll Meet on Edges.

I’ve spoken at other times and in a variety of different contexts about my early fascination with strange (to me) and unusual people, for example sideshow performers, evangelical believers who handle venomous snakes as part of their worship services, maverick intellectuals and scholars, the victims in what I refer to as “captivity narratives,” remote islanders, rock stars becoming rock stars, celebrities, chronic psychiatric patients, punk rockers, and so on.

Of late, I’ve been writing about some of my adventures at the edges of the world my conservative parents had in mind for me — and at the edges of my own identity, whatever that is.

The writing has required me to take more than a few backward glances. Mostly, those glances have returned me to times in my life when I took risks and emerged from some new experience as a recognizable but changed version of my former self.

Stay tuned!

Until next time,

–Jeff

P.S. Readers of my newsletter know that I like to include a couple of song recommendations for those who are interested in cool songs they may or may not have heard before.

Here’s a good one from Look for Your Mind!, the latest recording by the Lemon Twigs. I love the CD’s title, especially the exclamation mark at the end. It declares the need for an urgent, perhaps unsettling quest. Proceed at your own risk.

Anyway, check out “Bring You Down,” which joins “Summertime Blues” by Blue Cheer, “Stick Up for Me” by the Reigning Sound, and “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck as angsty laments for the little man who feels screwed by the powers that be. Here’s the link.

And here’s one from the Pretenders’ 2016 album Alone. Chrissie Hynde sings the title track, a cheeky celebration of resolve and independence, like no one else could. To the best of my knowledge, no one else has even attempted a cover. How could they? After ten years, I still smile every time the song comes on. Here’s the link: Here’s the link.

“I was so hungry for color.” – Sylvia Plath