Regarding Lucy Sante's 'Six Sermons for Bob Dylan'

Recently Tenement Press in the UK collected the full and original texts of the sermons Lucy Sante was asked to write for Michael Shannon to perform for the DVD element in Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981, the 2017 set covering his gospel years. I was privileged to be asked to write an afterword. Lucy is an old comrade. In the early 1980s, when I was still finding my way in the dark into the catacombs of what turned into my book Lipstick Traces, she sent me a rare collection of lettrist film treatments and scripts she’d found in a used booksore; it turned out to be a lynchpin for what followed, showing me where to look. And I recall a phone call from her some years later: “Can you tell me why my publisher is sending me hundreds of miles to go to a bookstore to give a reading to three people?” That’s what it means to write books. I was once walking down Solano Avenue in Berkeley and passed a now long-defunct bookstore, where in the front window sat a big, burly, unhappy-looking man sitting at a card table with a pile of books in front of him. It was Robert B. Parker, then one of the best-selling authors in the United States, followed year by year by readers like myself for his series featuring the Boston private eye Spenser. He was waiting for people to ask him to sign his books. There was nobody there.