Sunday Morning Coffee

Escaping the news for a few hours. From baseball to book bars to Bob Dylan.

Is there anything better on a languid weekend morning than a mug of fresh, hot coffee, and the Sunday newspaper, with its myriad of articles to discover? These Sunday Morning Coffee posts are my occasional accompaniment to the Sunday paper, just a few varied links to things I’ve been reading, listening to, or pondering.

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The news can be a bit overwhelming these days, and we all need an escape from the headlines. So here is a politics-free edition of Sunday Morning Coffee, with five suggestions for ways to take a break from the news. At the end, there are some vintage clips of Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s.

1. Read a book. Is there a book bar (or cafe) near you?

One of the best ways to escape is, simply, to read a book. And if you want to be around others while reading, well, according to this piece in the New York Times, Everyone’s Going to the Book Bar.

I believe that a lot of people are trying to find their way back to a simpler time when nothing was more interesting then a new book, and along with that has come the rise of the book bar. These aren’t mere bookstores, they’re cafes, bars and restaurants that invite you to sit for a while and read with no concern about clearing out for the next patron, providing the “third place” we all so desperately crave.

Eater even has a list of book bars around New York City.

A flurry of book bars has recently opened that prioritize solo time as much as low-key conversation, offering a fun alt-combo to record bars and libraries. These spaces for reading, drinking, listening to music, and chatting with other book lovers (or not).

Now, it’s likely that many of us don’t have book bars nearby. Maybe one day. But what most of us do have are bookstore cafes. And that’s just as good, isn’t it?

Honestly, is anything better than quiet time with a book and coffee?

2. Reconnect with baseball

Football and basketball may be more popular now, but baseball will always hold a place in the nation’s heart. And it’s certainly the best sport for celebrating spring, and for reconnecting with an American past when time was slower and the headlines didn’t overwhelm you every time you looked up.

Opening Day was just a few days ago. So even if you don’t live near a ballpark you can find a baseball game on TV pretty much every day from now until fall. Or, since we were just talking about books, no sport lends itself to literature quite as well as baseball. MLB.com has a list of some of the best baseball books of all time. Two favorites:

"The Glory of Their Times" by Lawrence Ritter
Originally published in 1966, this book provides a rare primary-source perspective on baseball in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Lawrence Ritter interviewed more than 25 players from baseball’s early years who were still alive in the 1960s, getting first-person accounts from “heroes of a bygone era,” as he calls them in the preface.

"Wait Till Next Year" by Doris Kearns Goodwin
This memoir, penned by one of our country's most celebrated historians, paints a vivid and heartwarming picture of what it was like to grow up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, in a post-war era. Doris Kearns Goodwin fell in love with baseball at the age of 6, after scoring a game with her dad for the first time, and she's been hooked ever since. Who can't relate to that?

3. Embark on an adventure

In a rut? You Might Need an Adventure, says this article in The Atlantic.

Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Ishmael’s prescription might seem counterintuitive advice in today’s era of self-care. But Melville perhaps knew something that we have forgotten: When life is getting you down, the answer is not more comfort but less.

Thankfully, the article also notes that you don’t have to go hunting whales, as Ishmael did, to reboot your life. Heck, maybe just a short road trip will suffice. Or even something you can do from home, like learning something new:

A challenging adventure doesn’t have to be physical in nature to bestow benefits; it can equally be mental. Indeed, learning new things with a spirit of curiosity and exploration has been shown to induce positive moods.

4. Or, if you really, really need to get away …

Check out this podcast from the Good Life Project, where author Pico Iyer discusses his newest book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, and the benefits he’s gotten from silent retreats in his life. And even if you don’t want to go anywhere near a silent retreat it’s an interesting conversation.

I mean, I think we’re in such a hurry, we can’t see what the hurry we’re in … And I think one remedy is that not necessarily by going to a monastery or a convent, but just from catching your breath, realizing there’s something you’re missing, and stepping away from it in whatever form that may take, you know, go for a week’s walk in the Sierras or in the Rockies. Do something just to try to be able to hear yourself for all the clamor of the noise.

5. Movies, music, and Bob Dylan

Music and movies are two other classic ways to take a break for a few hours. So combine the two with the recent biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown (it’s now available for streaming). I dragged my teenage sons to it when it was still in theaters and they were dubious beforehand but ended up loving it.

The movie focuses on a four-year period, starting with Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 as an unknown 19-year-old. It traces his meteoric rise over the next few years — while writing such 1960s anthems as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone” — and ends at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he sparked controversy among fans by going electric. Six decades later, Dylan is now also the only songwriter to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he did in 2016.

Anyway, the movie is fun, and Timothée Chalamet is incredible as Dylan, channeling both the singer’s voice and his aloof, inscrutable character. And it sent me down a rabbit hole of digging up old Dylan clips from the 1960s. So let’s end with a few songs…

This is Chalamet and Monica Barbaro (doing their own singing) as Dylan and Joan Baez in the movie:

And this is the actual scene of Dylan and Baez performing “It Ain’t Me Babe” at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival:

Dylan singing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” also in Newport 1964:

I had no idea that Dylan and Johnny Cash were ever friends before seeing this movie. But here are the two of them in some studio sessions, singing “I Still Miss Someone:”

And, finally, Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with “Like a Rolling Stone:”

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