Back to the primal scene: the roads from Champaign, Illinois, to St. Louis, Missouri. Roads paved . . . with poetry. I don’t just mean the poetry at the end of the road, a dollop of T. S. Eliot at the end of the rainbow of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch: I’m talking about that quintessential [...]
Thanks again to Susie A. for her evocative mediation on the art that grows on you. I feel some kind of Chia Pet joke coming on, but I shan’t succumb. But Susie’s argument did get me thinking, really just as soon as I read it, of the counter-argument: that equally there are songs (just to [...]
[Today's lovely post comes courtesy of fcrp regular Susie Allen. Susie's currently embarking on her second year as a Real Person, having graduated from the University of Chicago in 2009 with degrees in the lucrative and practical fields of English and French Literature. She now works at the U. of C.'s News Office. When not [...]
As I’ve been saying, I made my way last weekend, for the third time now, to the annual T. S. Eliot conference in St. Louis. Attendance is always something of a tough call for me: when I was in Carbondale for nine years, it was just down the road a stretch, making attendance fairly convenient [...]
Yeah, I left y’all hanging yesterday: heartless cruel bastard, it’s true. So what’s the 70s schlock that came on the radio next, after “Lucky Man,” in the face of which my critical faculties were powerless against my teenage heart? It was “Drift Away,” by Dobie Gray; not quite a one-hit wonder, but within spitting distance. [...]
Yesterday night I drove from Champaign, Illinois, where we’re visiting my daughter & son & son-in-law, down to St. Louis, for the T. S. Eliot conference. St. Lunatics! These Eliot folks—they’re crazy! The first day of the conference has been great, and I hope to write a little about it for Monday. But today and [...]
Here’s a tasty tidbit that even former roommate Texas Steve doesn’t know: “Smoke on the Water” was the first rock & roll record I ever owned. The single was released in May 1973, and I was a freshman in high school; 93 KHJ was givin’ away the hits as they played them—which meant that before [...]
As Robyn and I were making our way through security at LAX yesterday morning, a large advertising poster loomed over us. Not a bad spot for an ad: a captive audience, certainly, if not an entirely festive one. For the time it took us to remove our shoes, empty our pockets, put our laptops and [...]
I was quite surprised by the results of a study whose results were widely reported a couple of weeks ago: to wit, $75K is the magic number. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, annual household income, above $75,000, “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness or stress.” The [...]
Today’s videos prompt a kind of poll, I suppose. We’ve talked a few times here about covers: not in any systematic way, but as the spirit moves. And the spirit’s moved again: I’ve been thinking a little about covers that “change, change utterly,” to paraphrase W. B. Yeats. Most covers change the originals—sometimes quietly, sometimes [...]