I had a wonderful discussion with my “Literary Interpretation” students last week, about the detritus that is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My friend Paul Saint-Amour has written about the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a kind of test case for fair use, testing the boundaries of copyright; many [...]
I’m sorry for the false start: I’d said I’d start posting again a week ago, and I really believed it when I wrote it. I suppose that my mother’s death has been more disturbing, more disruptive than I’d anticipated. I’m not immobilized; in part because she had a series of strokes over the past three [...]
This is sort of a weird thing to write about—but if I didn’t write about it, I just wouldn’t write. And besides, I wrote this past summer about my own cancer surgery: clearly I’m not someone who puts a high premium on privacy. My mother, Joan Elizabeth Dettmar, passed away Tuesday night, aged 73. Since [...]
I’ve been vowing for a very long time to return to the harmonica. My only instrumental training as a child was keyboard lessons as a teenager; my mother won a Kimball organ on the Hollywood Squares (seriously), and for a couple of years I took lessons from a guy who, after he left our house, went [...]
In the Oakland airport the other morning, I had me an amazing hybrid breakfast food. Advertised as an almond croissant—a mighty fine thing, when you can find it—when I got it, it was even more mongrel than that: an almond croissant, the dough for which had apparently been rolled in a spiral like a cinnamon roll, [...]
Deborah Solomon’s interview with Garry Wills in the Sunday New York Times caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, visual: rarely have I seen a photograph in that feature that so clearly suggested the subject of the interview just didn’t want to be there. Having to talk to Solomon seems to have ruined [...]
Today’s title is, as some of you might recognize, a line snatched from the U2 track “Zooropa.” As such, it’s sung “in character”—the sentiment, that is to say, belongs not to Bono, ostensibly, but to his evil leather twin, The Fly. Whoever’s responsible for the sentiment, I’m here to disagree with it, at least as [...]
Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd…. we’re back. Before I abruptly walked off the set last week, reader Ken made a request: “I’d be interested to see your list of buy-on-release artists. I was just thinking yesterday how I may have finally reached the point where I am not constantly or primarily in search of new artists. I can probably [...]