November 2004
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The Elemental Thanksgiving I’m sure we’ve all, in the last week or so, seen a number of lists of Things For Which We Are Or Should be Thankful. Having just read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Volume 1, I’m of a mind to add something which I haven’t seen on anyone’s list: most of us should be…
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Yeats vs. Eliot A couple of recent biographies of Yeats have, not surprisingly, provoked in some reviewers that potent urge to rank the modern poets as if they were so many sprinters or show dogs. This is an odd compulsion, and seems no less so to me for the fact that I find it in…
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Rediscovering Jimi Hendrix A few months ago, writing about the pleasures of driving, I described myself listening to a Jimi Hendrix album on my daily commute. As soon as I wrote that sentence I felt slightly embarrassed: what a stereotypical baby boomer pop fan, on the far side of middle age, tooling down the highway…
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Escape from Missouri I intend to keep my resolution not to write about politics for the next four weeks, but I think I can justify the use of one reaction to the election as a segue into another topic. Novelist Jane Smiley, writing for Slate, tore into the people who voted for Bush with a…
Light On Dark Water 