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The Meditations of John Coltrane I first heard John Coltrane’s Meditations when I was a freshman in college, almost forty years ago. The hip graduate student who played it for me and a few other youngsters seemed much older and more sophisticated than the rest of us, and though we were determined to be cool…
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Some Kind of Artist A few weeks before the recent election the arts section of our local paper featured a discussion of the fact that so many artists are on the political left, sometimes the fairly radical left. The editor put the question to a number of local artists, and the unsurprising answer that many…
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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…
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All Hallows’ Eve I’m writing this on All Hallows’—that is, All Saints’—Eve. Tomorrow begins the traditional Christian month of praying for the dead. I had an especially vivid and disturbing dream of death a few nights ago which has left the subject very much on my mind. I can’t describe the dream in detail, but…
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Unfair, Unbalanced, Unrepentant I did not intend to emphasize politics in this journal, and, more specifically, I did not intend to write about politics again this week. But I find myself unable to stop thinking about the current presidential campaign. What follows has been bothering me for months; maybe I’ll be able to leave it…
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The Litmus Test Test My old friend Daniel Nichols, with whom I worked on Caelum et Terra is one of those relatively rare people who is genuinely conservative on social issues but tends to lean left on other matters. Though he’s vehemently opposed to the Iraq war (not necessarily a leftward position, of course), he…
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In Gratitude to a Donor Back in the early ‘70s I worked in a couple of record stores and I heard a lot of music to the point of satiety and well beyond. Sometimes music that I liked mildly, such as the Eagles’ Desperado, was run into the ground, and music that I didn’t much…
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