What I’m Listening To
Why blog? I’ve asked myself this question more than once. I’ve started and abandoned a couple of blogs already … if creating the space and then never even posting counts. They’re still floating around...
View ArticleBriefly
Some comments on previous posts, together with my finally getting around to reading The Metaphysical Club this summer, prompt the following reflection on writing about music: That whatever pleasure or...
View ArticleA Year in the Pit
Amid the offal and carrion. I can’t climb out of the pit, but I can climb high enough up the sides to get a pretty good sense of the lay of the land. Some days I can’t find the sides, so I just jump up...
View ArticleTwo Years in the Pit
I came to the internet because I wished to write deliberately: to drive life into a corner, stun it with a few well-placed hammer blows, slit its throat, hang it from a hook, and gather up its blood in...
View ArticleThree Years in the Pit
Time again to wander through the well-stuffed graveyard of my literary ambitions, whistling as I go, bending now and again to re-read inscriptions, I, patriarch of this obscure family of stones, one...
View ArticleFour Years in the Pit
Ah, work, work, work. Groan, expire, reanimate, groan again. The life of a property owner. Pools of blood to be drained and refilled, iron maidens to scour of clotted flesh, eternal fires to stoke and...
View ArticleFive Years in the Pit
Dear J.E., I’ve been thinking a lot about a comment you made in an email a few months ago. Right before signing off, and after some typically ear-opening remarks about music, you wrote (ahem): “Am I...
View ArticleSix Years in the Pit
Given the recent decline in production, is a year-end reflection warranted? It seems a tad self-indulgent. With so little to bite off—to riff on Shaw, about Henry James—one can become enamored by the...
View ArticleLeft Unsaid
What to do when, returning from the restroom after the early set of Dave Holland’s quartet at Birdland, you find Mr. Holland himself occupying the bar stool next to yours? Sit there and fidget, of...
View ArticleSeven Years in the Pit
Rather than spending the first paragraphs of this belated annual reflection flogging myself for the previous year’s scant output, wondering aloud whether this blog is still seaworthy, or is sinking...
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