UPDATED: 5/21 [I’ve added one example of Slahi’s book as an illustration of the Report on Torture–there are many others I may add later.] Last night on Interchange (The State of Terror: Guantanamo Diary) the…
Browsing Category Arts
If You Really Want to Know the Truth: Salinger’s Influence on Mohamedou Ould Slahi
I am reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary. Well, actually, listening to it. You can find out a lot about it at The Guardian website dedicated to it. Something I heard and noticed I have…
Druid Hill, 1969
I’ve known Dean Smith for over twenty years. Dean gave me his book of poetry American Boy upon its being published…I loved “Druid Hill, 1969” immediately and took to Amazon.com to say so. What I…
In the Heart or In the Head
Andrew Bird’s “Darkmatter,” a riff on a song from The Merchant of Venice. Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourished? Reply, reply. It is…
All Over Lost
I am nearly 47. I am very old and extremely ignorant of what has meaning to so many people these days. This piece in The New York Times by Leon Wieseltier (h/t Colin Allen), Among…
Immeasurably the Most Important Book of Poetry
CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING “KORA IN HELL” by Robert McAlmon [Williams reprinted Kora in Hell: Improvisations in 1957 without the Prologue. So, here is an audio recording of the 1920 Kora without the Prologue. (1:46:13); and here is beginning of…
Soldier-Sentimentalist-Poet
Two snippets from Ford’s The Good Soldier (1924). The word “sentimental” or some form of it occurs 28 times in the novel–a use for big data! ************ For all good soldiers are sentimentalists—all good soldiers…
Forget the Ones
Will Johnson, in Scorpion, has told an album-length story that seems to me to dramatize the human in a particular time and place but also to have dramatized an aspect of human nature that isn’t…
This is 40: Will Johnson’s Best
In 2011 Will Johnson turned 40. In that same year his rock and roll project, the group Centro-Matic, released what I think is their best album (I might qualify this by calling it their most…
The Golden Beast of Love
I have loved single songs off of probably every album Will Johnson has attached his name to. Multiple songs off of many of them. But I have always treated them as “one-offs” that are keyed…