[contextly_auto_sidebar] AS smart and funny as his novels are, Martin Amis is a devastatingly good essayist as well. I spoke to him recently about his latest collection, The Rub of Time, which assembles several decades of nonfiction pieces. The subject of the book is the toll taken by the ages -- the way it gradually erodes talent and inspiration as surely as it does the soil on a hillside. … [Read more...]
Punk, Indie Rock and Power Pop With Chris Stamey
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Though he's hardly a household name, North Carolina's Chris Stamey has been just alongside many of the key developments in left-of-the-dial rock music over the last four decades. As a young Southerner he visited and then moved to New York City right as CBGB's and Television were exploding, he helped found the dBs and Let's Active, which put him on on the ground floor of … [Read more...]
The Literary Courtney Barnett
[contextly_auto_sidebar] I CAN remember only a few times I've heard a song and immediately known I was hearing a major talent, someone I'd be paying attention to for years to come. The Smiths, Liz Phair, Pavement, Thelonious Monk, and Glenn Gould have all struck me that way. Time will tell if she really belongs in their company, but the Aussie singer-songwriter knocked me out with her song … [Read more...]
Southern Literature and the Drive-By Truckers
[contextly_auto_sidebar] CELEBRATED Yale historian C. Vann Woodward used to talk about the irony of Southern history, and the burden of Southern history, both phrases drawn in part from the novels of Faulkner. Patterson Hood, a son of Alabama who spent several decades in Athens, GA, before leaving the South like many a literary character before him, has made a fascinating songwriting career … [Read more...]
Joe Henry, Poetry, and The Blues
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LIKE a lot of listeners, I've long considered Joe Henry to be a smart and vaguely literary songwriter -- smart, more-or-less sensitive, good with words. But I was pleasantly surprised when Joe came out of the closet about his love of poetry, and since it coincided with the release of the powerful, understated record Thrum, I made sure to corner him for an interview in … [Read more...]
Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin
[contextly_auto_sidebar] THERE may be no contemporary writer who's shaped me, and many of the authors of my generation, more than Ursula Le Guin, who died Monday. Even though she was nearing 90, Le Guin is the kind of person who seemed like she would live forever: When I flew up to meet her in Portland a decade ago, she seemed so physically solid and intellectually sharp, she came across like … [Read more...]
Oprah, Trump, and The Man Who Saw Them Coming
[contextly_auto_sidebar] THERE has been, of course, an enormous amount of talk about Oprah Winfrey since her truly impressive speech at the Golden Globes Sunday night, and some have proposed her as the ideal candidate for the Democrats to pit against President Trump in 2020. Even with her candidacy far from declared, there has been a substantial reaction against this notion, with many … [Read more...]
Britain, Rock n Roll, and 1966
[contextly_auto_sidebar] WHAT was the real heart of the '60s? That depends, of course, on what we really mean when we talk about that much-mythologized and contested decade. The British rock critic and social historian Jon Savage, best known in the States for his chronicle of punk and the Sex Pistols, England's Dreaming, sees 1966 as the era's key year, and his book, 1966: The Year the Decade … [Read more...]
The Afterlife of Adam and Eve
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of my favorite books of the year is the effort by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt to make sense of several thousand years of Adam and Eve. Where did the original myth and its imagery come from, how did it resonate down the centuries for Christian, Jewish. and Muslim believers, for philosophers and theologians, and for poets like John Milton and artists like … [Read more...]
Rolling Stone, Music Journalism, and the Baby Boom
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LIKE a lot of people I know, I've just finished the biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Sticky Fingers is more than just the story of one man, though it gets close to its subject: It's a real cultural history of English and American music, of American magazines, of pop culture in general, and a shadow biography of what I call Boomer Triumphalism. Wenner, … [Read more...]