If you mean to undertake something vast, they say, you've every reason to expect that there'll be something vast in the offing. But that doesn't mean you'll gain the prize, or that your dreams will come true. It just means that there'll be a wake of sorts fanning out from your work, a web...

It’s hard to know what an audience at A Night is thinking…or feeling. For one, they aren’t really an audience, they’re unintentional allies in a ceremony. They don’t seem to know it, but we do. Beyond the applause and standing O’s, there is the ever foggy sense of “are they with us?” as we...

You might be a band when you say it. But you know you're a band when you play it. You could be a band when you learn your chops. But you know if you're a band once the needle drops. By year's end, our twenty months of waiting were done. We'd made a record - Rough...

A few months ago a certain degree of unspectacular life adversity leaned over to me and whispered: "What if you stop for a while? You were obliged off the road anyhow by the plague. Why not go the rest of the way there, and choose stillness?" Clever fellow. Years ago I remember coming across some stout advice...

I've for the most part been sitting down, these last sixteen months. I've been writing a book, which partly explains it. I'm hardly going anywhere. No plan I make survives the news. All that sitting makes for numbness, here and there, now and then. Occasionally I try to mobilize. Maybe something comes in that's...

What is this? That's something to think about, in the leisure hours imposed upon you now. I've got a suggestion: This is a God. Not 'from God', or 'of God', or 'by God'. It's more direct. INFESTANS. The God of now. Strange days - and we have lots of them now - need strange thinking, strange words. A...

Sunday - New York City: You write those three words down, in that order, and there's a feeling of having written a tight, picaresque novella. They have that weight, no doubt. They do for me, and I don't favour the place. It has always been too much for me, all at once. But to...

At some risk to the standing of our little website, as it holds on for dear life to a bit of asteroid out there in the blogosphere, I have in print and in person warned often about the looming hazards the internet has in store for literacy: cultural and spiritual and moral and written...