Eccentricity is one of those facts, one of those strategies, that one appreciates most if there is some sense of reality as contrast: all eccentricity, all fantasy, can render a subject, or a man, merely irrelevant. On some songs, such as the title song “Olé! Tarantula,” Robyn Hitchcock might be offering clues as to how he himself might be seen: he sings, “I feel like a three-legged chinchilla” and “looking at his fingers caressing the keys, if he don’t please you, then you just can’t be pleased.”
The Gates of Hell Swinging Open: Mark Eitzel, 60 Watt Silver Lining
Mark Eitzel’s voice is broad and deep without being loud, and his intonation is sensitive. “The view from the cliffs must have been exciting, and up to the peaks you were bound. Now you’re stranded alone, and the past is unknown, and there is no easy way down,” he sings, substituting “past” for “path,” before continuing: and the song captures aspiration, struggle, and spiritual reversal.
A review of On Opera by Bernard Williams
This book will contribute something to your knowledge of opera but it will not be easy to read. The awkwardness of Williams’s English makes the book unpleasant. It baffles me that a man who obviously had such a love for music could have written so unmusically.
A review of The Aeneid by Virgil
I am not a Latinist but I have over the years immersed myself in Latin texts and have a little knowledge of the problems that Fagles faced. Virgil began The Aeneid in the most striking way he could manage and a line or two from near the opening becomes eminently suitable for comparison of the original with Fagles’s translation.
A review of A Writer’s San Francisco by Eric Maisel
In fact, I haven’t enjoyed a book on writing this much since encountering Stephen King’s On Writing some years ago. When I got to the end of A Writer’s San Francisco, I actually felt compelled to go back to the beginning and reread it immediately, such is its charm and inspirational qualities.
Where Love’s Unwilled, Unleashed, Unbound: Madeleine Peyroux’s Half the Perfect World
Madeleine Peyroux’s Half the Perfect World is a good album and the collection’s first song “I’m All Right,” written by Peyroux with her producer Larry Klein and musician Walter Becker, is a funny-sad take on a love affair, and may be…
A review of The Search for Chess Perfection II by C. J. S. Purdy
Purdy was a prolific writer, and his writing was of such a consistently high quality, that the selection of instructional articles for inclusion in the book must have presented quite a problem. At any rate, we get a generous sampling…
Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Music Pioneer: Chuck Berry’s After School Session
Resistance to other people’s self-serving solicitations, whether they involve work, school, or love, is the theme of “Too Much Monkey Business,” and Berry’s guitar rhythms are fast, repetitive, and (now) have the aspect of something classical, as if one were…
A review of Chutney Power and Other Stories
He is deliberate, meticulous, and splendidly disciplined. The stories are perhaps not original in form but they would serve without degradation of any sort as works by a Chekov or a Joyce. Reviewed by Bob Williams Chutney Power and Other…
A review of One of Us One Night by Mark Wisniewski
There are seventeen poems in this chapbook so that in this brief book the poems are all fairly long. Most of them explore situations or play with narrative possibilities. The ingenuity is significant and the care in the selection of…