The first time Benny Goodman heard Bix Beiderbecke play cornet, he recalled, he wondered, “My God, what planet, what galaxy, did this guy come from?” (Skretvedt). Listening to him throughout my life, I’ve had the same feeling. So did hundreds of musicians who heard Bix during his short lifetime, and so have thousands of listeners […]
Like a Girl Saying Yes: The Sound of Bix Read More »
Alec Bobedash, the great Nagurski’sblocking guard, stands at the sternbent to raise the outboard motorover the sandy bottom ferns.The channel widens, bottom fallsaway. In northern morning hazethe slow prow slides risingonto Shishebogema, lake of many bays.Then the long run over the deepcenter, the outboard motor cut,the shore pines faint through the mist,Bobedash testing the anchor
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A sophomore in high school, I got my first job at a second-hand bookstore a few blocks west of the Northwestern University campus. I mainly dusted and straightened the innumerable old books of all sorts, took in money and made change, and cleaned up the place on Saturday mornings. That last task was the vital
Melville’s Pale Ravener Read More »
And Screw the Mountain, He Said, I Wants a Lake Shore – by Autumn Noelle Hall so this is me laying you out, old friend like an almost smile on that Lake Shore eyes squinchy-closed guitar hands folded so’s you looks like you’s listening to glistening riffs of jazz just-sailing off a river of moonlit
And Screw the Mountain, He Said, I Wants a Lake Shore Read More »
My old friend Price Strobridge might begin like this: If the observable universe Is 13 billion years old, and I am 65, then I have been around 433 whatever comes after a billionth of the time the universe has been around. As far as the universe is concerned, I’m not even born yet. If the
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In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full
The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop Read More »