Blog
1 August 2026
What Happened to the Cult of the Small?
or
Who Cares if You Sell Magazines?
William Anderson
There remains a cult of the small in the US, and its predicament is a limpid encapsulation of the pathologies or our time, the pathologies of the …
30 June 2026
Holding and Letting Go
Chapter 1 of The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) opens by inviting the reader to imagine a world where the Left had suffered a crippling political defeat. Eagleton’s argument is that postmodernism’s signature moves …
9 April 2026
This is mostly aimed at topical connections to some questions the arise from TE Hulme’s essay, “A Tory Philosophy” –
–can humans change?
–whither *the identity of man*?
These became right wing pieties to push back …
26 March 2026
I’m jotting down thoghts for my next talk at the Berlin Academy of American Music’s Composers Workshop, June 29 to July 5.
Without thinking, often even without overthinking, US music stays with what works.
Those working in an uptown head …
14 March 2026
Mario Davidovsky was an honored guest at FICA21, a new music festival and seminar at the Universiad Veracruzana. He later convinced FICA212’s founder and Director Emil Awad to bring me to Xalapa 15 or 20 years ago.
Emil Awad finished high school …
5 March 2026
What ails thee, uncle?
Don’t ask AI about political qauestions, but about other things, AI can be charming. Here, my reading of Beerbohm was already largely in accord with the agglomerator’s. I just like the leg up because I don’t …
24 February 2026
Froberger & Buxtehude to Bach
Bach clearly admired the bizarre in the works of Buxtehude and Froberger, and he composed all his own craziness into his revolutionary cosmic order wherein details of the A section that the work of modulating to V are …
23 February 2026
“Toss me a cigarette. I think there’s one in my rainoat.”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago”
(from Paul Simon’s “America”)
Hats off to the few of Americans who know what they want. Most often we belong …
