‘She could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him.’
When George’s father died, he neglected to tell his therapist, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except she could cop a mood, and she knew how to punish him with a vicious show of boredom.
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‘I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it.’
Amy Key on Joni Mitchell’s seminal album, released fifty years ago in 1971.
‘My work life – like, maybe, yours – is built around another, non-paying vocation.’
Hilary Plum on listening to the Swet Shop Boys while (not) working.
‘The highs and lows of fame, have been far better and far worse than both mother and daughter could have hoped for.’
Fiction by Alexia Arthurs, inspired by Rihanna.
‘Only M.I.A. could juxtapose the tropes of bad diaspora poetry against the horrors of interrogation techniques and get away with it. For a while, at least. ’
Momtaza Mehri on M.I.A.
First published in Granta 76: Music, an essay by Greil Marcus on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which inspired the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan.
‘One purpose of art is to get us to wake up, recalibrate our emotional life, get ourselves into proper relation to reality.’
‘The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location – or, in fact, on any couch ever – was, indeed, zero.’
An elegy by Nick Laird for his father, Alastair Laird, who died this year of Covid-19.
‘Green would work but blue, cobalt blue to be precise, would be better.’
Fiction set in Flatbush by Eva Freeman.
‘The stigma is to be a woman.’
Lynne Tillman introduces the photography of Kaitlin Maxwell.
'In December 1964, the Cunard Line placed its order for the ship that turned out to be the last great transatlantic liner'.
