From the monthly archives: December 2010
2010 Fiction Open: First Prize Not that Billyboy minds going to the store to buy Charleen her doughnuts and cigarettes, but being with the band is like walking a carnival midway, and that’s good for about one week out of the year. If he hadn’t started going with Charleen, Billy would be back home [...]
2010 Fiction Open: Second Prize When my mother was sick, before she died, I had this crazy urge to tell her about Wallace. I sat in the ICU waiting room, listening to Herbie Hancock on my Ipod and planned ways to bring up Wallace’s name. Maybe if she understood about him, she would understand [...]
2010 Fiction Open: Third Prize It was after midnight when Scott finished his front desk shift and met Alistair in the parking lot of the Sea View Hotel, where they both worked. Alistair was sitting on the hood of his convertible, smoking a cigarette, a mild breeze ruffling his blonde hair. “Where are we [...]
Memo from Mr. Don- Don’t have any particularly flash things to say as 2010 draws to a close, except that after 3.5 years of bringing literature about music to our cult of devotees we’re ready to hike the vision, scope and, hopefully, reach of our collective energy up a different kind of mountain in [...]
I’ve finished stretching, after the long run,
collapsed on the kitchen floor
it’s supposed to be good for you,
but I’m waiting for results that won’t come.
That night in Prague Mozart drank too much beer and sang the song he’d written to a brassy Bedouin. Napoleon shouted from the card table “Shut that idiot up—he can’t sing a lick.” “He can’t write either, “ Suzette added. Shoving Mozart into a chair, Jean Pierre leaped on the bar with his [...]
Holly’s bedroom was a treasure trove of excitement for a teenage girl. She had her own television, her own stereo, posters of all the hottest pop stars, and hundreds of records. Music was an arena where I shined – I knew all the words to all the latest pop songs. I knew the personal history of the musicians, knew all the gossip about them. This may not seem like a big deal now, but in those pre-People magazine, pre-TMZ days, being able to explain the complicated relationship between Patti Boyd, nee Harrison and Eric Clapton was an art.
Rob Lawson – R. A. Lawson (Ph.D., Vanderbilt, 2003) is a historian of American culture whose new book, Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and African Americans, 1890-1945 is available from LSU Press. His retrospective on the field of blues scholarship, “The First Century of Blues: One Hundred years of Hearing and Interpreting the [...]
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