Words & Music

by Mike Power

latest

  • Gun Control

    Seventeen people were killed yesterday in a school shooting in Florida. Next week there will be another school shooting, and this one will fade into the past for those of us lucky enough to not have our lives turned inside out by this all-American carnage. We have become a nation controlled by cowards. While every… Read more

  • Happy Valentine’s Day – Fools In Love

    I was introduced to Joe Jackson’s music in my freshman year of college. A friend told me that he wrote better unrequited love songs than The Beatles. Being an obnoxious 18 year old Beatle freak I tossed my friend’s Joe Jackson cassette out the dorm window.    My friend was right, of course. As he… Read more

  • Giovanni’s Room – Sex

      Sex is a difficult thing to write about. Too graphic and it reads like porn, too tame and the writer seems inexperienced or, worse, fearful. The Literary Review gives out an annual prize called the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for lines like this one from 2017 “winner” Christoper Bollen: The skin along her… Read more

  • Giovanni’s Room – Paris

      Even though I do it myself sometimes (like now), I have a problem with people who can write fiction when they write non-fiction, because fiction is art and non-fiction is…something else. Non-fiction can tell you the truth, which is important, but fiction does something much better: it points to the places where the truth… Read more

  • Poetry

    Such torment   I found out yesterday that Michelangelo was a poet. You would think that humiliating centuries of painters and sculptors would be enough for him but some people are never satisfied. His first known painting, The Torment of Saint Anthony, is on display at the Metropolitan Museum through February 12. I found out… Read more

  • Utopia For Realists

    It is almost impossible to believe this in the age of Trump but human society, in spite of glaring setbacks, is getting better. There is a way forward that seems the logical culmination of centuries of progress toward freedom, equality, and enlightenment. Rutger Bregman’s engaging book Utopia For Realists is as a good roadmap as… Read more