Words & Music

by Mike Power

latest

  • The Newest Circle of Hell

    In the first place, I didn’t know hell had so many circles. I thought I’d visited all of them until my foot went through the floor. I don’t know how I wound up in this newest circle of hell, or why. I’ve been a good boy, haven’t I? Good enough anyway. There’s a guy sitting Read more

  • Review: The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

      The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips hits a little too close to home for me. Not that I’m beautiful, or a bureaucrat, but like the protagonist Josephine I feel trapped in a job and a world that make no sense, and that seem guided by mysterious and sinister forces. I sometimes wonder if my Read more

  • Happy Blogiversary

    My name is Mike, and I’m a blogger. Two years ago today me and the Words & Music staff (I hope to have it tattooed one day) first dipped our wick in the blogosphere. One of the things I’ve learned blogs do best is making lists, and anniversaries are a good time to look back Read more

  • Review: Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro

    Julie Fierro’s Cutting Teeth is a messy book in the best possible way. Like the time of life it so accurately and lovingly depicts, it is a wet story. The pages drip with tears, spit, snot, blood, wine, beer, the salty waters of Long Island Sound and the juices of sex that create those little Read more

  • 20 Questions

    Let’s play twenty questions:   1. On your way to work do you ever stop and wonder if you’ve gone the wrong way?  2. If you got off at the wrong stop?  3. If you took the wrong exit?  4. If it’s too late to go back?  5. If it’s too late to go forward? Read more

  • Review: Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist

    Archibald Motley was born in 1891 in New Orleans. His travels would lead him over the years from Bronzeville in Chicago, to a year in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship, to Mexico in the company of his nephew, the writer Willard Motley, and through January 17 of next year in an exhibit at the Whitney Read more