My mini-column for last week’s New York Times Magazine is on poetry and song. King David viewed them as natural companions, but these days they’re seen as distinct, unrelated arts. Accepting Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Letters recently, musician and poet Leonard Cohen implicitly took David’s view. He spoke of learning a progression of six flamenco chords from a . . .
Ted Hughes once wrote a letter to his sister about Sylvia Plath’s “good fortune” in selling “a long rather bad poem” to The Atlantic, “one of the Mags in America.” (To be fair, Hughes generally admired Plath’s poems. But still.)
Angry birds — and especially smart, angry birds — aren’t just the subject of my latest NYT Mag mini-column. Because my mom collected and bred parrots, they’re something I’ve spent far too much time pondering. Did you know that crows develop grudges against individual people that they impart to their flocks? Or that African Greys are capable of labeling and . . .
I recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the end of the Latin Mass — and Catholic “drama of salvation” novels — even though I strongly disagree that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since the 1960s.”