“It’s so lovely now,” Jimi Hendrix said in his muzzy mumble, his topplingly elegant, close-to-gibberish, discreetly space-traveling undertone, onstage one night in 1967 at the Bag O’Nails in London. “I kissed the fairest soul brother of England, Eric Clapton—kissed him right on the lips.”This is one of many groovy scenes recorded in Philip Norman’s new Hendrix biography, Wild Thing. The fairest soul brother, we can be sure, was transported.
Tim LahanThe correct answer to the question “How are you?” is Not too bad.Why? Because it’s all-purpose. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions, Not too bad will get you through. In good times it projects a decent pessimism, an Eeyore-ish reluctance to get carried away. On an average day it bespeaks a muddling-through modesty. And when things are rough, really rough, it becomes a heroic understatement.
I met a traveler from an antique land
who stopped me with a blue-gloved hand
and said, “That’s close enough.
You might be carrying viral lint in your trouser cuff.”
I could tell from the smell in the room
he’d been having sex on Zoom.
It was a shame we were so out of phase.
It was a shame we met in these dog days.
The parks are brown.
The rich are out of town.
Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin; Fox Searchlight Pictures; GettyThe child and the writer are born at the same moment, to the same mother, each to his separate destiny. The child’s is to see everything, feel everything, be everything, and live in the scraps and sparks of language by which he understands everything; the writer’s is to wait, and hide, and grow, until the day when he steps in—pen in hand—to take possession.
Tim LahanThere are balloons, and then there are balloons.There’s the domestic balloon, over which we shall quickly pass—the sad little sphere that you blow up at home, with your own laborious, why-am-I-doing-this carbon dioxide. A lot of pathos, for whatever reason, attaches to this balloon.Then there is the irrepressible balloon, the balloon pumped taut with cartoon levity. A balloon of this sort is essentially an arrested impulse. A trapped prayer, if you like.
Illustration by Oliver Munday; Eamonn McCabe / Popperfoto / GettyIn a lecture called “Frontiers of Writing,” Seamus Heaney remembered an evening he spent as the guest of an Oxford college in May 1981. A “quintessentially Oxford event,” he called it: He attended chapel alongside a former lord chancellor of the U.K., went to a big dinner, slept in a room belonging to a Conservative cabinet minister. Heaney would not have been ill at ease in these environs.
Daniel SavageYou have to get up.That’s the first thing. Don’t just lie there and let it have its way with you. The sea of anxiety loves a horizontal human; it pours over your toes and surges up you like a tide. Is your partner lying next to you, dense with sleep, offensively unconscious? That’s not helping either. So verticalize yourself. Leave the bed. Leave its maddening mammal warmth. Out you go, clammy-footed, into the midnight spaces. The couch. The kitchen.