CLARK EVERITT

Get Into Ahmad Jamal

Back in the fall, one of my favorite style blogs shared a nice fall-inspired playlist of jazz tunes (which is actually good for any season, and I recommend checking it out here). Always being game for new (to me) jazz, I opened Spotify and fired up the first song on the list – pianist Ahmad Jamal’s 1958 hit, “Poinciana”, a preposterously catchy number based on a Cuban folk tune from the live…

This blog got stale. Even when I was still posting, it basically became a public fridge door for tacking up inspiring quotes. I’m not going to stop doing that, exactly (see below), so much as recommit to doing more writing of my own. Coming soon.

And so we must …

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America…

In search of a routine

I believe that work is likelier than inspiration to produce good writing (or good art in general), but I’ve never successfully built a routine to write. And, owing to that, predictably, I haven’t written very much.

With that in mind, it was interesting to look through this collectionof writers describing their own routines. The most common thing I see when writers describe their processes is some…

This week I’m reading Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law (1990), edited by Robert Hariman. This quote stood out, and helps point to the communicative and ideological functions that cases like Marissa Alexander’s play:

We all will continue to watch and read about these and similar proceedings, discuss, dispute, and judge the stories told, constantly adjusting our sense of common…

Baldwin on art

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and…