One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?                                 —Bix Beiderbecke The name Jim Jarmusch was all I needed to see. My browse through Blockbuster Video ended there, and I carried a DVD of The Limits of Control home. I wasn’t disappointed. Jarmusch…

Once I asked my neighbor, the composer David Liptak, why listening to classical music can be so meditative. David offered: “when your mind is focused on following the pattern in music, other preoccupations tend to drop away.” As I expand my skills in knitting (which I’ve mused on in earlier posts such as this oneand…

Among the register of things once known, now less known, is the fundamental capacity to spell. And if it would seem that a loss so detrimental to the world of letters—in truth, to the civilized world—would raise a greater alarm, such is not the case. Never before has such degeneracy been found less worrisome, less…

Yesterday morning I woke up laughing, thinking of a phrase my mother used to use but which I hadn’t heard in years, “Big Baptists.” “He was a big Baptist,” she’d say, commenting on something she’d read in the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, or even in The Baptist Record, the in-state newspaper of the Mississippi Baptist Convention,…

My father is a sophisticated kind of guy. When I visit his house, he lines the guest bed with red satin sheets that he picked up from the dollar store. He has never been rich. But that never seems to stop him. “You’re never too poor for a little style, Red,” he tells me, setting…

When I was in my twenties, my greatest regret was never having learned to play the piano, so much so that when merely walking by a piano I was overcome with a sense of anxiety and frustration. The sight of those eighty-eight keys was like catching just a glimpse of the ocean between buildings from…

I am re-reading Shelby Foote’s massive, three-volume history of the Civil War. Foote, who played the role of courtly southern scholar and mischievous scamp on Ken Burns’ heralded PBS Civil War documentary, was one of my favorite human beings. He was erudite, witty, and—a startling claim for a historian, really—supremely soulful. He could sift through…

The French filmmaker Claude Berri made some remarkable films during his long career. He directed two of my favorites—Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, which starred the young Emmanuelle Béart, Daniel Auteuil, and Gerard Depardieu. But he was more than just a director. He was an actor, and he served as producer on…

Everyone knows Rumi—thanks in large part to Coleman Barks’ rich, delightful translations. But how many know the other early master of Sufi poetry: Hafiz of Shiraz? Now, thanks to a new translation, Hafiz too can become a joyously playful companion on our spiritual journeys. Like Rumi, Hafiz was Persian, living in the fourteenth century—just a…

The biggest snowstorm in fourteen years was bearing down on the East Coast, and I was scared that I was pregnant again. Thursday at my part-time job, I’d fielded the e-mailed news bulletins that had called for some two feet of snow falling by the next afternoon, and asked my boss if I could take…