“For she is the world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin. She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives. She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats its farrow. Thus she unites the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity...

It’s not every day that a journalist—particularly one as sober and unflamboyant as longtime economics professor and “New York Times” columnist Paul Krugman—has a song written in his honor. But then Loudon Wainwright, whose “deep ache of laughter” I’ve written about before in this space, is no everyday songwriter.

Wainwright’s musings on the human condition most often walk the razor’s edge between heartache and mirth, with “The Krugman Blues” angling decidedly toward the “mirth” end of that equation.

Not that Paul Krugman is big on mirth himself.

Which is part of the reason, no doubt, that Wainwright has so much fun with this song—and happily lets us in on the joke.

Which does nothing but make this pairing of Wainwright the jesting singer-songwriter and Krugman the restrained economist all the more amusing and ripe for dramatization…

Matter of plain fact: In the probably 15 years or so that I have bee...

Post-election, I seem to have been keeping Walt Whitman’s “Complete Poems” close at hand, an old thick paperback, quintessentially dog-eared, the binding now so flaccid that it lies primly flat against my chest on this late fall day as I type these words.

I’m in southern California for my sister’s memorial weekend, an otherwise somber affair leavened both by the prospect of gathering in solidarity with a good part of my nuclear clan and its various affiliates, and by the region living up to its reputation as it unfurls yet another 78-degree day of balmy sunshine right on the cusp of winter.

If the word “exuberant” hadn’t been coined when it was (early 1500s, from the ancient Latin describing an overflowing milk supply from a cow or goat), someone would surely have had to come up with a version of it to describe Whitman’s poetry during his profuse creative period in the latter half of the 19th century.

It’s...

I always keep two questions in mind when I broach the idea of adding to the 600+ posts I’ve navigated through in the nearly 12 years of this blog’s existence. 1) Do I have anything new to say on this topic? 2) If I’m saying something old, can I say it in a new and fresh way?

I try to apply those two questions to virtually every creative work I engage with in my life, whether my own or someone else’s. It applies even to the occasional light and frivolous fare that a given mood or energy level will call forth as a momentary bulwark against the world’s relentless available diet of misery.

In this third iteration of “Brilliant Cover Songs,” we broach an old warhorse that you’ll hear get a whole new twist down below.

Johann Pachelbel composed his much-beloved “Canon in D Major” to a warm but not wildly popular welcome sometime in the late 17th or early 18th centuries...

A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last.

Onwards it goes, resuming its diagonal cuts once more as they round the bend and go out of sight through the late November afternoon mist.

This happy spectacle played out as I’d been walking along absorbed in thought about my sister Edie, who died the previous evening, right about the time I was finishing up the newly released PBS documentary on Leonardo da Vinci...