Author: James Parker
James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Barry Hannah, 1942-2010
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He wrote in a strange, slapstick, short-circuity language…
Read This PostEmergent Occasions (1)
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Man bites doggerel in this, the first installment of a new series.
Read This PostLester Bangs
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Strictly speaking it’s Meltzer who’s the hilo hero, who inverted the language of academe in pursuit of the rock thrill, but here’s what puts Lester in the pantheon: he redefined monotony. The vicious monotony of […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (10): Agent Zimmerman
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I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (9): Endless Rhapsody
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If Queen had not existed, it would by no means have been necessary to invent them. Sweaty old 1973, the year of their debut album (the campily Tolkien-rocking Queen) was also the year of Elton […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (8): The wild poet
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In December 1984 a small but memorable press conference was held in an English pub. It had just been announced that Ted Hughes was to be the new Poet Laureate, and a media reception had […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (7): Presidency of the Absurd
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The owl and the pussycat went to jail, for something the piggy-wig said. They sat for a while with no hope of a trial, and paper bags over their heads, Till a man with dark […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (6): Anarchy in the UK
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Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s […]
Read This PostSteve Coogan
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As the trickster-philosopher Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People STEVE COOGAN (born 1965) was jaunty, vulnerable, inspired, and frequently full of shit. It was a part only he could have played. When […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (5): Pants afire
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If your father presided over a blood-drinking sex cult whose membership also included the mailman, the doctor, the town drunk, and representatives of the local judiciary; if you ran with wolves as a young person, […]
Read This PostFlann O’Brien
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The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of […]
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