Other Recent Articles

All the articles in this section have been written since The Revolt of the Pendulum came out in 2009, and are thus queuing up to be loaded aboard a collection of their own, which might not be assembled in my lifetime. In early 2010, after I fell ill, I was forced to accept that I could work only at about half pace. But writing articles, like writing poems, is one of my mental substitutes for smoking, for which I had such a fondness until they hauled me in and started replacing every system they could pull free. While all that was going on I started writing some long articles for the Atlantic Monthly and the TLS. I grabbed at an invitation from the Australian Weekend Review because it was a chance to write about Mad Men. The new magazine Standpoint proved a welcoming home for articles about poetry, as did the New York Times and the Financial Times. So I wasn’t short of commissions. I was just very short of puff, but I hope that deficiency doesn’t show. Certainly my mind was clear. A mercy, because there was a lot of traffic. It was like starting off all over again, only this time the editors knew where I lived. Just how all those drugs and drips can balance up so as to make your brain shine instead of fall on the floor is one of the medical mysteries that I am still waiting to have explained to me.