A Shoe-Seller Speaks
I met Lauren (whose last name we are suppressing here) at a writing workshop in Provincetown almost fifteen years ago. She was shy, funny, brilliant, and very, very talented, and…
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Rick Moody
113 posts
Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and a volume of essays, On Celestial Music. His most recent publication is Hotels of North America, a novel. With Kid Millions of Oneida, he recently released the album The Unspeakable Practices (Joyful Noise recordings).
Swinging Modern Sounds #26: The Cessation of Miracles
The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team.
The Rumpus Interview with Quest for Kindness
Quest for Kindness seemed, to me, like career suicide, but in a warm and self-sacrificing way.
Swinging Modern Sounds #25: 100% Nepotism
It’s the Internet, where I am plying my trade here, and it’s meant to be the Wild West—unregulated, unruly, unpredictable.
Swinging Modern Sounds #24: A Magician of the Highest Degree
The millennium is not very old, it’s true, and yet today is the day on which I feel obliged to anoint a best song of the millennium, and to risk…
Swinging Modern Sounds #23: The Tragedy of Consciousness
Recently, I’ve been digging again through the wilds of the CD Baby site, where no print run is too small and no approach to music is too individual, and in…
Swinging Modern Sounds #22: Son of Interactive Playlist
Rick Moody shares the music he's listening to now thanks to suggestions shared by others.
Swinging Modern Sounds #21: On William Basinski
William Basinski was born in Texas in 1958, and, after a childhood playing wind instruments, he became in the early-eighties a composer of ambient and minimalist compositions.
Swinging Modern Sounds #20: Who’s Afraid of Serious Music?
Once, many years ago, I was at an artist’s colony in New Hampshire, The MacDowell Colony. I could never spend much time at MacDowell without suffering with paralyzing loneliness, and…
Swinging Modern Sounds #19: One Recent Example of Talent
“Talent” is from the Greek for a certain weight of gold, because, I suppose, people who had a lot of it seemed to be metaphorically wealthy. Here’s one example I…
Swinging Modern Sounds #18: Some Questions About the Tradition
Johnny Cash’s late covers are superior to their original recordings, but are they traditional?
Swinging Modern Sounds #17: Higher Love
Recently, I was given an assignment by Rumpus film critic and friend Ryan Boudinot to write about one of those pieces of music that is so execrable, so thoroughly gangrenous,…