Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe;
I was not offended.
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
George Clinton, “Maggot Brain,” 1971
It’s hard to say whether this kind of thing—making a case for [...]

By Andrew Zhou
Note: all headings represent the five compulsory components for an audition for piano at the undergraduate level at Northwestern University
I – a contrapuntal baroque composition equivalent in difficulty to a three-voice fugue
I perform a suite of Brahms’ late piano pieces for a recital held by my professor that evening at one of [...]

I.

In 1971, Don DeLillo published his first novel, Americana, within which a novelist, not the main character, fantasizes about his future life. He lives alone, in a remote place, venerated by the younger generation, sporadically visited by young admirers. I don’t know how many of DeLillo’s young admirers he actually receives in person, [...]

Samuel Beckett sympathized with lobsters. A female liaison told one of his biographers, James Knowlson, that when they would dine together at the Iles Marquis in Paris, they would always sit as far as possible from the trout and lobster tanks because of how much they upset “Sam.”
The detail appears in an early short [...]