Save this story for later.
A few years ago, my friend wrote a letter to the novelist Rick Moody. She did this because she had become too sick to write, but still felt strongly that she was a writer, even if there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between the present and the way her life had been. She also did this because Moody, the author of “The Ice Storm,” was now an advice columnist. In his “Life Coach” column on Literary Hub, Moody told my friend that she should appreciate the tang of fresh mint in a salad and try to understand her writing, at whatever scale she could manage it, as “an honest gesture” toward “cataloguing what you feel and who you are capable of being now.” As I read the column, I felt disappointed for my friend, who had been through so much and was now being told to enjoy garnishes more. And yet she was extremely satisfied with this response. Because Rick Moody also told her that she was brave, that her letter was itself a moving act of literatur
Save this story for later.
Live music has been a significant part of every Presidential Inauguration since 1789, when George Washington journeyed on horseback from Mount Vernon to New York City, and was fêted en route by various composers, including the German-American violinist Philip Phile, who used the occasion to début a new piece, “The President’s March.” (Washington was tense during his voyage, writing in his diary that he was “oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express,” and admitting that he felt increasingly uncertain about bidding adieu “to private life, and to domestic felicity.”) The Inauguration ceremony has only grown more elaborate and campy in subsequent decades, and, in the modern era, it usually involves one or two or three extravagantly dressed and jittery pop stars. This year, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks performed during the event, which is scheduled to be followed, on Wednesday evening, by a pr