What Fire Teaches About What Survives

What Fire Teaches About What Survives

London, September 1940The German bombing has been continuous since September 7th. Last night the fires in the East End were visible from here, orange against low clouds, the kind of light that makes the city look like something from the industrial paintings that Dore...
The Full Testimony: All Twelve Tracks

The Full Testimony: All Twelve Tracks

Present Day, July 10, 2026Seven days. The complete shape of Sanctified Hunger:Well Trained opens the album because it describes the precondition: the systematic training of judgment out of the person who will eventually be asked to do something that requires the...
The First Song Written Under My Own Name

The First Song Written Under My Own Name

New York City, December 1988I was in a club in lower Manhattan last night. I do not remember the name of the club. What I remember is a particular moment when the music hit something that had been sealed for a long time, and the thing inside came loose, and I left at...
Who Gets Damned and Why

Who Gets Damned and Why

Various centuries, consolidatedI have been paying attention to who gets damned across five centuries of institutional religion and the pattern is not complicated once you see it.The questioners. The ones who read outside the approved texts and ask why the approved...
Germany, 1636: Moving Through It

Germany, 1636: Moving Through It

The Rhineland, 1636The Thirty Years War had been running for eighteen years by the time I was moving through the Rhineland in the winter of 1636. A third of the German population was dead or had fled or was in the process of dying. I have seen other wars. This one had...
Why Holy War Cannot Be Metaphor

Why Holy War Cannot Be Metaphor

Present Day, July 4, 2026Some listeners will hear Holy War and experience it as a historical document, a meditation on something that happened in other centuries to other people. I understand why. History provides distance. Distance provides comfort.I am writing this...