Video: One of these things is not like the other things.

I admit it: I have a bias against literary novelists who write about music. It has to do with my appetite for immediacy. That's what I like about pop, and pop writing, and it's not a tendency always shared by literary fiction writers. So I see detailed explanations of milieu that I take for granted and I grow impatient. Obviously, this is my fault, but sometimes it's the writers' too. Once I showed a friend a piece a long music essay, by a well-known author, that seemed to spend its first page clearing its own throat. My friend summed up [...]