Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.