Like the wartime years of a civilian solider, they lay so much outside the real world that they had about them a certain unsubstantial, dreamlike quality. I came across the above passage in Page Smith’s biography of John Adams, which I started to read again yesterday afternoon. The passage refers to Adams’s days at Harvard.…
Someone mentioned that we recently passed the 30 year anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s Out of Time album. That was a watershed album for me. Indeed, R.E.M. turned out to be the soundtrack of my college years, and the years immediately after. I knew of R.E.M. before college. In high school, during the Los…