The history of contemporary music, of today’s music, begins in October of 1962 with the Beach Boys’ first album, Surfin’ Safari. It was quickly followed by the Beatles’ first UK album, Please Please Me, released in the UK in March of 1963. While the Beatles’ first US release wasn’t until…

The following paper was presented at the 2023 Popular Culture Association Conference of the South in New Orleans in session F 11.1: Friday, September 29th at 4:00 p.m. in Algiers A. Many thanks to Samuel Lyndon Gladden, University of New Orleans, for his work organizing this panel, and to fellow…

Last March I changed the title of my blog to Philosophy of Contemporary Song, partly because I’d just read Dylan’s recent book, and partly because of a conversation with my sixteen year old daughter Grace, who told me she wished people like me would write about songs by artists like…

Lee Trepanier’s “The Compliant College Classroom” and Blake Smith’s “Against the Writing Center” are both recent diatribes against the current state of writing instruction at the college level. They make similar claims from different disciplinary perspectives: Trepanier is Chair and Professor of Political Science at Samford University while Smith is…

I grew up watching Speed Racer, the original anime, on television in the late 1960s. I probably watched it from the time I was four or five until I was eight or ten on a constant stream of reruns. So when the Wachowskis released a live action Speed Racer in…

…and that is when he came to me, the great sucking darkness, the formless one, not a place where anyone or anything is, but the place where everything is not (at least as far as he can help it). And that is when he said to me, “Do it.” He…

O! Could any great stone, mountainous though it is, resist that wry, gentle, know- ing look that pierces your dark surfaces with humor like prismatic sunlight dript through summer windowpanes in early morning: you want the light, but don't want to wake up. c 2017 James Rovira

"The Magical Realist" Foundling of enchant- ed lands, dweller in starry ways, mythographer. 04-17-2017 Clinton, MS

The youth Phosphorus entered the valley as a gleaming light upon a black hill. Fire Lily saw him and loved him, saying, “Be only mine. . . forever!” “I want to be yours, my lovely flower, but that would give birth to your senses and spark thought.” “O let me be all yours within my glowing fire. Within my rays of light.” Fire Lily kissed Phosphorus and, exploding into flame, she gave birth to a wing’d, black dragon who called metals forth, who called forth