I had been making instruments, sort of, since high school. I fell in love with the classical guitar thanks to Andres Segovia and not long after fell in love with luthiery thanks to Irving Sloane’s marvelous book Classical Guitar Construction. I’m not sure when Glenn Johnson caught the romance...
This is my second post about Moondog, another study of one of the remarkable people I’ve known. His real name, we learned, was Louis Hardin. He had grown up in Kansas, Wyoming, Arkansas, and Tennessee, then spent three decades in Manhattan. He had a curious, double reputation. On one...
This is the sixth portrait in my series on “Meetings With Remarkable People” — ruminations on exceptional individuals I have known and explorations of just what qualities make a person “remarkable.” Moondog was certainly a unique man, one whose unusual circumstances resulted equally from fate, predisposition, and personal choice. My...
In writing this series of posts about Meetings With Remarkable People, I’ve been reluctant to write about living ones. Why? First, I worry that the individuals I’m portraying might not appreciate my perspectives; I’m sure Nina Gitana and Bill Lederer would take exception to much of what I’ve written...
This third post about William Lederer relates one of Bill’s most charming tales: his writing tutelage under Ernest Hemingway. The basic facts are verifiable: Yes, Bill did spend time in 1940 and 1941 on a gunboat in the Yangtze River, and during that period Hemingway did indeed accompany his...
I can’t resist writing about Bill Lederer as the first installment of my series on Meetings With Remarkable People. In 1975, or around then, I was living in Plainfield, Vermont, and eking out a living by various means, including teaching classical guitar. It was my first full winter in...
In 1964, I read P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, and it had a profound effect on me. The book is Ouspensky’s account of his quest to find direct evidence that the world is more than a material phenomenon — that some events take place outside the laws...