Philip Graham, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collections The Art of the Knock and Interior Design, and a collection of travel essays, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. He is also the co-author, with his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, of two memoirs of Africa, Parallel Worlds and Braided WorldsHis work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Paris Review, Missouri Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. A co-founder and fiction/nonfiction editor of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter, he is currently the Editor-at-Large for the journal’s website (www.ninthletter.com). Email: p-graham [at] illinois.edu
Website: https://www.philipgraham.net/
by Philip Graham It’s the middle of July, 2020, the middle of a heat wave in the middle of the pandemic, and my first day in the radiation room. I stand in socks and starchy hospital gown before the Star Trek-ish linear accelerator, waiting for the technicians to fit me on the machine’s bed-like tray…
by Philip Graham I am a writer, not a musician. I play no instrument, and I confine my singing to the car when driving alone. Yet my momentary career as a musical performer—exceedingly brief as it may have been—enjoyed a spotlight rarely offered to others. Public acclaim is simply the last step in a long…
by Philip Graham I discovered my ideal radio station by accident. In the fall of 1979, my wife Alma and I took up a brief week’s residence in the Paris apartment of a friend, a pause before we’d fly to West Africa and then live in a small upcountry village in Ivory Coast for over…
by Philip Graham Whenever I discover a band that sports an accordion in the lineup, I’m ready to listen. But this wasn’t always so. It all goes back to the mid-1960s, those days of my mid-adolescence, when my father’s favorite cousin, who we called our “aunt” May, came to visit nearly every weekend. The year…
by Philip Graham I’ve long been partial to Portuguese culture, so when Portugal transferred its last colonial holding, Macau, back to Chinese rule in 1999 , a friend surprised me with his marveling reaction: “Portugal had an empire? Who knew?” Perhaps his reaction shouldn’t have surprised me. In the United States, steeped as we are…
by Philip Graham In the early months of 1966, whenever a familiar look of boredom settled in my mother’s eyes at the thought of cooking, I’d suggest, “Why don’t we go out for pizza?” She always agreed. Our pizzeria of choice was conveniently located on a one-block strip mall less than a mile away, between…
by Philip Graham Back in 1971, I couldn’t have predicted that the release of Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, would mark the beginning of the end of a friendship. During my college years, Donald and I had bonded over a love of literature and a shared ambition to become, some day, actual writers. While I…
by Philip Graham Michele Morano’s first collection of essays, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, is a classic of travel literature that I have taught several times, to the great pleasure of over a decade’s worth of students. Now she has bested the power of that excellent book with a new collection of essays,…
by Philip Graham Now that a deranged president’s toxic presence will finally—finally!—begin to occupy increasingly smaller tracts of our inner lives, these new days might offer an ideal occasion to celebrate songs that sing of the singular mental spaces hidden inside us all—songs that can help re-acquaint us with ourselves. You might say that all songs,…
by Philip Graham FRONT PORCH Tucked away in my mind is a secret neighborhood, with a winding street plan that arranges all the music that I have come to love. It’s a sprawling, noisy place, block after block of obscure or popular songs, odd genres or unusual instruments that I have listened to over a…
by Philip Graham I had never before wandered through Tower Records in downtown Chicago, yet it felt familiar. Why not? Every store in the corporate chain was a similar gleaming cathedral of CD and vinyl excess, multistoried with escalators and elevators, and brimfuls of such a wide selection that, once you entered, you’d find it…
by Philip Graham I serve as the family cook as well as the family DJ, so no dinner party preparation is complete without a small stack of CDs waiting for guests to arrive. When the doorbell rings and my wife Alma walks to the front door to greet our earliest guests, I idle the burners…
by Philip Graham Although my love of music goes back to the glory days of the long-playing vinyl album, I’ve embraced all the succeeding platform incarnations, from tapes to CDs to downloading to streaming (well, not so much streaming—shame on you, Spotify, for disappearing musicians’ royalties down to the teeniest fraction of a penny). But…