All the articles in this section have been written since The Revolt of the Pendulum came out in 2009, and are thus queuing up to be loaded aboard a collection of their own, which might not be assembled in my lifetime. In early 2010, after I fell ill, I was forced to accept that I could work only at about half pace. But writing articles, like writing poems, is one of my mental substitutes for smoking, for which I had such a fondness until they hauled me in and started replacing every system they could pull free. While all that was going on I started writing some long articles for the Atlantic Monthly and the TLS. I grabbed at an invitation from the Australian Weekend Review because it was a chance to write about Mad Men. The new magazine Standpoint proved a welcoming home for articles about poetry, as did the New York Times and the Financial Times. So I wasn’t short of commissions. I was just very short of puff, but I hope that deficiency doesn’t show. Certainly my mind was clear. A mercy, because there was a lot of traffic. It was like starting off all over again, only this time the editors knew where I lived. Just how all those drugs and drips can balance up so as to make your brain shine instead of fall on the floor is one of the medical mysteries that I am still waiting to have explained to me.
