Sunday night, revisiting the letters Robert Palmer wrote to...

Sunday night, revisiting the letters Robert Palmer wrote to pianist John Kirkpatrick, which I saw at Yale a few years ago, spanning from when he was a grocery clerk to his professorship at Cornell. Mostly cordial, midcentury-mannered, workaday stuff, and then something really kooky will happen, like a vague description of personal anguish, professional uncertainty, the casual mention of being disqualified permanently from the military “for psychological reasons.” And then the letter will go on about such-and-such measure, and why the tie is important.