Apologies for that last. Rather than waste your time on William Kris­tol and Leo Strauss, can I instead sug­gest you ease your Monday-​morning pro­cras­ti­na­tions with John Latta on William Logan on Frank O’Hara? Thanks.

The com­plete absence of coun­try music on the whiplash­ing summer-​music chart New York put together last week is even less sur­pris­ing than the New York Times’s sim­i­lar sin of omis­sion a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I sug­gested to a friend the other day, the People mag­a­zine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imag­ine an “us” with a little less con­stricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.

There’s some­thing to Jane Dark’s sug­ges­tion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save dis­pos­able income and zip code, I’m at the demo­graphic heart of the class their ads are gun­ning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Har­mony. But there I go again, lis­ten­ing to—and, shh, even liking!–coun­try music.

Not that I’m too wor­ried; we all, some­how, find our own ways to sur­vive the dik­tats of glossy-​magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make coun­try music safe for the archi­tects of medi­ated cool, when even the high-​profile defec­tions of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jes­sica Simp­son, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.

For those who get their daily dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion via RSS: Camp­bell McGrath and I have been dis­cussing my Book­fo­rum review of his Seven Note­books in the com­ments sec­tion of my last post. (And here you thought the “Tenzone” was exciting…)

My review of Camp­bell McGrath’s Seven Note­books appears in the summer issue of Book­fo­rum. Check it out…