From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.
I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
Music can be a way for me to think back a lot of the time, almost like an opening into all the nostalgia I never express.
In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.
Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.
Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.
Of course, you wouldn't want to re-create the era of aristocracy; it was a totally unfair era. The finer aspects of it were admirable, and so there's nostalgia for that: the behavior, the values, the cultural sensitivities.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
There's no way to be a 30-year-old band, go on tour, and pretend the nostalgia isn't happening.
