Book Review: Stranded in the Future, by Robyn Hitchcock (2026)

Stranded in the Future, published earlier this year, is Robyn Hitchcock’s second memoir, following 2024’s excellent 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. Stranded in the Future picks up the story after the Day-Glo marvelousness of 1967 and takes the reader through the next decade of Hitchcock’s life. 

One of the main characters in Stranded in the Future, besides Robyn, is a reclusive rock star, referred to as both Mr. A during his rock star period, and Mr. B after he gave up the spotlight. It’s no shock to reveal that Mr. A/B is Syd Barrett, formerly of Pink Floyd. Hitchcock is a huge Syd Barrett fan, and he’s often covered Barrett’s solo compositions in concert. 

Syd Barrett is quite a legend in rock and roll circles. One of the founders of Pink Floyd, Barrett was a key artistic voice during their first album, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and then left the group in early 1968. Barrett released two solo albums, both in 1970, and then largely disappeared from public life and performing. Hitchcock was fascinated by Barrett, and a continuing theme of Stranded in the Future is Hitchcock’s near misses with encountering Barrett. 

The Robyn Hitchcock that we encounter in Stranded in the Future is a young man who wants to be a singer-songwriter. The book follows his maturation as an artist and the first recordings he makes with his band The Soft Boys. Hitchcock had a relatively long gestation period as a rock musician. His debut long-playing record was The Soft Boys’ first album, A Can of Bees, released in 1979, when Hitchcock was 26 years old. That’s not old by lifespan standards, but in terms of rock and roll, it’s on the later side. Syd Barrett had already been in and out of Pink Floyd, made his two solo albums, and was on the train to nowhere by the time he was 26. Paul McCartney had just started recording the White Album when he was 26. I could give a dozen more examples, but you get the point. 

Hitchcock is an excellent writer with a vibrant, impressionistic style of writing. There are great quotes throughout the book. One of my favorites was from Robyn’s father, the painter and novelist Raymond Hitchcock: “My father, however, was fond of saying that we were given speech in order to not communicate with each other.” (p.26) That’s food for thought.

Just as Robyn is always missing Syd Barrett, he also just misses connecting with Bob Dylan on a kibbutz in Israel in 1971. Crazy, man. Speaking of Dylan, there’s another type of near miss when Robyn buys Dylan’s new album Planet Waves. However, the record inside the Planet Waves sleeve is actually Brian Eno’s solo debut, Here Come the Warm Jets. “They were, briefly, label mates at that stage, and the record pressing plant had, in delicious error, put Eno albums in Dylan sleeves.” (p.118)

Robyn eventually forms a band called The Soft Boys, which is a fantastic name for a band. It’s a bit silly and non-threatening, especially during an era when testosterone reigned supreme in rock and punk. 

Stranded in the Future also covers Robyn’s romantic relationships, which are complex. His on-again, off-again relationship with “Ms. C” is an example of two people who are constantly being drawn towards each other, even though it doesn’t seem as though they like each other very much. 

Stranded in the Future is an interesting book, chronicling an often difficult time in Hitchcock’s life. I hope he writes a third volume; I’d be fascinated to read about his emergence as a solo artist in the 1980’s, and his success touring America. 

The Minnesota State Fair

The Agriculture Horticulture building at the Minnesota State Fair, August 28, 2026. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor) 

It’s the end of August, which means it’s time for one of my favorite things: the Minnesota State Fair. 12 days of food, fun, and lots of people, ending on Labor Day. The State Fair has always been a bridge between the seasons: the last gasp of summer, and the entrance to fall and the beginning of the school year. 

The Minnesota State Fair boasts an amazing array of fried foods, animals, and events. There’s something for just about everyone, in my opinion. I am biased, since I’ve been going to the State Fair since I was a kid, and it’s a strong family tradition. I know the Fair doesn’t change much from year to year. Yes, the corn dogs and the pronto pups still taste the same. But there is a certain amount of comfort in the unchanging aspects of the State Fair. The giant pumpkins and the crop art are still in the same places in the Agriculture Horticulture building; the games on the Midway remain largely unchanged from season to season. But things do change at the Fair, and these gradual changes at the Fair seem to me an apt metaphor for life itself. Life usually doesn’t change rapidly, but most often the changes happen slowly, almost imperceptibly, not always measured day to day, but rather year to year.

Of course, the State Fair does change. One of my favorite areas of the Fair was called Heritage Square. It was built in the mid-1960's as a temporary area, but somehow it survived. Probably because no one cared about it. There were train cars full of circus and sideshow histories, a building about the history of the Fair with random memorabilia—it was truly a random catch-all area. You had to want to go to Heritage Square—because it was so hidden away, it was highly unlikely that you would just stumble across it. But eventually progress came for Heritage Square, and it was torn down and replaced by the fancier West End Market. The West End Market is pretty, smooth, and shiny, but for me it will never have the funky charm and odd character of Heritage Square. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story about the Minnesota State Fair. “A Night at the Fair” is one of a series of stories detailing the adolescence of Basil Duke Lee. Fitzgerald’s beautiful talent for description is on full display, especially in this passage:

“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of people, were heavy with the rich various smells of popcorn and peanuts, molasses and dust, and cooking Wienerwurst and a not-unpleasant overtone of animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement of Northern autumn in the air.”  

What a lovely passage. You can see everything that Fitzgerald describes. What I love about this passage is that Fitzgerald was calling it up in his memory bank at a time when he hadn’t lived in Minnesota for years. But it was all there in his brain, ready for use at any time. In the story, Fitzgerald describes a ride that Basil takes on “Ye Old Mill,” a “tunnel of love” ride that is now the oldest ride at the State Fair. You can still take a ride on “Ye Old Mill,” more than 100 years after Fitzgerald did so.

I still enjoy the State Fair, and now I get to see the Fair through the eyes of my children, which is quite enjoyable. Now they have their own favorite foods they must have, and their own things they want to do. And so, the cycle of the State Fair spins on, like a Ferris wheel, slowly rotating against the brilliant blue of the late summer sky. 

Book Review: A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (1929)

Since Virginia Woolf’s domination of The Guardian’s list of the 100 best novels of all-time—she scored 5 books on the list—I’ve thought “I should read more of her work.” I picked up A Room of One’s Own at a used bookstore, thinking that I had read it in college, but as I was paging through it, I thought “Hmmm, this has 6 chapters and 125 pages? I think I only read part of it.” Now I can say that I’ve actually read all of A Room of One’s Own. 

First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is Woolf’s examination of the hurdles that women face in writing fiction. 97 years later, it’s still a very relevant book. One of the parts that struck me the most is the passage in which Woolf is describing how much power and control men exert over public life at that time. “With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry...it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry.” (p.42-3) Yes, that’s it exactly! Think of today’s “manosphere,” which is just spewing toxic anger and vitriolic misogyny. For decades, maybe even centuries, white men have been terrified of losing power, either to non-whites or to women. And Woolf captures that ridiculous anger perfectly. 

Woolf famously wrote that in order to write, a woman needs 500 pounds a year, and “a room of one’s own.” How much would 500 pounds a year be in 2026? According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, which can calculate how prices have changed going back to 1209, 500 pounds in 1929 would be 28,375 pounds in 2026. That’s $38,707 in US dollars. $38,700 is a good amount of money, but it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to support yourself if that was your only source of income. It might be able to support you if you were a single woman living in a small town, but if you’re trying to live in midtown Manhattan, $38,700 won’t last you very long. But $38,700 would certainly be a nice cushion if you were getting that much money from, say, an inheritance. 

Woolf comes down a little hard on Charlotte Brontë. Woolf clearly loves Jane Austen, and while she appreciates Brontë, she can’t help but compare the two authors. Woolf writes of Brontë: “she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely...She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?” (p.81) Yikes. It’s hard because our brains always compare two things. Thing A is like this, so Thing B is the opposite. Writer A is like this; Writer B is like that. Two writers will always be different because they are different people, so they will inevitably produce two different works of art, even if they are trying to write about the same subject matter. Some people write calmly, and some people write with fire and fury. 

At the end of Chapter 5, Woolf writes of her fictional female author Mary Carmichael, “Give her another hundred years...she will be a poet...in another hundred years’ time.” (p.106) We’re almost 100 years past Woolf’s book. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on the current state of women writing fiction, so it would be fascinating to read a leading contemporary female author tackle the same subject that Woolf did, 100 years later.

I’d highly recommend A Room of One’s Own; it’s a fascinating and engaging read. 

Book Review: My Impressions of the Wolfe Family and of Maxwell Perkins, by William B. Wisdom (1993)

William B. Wisdom is an important figure in Thomas Wolfe studies, as it was Wisdom that purchased Wolfe’s papers and manuscripts after Wolfe’s death and donated them to Harvard University. Two pamphlets of Wisdom’s writings about Wolfe were published by the Thomas Wolfe Society: The Table Talk of Thomas Wolfe, which recounted Wisdom’s meetings with Wolfe in New Orleans in 1937, was published in 1988, and My Impressions of the Wolfe Family and of Maxwell Perkins was published in 1993. The Table Talk of Thomas Wolfe is the more interesting volume, as it gives the reader some insights as to what Thomas Wolfe was like. 

My Impressions of the Wolfe Family and of Maxwell Perkins focuses on Wisdom’s purchasing of Wolfe’s papers and manuscripts from the Wolfe family after Thomas’s tragic early death in 1938 from tuberculosis. Wisdom was aided in his quest by Wolfe’s editor Maxwell Perkins. Perkins was more than just an editor, he was a true friend and mentor to Thomas Wolfe, and the Wolfe family put a lot of trust in Perkins. Scribner’s was the publishing house where Maxwell Perkins worked, and in addition to editing Wolfe, Perkins was also the editor for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. It’s pretty amazing that Perkins was editing three of the greatest American authors of that era. 

Julia Wolfe was the matriarch of the Wolfe clan, and she was a shrewd businesswoman who ran a boardinghouse and owned a substantial amount of property in Asheville, North Carolina. Wisdom knew that staying on Julia’s good side was key to maintaining a good relationship with the Wolfe family. 

It’s fascinating to read about the mundane details of Wolfe’s papers, like how Wisdom bought a huge storage trunk to transport Wolfe’s papers in. Wisdom also gives the reader an idea of the other Wolfe siblings. Suffice it to say, the Wolfe family was full of colorful characters, as anyone who has read Look Homeward, Angel will know. 

What I found to be one of the most interesting parts of the book was the section where Wisdom discussed Perkins’ and Wolfe’s differences. Perkins and Wolfe were always at separate poles politically, and Wisdom writes “Wolfe as he grew older was becoming more and more affected by social consciousness, which verged toward socialism.” (p.38) In some of Wolfe’s later short stories like “I Have a Thing to Tell You” and “The Party at Jack’s,” his social consciousness comes to the forefront and emerges as a core theme. I wonder how Wolfe’s political ideas would have evolved had he lived longer, and if his emerging social consciousness would have continued to be a theme in his work.