Tonight I’m listening to Harry Partch’s composition“Barstow: Eight Hitch-hiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing,” from the album The World of Harry Partch. The album is out of print, but Sony has been generous enough to make it available on Youtube.

I listened to it often in 1993, while writing the second half of The Book of Man. Part of it inspired this passage:

We passed a bridge in the middle of nowhere. There didn’t seem to be a town for miles around, just the sea on the right of the tra...