Golf is Not Only for Dummies

Written for ESPNet Sportszone, 1996

Elizabeth Nelson, future likely MacArthur Award winner as a big-time music critic, musician, essayist, and civil servant, is also a golf enthusiast. She's got a band called the Paranoid Style, which resonates with me because her band and my view of history were forged by Richard Hofstadter's essential 1964 book, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Elizabeth also writes musical koans on Twitter (as of this writing), miniature epiphanies about the unexpected intersectionality of rock music: "The Proustian-beauty of early Van Morrison meets the haunted-post war anxiety of The Kink’s ‘Arthur’, John Cale’s 'Paris 1919' LP is one of rock’s strangest and most transporting gestures. Nine songs over thirty minutes which weirdly summarize the global sweep of human history."

We don't always agree, but Christgau's Consumer Guide gave the Paranoid Style's latest album, "For Executive Meeting" (Bar None) an "A"; Nick Paumgarten wrote about the band this summer for the New Yorker; and I  gave …