The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in 1967, and the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil in 1968. Woodstock, perhaps the crown jewel of the counterculture, took place in 1969. And in 1970, the forty-three-year-old Ned Rorem blithely published Critical Affairs. The book is about the state of the culture, ruminations on lost people and their treasures, music (specifically, his own music), and a diary of his recent year in Paris while looking at the state of his old friends and their decaying high cultural life. Does this have the least resonance for our own time? Indeed, it does. Rorem’s comments seem as applicable today as they did then, which is to say that the difficulties he noticed then have only worsened. And his understanding of what it means to be a creative artist today–or if I must use that awful term, a “creative” –is just as relevant.