There are many things I love about C. Burnett's To Sleep With Anger: my old SF State comrade Danny Glover, Mary Alice, Ethel Ayler. The way CB depicts families and kids. If you haven't seen To Sleep... or his other early films, you don't know what you're missing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMk7...

Where have I been that I haven't read Scott Wolven before? As far as I can tell, he's clearly the Isaac Babel of noir fiction.

Found and treasured... And one of my favourite poets.

Walking down Judd Street, WC1. Maybe a sign that I dip into his autobiography yet again?

It's Dilla Time with Erroll Garner. From Dan Charnas's incredible book and playlist. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYX3...

My other world... J. Hoberman strikes again.

Spent a good portion of May Day reading Mark Nowak's excellent collection of documentary poems, Shut Up Shut Down, with an Afterword by Amiri Baraka.

A must listen for anyone who's read and appreciated Henry Dumas's The Metagenesis of Sun Ra (Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction...). sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-an...

Noah Davis's incredible paintings at the Barbican. Not to be missed.

Reading Szwed's Sun Ra book. Well-researched with plenty of rabbit holes to go down. & stories e.g. Ra playing at a Chicago mental hospital, where a woman who hadn't moved or spoken for years, rose, walked to the piano and cried out, "You call that music!" Proof to Ra of the healing power of music.

A visit to Highgate cemetery. Of course paid homage to K. Marx but also writer/painter B. Bainbridge.

My poem du jour : Anslem Berrigan's homage to Raymond Chandler, I Felt Like An Amputated Leg: "He looked about as/inconspicuous as a/tarantula on a slice/of angel food." Or: "It was him all/right, taken in a strong/light, and looking as/if he had no more/ eyebrows than a French roll."

When I arrived in San Francisco in 1965, Lami by Alden Van Buskirk was "the book" every young street poet was reading. It would eventually be immortalised by David Rattray in How I Became One of the Invisible, with further immortalisation by way of Rachel Kushner's The Hard Crowd.

Hitting the Oulipian and Zazie-infested Parisian streets with Raymond Queneau.The poems superbly translated by Rachel Galvin. E.g.: after a litany of 20th century stupidities: "and all that makes a real story/which settles over the city/in traces more or less futile/that we decipher like scribbles."

Definitely a must-read for all Ross Macdonald fans. Not just for the stories, which are, of course, great, but for Tom Nolan's incredible introduction which is, in fact, a biography of Lew Archer. An extraordinary piece of writing, not to mention the reading and research entailed in producing it.

Re-reading Night Soldiers, Alan Furst first in his series of spy novels, which I hadn't read since the late 1980s. I'd forgotten just how much of a debt it owes to Victor Serge's classic, even modernist, political spy novels, The Unforgiving Years and, to a lesser extent, Midnight in the Century.

A bit obscure for anyone except San Francisco music lovers of a certain era. But sighed as I read August Kleinzahler's poem The Magic Flute: "Flynn on his stool,/holding court down the block/at the Magic Flute,/his hound at his feet while the old LP's/hissed and popped through the weekend."

Barry Schwabsky in the New Left Review on the under-appreciated, if not forgotten, poet N.H. Pritchard newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

My favourite photo of Kenneth Fearing.

For me, Edward Wilson's novels constitute a political history of the post-WW2 relationship between the US and the UK, and the relationship between on the intelligence services of both countries. Here's a review of his latest Farewell Dinner For a Spy. woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2025/02/mons...

This is one I've been after for a long time. Thanks to my local Amnesty International bookshop. Long live Kenneth Fearing!

"Cloud fields change into furniture furniture metamorphizes into fields an emphasis falls on reality." Barbara Guest

Looks like we are all living in Jim Thompson's kingdom of El Rey. Here's an article- It's a Noir World- Noir Fiction in the Age of Trump- I wrote at the beginning of the first Trump presidency. Clearly it applies even more so these days. woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2018/07/its-...

Tom Raworth in the New Left Review! Via Luke Roberts' excellent review/article of Tom's wonderful book Cancer. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

George P. knows what he's talking about... crimereads.com/george-pelec...

What You Were Fighting For was so good I had to order a copy of the door-stopping Bright Segments (800+ pages!), even though the former is embedded in the latter. And I wasn't in the least bit disappointed.

Henry Moore on Hampstead Heath, 8:30 AM, Jan. 21st, 2025.

Finally... www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I love all three Laidlaw novels, but Strange Loyalties is my favourite. It's so deeply felt, filled with poetic and philosophical epigrams and Glasgow repartee. A crime novel in which the crime is buried so deep within the text one is still searching for it 3/4 of the way through the book.

Dread to think what sort of hell Trump will unleash come next week. If it's any comfort, there's an excellent piece by TJ Clark in the current LRB, in which the art historian and former Situationist, updates the Society of the Spectacle to critique the Trump era. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Long-awaited... (cover by the great Michael Myers).

Another in a series edited by Kevin Avery on Nelson (The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives & Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life and Writings of PN). It's truly a book for obsessives, be it for Nelson, Williams or Cohen. Love it that PN can't resist being both interviewee and interviewer.

My Rabbi, my bibles...

The great Congolese guitar player Docteur Nico... Here with the equally great Tabu Ley. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxF7...

This could well turn out to be my favourite book of 2025:

Just came across Robert Polito's short talk on Dylan and noir. I've long thought someone should write something on just that subject. Hopefully Robert's forthcoming book on Dylan will cover that ground in even more detail. But for now this will have to do. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC4I...

Jacques Roubaud, Poetic Master of Form and Whimsy, Dies at 92 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/b...

Reading the first chapter of Joe Boyd's latest reminded me of a long-time favourite, Mike Nicol's A Good Looking Corpse- The World DRUM- Jazz and Gangster, Hope and Defiance in the Townships of South Africa. Nicol would also go on to write some excellent South African-based crime novels.

This has to be one of the films of the year... mubi.com/en/gb/films/...

Peter Mathiessen must qualify as the greatest writer formerly employed by the CIA. Not that there's much competition. In any case, Shadow Country- a reworking his Watson trilogy- is just as good , if not better than, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, etc..

My record of the year: Ahmed's Giant Beauty (Pat Thomas, piano Seymour Wright, alto saxophone Joel Grip, double bass Antonin Gerbal, drums). A 5 CD tribute to the great oud and bass player (Monk, Coltrane) Ahmed Abdul-Malik. ahmedquartet.bandcamp.com/album/giant-... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5_C...

Paul S. Hirsch's Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism.

Just in: short sharp shocks from William Minor's Flabby Preludes For a Dog (Sacred Parasite, Berlin). E.g., Language: "Language is an excellent tool/for giving the wrong shape to something/that was useless to begin with."

Channelling Edward Hopper. From Bette Gordon's 1983 Variety, screenplay by Kathy Acker..

File under: Slow Learner. Although I've been reading Louis Zukofsky since the mid-1960s, I'm ashamed to say I've only recently come to realise just how great he is.

From the great Bay Area artist A.G. Rizzoli to British MPs...

According to Guy Davenport's Geography of the Imagination, Charles Olson once wrote a study of musical comedies. Now that's something I would love to read. Has anyone ever come across it in the Olson archives? Does it exist, or is it merely a rumour in Davenport's geographical imagination?

Well, of course... I mean, why not? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...