Beg to differ, tastes like fortified water to me. I much prefer NA Peroni, although it is not always easy to find.

Why haven't they named a Staten Island Ferry after him by now?

Maybe a Day of Mourning and Resistance, during which half the country stays out of work if possible and hits the streets everywhere? A national strike? Something so huge and unignorable that their "radical left" bullshit simply dissolves.

You don't read Updike for the laughs, but he gets off a first-rate joke in BECH IS BACK, when he writes that the perpetually blocked Henry Bech has just received "the Melville Medal, awarded every five years to that American author who has maintained the most meaningful silence."

My God, is that ULYSSES on the table? Now THAT'S postmodernism!

Malcolm Cowley was a good friend and one of his long-term critical champions.

So "We have a bot that will make the writing generated by a bot read like it was not written by a bot?"

I waa a book editor for 42 years and there is no fucking way a bot of any sort could do what I did, because my interactions with both manuscripts and the their authors was the human product of everything I had ever learned, read, and experienced. This ad is a steaming mountain of crap.

Posted this in June 2025.

As of 3:34 PM today the NY Times home page does not have a single dispatch on the ICE killing in Minneapolis. There is, however, an essay about the putative welfare fraud in that city. Way to go, Grey Lady.

Today on the Dipshit Podcast, Dipshit Ross Douthat talks to another Dipshit. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/o...

Time to go, Chuck. There's a very nice senior living facility in Brighton Beach that has a room waiting for you.

Lotta Susan Sontags out there for sure.

We saw MARTY SUPREME this weekend, and our experience was, first, hey, this is a lot of fun and then at a certain point, God, this is loud and narratively incoherent and basically exhausting, can we wrap this up please?

Listen, I don't have anything against Pat Benatar, but I keep on overhearing "HIt Me With Your Best Shot" at the gym or coffe shop and the damn thing lodges in my brain and stays there for days on end. Better her than Billy Joel, but still.

Want this too.

THE BOOK OF DANIEL, RAGTIME, WORLD'S FAIR, BILLY BATHGATE, an honorable lifetime of political activism -- this was a man. Plus guy was a working book editor for years, which I love about him.

Why are people putting up movie posters of second-rate and best-forgotten buddy movies and dumbass comedies? How does that enrich "the conversation"?

And years later, when his literary career had cratered (because of MOBY-DICK!), Melville walked along those very wharves in his employment as a customs inspector. He would have had to walk down a street named Gansevoort after his distinguished Dutch forebears.

Finished my essay taking a fresh look at Catch-22 in light of, um, current realities. The book and Joseph Heller have much to tell us today, none of it reassuring. And yes, it is still a great novel. I checked and it is timeless.

A corduroy jacket is always in style at the AHA.

Leo Kottke?

Called it.

Greenland next?

There's Little Marco to Trump's rear, with a thought balloon that reads in bold type :"I had to eat just a tremendous amount of shit to get here, but four years from now I'll be where that senile old bastard is, and it will all have been worth it."

I worked with James on three books by Burroughs in the mid-eighties, and while he could be self-important, he brought order and literary purpose to William's last years . I respected him for that.

Tony Dokoupil wrote a pretty good memoir about his father, one of the biggest pot dealers in the country. It was called THE LAST PIRATE and I ended up editing it for Doubleday. He was a nice guy and he had no obvious politics. I think he is in the grip of Forces Beyond His Control.

Imagine if He'd had a smart phone and a Truth Social account.

Let's hear it for caregiving spouses! My wife ministered to me for four or five months earlier this year when I was laid up with a quite serious bone infection in my ankle. I've done something similar for her in the past. So I know, I know.

AFTER THIS, Alice McDermott (The fact that she is maybe the best writer ever on my tribe, American Irish Catholics, puts the thumb on the scale considerably, but still.)

Churchill is the Yogi Berra of British Prime Ministers.

So was being his editor -- but it was also a privilege. I actually worshipped the guy, esp. in his guise as the best American essayist of the twentieth century. It kills me that the Library of America won't do a damn thing about that or his novels -- MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, JULIAN, BURR in particular.

I was his (last) editor for a few years. Every so often the brilliant tyrant let his mask drop and would act like a human being and not a god. I suppose it could get tiring even for Gore Vidal to be "Gore Vidal."

What with expensive tarriffs on imported Italian pasta, this brand may be in for a comeback.

Huge gratitude to WKCR in NYC for Bachfest, its annual year-end week of J.S. Bach's immortal and inspiriting music. And if you are feeling down about the human prospect, just reflect that you are a member of the same species as Bach, the greatest artist in human history. All is possible.

2025 Books cont.: PERFECTION, Vincent Latronico; CATCH-22, Joseph Heller; A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER, Nathan Kernan; JUST ONE CATCH, Tracy Daugherty; WALTER LIPPMANN, Tom Arnold-Foster; THE DIRECTOR, Daniel Kehlmann. Finis.

2025 Books cont.: THE SPLENDID CENTURY, W. H. Lewis; SILAS MARNER, George Eliot; DR. BRODIE'S REPORT, Jorge Louis Borges; A HERO OF OUR TIME, Mikhail Lermontov; THE VERY HEART OF IT and HENRY AND CLARA, Thomas Mallon; THE HISTORY MAN, Malcolm Bradbury; THE KILLING SEASON, Robert Cowley . . .

2025 Books cont.: THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE, Iris Murdoch; TENDER IS THE NIGHT, F. Scott Fitzgerald; MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, Nordhoff and Hall; THE COMFORTERS, Muriel Spark; AMERICAN HUMOR, Constance Rourke; AFTER THIS, Alice McDermott; THE LAST SUPPER, Paul Elie; ETHAN FROME, Edith Wharton

Books read in 2025: WHAT MAISIE KNEW, Henry James; THE WAR AT THE END OF THE WORLD, Mario Vargas Llosa; THE KILLER INSIDE ME, Jim Thompson; BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, Evelyn Waugh; THE BIG CLOCK, Kenneth Fearing;TALES OF GOOD AND EVIL, Nikolai Gogol; VERA, Stacy Schiff; WHAT WE CAN KNOW, Ian McEwan(tbc)

My favorite rejected cover ever. I liked it so much I framed it and kept it on display in my office for twenty years .

I know this sounds like a joke, but Sorrentino wrote the great Bay Ridge novel, STEELWORK. It stands to Bay Ridge the way PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST stands to Dublin. You may have to have grown up in Bay Ridge to fully understand this.

"How do you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." -- THE SUN ALSO RISES.

The dismaying truth is that if country elects a horribly hateful man as its leader and then allows that man to do horribly hateful and murderous things with absolute impunity, that country itself becomes horribly hateful. The stains from Trump will never wash out from our national reputation.

A great movie, and when I saw it while employed at Penguin, I managed to get the equally great book back in print.

“This phone is our direct line to suppliers for urgent matters,” jokes Rubinski. Above is a portrait of Chairman Mao, who was known for his fondness for sharp tailoring, among other things." -- From T. Yeah, like famines that killed millions. But he always looked sharp.

"History — my discipline — was among the majors chosen to be 'indefinitely discontinued,' along with anthropology and sociology." This is the New School, folks. Jaw-dropping in the worst possible way. Not a good year for college adminstrators -- caving in to Trump, eviscerating the liberal arts.

She worked as a secretary as did Betty Smith. Harper Lee worked as an airline reservations clerk.Tom Pynchon was a technical writer for Boeing. Don DeLillo was a copywriter for Olgivy and Mather. William Gaddis wrote annual reports for huge corporations. Joseph Heller was a Western Union messenger.

He has. He's a critic who will rave about the thematic complexity and formal innovation of the dumbest, most straightforward Raoul Walsh film. He's the guy who used to go into a long involved spiel in your English class and everyone else rolled their eyes in classic "oh please" fashion.

Thing From Another World The Trial of Joan of Arc 2001 A Space Odyssey Office Space Performance (well, define "perfect') And as long as I am here, Dog Day Afternoon.