"They love me in Berlin, baby."

And we should care because . . . ?

“Is there any greater freedom than not caring anymore what certain people in New York think of me?” Chris Kraus, I LOVE DICK

Antonin Artaud and Tom Verlaine -- separated at birth?

It really bothers me that profound media annoyances Bill Maher, Ann Coulter and Keith Olbermann are all Cornell graduates. We produced E. B. White, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Farina, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Price . . . and them?

Wayne Thiebaud, watch your back!

Okay, now get on to the books with GIRL in the title.

Viking Compass was one of the great trade paperback imprints of the fifties, sixties and seventies. This was not Cowley's best book, but it is chock full of facts and smarts about the Quality Lit game.

I'll bet those wine moms even have book clubs, where they read and discuss subversive literature like Tom Paine's COMMON SENSE and Hannah Arendt's TOTALITARIANISM. (And the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.) They must be stopped!

I used to think hell would be being forced to watch Lawrence Welk reruns for all eternity. But this is worse, far far worse. And the only thing that keeps Kid Rock from his position as Biggest Asshole in the Universe is the existence of DJT.

"Now, Mortimer," says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand -- which is particularly rich in knuckles . . . ." --OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.

"Spare me this 'I have a functioning intellect' stuff."

It's science!

Jonathan Ross is the latest iteration of William Calley. Both belong to the class of lumpen white dudes tasked with, and poory trained for, the ugly job of keeping black, brown and yellow people in line. You could summon some sympathy for them, except for, you know.

Read this from a certain angle and you might think, hmm, early Wallace Stevens?

Now this is hard-hitting journalism. Lincoln Steffens , Nellie Bly, Ida B. Wells and Jacob Riis wept. (Btw, what are the chances a huge public beach would be named after Riis today?)

I forget what I paid for my first edition, but it wasn't signed and it might have run me $300.

I edited LIGHTNING ON THE SUN for Doubleday. It was one of the few times that I offered a suggestion for plotting and it actually helped Rob over a hump. Alas, he od'd while reading the galleys. He was his generation's Robert Stone and he had so many books to come in him . . . .

There was a television show for kids called Winky Dink in the early fifties . It was interactive: you put a vinyl plastic cover over the screen and followed the prompts to do an actual drawing on the cover with your crayon. I did it myself and it was fun.

As Flannery O'Connor immortally said, "There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

Some people are, well, people. Other people are, you know, gods.

What would her one-time prof Harold Bloom say? (A not uncomplicated question to answer, btw.)

A headline from the Daily Beast with a certain political resonance.

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."