MOST RECENT BLOG POSTS
10 American novels as much fun to write as to read? Taking Terry Teachout's idea: American novels I would have written if I could have...
Ex-Theatre Critic Kidnapped By Somali Pirates A former SF Weekly theatre reviewer researches a book about pirates and ends up in their clutches...
'FUG YOU': A Decade of Poetry, Politics, & Rock 'n' Roll Ed Sanders's new memoir is a picaresque chronicle of the 1960s that reads like a nonfiction outtake from Pynchon's V....
Occupy My Wallet Want to piggyback on all these Occupy demos? Here's how...
A Book Clerk Who Was More Than a Clerk Fifty-four years ago two undercover cops in San Francisco arrested Shigeyoshi Murao for selling them an "obscene" book of poetry....
Tiny interventions After a weekend of discussing cultural mega-projects, I'm rather enamored of the radical alternative: the world's smallest cultural facility.
A study of reading habits With apologies to Philip Larkin....
LES Jews It's a different kind of memorial....
Same Key Can a concert with less variety be desirable?...
Brief thoughts regarding house recitals and David Foster Wallace's lack of conviction What makes a house concert sing? Plus, David Foster Wallace isn't responsible for infecting a generation of writers...
Poet Laureate's Factory Stiffs, Society's Throw-Aways Philip Levine, no prodigy, wrote poetry for seven years before his first poem was published in his mid-20s....
Tell It to Gertrude Jed Birmingham connects Mad Men and William Burroughs. Eddie Woods offers some corrective history about authorship of The Hashish Cookbook....
Verismo High technology allows sound recordings of greater and greater surface perfection -- maybe we don't want it...
What's the Catch? Nelson Algren gave Joseph Heller the biggest boost he ever got. But he's excluded from Vanity Fair's Heller biography excerpt....
Music for Silenced Voices An accessible new book about Shostakovich's string quartets provides a fascinating entry-point into the composer's life and work...
A 'John' Named Nelson Algren A point of information for Annie Sprinkle....
Quick Change Artist Mozart's music offers an almost constantly shifting and evolving rendering of human state-of-mind...
Repetition is a Form of Flattery Even music that isn't repetitive is subject to considerable repeating...