Good question. It’s the title of a new book, just published in South Africa by Dye Hard Press. Although Sinclair Beiles was a prolific poet, novelist, and playwright, “there is very little information available” about him and even less about his work, co-editor Gary Cummiskey writes in the introduction. Beiles is best known for his […]

Michael Kinsley gets it. He takes note of “Where Did the Vampire Squid Come From?”, which pointed out that Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs — “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” — bore a striking resemblance to an old […]

Martin Luther King Jr. was bold and beautiful for a reason. He seems a figure from a distant past. Is it because he died so prematurely, killed by an assassin’s bullet, at 39? Or does he recede into history because someone of his towering stature is unimaginable in a aaaeulc led by blustering moral pipsqueaks? […]

This full-page ad in The New York Times, which ran today on page 29, marks the 40th anniversary of the WAR IS OVER! campaign launched by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Dec. 15, 1969. Click the image or this link to watch a campaign video. And have a look at this slide show. Billboards […]

A thought for the New Year … Question: “Do you still believe that the people have the power?” Answer: “I’ll always believe that. I think that they don’t know that. I don’t think that they believe that. And I understand why they don’t believe that, because it’s getting harder and harder and harder to penetrate […]

This came over the transom. My sentiments precisely. Reminds me of Philip Larkin. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

… or listen here to words of gratitude. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

So many immortals are buried at the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris — Balzac, Molière, Oscar Wilde, Proust, Max Ernst, for starters — that the witty artist Arman must rank among them as a mere mortal. But his stylish, minimalist headstone has the best epitaph of all of them. (“Alone at last!”) I saw it […]

I didn’t want to post this item, especially because I have no interest in writing anything that might be misconstrued as a defense of Goldman Sachs. But has anybody besides my staff of thousands — Bill Osborne, to be precise — noticed that Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped […]

This is very bad news. Here’s why. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Dave Teeuwen’s Interview with Graham Masterton on William S. Burroughs is a gem — every last word of it — and especially the remark that Burroughs said “he felt as if he had never lived the life he was supposed to live, and that somehow he had ended up as an outsider on the edge […]

From Video Poetry and Video Fictions, courtesy of Richard Kostelanetz, who produced the visual content in 1989, and Seth G. Samuel, who composed and performed the music in 2009. Postscript: Nov. 2 — A change from the change … and I doan care if dey mispell Artur’s name … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Here’s the truth, simply stated … bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don’t believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000! … even 400 copies! just for suckers! Alack! … Alas! … only love and romance … and even then! … manage to keep selling … […]

Here’s the beginning of a nice little tale of blackmail and paranoia by the late Kurt Vonnegut. It’s one of 14 previously unpublished stories in a new collection of short fiction, Look at the Birdie, just out from Random House. I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I […]

Did you see this? How could you not? It was frontpage — front and center above the fold — the kind of news that sends the mind reeling: Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace. Really. Americans wounded in the Iraq war are being ferried back to the scenes where they were maimed to help […]

Malcolm Mc Neill animated Televolution 20 years ago. “I redid it for Charles Darwin,” he said the other day, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and to pay tribute to On the Origin of Species. The 19th-century naturalist’s masterwork was published in November 1859. Mc Neill’s animated cartoon consists of 1859 frames. Televolution […]

Have a look at “The Subliminal Kid,” a short, brilliant sequence from Andre Perkowski’s “Nova Express.” Excerpts of his montage film, a three-hour work-in-progress based on the writings of William S. Burroughs, will be screened tonight at the School for the Visual Arts in New York as part of an ongoing homage to Burroughs, celebrating […]