Speaking of Lower East Side...

I can't let the year end without taking note of a new coloring book -- yes, a coloring book -- titled Legends of the Lower East Side. It's...

Was an online editor for the New York Times being cute? Have a look at the photo of a woman sticking her head in the toilet. It sat like an illustration from The Onion next to the headline "Putin Says Clinton Incited Protests Over Russian Vote." Here it is on...

Richard Sargent likes to take pictures of them. "Photographing torn posters is a cliché in which I continue to indulge," he writes. In fact, his photos of "decaying urban billboards" -- all of them shot in northern California's East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond -- transform...

In 1989, Michael Lawrence filmed an interview with Steve Jobs for Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress.

"I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him," Lawrence messages in an email. "I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave...

The "vulgo-cynicism" of Carl Weissner's Die Abenteuer von Trashman The Adventures of Trashman -- his term for the humor of his latest book -- was already on display in last year's Manhattan Muffdiver.

Both books, from Vienna-based Milena Verlag, are written in German. Although I read German...

Fifty-four years ago two undercover cops in San Francisco arrested a clerk at City Lights Bookstore for selling them an "obscene" book of poetry. The clerk was Shigeyoshi Murao. The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Several months later, on October 3rd, a municipal court judge ruled that the book was...

Susan Fleet -- trumpet player and feminist music historian -- set her first crime thriller, Absolution, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where homicide detective Frank Renzi takes on a serial killer who preys on women. Fleet's new killer thriller, Diva, is subtitled "a novel of psychological suspense." That's...

Jimmy Breslin was right. It's a lousy idea to turn the victims of 9/11 into martyrs and just as lousy to turn Ground Zero into a glorified cemetery. It was wrong in 2003, when he railed against both ideas in his newspaper column; and it is now, when the 10th...

Sometimes you get lucky. This was a long time ago. When the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were about to be announced, an editor assigned me to write an appreciation of the book that won the poetry prize: "What Work Is," by Philip Levine. It would also win a...

Just read the excerpt in Vanity Fair of the new Joseph Heller biography, which includes this graf:

Candida (pronounced Can-dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller's new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. ... In time, her client roster came to include...

Annie Sprinkle led off her review of Chester Brown's Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John by pointing out that in her "nearly 40 years in the world of sex workers," she knew of only one person ever "to come out voluntarily -- with...

Supervert has just redesigned his Fleursdumal.org Web site, which was first launched in 2004 and is "the definitive online edition" of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal...

If it's true that professional boxing now has 68 world title holders in 17 weight classes, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, then it's not surprising that AT THE FIGHTS: American Writers on Boxing, a new anthology from The Library of America, reads like an elegy for the...

When Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader or Glenn Greenwald or Paul Krugman or Chris Hedges or any number of Obama's leftwing critics call him a disgrace and worse -- ok, let's say it, a finkified hypocrite -- their opinions are dismissed on the right as...

Here's Joe "Good Guy" Biden contradicting himself about WikiLeaks. Sickening, isn't it? Thank you, Glenn Greenwald. (Update: Dec. 19 -- Really sickening, to say nothing of U.S. officials calling European standards for human rights an "irritant.") Which brings me to Paul Krugman's blogpost, "Decade of the...

Violence in the streets scares the shit out of the authorities. More than guerrilla geeks, student rioters in the streets send the authorities into a panic, making them so repressive that the violence boomerangs. The authorities lose control of the situation and whatever moral high ground they...

Here's one way the print version of a daily newspaper beats the online version.

Paul Krugman's...

Words of Gratitude. It's the week of Thanksgiving, after all. And here's more Burroughs ... on Jesus ... the A-Bomb ... the Titanic ... Doc Benway ... you get the idea. It's a 1989 reading.

Burroughs was doing perfected shtick by then. The automatic audience adulation, which...