For the 50th anniversary celebration of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which begins any minute now -- it's scheduled for July 1-3 at the University of London Institute in Paris -- have a look at the cover of the original edition brought out in 1959 by French...

He died in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Place de l'Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot...

Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as "beehive music." I had to laugh. She wasn't wrong.

(One composer,...

In London The Guardian posted its obituary Sunday at 9 p.m., which means it went live in New York at 4 p.m. But this morning's print edition of The New York Times makes no mention of Ballard's death.

OK, print is slow -- but not that slow. And how...

All the Hemingways I saw were going for stratospheric prices. Well, not exactly going. More like asking. If I remember correctly, a signed presentation copy of the rare Paris edition of in our time had a price tag of $465,000. Signed firsts of Ulysses by James Joyce and...

...from Hassan Sabbah:

Listen to my last words, anywhere!
Listen all you boards, governments, syndicates, nations of the world,
And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory,
To take what is not yours ...

Henry Kisor has posted on his news blog an item called The 'Inept Blob' vs. the 'Inhuman Turd,' about the nasty friction between the novelist Nelson Algren (a literary great, in my opinion) and the editor William Targ (a not-so-great, in Algren's opinion).

Which reminds me: Dan Simon's...

The classical music editor of The New York Times takes up his longtime role once again as chief media apologist for the Vienna Philharmonic. In a promotional article about the orchestra, James Oestreich plants a big wet kiss on Clemens Hellsberg, its chairman and archivist, lauding him as...

A laid-back tune for a lazy afternoon. It's by Fats Waller for a song he wrote with lyricist Andy Razaf. That's Dick Hyman playing.

The video was recorded by yours truly on Feb. 18, 2009, at the Living Room of Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan (Lexington Avenue...

Obama knocked it out of the park at the Abe Lincoln bicentennial dinner in Springfield, Illinois. Stunning.

He created an unexpected word picture:

Here in Springfield, it is easier, perhaps, to reflect on Lincoln the man rather than the marble giant, before Gettysburg and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Bull...

The one-stop shop for all things William Burroughs, RealityStudio, has had a design overhaul. "I was really anxious not only to spruce up the site a bit, but to make the range of content more apparent," RS godfather Supervert says. "With the old site, a random visitor would have...

Harold Pinter, who died two days ago at 78, received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005. Too sick to travel to Stockholm to accept the award, he gave his Nobel Lecture on video. The lecture begins with a quotation:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

...

Elisabeth Bumiller's Pentagon Memo takes note of the "semantic dance: What is the definition of a combat soldier?"

Even though the agreement with the Iraqi government calls for all American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June, military planners are now quietly acknowledging...

Lately I haven't been paying much attention to Countdown. Non-stop, over-the-top bluster can get on anybody's nerves, and Keith Olbermann has managed to get on mine -- even though his rants take guts and even though I agree with them. But whenever he has Jonathan Turley on...

At the Council on Foreign Depredations Relations this morning I expected to hear what I thought would be a Southern-fried swan song from Laura Bush. Instead it turned out to be a speech someone wrote for her about women's rights, because today marks the 60th anniversary of the U.N.'s...

Malcolm Mc Neill's unpublished memoir about his longtime collaboration with William S. Burroughs, Observed While Falling, is just as spellbinding as the lost art of Ah POOK IS HERE, his current show at Salomon Arts (now extended through Jan. 16 ) in Manhattan. Mc Neill is one...

Is it something in the November air? Doubtful. Maybe it's the god of artistic collaborations wanting to set the record straight. Let's say it's strictly dumb coincidence.

Whatever the reason, this month provides a happy occasion for legions of Jack Kerouac fans, to say nothing of William S. Burroughs...

Because of something Ralph Nader said on Election Day -- he asked whether Barack Obama was going to be an Uncle Sam or an Uncle Tom -- I feel obliged to take note of an interview (as posted on YouTube) that Nader did shortly afterward with Fox Report news...

Now that America has elected a black fist bumper to the presidency, take a look at the newspaper he has in his hand. Take a close look. The photo, shot during the election campaign, shows him carrying the Wall Street Journal.

As everybody knows, the Journal's editorial page falls...

As mentioned here earlier this week, "there must be millions of cleverly individualized videos like this one circulating now."