a blind flaneur

For many years I carried in my head an unfinished project that I called Gutenberg’s Exile. That phrase was shorthand for the complex relationship I have with books and reading. I was cut off from the printed word, expelled from the Gutenberg Revolution. A little twist of fate in my own DNA […]

Rowan Jacobsen considers Penn Cove oysters (left) to be the sexiest shellfish he’s ever eaten. They come from Washington state and perennially win the annual Most Beautiful Oyster Contest at Elliott’s Oyster House at Pier 56 in Seattle. “They … get bountiful and succulent, and they have this gleam to them as they sit in […]

[Source: NYT]
Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84 - New York Times 111007
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died today in Manhattan. He was 84.
He died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital […]

Howl Against Censorship
Fifty years ago, on October 3, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Against Censorship great epic Beat-era poem HOWL was not obscene but instead, a work of literary and social merit. This ruling allowed for the publication of HOWL and exonerated the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who faced jail time and […]

“Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.” So said the Sufi poet Rumi, who was born 800 years ago this month in Persia. Rumi is the hottest-selling poet in America today, thanks in large part to the free verse translations of Coleman Barks. The translator discussed his […]

Gustave Courbet. A Young Woman Reading. 1866/1868. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The best reading is forbidden reading, rapt reading, reading with wild abandon until you are done with it, until it has had its way with you. The young woman in Courbet’s painting is reading this way. What could the book be that captures […]

Lorraine Gordon, 84-year-old doyen of the Village Vanguard, published her memoirs earlier this year. Alive at the Village Vanguard tells the following story about the first time Lorraine heard Thelonious Monk in a cramped uptown apartment in the 1940s. She was married then to Alfred Lion, founder of Blue Note Records and an early promoter […]