I could not resist buying this book on the "Collectibles" shelf from the Brewster Ladies Library book sale. Not what you think . . . a "true story" of cross-country travels by burro the thirties. Think BLUE HIGHWAYS. Might be great!

"Potentially creating a more freewheeling era." How does the Times hire its subeditors? "Must be a moral idiot with no sense of gravitas, historical knowledge or possible dire mortal consequences"?

Alexander Calder's line drawing of his good friend, the critic and editor Malcolm Cowley. They had the same birthday in August and would throw lively (and more) parties each year in Northwest CT.

I worked with Joel Rose and Catherine Texier and we published this anthology of work from the magazine. It was hard core in the best sense. You took your life in your hands going to their parties, but they were worth it. I had a bunch of copies of the magazine but then I changed jobs and all gone.

If you are looking for a prose translation of this suddenly hot hot hot epic, I reccomend the Rouse version. It managed to hold the attention of bright male adolescents of the old Brooklyn variety in the mid-sixties. Buy this edition on ABE Books for the authentic teen near-boredom karma.

A young woman is tried for heresy in a medieval ecclesiastical court and is found guilty.

The wages of treason -- aka la trahison des clercs -- to the human project are considerably handsomer than those of the average professor. As much as they might protest that they are "humanizing" and safeguarding AI for us, a clear-eyed description of them: quislings.

Apparently the Self-Parody Alert System at the New York Times has been short-circuited by the heat.

F'rinstance, you can do this, right?

Maybe "Claude" should be renamed "Fred"? Yabbadabbado!

On MSN this morning I heard a conservative columnist praise Marco Rubio for "eloquence" and say that he is the likely 2028 Republican nominee for the presidency for the good job he is doing. By this logic Dean Rusk should have been the Democratic candidate for president in 1968.

"[Herman Melville] came as a lamb to the slaughter, with no suspicion that the city of New York was a literary butcher shop." -- Perry Miller on the reception of his first book, TYPEE, in THE RAVEN AND THE WHALE.

Found this in my "liberated" copy of MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO. Poignancy of a long-gone bookstore and a price of ninety-five cents plus tax for a truly great book. Sigh.

Picked this up on a whim in Bryant Park. Simply fantastic. Mailer overshoots the mark intellectually, metaphorically, syntactically over and over again, he's vainglorious and self-important, but none of it matters. Blazingly eloquent and far seeing and brave. God, how it made me miss him.

"There's something they aren't telling us. Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It's the sum total of the things they aren't telling us."

This book tells a somewhat different story. Hauptmann got "written out" to a significant extent.

The presence of Jill Biden's memoir at the top of the bestseller lists tells me -- as if I did not already know -- that Democrats are more interested in relitigating their defeats and savoring the bitterness than learning from them and winning. Up ahead in 2028: Kamala Harris.

After our viewing of Widow's Bay, I am coming to the conclusion that Shirley Jackson is the new Philip K. Dick. Just add a dash of Ira Levin and there you have it.

In regard to Versailles, here's a book whose time has come round again. Keynes was so disgusted by the terms of the treaty the Allies came up with that he resigned and wrote this far-seeing dissent, which proved to be correct in every detail. Where is our Keynes for this moment?

Secretary Rubio? Hello, Mister Secretary? Are you there? Hello? Little Marco seems to have joined Representative Tom Kean in his hidey-hole. When a war of profound global impact is being ended by negotiations the Secretary of State usually gets involved. This guy wants no part of its stink on him

Marcel who? WAR and what? Bought this 1207-page book for $17 in trade at Old Books in Hudson, NY. Felt it was time for me to make good on my Thomas Mann completist pretentions. Back to you in . . . a while with my findings.

"Well, one good thing about dying, you don't have to go to any more poetry readings." -- Joe Brainard

David Gates is the Donald Fagen of Fiction. White males on the downslope in many flavors of spiritual and existential distress.

" . . . the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways . . . Finding that well chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways." -- Sylvia Townsend Warner, LOLLY WILLOWES.

Dear Mr. Faulkner: In regard to your typescript for THE SOUND AND THE FURY . . .

"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." --an epitaph for our times, courtesy of Nathanael West