A Naked Singularity

By Sergio De La Pava

University of Chicago Press, 678 pages, published May 2012

(This review was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books on May 16, 2012)

Crack open this fat novel with the zingy… Read full post »

 Astronaut David Bowman, after painfully decommissioning the charming rogue supercomputer HAL as they approach Jupiter’s moon Iapetus in the 1968 film 2001 A Space Odyssey, confronts a space oddity. To those of us who saw the epic movie by Stanley Kubrick eight or nine times back… Read full post »

Safkhet Publishing, Cambridge, UK

Joey Ramone, on stage at the Rainbow in London on New Year’s Eve 1977, apparently recovering from a pre-gig chow-down at a local Indian restaurant, mournfully groaned into his mic, “After eating that Chicken Vindaloo, I wanna be well.”&nbs… Read full post »

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire - Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, by Will Hermes

Music journalist Will Hermes, referring to rock ‘n’ roll critics back in the day, wrote, “… their sense that the entire world of art and culture and human emotion… Read full post »

“Please mister postman, look and see, if there’s a card in your bag for me.”

Marvelettes, 1961. Big hit. Also fourth song, side two, the Beatles’ Second Album, spring of 1964—a bouncy bit of Beatlemania. A sprig of middle of century sunshine, youthful… Read full post »

 (This review was published on 11/2/11 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.)

On January 22, 1984, in what has become an iconic moment in advertising history, the first Apple Macintosh computer was introduced to the world. Striking a cinematic blow against an Orwellian B… Read full post »

Earlier this year, I was named fiction editor of Montpelier, Vermont-based Hunger Mountain - A Journal of the Arts.  Great publication.  A wonderful honor. Coming to grips with this new gig, the rejecting and accepting--mostly rejecting, I scribbled the bit below.

H… Read full post »

Elvis Costello released his third album in the snowy winter of 1979.  In those days, Elvis was known as a ‘new wave’ rocker, not ‘punk,’ not mainstream, but hard to define, left of center, quirky.  Kicking off side two of Armed Forces was a vaguely mart… Read full post »

My recent post about The Autobiography of Mark Twain and the pronouncement, made by his publisher George Harvey in 1900, that the book would likely be produced in the year 2000 by "electrical method" was broadcast today on the Lake Effect program, WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio. &nbs… Read full post »

Before two giants of 20^th Century American literature were published, when both were unknown, discouraged and broke, Allen Ginsberg wrote a letter to Jack Kerouac telling him, “DON’T FLIP, take care of yourself now, rest from fatigue and figure what next to do.  This… Read full post »

Some books are like potato chips—you just can’t stop readin’ ‘em.  Maybe it’s the salt. Or some diabolical bioengineerickal sort of thing cooked up in a crackling subterranean megacorp lab inducing an addict-like craving unknown by the EPA or USDA.&nbs… Read full post »

Last month, I posted a bit about that Facebook movie, The Social Network.  That piece was broadcast today on WUWM, Milwaukee Public Radio, NPR.  Good movie. Have a listen here.  Fun stuff--when technology became as cool as rock 'n roll. Read full post »

So the Beatles are on iTunes.  Here's a short post from last year about those reissued recordings. Please consider this my own reissue:

 Yeah, all those new Beatle reissues have been out on the street for a while now.  I bought some.  And I’ve been asked what differences the… Read full post »

Somewhere, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that writers should begin a story, any story, novel, whatever, as close as possible to the end.  At least, I think he said that.  Did I dream that?  Anyway, great advice.  And here’s a fine little chalk talk by Mr. Vonnegut.  He’s ta… Read full post »

What kind of screwed up world do we live in where American kids don’t care about Swinging London?

Kids of my g-g-generation marked the beginning of Modern Cultural Life in 1964—specifically February—Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the subsequent glorious British Invasion of Sixties band… Read full post »

There’s a Silicon Valley technoid sort of thing called the network effect. It’s an algorithm, you know, something from math class. Now, I have to say that I don’t think about algorithms on a daily basis and I bet you don’t either, though in my distant computer networking techn… Read full post »

One hundred ten years ago, somebody was thinking about electronic publishing.

On October 17, 1900, George Harvey, president of Harper and Brothers Publishing Company wrote to Samuel Clemons’ literary agent about the great man’s on again off again autobiography.  Clemons, though he h… Read full post »

 Jill and I sat down in the plush seats of the old Fullerton Hall auditorium in the Art Institute of Chicago last night, there to hear New Yorker music critic Alex Ross speak about the intersection of 20th century music and literature. Mr. Ross' recent book--The Rest is Noise—Listenin… Read full post »

(This essay was broadcast on Milwaukee Public Radio WUWM's Lake Effect program on May 7, 2010.  Listen to it here.) 

It’s a little known fact that Marcel Proust—yes, that MarcelProust—he of the monstrous early Modernist novel Remembrance of Things Past&m… Read full post »

(This essay was broadcast on WUWM NPR in Milwaukee on April 12, 2010.

Stories—you know, fiction, actual made-up stuff—are dead.

I clicked off the last scene of Jersey Shore on my 52 inch flat-screen dual-quadrasonic surround-sound 5.1 plasma TV and began/… Read full post »

33 1/3 Greatest Hits

Edited by David Barker

Full disclosure: I am reviewing this book but I did not read the whole thing. And I don’t want to. Forget it. See, this is a greatest hits collection, and I only liked that record, that record and that record. Not that record.… Read full post »

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.  Most excellent fancy.  It’s like a Terry Gilliam movie directed by Ralph Steadman—psychedelic and distorted and fundamentally humane.

“I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.  My posture is consciously co… Read full post »

In 1972, the Rolling Stones, about to begin a larger than life, full-blown rock and roll journey across America, released what became one of their most important records—Exile on Main Street.  A mythic American landscape unreels in the music, like a deafening low-flying crop duster ve/… Read full post »