Last month’s North Beach Poetry Festival, William Taylor, Jr., poet, author of Words For Songs Never Written, and gentleman, has provided a very succinct report of the festival’s events which,…
Maybe because I’m one-quarter Belgian, or so my parents claim, I tend to go out of my way to discover famous Belgians. I’m half-kidding about that but I do admit…
I laughed out loud, like a lot of writers probably did this week, when I read J. Robert Lennon’s confession in the L.A. Times, The Truth About Writers. The truth,…
Billy Collins says we need better poets in the US: “There’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t…
I’m sure that if I ever make it to Rome, I’ll go see this, even though I can see something similar every morning when the neighborhood stray/feral cat population (and…
Farrah Fawcett and my mother were born about a month-and-a-half apart, and to my knowledge, that’s all they have in common. Fawcett’s death has been overshadowed by Michael Jackson’s, which…
If you really, really need something from a person, ask in the right ear. Especially if you’re in a club in Italy and need a cigarette. Speaking of cigarettes, D.…
Michael Jackson, the pop icon, has died, and it’s pop culture news so big, even we can’t ignore it. But although there could only be one Michael Jackson (thankfully?), there…
Wes Anderson on screening Rushmore for Pauline Kael. (thanks Craig) Hey, City of Toronto, you can do better than this. Chicago’s South Side nightclubs in the 1970s. The inventor of…
In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. This is the ninth interview; you…
Fox News attacks ABC for ‘unprecedented’ access to a U.S. president. Apparently they don’t remember the last eight years. Rules of engagement for journalists on Twitter. WSJ publisher calls Google…