I’m delighted to note the publication of Surpassing Pleasure (Porcupine’s Quill: http://porcupinesquill.ca), a collection of poetry by John Slater, a Cistercian who is known within his order as Brother Isaac.
Brother Isaac is the winner of the 2007 Foley poetry…
Bill Kauffman
Putting Sam Peckinpah in his place: “Peckinpah Country” (from The American Conservative).…
Tom Russell, true son of the American Southwest, sings about the Man from Home. Thanks to Brian Frizzell for the link.…
I was delighted to see that Thomas Mallon, a superb novelist whose subject is often American politics (my favorites are Henry and Clara and Two Moons), has just published Watergate: A Novel. I shall order forthwith. (This link is to…
My friend Paul Buhle, the great historian of the American left, has edited, with his wife Mari Jo Buhle, It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1076-it-started-in-wisconsin), just out from Verso. The best…
This is the last audience to which I should announce such a thing but after fumbling an editing gig or two because I lacked a one-stop site containing my bio, clips, etc., I have agreed to—aw, to hell with the…
Brian (no relation to Lefty) Frizzell, Brooklyn’s archivist of Americana, sends a link to Matt Morris’s Pickin’ & Trimmin’ http://vimeo.com/31066145, a lovely documentary short film about a barbershop in Drexel, North Carolina, in which banjos and mandolins and clippers and shears make…
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY—Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” that tuneful Iowa-placed warhorse—no, parade horse—of community theater. (The flaw in community…
This Christmas–like last Christmas, and the one before that , and the one before that….–hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women are far from their homes and families, fighting the endless wars and otherwise serving the anti-American Empire. (Obscenely,…
Burned-Over District, NY…—I’m reading Charles J. Shields’s absorbing new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, and while its morose subject deservedly never won Father or Husband of the Year, he was rather more complicated than his scatological
When next you stumble into the corner video store: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/redford-goes-ron-paul/…
Mobility is the great undiagnosed sickness afflicting America. All of our ruling class and most of our writing class consist of deracinated careerists who scorn the placebound as ambitionless losers and sticks in the mud wholly unsuited for world conquest…
….we’ll be reading aloud–for the fourteenth consecutive year–from the works of Batavia’s native (if sometimes wayward) son John Gardner. Where? The Pokadot, literary-culinary capital of NY, at the corner of Liberty and Ellicott Streets. When? Saturday, October 22, at 8…
No, not the tune by the Fabulous Poodles, but rather my memories of Peter H. Clune, who was gunned down in the bleakest film noir you’ll ever see: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/the-last-picture-show/.…
Carl Oglesby, former president of Students for a Democratic Society and folk-singing prophet of Middle American anti-imperialism, died Tuesday. Herewith an interview I conducted with Carl for Reason magazine and a tune from one of his albums. No, Carl never became “the…
From today’s Wall Street Journal, my review of the Library of America’s Ambrose Bierce omnibus:…
