Aphorism, the gemstone of rhetoric,  succeeds on sound. To be memorable, aphorism must have rhythm, ring and poise. Does that make the aphorism poetry? In turn, can poetry be aphorism?

Of course.  Poets distill their parade of image and observation into aphorism. It’s become something of a formula: the poet creates…

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Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan was a tincture of its times, a distillation of a particular culture (recent Russian-American) with a heavy scent of satire. His latest, Super Sad True Love Story travels into the future of, as the jacket states, “say next Tuesday,” to further concentrate its contemporary satire. As with all satire,…

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For many of us, the 1960s never ended. Tom Hayden takes that belief a step further. The ’60s continue…for everyone.

Hayden’s book, The Long Sixties, takes the political history of the ’60s and finds its legacy alive today in the social movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. He sees…

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Making sense of the 1960s is a futile task. Rob Kirkpatrick doesn’t even try. His comprehensive 1969: The Year Everything Changed, offers an overwhelming  compendium of events in that cataclysmic year. The book’s thoroughness, without over-riding purpose, is apparently an attempt to find the year more influential than, say, 1968. Suggesting…

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Somewhere in one of Carlos Castenda’s early books–we don’t remember which one–the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan advises never paying attention to crows. To do so is to acknowledge their bad sign, he warns.  Lyanda Lynn Haupt, in her book Crow Planet, suggests just the opposite. A denizen of Seattle, Haupt says that…

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Tom Rachman knows the newspaper business, knows it as it was and as it is. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, he’s worked as an editor for the International Herald Tribune in Paris and has been a foreign correspondent in Rome for the Associated Press. What we can’t tell…

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You might be surprised by some of the role models that filth-happy movie maker John Waters includes in his book of influences. A few are staid, respectful even tasteful models such as Johnny Mathis.  On the other hand…

Waters admires Mathis because they’re opposites. Mathis is, “So mainstream. So popular. So…

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This Rabbit has never quite gotten Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero to equate. We read the book when it came out in 1985. We liked it for its take on the disillusioned youth of wealthy Los Angeles. We’d been around enough to know that rich kids always have the best…

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“I am the man who has best charted his inmost self.” Antonin Artaud quoted by Helen Weaver

Helen Weaver’s account of  her early days in Greenwich Village is misleadingly titled. Weaver, a new age author and translator nominated for a National Book Award in 1977 for her reading of Antonin Artaud,…

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–“I saw the best minds of my generation….” Allen Ginsberg

According to Beat archivist Bill Morgan, the poet Gregory Corso — or maybe it was poet Gary Snyder as claimed by Beat chronicler Ann Charters — once said that three people (three or four, in Snyder’s quote) do not make a generation.…

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