If the Sox trade Manny to placate a bunch of bigoted Boston Irish sportswriters, I’ll boycott Harp for a year.

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Anyone read Fields of Fire by Jim Webb? I haven’t, but I’d like to. How a man with half a wit–who wrote a critically acclaimed novel laced with sex and bad words–won a U.S. Senate race is beyond me. Maybe voters just read an AP synopsis that went something like this: “Webb is the author of […]

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Which famous American writers never set foot in Gotham? Faulker, I’d imagine. Maybe Eudora Welty, though she’s insufferable. Pity the stifling heat couldn’t keep her from writing. Is the south good for anything? Maybe fried shit and street festivals with booze.

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Method Man does an adequate job playing a Rasta in The Whackness. Wonder if he worked with a dialect coach. Wonder if he shot high.

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A.M. Homes writes like a man. Maybe she drinks like one too. Maybe she rides cabs to the outer reaches of Old Brooklyn. Maybe she tips the Tracy Chapman tribute guy outside the Canal St. stop. Maybe sometimes, if she’s in the right mood, she joins in.

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Franzen has a deeper voice than I expected. Now that he’s got some macho street cred in my filter, I bet he cheats at poker. I bet he screws television actors. I bet he’s working on something BIG!

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Anne Bradstreet would be a motivational speaker in 2008. She’d hit small business conventions but avoid the mega-churches. Just imagine her at motel conference rooms throughout the Midwest! I know she’d deliver. I know she missed her century, badly.

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Ray Carver wrote awful poems, but he earned the right–at least his wife tells us as much in her introduction to his collected verse. Her name escapes me. Ditto for home equity.

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Michael Keaton makes a better Batman and a better Viagra spokesman than Christian Bale. Bale makes a better Brit, barely.

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Robert Pinsky looks 80 in the scalp and 30 in the face. What more could a crusty poet ask for? Maybe a MacArthur Grant.

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Edwin Booth could play Hamlet at Fenway Park. Such vocal resonance! Such a hulking physique! Such a fucked up little brother…maybe he should have taken a break from touring every now n’ again…you know, to connect…

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Beware of films you found compelling at 17. Watch them in your twenties with a few smart-alecky grad school friends, and you could find yourself eating crow. Just off the top of my head I’d put Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut and The Big Lebowski in this category. Watch them alone before you invite a crowd. Vet […]

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Returning to Robinson Jeffers for a moment…did he ever write a love poem? Did he have what we might call a life partner? Or did he date an eagle? Or a canyon? Surprising also that a Presbyterian minister would subsidize his son. The Chamber of Commerce at prayer ranks idleness as a cardinal sin, worse […]

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You wonder if Wooster Group actors fear for their safety during lightning storms. Heard an NPR report that said headsets may conduct lightning, often frying folks. Wooster Group actors, of course, take direction on headsets during each performance. What if lightning struck? What if the show stopped? What if Dumbo, Brooklyn lost its luster–or at the very least […]

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I bet Zelda Fitzgerald snuck booze in the nuthouse. I bet her estate hits me for libel. I bet she wasn’t even nuts. I bet Save Me the Waltz reads better than anything Jean Rhys spit out. I bet she could dance like hell.

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