“Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them.” — Patrick Modiano, In The Cafe Of Lost Youth We’ve all experienced a silver summer: a season or period in our lives that glows, inflamed with retrospective significance. While it’s happening we may sense some looming consequence, or not. OverContinue reading “Silver Summer: Exhuming the Buried Legacy of Lost Youth in 5 Novels by Patrick Modiano”
Tag Archives: Books
AGAINST NOSTALGIA: Gary Indiana’s Unsentimental Journey
Reading reviews by the late author Gary Indiana during the second half of the 1980s, I figured the guy was a lunatic, to be honest. Vituperation and vendetta marked his tenure as art critic of The Village Voice, from 1985 to 1989 — alongside viperish wit and deadly-stiletto targeted prose. That’s why I never missed reading his column.Continue reading “AGAINST NOSTALGIA: Gary Indiana’s Unsentimental Journey”
R Meltzer (Re) Considered
If Richard Meltzer didn’t invent the post-grammatical mode of discourse utilized on the internet, then he prefigured it to a degree that’s uncanny. I’m living for giving the devil his due — Blue Oyster Cult, “Burnin’ For You” (lyrics by Richard Meltzer) Today the mainstream media covers pop music so extensively — exhaustively? — that it’s impossible to imagineContinue reading “R Meltzer (Re) Considered”
Book Review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Beginning with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and continuing with so-called New Journalism during the late Sixties, people tossed around the term Non-Fiction Novel when referring to book-length reportage written in modestly ambitious prose. Beginning with Catherine Lacey’s audacious novel Biography of X, published in 2023, we need to invent a new label, along the lines of FictionalContinue reading “Book Review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey”
Book Review: Paging Dr. Mueller
Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories by Cookie Mueller “Firstly, you’re right about my mind being open, in fact it’s so open at times I feel the wind whistling through it.” — Cookie Mueller, “Ask Doctor Mueller” column, East Village Eye circa 1983 During her attentuated forty years on earth, the inimitableContinue reading “Book Review: Paging Dr. Mueller”
There He Goes Again
“The Presidential election is just too stupid to watch…you see Ronald Reagan in these neighborhoods with poor people and you can just hear him saying ‘Oh my God what am I doing here?’ But his hair looks really good.” — The Andy Warhol Diaries on August 21, 1980 My mom, a moderate-to-liberal Rockefeller Republican, intuitedContinue reading “There He Goes Again”
“Every day, I have to redefine myself” Remembering Shiva Naipaul 1945-85
His books are long out of print, basically forgotten. And when they were current, his last name always overshadowed his first. But contemporary readers fortunate enough to spend time with Shiva Naipaul, the late younger brother of Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul, will find the former a true original, perhaps the great lost author of theContinue reading ““Every day, I have to redefine myself” Remembering Shiva Naipaul 1945-85″
Book Review: “Love, Not Just A Habit”
Originally Published In The Los Angeles Times Book Review February 24, 2008 Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by David Sheff Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff WHEN 18-year-old Nic Sheff fell in love for the first time, it hit him hard, the way it hammers many sensitive adolescents, aContinue reading “Book Review: “Love, Not Just A Habit””
When AM Radio Wouldn’t Shut Up
A dusty paperback novel conjures up the heyday of late night talk jocks My stack of library books depleted, I recently combed our overflowing shelves for something to read during these long housebound days. A dusty paperback from 1972 caught my eye: The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin. The author was a well-regarded dispenser of serious literary fictionContinue reading “When AM Radio Wouldn’t Shut Up”
Book Review
Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale And Why We Bought It (Bloomsbury 2008) by Elizabeth Royte. (Originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review June 1, 2008) In 2006, Americans consumed, per capita, more than 25 gallons of bottled water — twice as much as in 1997 and almost five times as much asContinue reading “Book Review”
Mark Coleman 