In FOREIGN AFFAIRS this month Niall Ferguson is trying to link Spengler, Toynbee, and Paul Kennedy to paintings by Thomas Cole. Will it go?

Right wing columnist Tony Blankley keeps writing about the idea of mandatory national service for all Americans. Would it ever, ever fly?

"What's your favorite book?"

If I say THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis do I get to have a diabetic cookie?

What's your position on Creech Air Force Base?

On the blues - Francis Davis or Robert Palmer?

Listen to me - what do you know about J.D. Salinger and Peter Burling's toy bus stop? Never saw that coming huh?

I'd really like to meet somebody who owns one of Piero Manzoni's cans of shit. Wouldn't you?

The correct answer to the quiz question is Doyle Dane Bernbach.

I wish I had the fortitude to review a novel like ECHO HOUSE by Ward Just the way I used to review books for Patsy Moore's zine - bit I just don't have it any longer. Ironically in some ways I'm enjoying fiction more.

Anne Conway, 1631-1679

There is no picture of Anne Conway. A detail from a Dutch interior painting is often presented as showing her; but the owners of the painting, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, report that recent scholarship has shown that it’s certainly not her.

What do you think about the death of Eugene Izzi??

A woman said, "Your indiscriminate use of the word 'cunt' is offensive." Was she talking to me? This was in a most pleasant garden environment. I was sipping a sugar free vanilla latte. We were all strangers, all tan and looking summertime good. There were unspoken quodlibets in the air about propagation. I held up a copy of the book FORGIVENESS: BREAKING THE CHAIN OF HATE by Michael Henderson in front of my face. I understand - you don't think such a book could give off a progenitive vibe. You're wrong. And I was going to go with Jampolski at first - not sexy!

Then a scut in a daffodil dress was asking about Avis Bohlen, Nina Tannenwald and Freeman Dyson. This was an intellectual cafe even if all anybody can think about is grinding the G spot into ecru paroxsym. You think he's let pre-cum seep out? You think she's moist behind that Mac laptop? Have you ever thought you might like to order just a plain old cup o' mud?

A bee approached. A hag lunged at it with a copy of GOLF FOR DUMMIES, swatting. She had hands like a grease monkey - what's that about? Spoliate and plunder.

The waitress of last summer is the hostess now. Cheek to cheek with the proprietor, even. It never ends. Interviewing applicants. Barking commands.

Somewhere a television is repeating Graham Allison's hypotheses about loose Russina nukes. Where is it? In your mind? Your anus? Your partner? No, it's there, behnd the coffee bar. We want, we want, we want!

I have a brother who was born with Down's, and for this reason I can tell you unequivocally that the American playwright Arthur Miller was a piece of shit. You figure it out.

124 years ago today - 1/29/1886 - Karl Benz invented the automobile. For no real or discernible reason this flew into my brain as I sat alone sipping tea and reading a porn story FOURTH DATE, FIRST FUCK by Dion Farquhar. That might be wrong. I might have been reading A NEW THEORY OF BEAUTY by Guy Sircello (he died of AIDS (I like obscure philosophy books like that (I am the only person you know who has ever paid $90 for a worn copy of UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING by Paul Ziff))). Then again, it might have been a porn story by Carol Queen or Svetlana Boym. We all have our agendas. Our weaknesses. One of my glaring weaknesses has been revealed to be collecting pixels of the Russian double-headed eagle symbol (because I read an article about it by Kruschcev's daughter). It's like that. You told me you could simultaneously read articles by Matthew Hoey in the BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS and finger your pee hole, but I knew you couldn't. How did I know? Your wife told me.

Thomas Merton informs us that his father painted like Cezanne. Oh really? Like how? Like THE BLACK CLOCK?

Gather round, my peeps. Dudes! Dudettes! I'm certain everyone knows about Professor Robert Putnam's so-called Uppsala paper and the consequences it has for us all. I mean, it's all over the internet, everywhere. What? Oh really? Oh, all right then. How about Ashley Dupre on the NY Jets and their chances against the Colts? No? Maybe - please - maybe Ashley Dupre on dating and relationships? No? I give up.

She wants $40 for a bikini waxing. "Can I have forty bucks to wax my thing?" I think it was Thomas Berger who wrote, "I absolutely worship the English language."

I want you to understand this: "Soon, when they buy plane tickets online, travelers will be prompted to contribute two dollars, two euros, or two pounds to development aid - a form of innovative financing that could help save millions of lives." This sentence was composed by Philippe Douste-Blazy. What does it mean? What does it mean to you, specifically?

Charles Krauthammer has informed us that Europe wants recognition as a "leader" in world affairs despite (basically) doing little but sucking on America's tit for about sixty years now. Can we have a show of hands?

In one of my largely unknown novels I wrote about a half-erection, "It wasn't hard, but at least he was able to get it in there" - I now confess to all the world that I plagiarized this from Richard Yates. Ya happy? You! And you thought I was going to start ranting about the world's first and only mail order religion, the Psychiana of Frank B. Robinson. You!

It is well memorialized: when I was twenty two I had a woman wipe her ass with pages she ripped out of my (prodigious) copy of the mots of Baltasar Gracian. This was in a casino I do not care to name. She was thirty eight. She was tired of losers, amongst which she counted students of the humanities. She wanted men who could make money (so she could take it). There were questions as to why I couldn't study business in the university, go to Wall Street, make money. Business. I said "Look, cunt - what is it about business that you need to know, exactly?" I showed her my copy of REALITY IN ADVERTISING by Rosser Reeves. It appeared, somewhat amazingly, that she remembered Reeves' immortal Anacin ad from the early 1960s. Too, she had knowledge of "It melts in your mouth, not in your hands." This was a bitch who understood the power of the belly button 20 years before Britney Spear, yunnerstan? Yunnerstan?

If she were here today (she's not) (she's exanimate, she's inorganic), I would tell her this - "Look, cunt - I read a 700 page biography of Howard Hawks and there is nothing in it like Mariah Carey or Kanye West showing up drunk and appearing on camera on awards shows. Beauty is beauty, and this is all you need to know."

I think I'm a pretty qualified member of what David Brooks calls the "educated class," but I agree with almost none of it. I just can't get behind compassion via paperwork.

I will say, however, one thing before moving off the political, and that is this: the novel ends beautifully, in what is really a master stroke. As I read deeper and deeper into the book - especially in the chapters where the NYPD starts to take on a role in the narrative - the Huffington Post/Daily Kos/Firedog Lake type pontificating started to grate on me a bit, but in managing to find a conclusion that avoids any one political ideology Hamilton atones for this 'sin'.

Invariably a novel that aims at the dual objectives of 1) the investigation of the human heart and 2) political commentary will conclude that matters of the first are more metaphysically worthy, more valuable, than matters of the second. Hamilton selects an epigraph from Francois Bizot (once a prisoner of the Khmer Rogue) in order to perhaps illustrate this point:

"I think we should maybe have the courage to identify ourselves with and humanize the torturer. Maybe we should look at ourselves, instead of saying "Never again," which does not work. We could try to ask a new question, as well as a very old one:
"How is it possible?" We may find the answers in ourselves."

This is noteworthy for two reasons - firstly, the fact that an author quoted in an epigraph has to be given credibility by the inclusion of biographical facts about his life is a huge red flag and, secondly, the implementation of this very sentiment is being carried out today, in real life, as a matter of national policy, before our very eyes, with nearly disastrous results.

The novel has, as its main plot, the following story line: an American kid is recruited by radical Islamists to blow up the New York subway. But it is about many other things as well, and has many other engrossing characteristics which I'm going to concentrate on here. In POLITICS AND THE NOVEL Irving Howe wrote "The great test for the writer is: how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinions?" If we take it as a given that all political commentary and analysis is fundamentally opinion, then the truth that shines through will be what the great aesthetician Arnold Isenberg, in his essay "The Problem of Belief", called 'fancy truths'. I think Hamilton's strength amd skill lie more in this arena than in the political, and so that is what we'll take up as our main concern in the four or five blogs to follow.

This weekend we suspend our usual incoherent ramblings in order to present a review of the novel 31 HOURS by Masha Hamilton, brand new from Unbridled Books.

In his great book on 70s American film, A CINEMA OF LONELINESS, Robert Kolker discusses, in the chapter on Scorsese, Roland Barthes' concept of "New York-ness" - that is, the idea or archetype of what NYC 'should' look and feel like in the collective psyche(s). There is no one ideal of New York-ness (compare Scorsese's hellhole with Woody Allen's pleasant Fifth Avenue, for example). Masha Hamilton's new novel works within a comparatively new framework of New York-ness that didn't really exist in generations past - terrorist New York. I dabbled in a little bit of New Historicist type Theory while contemplating this novel, reading it side by side with Christopher Dickey's excellent nonfiction book on terrorism and the NYPD called SECURING THE CITY. This was profitable and rewarding.

hello this is a postmodern post something like el doctorows loon lake or william h gass omensetters luck it has to do with a neuroscientist named ledoux his work with gazzinaga is quietly destroying the notion of free will and volition but the reason i am writing is that i had a synchronicity there...i read a book called on desire by irvine and he discussed ledoux then the very next book i picked up for my personally self imposed required reading was the survivors club by ben sherwood and ledoux was profiled in there too what do you think about this that i had never heard of this man and he shows up in pages like this so forcefully

I am considering a career in rap:

"Girlfren say she wanna do the nasty
Acuzz it is so fan-tas-tee
Her Jamaican dude, he be a Rasty
Fuck her so hard she need angioplasty"

No? OK then. Let's return:

What should I read tonight? The choices seem to be WHY CAN'T WE BE GOOD by Jacon Needleman and RIDE EM COWGIRL: SEX POSITION SECRETS FOR BETTER BUCKING by Dr. Sadie Allison. Doesn't seem like much of a noviation, does it? Needleman should have done better at holding my attention with MONEY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE.

That? On the wall? That came out of me in a spray. Remind the cleaning lady about that next time you see her, won't you?

Here's a sweet new way to think about credit: you charge a $100 meal. The next day it comes out of your body in an alarming nuclear shit storm. Six months later you still haven't paid off the original balance. Is this an intelligent way to conduct yourself? You decide. I'm preoccupied.

Cinema students: why does Taylor Hsckford use that image of the shifting clouds in every goddam film? Eh? That's E-H, eh? It's most annoying in DOLORES CLAIBORNE, is it not? Or the one where Pacino plays Satan? We know this much: in the crush of history many women have remarked on the curvature of penis. Why does it sway to the right? To the left? (This was the conversation I had with Mamas in the screening of THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE that we attended. They show commercials for the commercials. Waddya think Leo Burnett is doing in his grave? Smoking a Marlboro?)

My only auspices are the auspices of doubt.

For the New Year our initial intention had been to write about Errol Flynn and his attraction to Tantric Sex or, alternatively, the time I saw a stereotypical hot beach babe at poolside reading THE BOUNDS OF SENSE by P.F. Strawson, but upon slight reconsideration we're going to install a short exercise in intonation and pronunciation.

Note how the meaning changes with the emphasis:

*I* didn't say he beat his dog.

I *didn't* say he beat his dog.

I didn't *say* he beat his dog.

I didn't say *he* beat his dog.

I didn't say he *beat* his dog.

I didn't say he beat *his* dog.

I didn't say he beat his *dog*.

Tally ho.