A friend was startled, because of the old superstition, when I mentioned that one of my cats is black. I’ve heard a couple people making hay out of the new year ending in 13, another locus of superstitious fear. Somebody... Read More

12/24/12 I got back yesterday from an unplanned trip east. I’m supposed to drive to DC in two days, this quick turnaround to Connecticut was a tight squeeze, an interruption of production runs. A friend has been in hospital and... Read More

In updating its stylebook for reporters Associated Press has banned the terms “homophobia” and “Islamophobia”. Which begs the question, how then is one to refer to homophobic, or Islamophobic behavior or attitude? One irate commentator said under his breath that... Read More

The best analysis I’ve seen of what amazon.com is doing to the book industry is Late Night Library’s conversation with Tin House’s Rob Spillman. Scroll down just a bit for the podcast. And here’s a lovely antidote: Ann Patchett’s experience opening a new indie bookstore... Read More

November 28, 2012 The wompus is proud to announce six nominees for the best-of-the-small-presses Pushcart Prize. As they say in the trade, it was a very tough choice. We nominate Terry Wright’s Fractal Cut-Ups for its fusion of take-no-prisoners cultural observation,... Read More

November 27, 2012 I signed a petition asking Gatorade to take flame retardant chemicals out of their products. Do you ever ask yourself just how crazy we have become? Later I heard a radio report detailing a new outbreak of... Read More

On the Book Arts list I came across a tiny little film by Nick Esdaile and Joe Fellows called Lennon’s Poster, a mini-documentary about the recreation of Pablo Fanque’s circus poster which inspired one of the songs on the Sgt.... Read More

I read some poems at Kajun’s Pub in New Orleans. I was the warmup act for co-authors of the new wompus chapbook Super Poems, Chris Shipman and DeWitt Brinson, whose work I already loved and now I positively adore, so... Read More

Silliman’s blog recently linked to a meditation by John Yau, a meditation on a meditation, you could call it, about Robert Kelly’s Line of Sight, a mysterious little pamphlet published in 1974 which had an intense impact on Yau. Yau begins... Read More

I lost a blog entry to the mysterious cyber-shadows. It was about David Foster Wallace. I won’t recreate it, it was a difficult entry to write, heavy with his loss on the occasion of the publication of D. T. Max’s... Read More