All posts by: Sammy Greenspan

Banned words, Tahrir Square redux, Apple don’t fall far from tree, How e-books and sausages are made, Fear of kale

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

Late Night Library, Revenge of the Bookstore, the Colbert Bump

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

Pushcarts, rejection, inescapable contradictions

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

Art is art

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

Lennon’s Poster

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

frankenstorm, NOLA, publisher-puts-on-writer-hat

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

“only poetry, no text books”

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

Broken, human

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

more hand binding

Gluing the text block, gluing on the cover. Different strokes…... Read More

Ohioana

These are some of the books we shipped to the Ohioana Library archive last week.... Read More