We’ve sort of gotten out of the free literature business here at Literature R’ Us, but we’re back with a bang, thanks to the remarkable labors of Alex Avenarius, who not only edited my Nero Wolfe novellas, Three Bullets, but put them in coherent electronic form for the web, for downloading for Kindle, and for…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Caravana Cultural—“Hackensack”
Thelonious Monk’s salute to suburban New Jersey, performed in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico last September, by Miguel Zenon, Alto Sax, Bruce Barth, Piano, Doug Weiss, Bass, and Jeff Ballard,Drums. Posted by Miquel Zenon. I won’t resist following this with, frankly, a somewhat more authentic version, featuring Monk in London in 1964, with Charlie Rouse, of course,…
Boston bombing not quite as terrible as it could have been
Two young men with a chip on their shoulders murder four and injure more than a hundred, while significantly reducing the quality of life for 300 million people. It’s wonderful what you can do with a couple of pressure cookers and some black powder. It’s definitely on the upside that we won’t be invading anyone…
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Several people suggested that I see you, so I guess we both have bad taste—I in friends and you in clients.” “What is life without risk? Seriously. I may die tomorrow but I’ll have lived today. Eat each meal as though it were your last. That doesn’t mean I have trouble accepting…
Why George Will will never run out of copy
Whenever George Will feels like phoning it in, which is every other week or so, he will find a radical feminist to make fun of. Fortunately for George, they just keep coming. A case in point is an unintentionally hilarious twofer at the New Republic, an idiot review of an idiot book, Ann Friedman’s take…
Ramesh Ponnuru—“Yes, I am a partisan hack. Why do you ask?”
Several dog years ago I pegged, or tabbed, Ramesh Ponnuru as an intelligent conservative. Obviously, Ramesh resented the charge and has been doing his level best to refute it. He’s at it again here, with the seriously fatuous “Obama’s Second Term Already Looks Like a Failure,” aggressively gliding over such Republican embarrassments as the virtual…
Murderers, left, right, and center
Everybody’s doing it, so it must be good, right? Michael Moynihan leads off the hit parade at the Daily Beast with “How 1960s Radicals Ended Up Teaching Your Kids,” detailing American academia’s endless fascination with murderers—left-wing murderers, of course. They’re so gosh-darn authentic! The murderers in residence currently include Cathy Boudin, already a member of…
Lexington High School—“Stuffy Turkey”
Another obscure Monk tune, which can sound a lot like “Flat Foot Floogie” if the musicians aren’t careful. When Monk first signed with Riverside Records, producer Orrin Keepnews had the great idea, which probably was a pretty good idea, to start off by featuring Monk playing tunes that people knew—an album of Ellington tunes and…
Steven Greenhouse, ignorant snob
Jonathan Cohn, writing in the April 29 issue of the New Republic, moans about the “Hell of American Day Care”. In France, of course, they do things much better, devoting about 1 percent of GNP to pre-school services, more than twice the U.S. budget, according to Cohn. He cites New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse,…
The war crimes of Barack Obama
The New York Times opens a window on oppression, American Style, with a powerful statement by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, an 11 year inmate at Guantánamo (11 years without being charged of an actual crime). I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime….