Back in 1982, a business book called Megatrends by John Naisbitt made a big splash. The most memorable phrase in this study of future trends was “high tech, high touch”, describing a product style or marketing approach that combines technical wizardry with heightened emotional appeal. The idea was that the cold touch of technology innovation can be balanced by a compensating increase in interpersonal intimacy and connectivity. This was some pretty nifty trend-spotting, because the year was 1982 and Naisbitt …

I have a love-hate relationship with William Logan, the New York Times Book Review’s fiery poetry critic, who eviscerates the new volume of selected Frank O’Hara poems on the cover of this weekend’s issue.

On the positive side, Logan is always bold, loud and exciting to read. He avoids the type of sniffy or simpering poetry criticism too often found in this and similar publications. He may even be consciously trying — and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — to be …

Hey, remember when I said I was going to read Ulysses? I have to say I’m still not quite ready to admit that this book has kicked my ass. (I maintain that it’s really not that hard once I get into the rhythm of it, but it’s just that every time I think about picking it up, I look at it and say “Why the fuck is this book so long?” I don’t like reading a few hundred pages of something and looking …

1. Wow! Do you remember when I told you about my impromptu train buddy Jay Dixit, blogger for PsychologyToday.com, who inspired me to read (and then, unfortunately, hate) Jennifer 8. Lee’s book The Fortune-Cookie Chronicles? Well, Dixit now finds he has a rather monumental honor; on June 13 he conducted what appears to be the final interview by America’s favorite iconoclast George Carlin. Really good stuff.

2. I wrote a few days ago that “language was George …

1. We don’t hear enough about cartoonist Jules Feiffer these days, so this interview is a nice refresher. (Via Slut).

2. Hamlet, who was also sick, sick, sick, will never go out of style. However, the Hamlet currently running at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park got a terrible New York Times review. My favorite recent Hamlet was right here.

3. Richard Hell, who is not sick, sick, sick but is often mistaken as …

Language was George Carlin’s playpen. Here he is on the difference between baseball and football:

I enjoy comparing baseball and football.

Not Arthur Schlesinger Jr. again.

The New York Times Book Review has John F. Kennedy and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the subject of One Minute To Midnight by Michael Dobbs, on the cover today. Reviewer Richard Holbrooke correctly asks why we need “another recapitulation” of this familiar tale, but I’m barely convinced when he concludes that Dobbs’ book justifies itself with “sobering new information about the world’s only superpower nuclear confrontation — as well as contemporary relevance.”

This may be a very good …

Why is literary fiction inevitably a poor seller? This question is at the core of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.

John Carey asserts that the English literary intelligentsia of this era made a conscious effort to segregate literary fiction from the newly literate (or semi-literate) mass culture produced by the late nineteenth century educational reforms to which many of the intelligentsia opposed. The Education Act of 1871 …

2. Here’s an even better idea: a truce between Israel and Hamas. …

1. Ahh, zines. Of course the zine scene is still alive (it’s been ingested into and mostly absorbed by the blog scene), but we used to print them on paper — typing paper, computer paper, newsprint — and try to distribute them in book and record stores. We didn’t have blogads.com around then either, but you could usually find someone with a band or a poetry chapbook to pay $20 for a quarter page.

As you’ve probably guessed, I once …