Samizdat Blog

So check this out: What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business R...

It saddens me greatly to hear of the passing of Reginald Shepherd. We lived a few blocks from one another in Chicago's Wrigleyville, bu...

Click for a larger, more printable view. Print many copies. Stand on a street corner. Pass them out like pizza coupons. Repeat!

It might have been the three bottles of Tsingtao, it might have been the extra-spicy shrimp chow fun, it might have been all those hours eye...

Okay, okay, okay. Sure. Since you've been after me about it for so long, I'll tell you. You're always asking me "how doe...

"It's picked over already! You'd better hurry!" These, gentle reader, were the words with which I was greeted by Patrick...

So there I was, furtively engaged in that most shameful of activities — doing an online search for my own name. Since my dad has the same n...

"Sometimes," I recall my high school art teacher saying as he looked through my sketchbook, "it's by fucking up that we g...

The annual Art & Craft Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference kicks off in a few weeks, and I'll be sullying a schedule that i...

The zeitgeist is nothing if not promiscuous, and apparently she's been two-timing me with Ron Silliman, whose post today has to do with...

Gather round, boys and girls, and I'll tell you a tale of a long-ago magical time known as the Clinton Administration. Back in those ch...

Back from Paris, where I was at a fabulous, compact conference on poetry and "the public/private divide" at the Sorbonne. There w...