Don't Call Her A Mentor Book Review: Come Back In September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney

Not just another memoir about NYC during the 1970s and 80s
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A Surrender to Market Forces The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a bill that would have profound repercussions for American journalists.

At the time most journalists were too busy ignoring the internet to notice The Telecommunications Act of 1996; listening to the radio and going to concerts would never be the same

www.thedriftmag.com/a-surrender-...

Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld DHS’s Regime of Images

Cowboy hats and penguin poop: Trump’s meme agitprop www.thedriftmag.com/into-the-rig...

"I Go Through People" A star-crossed not-exactly-love story set in New York's East Village, occurring over 24 highly caffeinated hours in spring 1986

24 hours, a quart of espresso, two young people in NYC’s East Village circa 1986, lots of talk and no sex
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Reading a literary memoir, I realized there were more house fires back in the days when more people smoked cigarettes - the NYFD kept busy

First known reference to the Elvis song “Poison Ivy League”!

In 1978 Chomsky gave a lecture on my college campus which I attended under the naive impression he would speak about linguistics. Instead he detailed how media and corporate elites actually ruled the country. What a long strange trip etc

nobody ever accused Bokris of being an elegant prose stylist but I’d bet all the hair raising stuff about Lou’s drug use during the mid 1970s is accurate

A deep dive into the muck of old school show-biz, among other treats

"A million bucks, a bottle of Scotch and a blow job" Remembering Nick Tosches

There’s been some discussion about Dino by Nick Tosches on another platform so I dug up this obit of Nick from a few years ago, not that his testosteronic prose is likely to win converts these days but who knows
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I’m guessing 77 but I was living in Ann Arbor. I know the Ohio River froze, my high school buddies walked across to KY and back

maybe not quite as funky as usual this winter (coldest since 1977 according to my old bones)

The snips of synthy 1980s music in Marty Supreme from Tears for Fears and New Order drew a sly connection between the ambitious 1950s hustlers in the movie and yuppies on the make during the Reagan Era

The Glass Man by Anders de la Motte because Scandinavian crime fits the weather today

Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90

Paperback copies of this book were EVERYWHERE during the 1970s along with deathless classics such as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/o...

2025: Book By Book Measuring the year in books. Rereading Swann's Way was a treat, even better the second time around. The William F Buckley biography was the best non-fiction I read this year.

My annual reading list, on a new platform (for now).
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Silver Summer: Exhuming the Buried Legacy of Lost Youth in 5 Novels by Patrick Modiano “Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them.”

“In The Cafe Of Lost Youth reads like the oral history of an au courant underground scene. Set in 1950s Paris, it could just as well be downtown NYC in the 1980s or any local bohemian place and time of your choosing.”
markcoleman57.medium.com/silver-summe...

My (Im)Modest Book Proposal STEP LIVELY (and watch the closing doors): Onboarding NYC 1980–85

Businessmen in Brooks Brothers suits and silk-stockinged ladies strolled the same sidewalks as street kids in sweatsuits toting boomboxes or Mohawked punks in black leather and jeans. They only collided occasionally.

markcoleman57.medium.com/my-im-modest...

The Prospector Jeff was a garbage broker, a speculator in recyclables, a trash tout. He picked investments out of the flotsam and jetsam left in the…

Appropriating abandoned couches, appliances and houseware from the city streets was apparently a New York thing: a hobby for some and others, a way of life.

markcoleman57.medium.com/the-prospect...

Bicentennial Bust: How I (Barely) Survived Catholic High School Front entrance to St Xavier High School Cincinnati, Ohio, sometime in the 20th Century

The Cincinnati Enquirer sports section ran a full page of letters denouncing me as a symbol of “what’s gone wrong with the permissive modern liberal era” and so on.
markcoleman57.medium.com/bicentennial...

AGAINST NOSTALGIA: Gary Indiana’s Unsentimental Journey Author Gary Indiana in 1989, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe

my 2025 hit parade beginning with a belated look at the beguiling, scuzzy world of late author Gary Indiana markcoleman57.medium.com/against-nost...

Runaround Sue The life and afterlife of Susan Sontag

This superb overview of Susan Sontag’s life and career reminded me of Norman Mailer. They both blended talent, ambition and persona in bids to rule over the literary scene in a way that wouldn’t be possible today.

open.substack.com/pub/agoodhar...

Silver Summer: Exhuming the Buried Legacy of Lost Youth in 5 Novels by Patrick Modiano “Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them.”

From behind the (unintentional) paywall, my essay on Nobel Prize winning French novelist Patrick Modiano and the idea of a "silver summer" - the supercharged period in young adulthood that can inform, and haunt, the rest of your life.
markcoleman57.medium.com/silver-summe...

Escape at Dannemora was terrific, and terrifying, felt like *I* was locked up, Patricia Arquette was frighteningly good

Adam Phillips · In Praise of Difficult Children It isn’t simply that rules are made to be broken: the rules tell you that there is something to break. If there was no...

Fifty years later, I understand myself as a teenager *shrugs* better late than never
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Surrealism Against Fascism • EQUATOR A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us about confronting the far-right in a new age of genocide?

“Fascism was, in every way, Surrealism’s political and aesthetic doppelganger, its evil twin.”
www.equator.org/articles/sur...

In the autumn of Salman Rushdie The author’s late style in The Eleventh Hour, his new collection of fiction, reveals a venerable writer displaced by time

“Before, Rushdie’s storyland presented a radical future for the globally displaced. Now, Rushdie writes as a man displaced by time, by the vicissitudes of ageing not migration; his storyland is a memory mausoleum.”
www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

My First NYC Thanksgiving My First NYC Thanksgiving By Thursday November 26 1981, I’d lived in New York City for a little more than eight months. Already ensconced in my second shabby rent-stabilized studio apartment and …

Looking down a side street I saw a huge parade balloon being deflated. That’s the lingering image of my first NYC Thanksgiving. Luckily, that day was the only time I truly felt lonely in the city.

markcoleman57.medium.com/my-first-nyc...

JG Ballard, Incredibly Strange Film, Incredibly Strange Music and Pranks all opened me up to brave new worlds

Last Call at Max’s BETWEEN 1965 AND 1974, Max’s Kansas City was the central meeting place for the personalities, professions and mixtures of mediums that characterized the culture of the period. Painters, poets, photogr...

“The back room was an important forerunner for a branch of performance art: there the presentation of one’s own image was a major preoccupation. Life and art were integrated, sometimes to the extreme of life-as-art.”
www.artforum.com/features/las...