“Ten Things You Need to Know to Live on the Streets” – a handy guide for the dispossessed, conceived by Walter Mosley, at The Nation.

5 Food and clothing are easier to find than a safe place to sleep–the first truth of homelessness is sleep deprivation. Always have a blanket. Whenever possible, sleep in groups with staggered schedules, so you can look out for one another, prioritizing children’s needs over those of adults.

The hard-boiled crime story told by John Heidenry in “Zero at the Bone” reads like something exhumed from a time capsule. That’s because it is. As a boy in St. Louis, Mr. Heidenry came into close enough proximity to the kidnapping of 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease in 1953 to have developed an enduring fascination with it. That fascination has yielded a tough, gripping chiller of a book, written straightforwardly yet cloaked with the trappings of pulp fiction.

Wow. Is that even an English sentence? How can something be “cloaked” with “trappings”? It’s like a black hole of meaning, only much less interesting than that would be.  Dear NYT, somebody needs to put Janet Maslin to bed.

Derek White is entering the new-text-yard pleasingly: || | || CASTing A HEXaGRAM : NEXT ∃XIsT ∀mPIRE ARK N j∩NY || | ||. My man inventing his own languageses n whatnot, blogstyle. Loved. “…left the SKY cracked open like a confetti-egg bleeding pyres, running along the new “highline,” then south along the Hudson UNtil I could see elliIS ISland & the staTUE of LIBerty through the fog…”

An Annotated List of 61 Essential Post-Modern Reads.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about getting a tattoo of this line from this book. Are text tattoos stupid? Do they blur badly over time? Where would one get a 60 word quote tattooed on their body? I’ve been thinking around my wrist but seems rash, and maybe bad. Text tattoo thoughts? Suggestions? Heeding? Help me figure this out. I’m probably just running my yap.

It’s a cold day in Hell when I agree with every. last. word. of a Peggy Noonan column. Anyone down there want to shout back with a thermometer read? Here’s one of my many favorite parts of her take on the lately departing Mrs. Palin-

“The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

there is a new dispatch lit review up here featuring three stories by amelia gray.  amelia gray is reading in chicago this saturday i think at the book cellar.  come see people wearing cute glasses and tight jeans and shit.

HTMLG BFF Michael Kimball will be interviewed on All Things Considered about that postcard project thing tomorrow, Friday, July 17. I hope California has their budget balanced by then.

Wait, how do you come up with names for characters?

Interview with John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive Press over at Jacket Copy.

(via Josh Maday)