Hot damn, dear reader…today we raise a whole goddamn bottle to Norman Kingsley Mailer, the literary titan who swaggered into the world on this day in 1923 (the same year my father was born) and spent the next 84 years punching, writing, and philosophizing his way into the annals of American letters. There are certain figures in the literary cosmos – cosmos here meaning that sprawling, barely governable constellation of egos, neuroses, and typewriter shrapnel – whose birthdays feel less like commemorations and more like controlled detonations.  Mailer was a force of nature, a human hurricane of ego, intellect, and testosterone who made it his business to provoke, challenge, and occasionally terrify anyone who dared stand in his way.

Mailer was an absolute badass.  Not the Instagram-filtered, hashtagged kind, but the real fucking deal – the kind who wrote like his typewriter was on fire and lived like he had a personal vendetta against boredom.  This is the man who gave us The Naked and the Dead, a WWII novel so raw it smells like gunpowder and sweat.  He followed that up with The Executioner’s Song, a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece that turned the grim, true-crime story of Gary Gilmore into a sprawling, novelistic epic.

Mailer dissected the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the brutality of a barroom brawler.

Mailer wasn’t just about the words.  He was a walking, talking, headline-generating spectacle.  He ran for the mayor of New York City (on a platform that included seceding the city from the state), headbutted his way through literary feuds, and once famously decked a critic at a  party.  He was the kind of guy who could charm you with a perfectly turned phrase one minute and make you want to throw a drink in his face the next.

Mailer’s genius (and his madness) lay in his refusal to play it safe.  He bulldozed boundaries, set them on fire, and then wrote a 10,000-word essay about the ashes.  He was a pioneer of New Journalism, blending fact and fiction in a way that made journalistic purists clutch their pearls and readers care more deeply about the stories.  He was a messy, complicated, infuriating pain in the ass, but he was never boring.

So here’s to the man who turned literature into a compact sport, who made us think, argue, and occasionally cringe, and who reminded us that great writing isn’t about being polite – it’s about being alive.

Happy birthday, Mr. Mailer

N.P.: “Smack My Bitch Up” – Aytkact

Welp, here we are again, dear reader, another Tuesday spinning around the sun on this mud-ball of consequence and cheap wine, and the calendar, that merciless tick-tocking ledger of our own slow decay, informs us that it is January 27th.  A day that would, if I were in charge of things, be a global holiday of mandatory, state-sponsored debauchery.  Why? Because on this day, back in 1756, the heavens smiled (maybe smirked) down at humanity, and out popped – fully formed, one assumes, with a tiny powdered wig and a head full of symphonies that would make angels weep into their celestial cognacs – one Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.  [Preemptive response to any snarky freshman insisting Mozart’s middle name was Amadeus…you’re not wrong: it’s in there.  “Theophilus” translates to “lover of God” or “beloved of God,” which he often rendered as “Amadeus” in Latin.  Now quit whining and pay attention.]

Wolfie.  The Kid from Salzburg, that smug little Archbishopric town, a baroque snow-globe of a city that probably didn’t deserve the cosmic anomaly it was hosting.  This was the starting block of a thirty-five-year rampage of such concentrated, supernova-grade talent that it still scorches the ears and baffles the mind.  Almost instantly beyond merely composing music, he mainlined the divine, scribbling down dispatches from a dimension the rest of us can only glimpse in our most profound moments of chemical or emotional excess.  He committed a kind of ecstatic arson on the very idea of what music was supposed to be, torching the rulebook while humming counterpoint so perfect it bishops shit and aristocrats rethink their live choices.  Dude was basically a human high-pressure hose of melody, spraying the 18th century with a recursive, self-referential brilliance that, frankly, most dear readers are too intellectually malnourished to even process.  He spat out concertos like sunflower seeds.  He tossed off operas that contained more human truth in a single aria than most novels manage in 400 pages of tortured prose.  All this while navigating the powdered, perfumed, and profoundly perilous viper pit of Viennese court society.  It’s been 270 years of the little bastards ghost still owning the room, still making every  subsequent composer sound like they’re trying to hot-wire a harpsichord in the back of a stolen carriage while Mozart’s already three towns ahead, laughing in perfect sonata form.  You listen to the Jupiter Symphony or the Requiem and you realize the rest of us are just dicking around with tuning forks while he was out there rewriting the laws of emotional physics.

And then, the flameout.  The big, ugly stop.  Thirty-five.  An age when most of us are just starting to figure out how to properly file our taxes, Mozart was already a legend being shoveled into a pauper’s grave.  The official story is as thin as cheap soup, some horseshit about a fever.  But we know better, don’t we, dear reader?  The darkness that always nibbled at the edges of his brightest compositions finally came to collect.

Was it Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrity, finally succumbing to a fit of murderous envy?  A plausible, almost operatic, narrative.  Or was it something more sordid, more human?  A bad plate of pork, a dose of trichinosis turning his guts into a warzone?  A grimly ironic end for a man who lived his life at forte fortissimo. Or maybe it was mercury, the fashionable cure-all of the day, a slow-acting poison administered by a jealous husband or a quack doctor.  Regardless, we know it was no grand operatic exit, no dramatic farewell aria – just a genius reduced to a shivering, swollen husk in a rented room while the city outside kept right on waltzing without him.

But here we are, centuries later, still blasting his stuff in concert halls and headphones and car stereos at 3 a.m. when the world feels too stupid to live in.  The music doesn’t age, doesn’t date, doesn’t give a flying fuck about your theories or your playlists or your fragile ego; it just sits there, eternal and smug, daring you to keep up.

So today, raise a toast to the Wolf…not of some polite Riesling, but of something with a kick: whiskey, cheap red, black coffee laced with spite.  Happy birthday, Wolfie.  He burned twice as bright, and if he only lasted half as long, well, maybe that was the point.  He crammed a hundred lifetimes of pure, uncut genius into three and a half decades, leaving behind a body of work so perfect, so impossible, that it serves as a permanent middle finger to the quiet desperation of an ordinary life.  (And if you’re reading this while some string quartet is sawing through Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in the background, crank it louder.  Let the uncultured heathens next door know the dead genius is still winning).

N.P.: “Mozart” – Trans Siberian Orchestra

Hot diggity damn, dear reader…tonight is Burns Night!  Since you are not already drinking whisky and jumping off the furniture, I can only assume you are unfamiliar with Burns Night. Fair enough…it is my depressing belief that very few Americans read much anymore.  I’m not confident that many of them can read. But that’s another topic for another day.  Today is Burns Night, dammit.

Today we celebrate the birthday of the OG wordsmith of Scotland, Robert Burns!  Born January 25, 1759, this literary legend penned verses that Rolling Stone said, “flowed as smoothly as a fine Scotch whisky and as sharply as the Highland wind.”  Fact check: true.  This founding member of the D.P.S. was not only a rebel with a quill…he was the man who made haggis a legitimate subject of lyrical devotion.

Speaking of haggis, have you read his “Address to a Haggis?”  Only Burns could turn a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oats into an ode of unparalleled grandeur.  Any Burns Night celebration worth its salt (certainly any I’ve ever attended) features a massive haggis, held aloft by a group of dudes in kilts, making a lap around the entire room so all in attendance can get a close-up look at what they’re about to eat.  There are whoops and cheers (especially by those of us who’ve been drinking Snakebites for the previous few hours).  When the haggis has finished its tour around the room, it is eventually placed on a table in the center of the room, and someone then reads the “Address to a Haggis,” as significant amounts of whisky is poured over the haggis, and then it is cut with a sword and plates of the rotten stuff is passed around to whomever is daring enough to eat it.  At least that’s what how I remember it going down…I was always completely shit-housed by the time the haggis showed up.  As it should be.  As it must be.  Haggis is food for drunk people who are hungry, freezing, and out of options.  Sober people cannot eat haggis.  I mean it’s physically impossible.  The sober mind will not let its physical self willingly consume something so fetid and foul.  I have personally verified this theory many times: cold nights in San Francisco when the fridge was a little barren at home, a warm, whisky covered haggis is goddamn delicious.  Sober with a full stomach, and that same haggis is repugnant.

And let’s not forget Burns’ saucier side.  He also gifted us with “The Fornicator,” a tribute to all of us unapologetic fornicators, including himself.

And fornicate he did!  Burns fathered 12 children, nine of them out of wedlock.  He was prolific in many ways.  He worked as a farmer, a customs officer, and was allegedly the smoothest talker north of the border.  Burns was into the Enlightenment philosophers and could talk about Rousseau and Voltaire while slamming shots.

Like so many greats, Burns’ spark was snuffed out too soon.  He died on July 21, 1796, at the age of 37, likely due to rheumatic fever exacerbated by his hard-living ways.  Remarkably, the day he was laid to rest, his son Maxwell was born.

Today I recommend you crack your Burns anthology and check out “Tam o’ Shanter” or “A Red, Red Rose.”  Or, better yet, you could gut a pig, make some haggis, and recite the “Address” as you wash it down with whisky.

Slàinte, Robby!

N.P.: “Shy Boy” – JD McPherson

It is January 19th, dear reader, which, as I’m sure you know by this point in our relationship, means that somewhere in the vast, spiraling ether of the literary afterlife – a place I imagine looks suspiciously like a Baltimore gutter circa 1849 and smells faintly of amontillado and laudanum – Edgar Allan Poe is turning 217.  Or he would be, had he not shuffled off this mortal coil in a weird delirium tremens fugue state at the ripe old age of 40.  But we are not here to mourn the brevity of the fuse; we are here to celebrate the explosive, terrifying bang.

To be clear from the start: without Poe, modern literature is basically just a series of polite tea parties where nothing bleeds.

Before Poe, “scary” stories were mostly just moralistic claptrap about why you shouldn’t wander into the woods or stiff peers in castles rattling chains.  Poe took those chains and strangled his reader with them while whispering sweet nothings about the inevitability of premature burial.  He was the original architect of the American Nightmare who looked at the burgeoning optimism of the 19th century and said, “Yes, but what if a bird flew into your room and screamed at you about your dead girlfriend until you went insane?”

Consider the sheer, unadulterated audacity of the man.  He invented the detective story – invented it, wholesale, out of thin air – with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”  He gave us C. Auguste Dupin, the ur-Holmes prototype for every socially maladjusted genius sleuth from Baker Street to whatever Scandi-noir police procedural you’re currently binging on Netflix.  And he did it not because he loved the law, but because he was obsessed with the puzzle, with the friction between the rational mind and the irrational universe.

And honestly, if you haven’t tried to read “The Fall of the House of Usher” while nursing a hangover that feels like a nine-inch nail through the frontal lobe, have you even really read it?  The sensory hypersensitivity of Roderick Usher is not just a gothic trope: it is the definitive literary depiction of the Sunday Morning Fear.

We celebrate him today not because he was a saint – by all accounts, he was a disaster of a human being, a walking catastrophe of bad debts, worse decisions, and a liver that was essentially waving a white flag for two decades – but because he had the balls to stare into the abyss and take meticulous notes.  He understood that the monster isn’t under the bed: the monster is in your head, and it is probably significantly smarter than you are.

So here’s to you, Edgar, you gloomy, brilliant wretch.  I hope wherever you are, the bells are ringing, the raven has shut its beak for five minutes, and the cask is tapped.

Cheers.

N.P.: “Death Waltz” – Adam Hurst