Mark Dery

Lenny Kaye—longtime guitarist in the Patti Smith Group, rock writer, editor of the legendary anthology of garage-sale gleanings Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968—has spent much of his life excavating the cultural landfill.

Evan Michelson — a dealer, at Obscura Antiques & Oddities in Manhattan, in anatomical curiosa and weird antiques, and co-star of the Science Channel reality show Oddities—is unique in her disposition to defend, with some heat, the virtues of the moral philosopher and political radical Jeremy Bentham—not a subject that rouses many of us to throw down the gauntlet.

Luc Sante is—to use that blurb-whore phrase deservedly, just this once—a writer’s writer.

Kim Carsons, the “morbid youth of unwholesome proclivities” who stars in William S. Burroughs’s novel The Place of Dead Roads, would love Richard Barnett’s gorgeously illustrated new book, The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration.

In hindsight, the 19th century, with its far-flung outposts of colonial power and its scientific expeditions deep into the Conradian jungles of empire, looks like a golden age of exotic contagions, tumors, abscesses, and other morbid curiosities, not to mention…

“We’re all black centipedes at heart,” the novelist and mordant social satirist William S. Burroughs once observed. Clearly not a people person.

At about eight in the evening of Saturday, the fifth of February, 1818, Matthew Lewis was tucking into dinner on his sugar plantation in Savanna-la-Mar, Jamaica.

To me, centipedes are a means to a philosophical end: anatomizing the emotion of disgust.

Is there a personality type that gravitates toward giant centipedes?

Are we our things? Are they us?

Part of a Series: “Self-Help for Surrealists.”

Predictably, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary” (September 28, 2013–January 12, 2014) at the Museum of Modern Art, packed them in.

His studied cool, like a high-roller blowing smoke rings with overdone unconcern, is a dead giveaway. So, too, is the plinkety-plink of marimba keys, so high they make a sharp, brittle noise, like bones, as he sings those words.

To this day, my leftish friends of a certain age define fashion as any investment in appearance whatsoever, and view it with deep suspicion as clear evidence of counterrevolutionary tendencies.

“Getting the Fear,” Manson called it—embracing the dry-mouthed jitters of sheer terror, riding that moment when your heart is thudding so hard it feels like something trapped inside your ribcage, trying to get out.

In suburbia, the only good lawn is a dead lawn, a lawn where nothing moves, where every unloved bug and unsightly “weed” (in smirking quotes because only culture makes a weed) has been wiped out with a little help from our friends at Monsanto.

The Surrealist calls not for the abolition of manners, but for an etiquette that does away with snobbery and class-anxious conformity and substitutes, in its place, a social philosophy that celebrates the insurgent intellect and the idiosyncratic self.

Sometimes, it seems as if American history is measured out in dead black bodies.