Over at Politics and Culture, Amitava Kumar and Micahel Ryan edit a special issue on Rotten English.  Here’s an excerpt from Dohra Ahmad’s book Rotten English, in the issue:

One day as I was compiling material for this anthology, I sat in a train station in Jamaica, Queens reading Paul Keens-Douglas’s poem “Wukhand” when an older man sitting next to me began to chuckle.  “That’s just how we talk back home,” he said, pointing at the page.  “I never saw it written down before.”  This collection consists of two and a half centuries of writing that had never been written down before, of authors codifying previously untranscribed speech patterns. Keens-Douglas’s poem opens boldly in the voice of a Trinidadian day-laborer addressing a potential employer with the plea “Sah, gimme a wuk nah.  Ah lookin ole but ah strong.”  Other selections capture the speech of convicts and child-soldiers, bluesmen and housemaids from Mississippi to Scotland to India.  But more than that, Rotten English consists of literary works of extraordinary originality, power and beauty.  The poem that amused my train-platform neighbor employs a spectacular range of literary techniques, weaving among direct address, personification, Biblical reference, and a good deal of humor.  Like Keens-Douglas, all of the other authors contained here forge vernacular language into poems, short stories and novels that captivate readers with their artistry.

What would once have been pejoratively termed “dialect literature” has recently and decisively come into its own.  Half of the novels that won the Man Booker prize over the past twelve years are in a non-standard English: the British Commonwealth’s most prestigious award honors passages like “It ain’t like your regular sort of day” (the opening line of Graham Swift’s Last Orders) and “What kind of fucken life is this?” (the persistent refrain of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little).  The reading public has been just as approving, eagerly devouring works like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Junot Díaz’s Drown.  Many vernacular novels, Walker’s own as well as Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, have become acclaimed movies.  This success is by no means limited to fiction; vernacular poetry has flourished in venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.  The aim of this collection is to represent that literary florescence, along with the earlier works that anticipated and enabled it.  Rotten English celebrates the stunningly unanticipated ways in which English has changed as it grew into a global language.

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse’s defense (sort of) of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Rowan Williams doesn’t need me to defend him, having, presumably, better placed and more powerful friends (one in partiuclar). But here goes anyway. One of my several Anglophile (and this one a rare Episcopalian) in-laws just sent me (approvingly) this piece from the Sunday Times, and added the following, rather lovely if a little unlikely, quote, recommending a different version of multiculturalism from that which he takes the Archbishop to be committed (which, I gather from googling, comes from Mark Steyn):

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

‘’You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Let us take the Archbishop’s supposed treason first. The Archbishop’s actual speech, has been available for days. And the World at One transcript is here. So it is surprising that journalists like Ms. Marrin have been able to get away with what seem like wilful mireadings and mishearings.

Stanley Fish over at his NYT blog Think Again:

The responses to my column on Hillary Clinton-hating have been both voluminous (the largest number in the brief history of “Think Again”) and fascinating. The majority of posters agreed with the characterization of the attacks on Senator Clinton as vicious and irrational, but in not a few posts the repudiation of Hillary-hatred is followed by more of the same. Lisa (No. 17) nicely exemplifies the pattern. She begins by saying “I agree that there is a rabid nature in the manner in which numerous conservative groups attack Hillary Clinton,”, but in the very next sentence she declares that “most of Hillary’s reputation is well earned” and then she spends nine paragraphs being rabid. A significant minority of posters skipped the ritual disavowal of hatred and went straight to the task of adding to it.

These Clintonphobes said things like “there’s nothing to like about her”(394) and wrote at length about her clothing, her voice, her laugh, her arrogance, her “countless plastic surgeries” (an inference it would seem from the fact that at 60 she still looks good), her insincerity, her stridency, her ambition, her love of power, and her husband. In their view, the hatred they expressed was not irrational at all, but was provoked by record of crimes and character flaws they are happy to rehearse. Their mirror image on the left objected to my saying that President Bush fills the same role for liberals that Clinton fills for her detractors. No, no came the protest.

From The New York Times:

Artful persuasion depends on eye contact, but not just any kind. If one person prefers brief glances and the other is busy staring deeply, then it may not matter how good the jokes are or how much they both loved “Juno.” Rhythm counts. Voice cadence does, too. People who speak in loud, animated bursts tend to feed off others who do the same, just as those who are lower key tend to relax in a cool stream of measured tones. “Myself, I’m very conscious of people’s body position,” said Ray Allieri of Wellesley, Mass., a former telecommunications executive with 20 years in marketing and sales. “If they’re leaning back in their chair, I do that, and if they’re forward on their elbows, I tend to move forward,”

Psychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century, analyzing activities like political propaganda, television campaigns and door-to-door sales. Many factors influence people’s susceptibility to an appeal, studies suggest, including their perception of how exclusive an opportunity is and whether their neighbors are buying it. Most people are also strongly sensitive to rapport, to charm, to the social music in the person making the pitch. In recent years, researchers have begun to decode the unspoken, subtle elements that come into play when people click. They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

More here.

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The Shirt
Robert Pinsky

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

The Triangle Fire
More

..

Rest at pale evening…
A tall slim tree…
Night coming tendrerly
Black like me.
(from Dream Variations, 1926)

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. His mother was a school teacher, she also wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a storekeeper. He had wanted to become a lawyer, but he had been denied to take the bar exam. Hughes’s parents separated and his mother moved from city to city in search of work. In his rootless childhood, Hughes lived in Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana and Buffalo. Part of his childhood Hughes lived with his grandmother. At the age of 13 he moved back with his mother and her second husband. Later the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Hughes’s stepfather worked in the steel mills. During this period Hughes found the poems of Carl Sandburg, whose unrhymed free verse influenced him deeply. After graduating from a high school in Cleveland, Hughes spent a year in Mexico with his light-skinned father, who had found there a release as a successful cattle rancher from racism of the North. On the train, when he returned to the north, Hughes wrote one of his most famous poems, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. It appeared in the African-American journal Crisis (1921). As an adolescent in Cleveland he participated in the activity of Karamu Players, and published in 1921 his first play, THE GOLDEN PIECE in 1921.

Supported by his father, Hughes entered in the early 1920s the Columbia University, New York. For the permanent disappointment of his father, Hughes soon abandoned his studies, and participated in more entertaining jazz and blues activities in nearby Harlem. Disgusted with life at the university and to see the world, he enlisted as a steward on a freighter bound to West Africa. He traveled to Paris, worked as a doorman and a bouncer of a night club, and continued to Italy.

After his return to the United States, Hughes worked in menial jobs and wrote poems, which earned him scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. According an anecdote, Hughes was “discovered” by the poet Vachel Lindsay in Washington. Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel, where Hughes worked as a busboy, and dropped his poems beside the Lindsay’s dinner plate. Lindsay included several of them in his poetry reading. It prompted interviews of the “busboy poet”. Hughes quit his job and moved to New York City.

In 1929 Hughes received his bachelor’s degree. Hughes emphasized the importance of African culture and shared Du Bois’s belief that renewal could only come from an understanding of African roots.

“My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?”
(from ‘Cross’)

In several of his poems, Hughes had expressed with ardent voice sociopolitical protests. He portrayed people, whose lives were impacted by racism and sexual conflicts, he wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness. But basically he was a conscientious artist, kept his middle-of-the road stance and worked hard to chronicle the black American experience, contrasting the beauty of the soul with the oppressive circumstance.

Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud –
Not like a shroud.
(from Color, 1943)

In his later years Hughes held posts at the Universities of Chicago and Atlanta. The poet also witnessed that doctoral dissertations already begun to be written about him – the earliest book on his work appeared already in the 1930s. Hughes never married and there has been unrelevant speculations about his sexuality. Several of his friends were homosexual, among them Carl Van Vechten, who wrote the controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926) – Hughes had recommended the choice of the title – but several were not. Hughes died in Polyclinic Hospital in New York, on May 22, 1967, of complications after surgery. His collection of political poems, THE PANTHER AND THE LASH (1967), reflected the anger and militancy of the 1960s. The book had been rejected first by Knopf in 1964 as too risky. Hughes’s own history of NAACP appeared in 1962; he had received a few year’s earlier the NAACP’S Spingarn Medal.

Hughes published more than 35 books, he was a versatile writer, but he hated “long novels, narrative poems”, as he once said. Although the Harlem Renaissance faded away during the Great Depression, its influence is seen in the writings of later authors, such as James Baldwin, who, however, criticized Hughes’s poetic achievement. From the late 1940’s through the 1950’s Hughes revised under pressure his poems- may of them became less tough.

Matti Friedman in the Chicago Tribune:

Underneath the homes and ragged streets of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan lie the remnants of a glorious Jewish past: coins, seals, a water tunnel hewn by a Judean king 2,700 years ago, a road that led to a biblical Temple.

But archaeology is hard-wired into the politics of modern-day Arab-Israeli strife, and new digs to unearth more of this past are cutting to the heart of the charged argument over who owns the holy city today.

Israel says it’s reconnecting with its ancient heritage. Palestinians contend the archaeology is a political weapon to undermine their own links to Jerusalem.

Lying on a densely populated slope outside the walled Old City, the area is known to Israelis as the City of David, named for the legendary monarch who ruled a Jewish kingdom from this spot 3,000 years ago. It is the kernel from which Jerusalem grew.

But Silwan is in east Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in 1967 and which Palestinians claim for the capital of a future state.

Palestinians and Israelis are trying again to negotiate a peace deal, one which must include an agreement to share Jerusalem. The collision in this neighborhood — between Silwan and the City of David — encapsulates the complexities ahead.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Sughra Raza. Rhinebeck Afternoon.

Painting: acrylic on canvas, 2004.

Digital photograph January 26, 2008.

Thanks to Gerald and Stephanie Kufner for their help in staging the shot.

In the Guardian:

The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book – a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products. Then hook the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.

Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book, with, perhaps, not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA might produce.

Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.

Among Parker’s bestselling books (as ranked by Amazon.co.uk) one finds surprises.

His fifth-best seller is Webster’s Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.

“Why is it easier for women to have multiple orgasms than it is for men?” Heiman asks. “How does it interact with attachment issues?”

There are lots of other questions, she says, but oddly, in our supposedly sex-obsessed society, it’s nearly impossible to get funding for sex research.

Another complication: The orgasm question touches on some profound mysteries about how feelings and consciousness can emerge from the brain.

For Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University, that’s what makes the neurobiology of orgasm so fascinating. A coauthor of the semi-technical 2006 book The Science of Orgasm, he got interested in applying his field of neuroscience to sex while studying rats.

more from The Philadelphia Inquirer here.

It must have seemed to the Iraqis that they were being hauled before a nightmare judge. They were accustomed to this, to violent noises, interrogations, searches. But still they were cowed by Hagner, by all of it. And even though he was careful to say Thank you and even sometimes Things are gonna get better to those frightened people, the words seemed empty after what had just been done, and Hagner seemed remote and alien. Inhuman. A few hours later, Hagner would emerge from his armor cocoon, pale and sweat-soaked, a wiry, almost skinny guy from Essex, Maryland, eating candy and falling exhausted onto his bunk. Happily alive, dreaming of boats.

Hagner and his men were doing what other people would later call winning the war. They didn’t know they were winning it. I, embedded with them, didn’t know it. US politicians now describe Ramadi as a model of success. The president points there and grins. Look, it’s working. There’s the proof. If this is true, Ramadi must have changed a great deal since I visited.

more from VQR here.

Your book is about a trial—what’s at stake?

Trying Leviathan centers on a trial that took place in 1818 in Manhattan, where a jury had to determine whether a whale was a fish for the purpose of New York State law. This question had come up under a statute requiring that all fish oil be inspected and taxed. A savvy merchant in New York City, one Samuel Judd, who had three barrels of spermaceti in his possession (spermaceti is a waxy goo found primarily in the heads of sperm whales), turned the inspector away, pointing out that, according to the latest scientific authorities, whales weren’t fish, so he was off the hook for the fees. The dutiful inspector, James Maurice, chortled (“Whales not fish? OK, wiseguy!”) and slapped the cuffs on him. The issues at play in the trial—human taxonomy, oceanic monstrosity, the interpretation of Genesis, atheistical French philosophy, power politics in the early Republic—turned a minor legal fracas into a major sensation. For three days, the papers wrote about little else, and Maurice v. Judd would be the subject of endless jokes, scurrilous poems, double-entendres, angry Op-Eds, and backroom gossip for years to come. Before it was over, the trial had become a pivotal test case not just for whales and fish, but for comparative anatomy, natural history, and finally, really, for science itself in the US.

more from Cabinet here.

Raymond Carver

I really admire what the Giants have done this season. It isn’t often you see a team struggle early, eke out a series of road wins, and still manage to peak at the perfect moment. It’s a rare occurrence, I’ll say that much.

On the other side, you’ve got football’s version of Goliath. Experts tell me the Patriots are the strongest team in NFL history. From the moment they beat the Colts, they’ve been earmarked as Super Bowl Champions. It’s tough to pick against an undefeated record.

All that being said, I’ve been so impressed with Eli Manning’s development these last four weeks that I’m willing to take the underdog. What can I say? I believe in the New York Giants.

Prediction: Giants 31, Patriots 28

Raymond Carver, edited by Gordon Lish

It isn’t a thing you see often, I’ll say that much.

They tell me this is Goliath.

I believe in Giants.

Prediction: G.

more from McSweeney’s here.

New cameras don’t just capture photons; they compute pictures.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

The digital camera has brought a revolutionary shift in the nature of photography, sweeping aside more than 150 years of technology based on the weird and wonderful photochemistry of silver halide crystals. Curiously, though, the camera itself has come through this transformation with remarkably little change. A digital camera has a silicon sensor where the film used to go, and there’s a new display screen on the back, but the lens and shutter and the rest of the optical system work just as they always have, and so do most of the controls. The images that come out of the camera also look much the same—at least until you examine them microscopically.

But further changes in the art and science of photography may be coming soon. Imaging laboratories are experimenting with cameras that don’t merely digitize an image but also perform extensive computations on the image data.

More here.  [The photo below is a more “painterly” image rendered by a digital camera.]

Researchers are revealing hidden complexities behind the simple act of kissing, which relays powerful messages to your brain, body and partner.

Chip Walter in Scientific American:

A kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. At the extreme, a bad first kiss can abruptly curtail a couple’s future.

Kissing may have evolved from primate mothers’ practice of chewing food for their young and then feeding them mouth-to-mouth. Some scientists theorize that kissing is crucial to the evolutionary process of mate selection.

More here.

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Preface to a Twenty-volume Suicide Note
Amiri Baraka

Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus…

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

..

A black woman refused to give up her seat on a bus. She was brutally attacked and thrown off…and she took the case to court. Rosa Parks? No. Her name was Elizabeth Jennings.

Here’s how the New York Tribune reported the Jennings incident in a February 1855 article: “She got upon one of the Company’s cars last summer, on the Sabbath, to ride to church. The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full; when that was shown to be false, he pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence; but (when) she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted. The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered, but she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”

The African American community was outraged, and the following day there was a rally at Jennings’ church. A letter she had written telling her account of the incident was read aloud: “Sarah E. Adams & myself walked down to the corner of Pearl & Chatham Sts. to take the 3rd Ave cars,” she wrote. She described how the conductor, thought to be one Edwin Moss, and the driver had attacked her. “I told him [Moss] I was a respectable person, born and raised in this city, that I did not know where he was from and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.”

“Then,” Jennings continued, “the (police) officer without listening to anything I had to say thrust me out and tauntingly told me to get redress if I could. I would have come up [to the rally] myself but I’m quite sore & stiff from the treatment I received from those monsters.”

Jennings sued the company, the driver, and the conductor. Messrs. Culver, Parker, and Arthur represented her. Arthur was Chester A. Arthur, then a novice 21-year-old lawyer and future President of the United States. This law firm was hired because it had demonstrated some talent in the area of civil rights the year before.

Jennings was well off and well connected. Her father, Thomas Jennings, was an important businessman and community leader who had associations with Abyssinian and St. Phillips, two major African American churches. As a tailor, he held a patent on a method for renovating garments and maintained a shop on Church Street.

He and others who had been involved in the fight to end transit discrimination helped raise money for Jennings’ lawsuit. News of the trial reached all the way to San Francisco, where an African American group called the Young Men’s Association passed a resolution condemning Jennings’ treatment.

In 1855, Judge Rockwell of the Brooklyn Circuit Court ruled in Jennings’ favor, stating that: “Colored persons if sober, well behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence.”

Elizabeth Jennings claimed $500 worth of damage. The majority of the jury wanted to give her the full amount, but, as the Tribune put it, “Some jury members had peculiar notions as to colored people’s rights.” They eventually agreed to give her $225, and the court added 10 percent plus her expenses.

Within a month of the Jennings decision, an African American named Peter Porter was barred from an Eighth Avenue rail car. He too sued and the company settled out of court. From then on, African Americans were allowed to ride on rail cars on an equal basis.

From Scientific American:

Study analyzing more than 200 years of data finds that couples consisting of third cousins have the highest reproductive success. It is not quite incest. And though it will increase your chances of birthing a healthy baby, it is a bit unorthodox, to say the least. Still, scientists at Icelandic biotechnology company deCODE genetics say that when third and fourth cousins procreate, they generally have scads of kids and grandkids (relative to everyone else).

It has long been wondered exactly how kinship influences reproductive success. Previous studies have uncovered positive correlations, but the biological data has been clouded by socioeconomic factors (such as average marrying age and family size) in those populations in which consanguineous marriage is commonplace, such as in India, Pakistan and the Middle East. The new study, however, was able to shed light on the biological reason for the earlier findings.

More here.

This has been getting a lot of press.  The full text of the archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ lecture on shar’ia and secular law.

[I]n contrast to what is sometimes assumed, we do not simply have a standoff between two rival legal systems when we discuss Islamic and British law.  On the one hand, sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God; on the other, it is to some extent unfinished business so far as codified and precise provisions are concerned.  To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system.  In a discussion based on a paper from Mona Siddiqui at a conference last year at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, the point was made by one or two Muslim scholars that an excessively narrow understanding sharia as simply codified rules can have the effect of actually undermining the universal claims of the Qur’an. 

But while such universal claims are not open for renegotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the ummaSharia is not, in that sense, intrinsically to do with any demand for Muslim dominance over non-Muslims.  Both historically and in the contemporary context, Muslim states have acknowledged that membership of the umma is not coterminous with membership in a particular political society: in modern times, the clearest articulation of this was in the foundation of the Pakistani state under Jinnah; but other examples (Morocco, Jordan) could be cited of societies where there is a concept of citizenship that is not identical with belonging to the umma. Such societies, while not compromising or weakening the possibility of unqualified belief in the authority and universality of sharia, or even the privileged status of Islam in a nation, recognise that there can be no guarantee that the state is religiously homogeneous and that the relationships in which the individual stands and which define him or her are not exclusively with other Muslims.  There has therefore to be some concept of common good that is not prescribed solely in terms of revealed Law, however provisional or imperfect such a situation is thought to be.  And this implies in turn that the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful.

New York has always been a gangster’s paradise. That’s part of its romance and its lore. From groups like the 19th century Plug Uglies, immortalized in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 “The Gangs of New York,” to their 20th century counterpart, the Mafia, the city has a peculiar fascination with its least repentant miscreants, the ones who flaunt their lives outside the law.

Twenty years ago, John Gotti ruled the tabloids, and before him Joey Gallo, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano — the list goes on and on.

As to why this is . . . well, Jimmy Breslin has an opinion. “I can barely handle legitimate people,” he writes in the opening pages of “The Good Rat: A True Story.” “They all proclaim immaculate honesty, but each day they commit the most serious of all felonies, being a bore.”

more from the LA Times here.