Luc Sante makes up for a dirth of blogging by posting a few illustrations from one of my favorite books, Nize Baby, by Milt Gross. Written in the twenties as a newspaper column, it purports to be the overheard conversations of the residents of a lower east side tenament, but all the talk jumbles together, and it quickly turns into one of the most bizarre and hilarious exercises in dialect humor you will ever read. Much of it retells classic fairy tales, and at times the dialect gets so thick it becomes a Yiddish Finnegans Wake, only funnier. Long out of print (that's a hint, Fantagraphics), but if you come by my place I'll let you look at the less valuable of my two copies.