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Happy Birthday, Albert!


I didn’t realize until a moment ago that today was Albert Camus’ one hundredth birthday. He’s one of those guys you like when you’re young, fall out of love with, and then rediscover as being pretty great.

By coincidence, while waiting to see if I would be selected for jury service, I we as reading his journals. Specifically, his earliest ones: 1935-1943. I’m up to summer 1938.

Anyway, pick up some Camus in the next day or two. Totally worthwhile.

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‘Orphan Hours’ By Stanley Plumly (New Year’s Resolution, Book Thirty-Seven)


Once again folks, I’m tired, sick, and probably overworked. Stressed out, is what I’m saying, with a variety of physical, mental, and spiritual implications.

But I still made it to the poetry reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library last Monday. But I’m not going to write as much or as well, thoroughly or coherently as normal. Suck it up, readers (or, more realistically, ‘reader,’ because, let’s face, a irregularly updated blog about poetry doesn’t get many readers, so to my one reader, I just said, ‘suck it,’ so maybe now I have no readers at all).

Plumly read with C.K. Williams. Plumly is local and a former Maryland poet laureate, but I’d read a lot more about Williams (though I’d never read either’s poetry).

When I slipped over to a bookstore to check out their work and pre-buy a book to be signed, I expected to walk away with something by Williams, but found that Plumly is much more to my taste. On the page, to be honest, I wasn’t very interested in what I saw of Williams’ poetry. Plumly was more my type.

At the reading itself, Williams was enjoyable. He has a fast and enjoyable reading style. His work reads quickly on the page.

Plumly is a slower poet. He reads his poetry more slowly and his poems read more slowly on the page. I think that’s one of the reasons I preferred his work.

I will say this, Plumly is very good, very talented, but maybe not very distinguishing, by which I mean, his poems do not strongly distinguish themselves from other, similarly style poets. If you’re looking for a comparison, I’d say he most reminds me of the the late, great Adrienne Rich.

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Peter, I Believe You


Peter Schorsch, when you say, No, I did not play the Florida GOP to write that memo ‘warning’ the nat’l media about my blog, I believe you.

But you’re wrong when you say attacking you will have no effect, that this sort of thing is not done, etc.

The FLGOP will actually have some trouble attacking Crist, because the media will always be inclined latch onto the angle of ‘Crist just goes wherever the popular wind is blowing.’ Why? Because that’s always been the knock on Crist. And the media tends to play into accepted tropes.

Rick Scott’s problem is that, well, Crist has 100% percent name recognition and is generally liked by Floridians. And they like him, despite already fully believing that he just follows prevailing trends, regardless of how many zig zags occur.

That’s the problem: they know this and they like him anyway.

So they are trying to subtly push the media into buying into the idea that Crist’s supposed lack of an internal rudder leads him into dealings with people who have… well, unsavory legal/criminal problems.

The fact that Crist used Peter for something will be used to show a pattern – first Jim Greer and now Peter Schorsch.

They believe that people will stop being okay with Crist’s zig zagging if they also believe that is judgement is flawed. You don’t mind him flip flopping if that takes him to the right place for Florida. But what if he doesn’t?

If this stratagem works, the conversation will shift to Crist’s judgement. Did he show good judgement by hiring Schorsch after those… kerfuflles he had over Jamie Bennett and Earnest Williams’ campaigns and the Tarpon Dems and the legal issues and criminal accusations… well, you get the picture. Other names will be inserted, culminating in tying Greer around his neck.

Peter’s just a small link in a chain they’ll be building over the next year.

Though, I’m not convinced it’ll work. Florida just likes the guy. Always have. And they can’t stand Rick Scott.

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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – From Beyond The Hallowed Halls


Why are people so concerned with a few hundred thousand dollars when I have uncovered the secrets of the universe?

There should be a punctuation mark for irony. Actually, there is. Or rather, there are several. But I don’t think my word processing program is familiar with them, so I never use them. But you can see how such a thing could be useful, especially in electronic communications, like email and text messages.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, or least, everybody who was anybody to having pretensions of intellectualism and were also under age twenty-five, none of which is intended as a knock on the book, had this book back in the early nineties. And probably before that, too, but frankly, I wouldn’t have known if they did. I mean, sure, I probably saw some of the shelves and was intrigued, with a cover like an oversized science fiction novel, but I really couldn’t have made any reasonable generalizations at the time.

I had no idea that Fanny Howe and Susan Howe were sisters. I love Fanny Howe and am always frustrated at how difficult it is to find her work. On the shelves where I had hoped to find Fanny was, instead, a poetry collection by Susan, instead. But knowing they are sisters doesn’t make it any less frustrating that the only bookstore in DC that seems to stock Fanny’s poetry is Bridestreet Books, which makes sense, seeing as they have, hands down, the best poetry selection… well, anywhere I’ve seen. And that includes the estimable Skylight Books in Los Angeles and even the serpentine stacks of the Strand in New York.

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Weekend Reading – Birth Of The Book


Mallarme and the book. (P.S. – I love Mallarme. I got very offended when, listening to a performance of Debussy’s score for Mallarme’s L’apre midi d’un faun, one of the musicians, a guitarist, the piece having been arranged for guitar and flute, said no one cared about the poem anymore. Then, we saw an exhibit of materials from the Ballet Russe at the National Gallery of Art. Of course, one of their famous pieces, staying none other than Ninjinsky, was that same Debussy piece. So Mallarme is awesome. Read his poetry.)

Proust’s simple plots.

Scholar, theorist, deconstructionist, conman. But that last one doesn’t actually have much to do with the validity of the first three. Even if it does make him icky.

Sixty years, man. Sixty years. Rock on, Dissent!

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‘Pierre Reverdy’ By Pierre Reverdy (New Year’s Resolution, Book Thirty-Six)


9781590176795I actually finished this a while back and it deserves a lot more time than I’m about to put into this post, but I’m tired, stressed at work, and I think I have a sinus infection, so kiss my behind.

Short version, I’ve been wanting to read this poet for a while, but he’s been out of print, so kudos to the New York Review of Books for publishing a new collection of his poems. They assembled a crackerjack list of translations, some more recent than others (Kenneth Rexroth has been dead for a while, so I’m guessing his translations aren’t new). Initially, I tried to look for correspondences between the translators and the individual poems, but that kind of fell apart. At first, it seemed that Rexroth, who himself always wrote left justified lines, usually of medium to long length was picking similar poems and usually he was… until he wasn’t.

Similarly, Ashberry did a lot of poems that were ‘blocky’ with some occasionally jagged enjambments, but really, I think my premise doesn’t hold up so well.

I wish I knew whether the poems were in chronological order. I think they are, but I wish I knew.

Anyway, he’s very good. If you like Rene Char, you’ll love Reverdy.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – The Newest Left


Marxism or bust!

How awesome is this? Paul Krugman writing about poetry! Not to digress, but an acquaintance of mine met him at a science fiction convention a few years and he admitted his great love of Isaac Asimov. Asimov spoke at my elementary school when I was kid. I mean, he didn’t speak to me class. The school was just the venue. My mother went. She said he came across as sweet, but a little too idealistic and a teensy bit wedded to traditional gender roles. But I digress. Let me digress some more. I was too young to go, but still disappointed, because, at the time, I was just beginning to raid my mother’s vast collection of Asmiov pulps. Everything from his terrible, early Lucky Starr novels to The End of Eternity (which is my personal favorite, if it’s the one I’m thinking of, which is the one where a mushroom cloud in a 1930s classified ad is the key to pinpointing where the lady has gone in time). But actually, Krugman only briefly touches on poetry and admits he doesn’t read it. May I humbly suggest something like The Displaced of Capital as being appropriate for an economist? It also relates to the link about, about the rise of young Marxist thinkers. Which I think is awesome. I am not now nor have I ever really been a Marxist (though I played at being one in high school and a bit in college, but I’m probably more like a Vermont Democrat and ,really, I always have been), but it’s good to see his ideas being debated again. Not only was he genius, but we need a counterbalance to the way blowhards like Mies and Hayek have pulled the conversation so bloody far to the extreme right. I’m not going to talk about Rand. She’s not a philosopher. And she’s only a novelist in the broadest sense that her books have words in them and things said are ascribed to people with names that we are supposed to believe are ‘characters’ but are only characters in the sense that the Grimlock, the leader of Dinobots, from the Transformers cartoons I watched in the early and mid eighties, was a three dimensional character. Hint: he wasn’t, because it was a show for nine year old boys. In Rand’s defense, novels like Atlas Shrugged are aimed squarely at slightly sensitive sixteen year old boys, who feel that maybe they are slightly smarter than their peers and know they are definitely less physical capable and are kind of hoping that their hoped for slightly more braininess will one day lead them a chosen land and here’s this Rand person telling them, that, heck yeah! You’ll go to a cool valley in Colorado and be super awesome and women will totally want to make sexy time with you! That’s totally awesome, right? Except then you turn seventeen and if you have any self awareness at all, you start to question this paradigm. You hear that, Paul Ryan? You lack the self awareness of a seventeen year boy. Yeah. I said it. So, in conclusion: educated people should read more poetry and should not read Ayn Rand after their seventeenth birthday.

Foreign affairs time? More like sexy time!

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‘Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant’ By Anthony Powell (New Year’s Resolution, Book Thirty-Five)


Clearly, I am not going to make it to fifty-two books this year. Work and life have been stressful and difficult lately and that has held me back from concentrating on reading. I need a reading vacation. Not a vacation from reading, but a solid week without television or much internet to just calm my mind and bury it in books.

So, contrary to what I said in my last post about these books, Jenkins does not return to Jean. It was just a flashback to his relationship/affair with Jean Duport née Templer. A poorly identified flashback.

He is well and truly married to Isobel Tolland and there is still a lack of affection and relationship described. Who is she? Why did he marry her? Does he love her? Hell, if I know.

The atmosphere of a gritty, economically declining England is well depicted. People’s fortunes decline and struggle.

And Jenkins’ relations to some musical types is narrated. The school day friends/acquaintances, Widmerpool, Stringham and Peter Templer (Jean’s brother), do not appear so much. Widmerpool does after Isobel has a miscarriage, but it’s mostly about other folks. A recurring figure, the writer St John Clarke, dies and that made me a little sad. He was depicted as a not so very good writer and a bit of a weak minded, sad sack and I felt a little defensive and wanted to come to his aid against the author’s insinuations, though if he’d been real, I’m certain I would have despise his books.

I wish that Nicholas Jenkins were less of a tool to describe a changing society and given more of an interior life we could e exposed to, but as a narrator, he is not so forthcoming. Only in earlier books, when talking about Jean.

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Weekend Reading – Not The Same Thing At All


Club Monaco (which, is apparently, a women’s apparel store) is not actually a place for learning, reading, culture, and enlightenment. Go to a museum, folks and then go to a bookstore with your children to talk about their favorite exhibit. And buy them a book, too.

Add this to the list of things that Rick Scott doesn’t understand (list also includes ‘Why Medicare fraud is a bad thing’ and ‘Why eliminating people of color and seniors from the voter rolls makes people think you’re an a–hole’).

In other (former) Florida Republican Governor news, Jeb Bush’s education ‘foundation’ accused of selling corporate donors access to taxpayer funded, education dollars.

Gertrude Stein and modernist bookmaking/typography.

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The Arts Shutdown


sad daily tweet from the Hirshhorn Museum
sad daily tweet from the Hirshhorn Museum

This shutdown sucks.

Especially if you live in the DMV (that’s the District of Columbia/Maryland/Virginia).

A pre-teen friend of the family was staying with us for a couple of days. We were going to go hiking in a national park one of the days and even though the park was technically closed… well, there are work arounds. But it was raining too much, so I can’t blame the shutdown on that.

But what do you do with a child that age when you’re looking for things to do? If you live in DC, you take them to a museum. They’re fun, free, and awesome.

Ugh.

Here’s a piece from Hyperallergic called Taking Stock of the Shutdown’s Continued Impact on the Arts that you should check out.