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Midweek Staff Meeting – Naptime


Rizzoli-BookstoreThis article contains the most useful map of Washington, DC that you will ever encounter.

This is a fantastic bookstore and I’ve found some incredibly interesting books there and it’s always on my list of places to visit when I’m in NYC, so it would be a terrible shame if were to close.

Some great ways to celebrate National Poetry Month that will also make your more employable. I’m not kidding.

How is this not blowing people’s minds? Or is it? It’s blowing my mind, I know that. The BLACK PLAGUE OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY WAS NOT THE BUBONIC PLAGUE BUT SOMETHING ELSE. That’s right. It was some kind of pneumonia thing spread by sneezing and not something with pus filled pustules spread by rats and fleas. Holy cow, Batman! I’m not kidding. This upends a lot of what I used to think I knew. And what about Camus’ novel, La Peste? How do you say sneeze in French? Le Sneeze? Should that be the new title? OMG!

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Reclining Buddha At Wat Pho


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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Yes, But Was He Any Good?


This article goes into the big question when it comes to J.R.R. Tolkien: was he any good as a writer? The article says… maybe. It’s all a bit wishy washy. And I object strenuously to the negative criticism of his poetry, which I loved when my mother sang to me while reading The Hobbit out loud to a seven year old me. I think that there is also an argument to be made for a little pomo gamesmanship in his writing, if you look at it as having been written in an imaginary language (based on Anglo-Saxon and pre-English languages from the British Isles) and then translated into English. Rather as if someone wrote an epic novel in Klingon and then translated it into English. And, in case you hadn’t figured it out yet – I’m a fan of Tolkien.

Neo-liberalism and negative solidarity.

UC Davis has sold out to Amazon.

Emile Zola: novelist, polemicist, pamphleteer… influential art critic?

There are Crystals in Stone and Pressure in Snow So Are Snow and Stone the Same

Allen Ginsberg was many different from the others.

I’m glad that some newspapers are still covering poetry. Even if it is on the other side of the country (Dear WaPo, would it kill you to write more about literature and poetry ’round here? ‘Cause there’s a lot of it, most of it having nothing to do with poorly researched, pseudo-timely musings on the politics of six months ago).

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Richard III


Last Saturday was a pretty spectacular day. We meandered over to Jimmy T’s, Capitol Hill’s finest greasy spoon breakfast diner for omelettes and fried, jalapeno cheddar grits. Then we began our walk over to the National Gallery of Art’s West Building (whose collection is, basically, art before WWII).

Our path took us by the Folger Shakespeare Library, which is, of course, one of my favorite underappreciated DC destinations. A poster was up on their administrative offices for their upcoming production of Richard III.

STC 22314, title pageAs a teenager, I had a minor obsession with this play. I memorized the opening soliloquy (you know: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent…) and stayed up until 3:30 in the morning to watch our local PBS station’s 1:00 am broadcast of the movie version starring Laurence Olivier as the titular hunchback (in Tampa Bay, if you enjoy good live theater, well your main option is go somewhere else; probably to another state).

But, you know, I’ve never seen it performed live.

So, we went into the theater and, after wrangling over our respective schedules, purchased two tickets for the second night of the play.

She noticed that there was a sign in front of the theater doors that said the theater was in use, but a fellow sitting in the lobby said that we could go upstairs onto the balcony if we wanted to watch the rehearsal.

The actors and director were still blocking scenes and we walked in on the one where Richard is standing over the body of Warwick and plotting to marry Anne. The fellow who told us we could watch came in and revealed himself to almost certainly be one of the actors (though I didn’t get see what his role is).

I could have stayed there all day, but she had never seen nor read the play nor was her knowledge of Western history and culture deep enough to know the story of an admittedly minor player in English history (though a looming figure in English cultural consciousness) and did not want to ruin the surprise of not knowing how things would end when we saw the full play.

So. Great freaking day, right?

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Saturday Post – Hacks


Online predators (it’s not what you think) disguised as missionaries.

Independent bookstores turn a new page on brick-and-mortar retailing - The Washington Post-1Because pointing out that Thomas Friedman is vaguely racist (in a neo-colonial way) idiot whose grasp of current economic and socio-political realities is on par with a chimpanzee who has been locked in a room with a March 3, 1971 edition of Time Magazine.

Oracular revelations and the artist as mystic.

I’m not convinced by the author positing Norman Mailer as a great public intellectual (though, the author is very upfront about Mailer’s deep flaws), but it’s something I think about a lot. The idea of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert deliberately shrugging off the possibility of becoming ‘public intellectuals’ is interesting (and not something I would have thought of), but the point about Paul Krugman drills down to the real issue. Sort of. It’s not just that Krugman’s writing is typically specialized (I wish he would write more deeply about science fiction, apparently, one of his great affections). It’s that the ideal of the generalist is nearly impossible to attain. I read many years an essay where the author wrote that Goethe was the last Renaissance man (in the sense of being able to write and study and theorize as an expert in an incredibly wide range of human knowledge). He was not only a great poet, but one of the greatest novelists of all time. He was a scientist, who wrote innovative papers on meteorology. Too much is out there and available to humanity for someone to realistically be sufficiently well versed in a wide variety of intellectual fields (particularly the sciences) to contribute to a wide variety of fields.

Ooohhh… a new bookstore has opened up in Frederick, Maryland. Not so far away, or not so far away from my work. But otherwise, this is your standard (and, thankfully, accurate so far as I know) story about how indie bookstores are making a comeback.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Cranky Poets


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There be monsters still.

Nothing wrong with being a cranky old poet. It’s how I want to end my life.

‘We are not seen as the guardians of culture, but the greedy gatekeepers of knowledge. The majority of people do not know what publishers actually do.’ That was YS Chi, Chairman of Elsevier and President of the International Publishers Association. And I think it’s a valid point. I respect books published by actual publishers than those that are self published because some sort of gatekeeping process has taken place. Gatekeeping is not bad. And I’m not saying the publishing industry doesn’t often print absolute c–p (Dan Brown, cough, cough). But it’s something and it’s important.

This sounds less like a problem of French books and more of a problem of Anglophone readers…

For a country as surreal as America, we haven’t been very open to surrealism.

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Saturday Post – Where Are All The Jobs?


The recovery of the arts economy is lagging well behind the rest of the economy. And how much of this is due to the growing idea that music and literature should be free on the internet? Because, that’s bulls–t.

Is Amazon even a good business? Not everyone thinks so. Maybe the model sucks. That would suck in a way: brick and mortar killed by a model that turned out to be bad and, presumably, unsustainable.

Maybe. But it would be nice to see both of them survive. But certainly, if, as the highlander says, there can be only one, I’d like it to be indies.

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Sunday Paper – Overdoing It


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If we are marked to die… well, this might not be the worst way. Repeated outbreaks of the ‘pox,’ excepted. Johnson’s biographer was a man of epic tastes, if not an epic man.

The debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Notice how the piece ends by positing Burke (and Paine) as liberals. It is melancholy, isn’t, to read about a time when philosophies, not ideologies alone, could drive history and politics.

Writing and painting are very different things. Don’t get them confused, Cezanne suggests.

Here’s a great profile of the poetry press, Copper Canyon Press. They are not a terribly innovative press – well known (in their native countries) poets in translation and reliably well known poets in America (folks like W.S. Merwin) – but whatever. They publish a lot of poetry and have the clout to get written up in the NYT. What have you done for poetry lately? Huh? Probably less than Copper Canyon. And they did this cool thing where they solicited charitable contributions (they are a non-profit) that would go to help support paying advances to poets. Isn’t that a great idea? Money for poets! About time. Good job!

And speaking of poetry publishers in need of charitable contributions… well, here’s a story about a non-profit poetry organization that needs charitable contributions to keep publishing poetry. My dramatic segue wasn’t really followed up with much was it? But, seriously. It’s a good cause and needs publicity. It’s similar to that Coppy Canyon idea of soliciting money to pay advances to poets. Just helping poets make a living that includes, in some fashion, writing poetry.