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Midweek Staff Meeting – Yes, It Is A Problem


I took this picture at the Providence Athenaeum
I took this picture at the Providence Athenaeum

Yes, H.P. Lovecraft was racist; yes, I still love his stories; no, his milieu doesn’t excuse it; and yes, it is an issue.

It’s only a matter time before they just buy the whole damn state. After all, under Rick Scott and GOP, it’s already for sale.

Feminism is not a wave (nor a particle).

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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Medieval Science


Robert Kelly’s ‘An Alchemical Journal’

Notes towards a poetics of the Dow.

We don’t need publishers and bookstores to take on Amazon. We need the DOJ to take on Amazon.

What’s like being president of the Poetry Foundation?

No, not nothing.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Remembering Gary


How Gary Gygax came to leave TSR.

I’m on the side of the antifree.

What’s your chair look like?

chairs

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Unpopular Philosophies


Michael Oakeshott and  the ‘politics of mortality.’

Books and bookstores are an essential social good. So say the French. Can you really disagree with them on this?

Amazon invents a library. That costs money to rent books.

Just because I love poetry, does not mean I appreciate sentimental blather about poetry.

My all-time favorite reply to the question “What is the one thing you like least about reading in print?” came from an American: “It takes me longer because I read more carefully.” Isn’t careful reading what academe was designed to promote?

A union for bookstore employees!

Please note: this is from the organizing campaign. Book Culture employees are not unionized and the store rehired a bunch of fired workers.
Please note: this is from the organizing campaign. Book Culture employees are not unionized and the store rehired a bunch of fired workers.
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Weekend Reading – Animal Metaphors


immanuel-kantI like hedgehog novels. I think. I don’t know. This is confusing.

The year of living Kantically.

‘The liberal state is in crisis, basically, because its regulatory, legal, and political institutions have either been captured, or have been laid siege to, by the economic interests they were created to control. While the liberal state was never intended to enforce distributive equality, it was always supposed to keep the power of big money from suffocating competition and corrupting the political system. This is the task it struggles to perform today and must recover fully if it is to regain the confidence and support of the broad mass of its citizens.’

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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Local Boy Done Good


gal1-243x366If you read through the whole article (fascinating, in and of itself), you’ll see a contribution made by the Folger Shakespeare Library!

A great little way that the Indiana Poet Laureate is promoting a bit o’ poetry literacy.

Deep reading Dickinson.

I gotta recommend Diego’s. Have the Greek fellow do it, if he’s available.

I worry that the quality of public intellectuals has gone down in correspondence with the decline in the quality of the public’s intelligence.

But they’re doing something right over there – in this case, protecting brick and mortar bookstores from predatory pricing practices.

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Weekend Reading – Utilitarianism


dc_guerrilla_poetry_insurgency_t_shirt-r25d98f20201d429295cd22d5cef3e520_804gs_512I need it.

The internet age and its reading discontents.

Approaching fatherhood philosophically.

The economist as novelist. The economist as literary critic/theorist.

The canon will never die. Or, rather, the debate about the canon will never die. Nor the canon, really. It will just get bigger. But if it gets too big, does it also get meaningless. It’s a legitimate question, though my own opinion is ‘no.’

Teach poetry.

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Weekend Reading – I Should Be Working There


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I want one of these offices.

Great people, each and every one!

More manifestos, please!

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Weekend Reading – In Praise Of All The Saints


St. Mark’s is saved!

Another one (Amazon user) bites the dust.

They had a sort of reunion of these folks a couple years ago at the Folger Shakespeare Library and it was a great night and a great reading. I’m certainly jealous of their experiences.

This is part of a short series about poetry and poets, viewed through the lens of the western Zodiac. This last one contains my sign – Libra. How does this analysis relate to me, to my poetry? Does it? In truth, I always like to think that maybe it does, even if only a little…

A marvelous summer reading list from a great bookstore.

He did and so should you.

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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – New Media, The Internet, Crowdfunding, Etc, Are Not A Replacement For Existing Cultural Institutions, But Are Add-Ons, At Best


1-prehistoric-code

The history of Historical Materialism.

This is what a clay envelope looks like.

This sucks. Is this true? Does no one read Henry Miller anymore? Seriously? Why not?

Let’s not overstate the promise of participatory democracy to drive, direct, and fund our culture.

Art in the service of labor.