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Midweek Staff Meeting – They Can Take It Away Whenever They Want To


In the ‘cloud,’ corporations own everything you think own (and everything you used to own).

The next American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Academic a–holes.

A very earthy sort of ‘vie boheme’ near Covent Gardens in the eighteenth century.

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Library Late


camus-remixLast Friday, the day after Albert Camus’ 100th birthday, the Scandinavian video art duo ‘Orchid Bite’ performed a piece entitled Library Late at the Atlas Theater on H Street.

And it was amazing.

The centerpiece was long stretches of an audio recording of Camus reading from his first published novel, L’etranger. While there were short passages that were written on the screen in English, as is subtitling the narration, that was infrequent and, what’s more, my limited French was enough to tell me that often the English passages were not those Camus was reading aloud at that moment.

It didn’t so much matter that I could not truly understand what Camus was saying, because the magic was the fact of this voice coming from across time, his voice speaking to us from the grave. Especially since, hundredth birthday aside, Camus has been having a bit of a ‘moment’ these last few years. For me, it started when I read the late Tony Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. But even then, I was catching on to something already fecund in the zeitgeist. Camus was back, baby.

Orchid Bite mixed… not so much music, as sounds and fragments. A piece of a song vaguely familiar, but mostly just evocative tones, mixed with images that directed the mind to Camus’ origins and the setting of the novel: Algeria.

Not an Algeria of camels and orientalist exoticism, but beaches and roads and houses and trains. A place where people lived.

And, again, behind it all, the firm, ghostly, and insistent voice of Camus calling us to… ?

I don’t know.

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The Sunday Paper – Poetry, Please


Yes, young people should read more poetry. And write it and talk about it. And I love how this article emphasizes poetry as a political act, quoting from openly (and less openly) political poems. Occupy Wall Street famously had a library. The movement forward must have a library and there must be plenty of poetry in that library.

Grief for the dead as poetry.

The New York Review of Books turned fifty last week.

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Weekend Reading – What Use Are You?


The slow death of the humanities in the university.

I see nothing wrong with conflating coffee and sex. In fact, I’m also going to start using the word ‘coffee’ when I mean ‘sex.’ However, I will still continue to use ‘coffee’ to mean ‘coffee.’ I apologize in advance for any confusion this may cause.

Some suggested careers for me.

You have been reading it wrong this whole time. Unless you’ve never read Beowulf, in which case… well, really, the question becomes, why haven’t you? It’s a foundational work of western literature and it’s widely available. The late, Nobel prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, wrote a wonderful and, I might add, readable translation of the Old English poem. I know that the article this links specifically name drops Heaney as one of the translators who got that first line wrong, but even assuming this fellow is right, you can just redo those first lines in your head as you read it.

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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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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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‘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.