Close Calls With Nonsense

I have become convinced that I should use this blog for shorter posts, more often. We’ll see whether my temperament adapts.

I’m in the current Believer on Gary Copeland Lilley (this is not the Believer music issue but the one just before it). I’ve been reading more brand-new books that look New Thingesque: still excited about Joseph Massey’s now that I’ve spent time with it; not sure what to make yet of Joel Bettridge– half these people seem to be Ronald Johnson scholars. I’m pretty sure that I’d rather read Massey than Johnson– then again, I’d rather read Niedecker than read Zukosfky. I recognize that she herself didn’t feel that way.

I might need to stop telling people I like that I would like to read more of their unpublished work, having liked what I saw when I saw what they published. Several MSS of that sort have been sitting unshelved and unread for a couple of months; I must read them or become unhinged. Instead I am reading Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection. (Warning: the site for his novel, though admirable in other ways, plays music without being asked to play music, which book promo sites should not do.)

And we had a summer day.