Close Calls With Nonsense

Want to know what the @#$% happened in last night’s election? Here’s my take on the London Review of Books blog, where I hope I’ll be making less than regular but more than occasional appearances.

I’ve apparently been elected to the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where I’ll be joining such luminaries as Craig Teicher, Jane Ciabattari, Lizzie Skurnick, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Kevin Prufer… fortunately my responsibilities don’t start quite yet. It’s a welcome honor and I hope I don’t screw it up.

I’ll be reading at Fordham University along with Eamon Grennan on Feb. 25; the event’s supposed to focus on Irish poetry, and I’ll probably be talking a bit about the poetry of Paul Muldoon.

And now, music. When I feel frustrated with other people’s irresponsibility or overwhelmed by my own responsibilities there’s really only one band I can completely enjoy: it’s Scrawl, of Columbus, Ohio. I saw them at the end of their final tour, when they were in the process of being dropped by their major label, before about a dozen people in a big white room at the Knitting Factory: it was anticlimactic and sad, and it was also one of the best rock shows I’ve ever seen, and you can usually pick up their great last album, which also serves as a best-of (with out-of-print songs re-recorded), for pennies.

Scrawl broke up after that tour, to nobody’s surprise, and I thought they had stopped making music– but now it turns out that singer and bassist Sue Harshe has at least two great new songs. Is there a record? Are these live videos of Scrawl in Columbus really from 2009, which would mean that the band has come back together? Are there new songs?

Scrawl guitarist Marcy Mays apparently owns part of this Columbus bar. Here are two Scrawl songs, in much better sound quality than you’ll get from the video. And here’s a crazy long interview for compleatists; there was another one in a zine called Too Fun Too Huge, which I ought to revisit someday.