Close Calls With Nonsense

Did you know that if you read only poetry and poetry criticism for more than a month at a time your eyelids will fall off? Pretty scary. I’ve come close, but I’m happy to say that I’ve avoided that fate, and not (or not only) by reading about the women’s Final Four: also just finished the first novel in the “Science in the Capital” trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and either it’s really first-rate, or I am the ideal reader for a novel about global climate change in which Washington, DC gets hit by big floods. Or both!

It’s got a witty– but by no means optimistic– ending, and has me scurrying to the second novel in the triad; if you want a short, optimistic look at one way to solve a very big political-cultural problem (though not global climate change) check out this anticorruption tool from India (and from Indian expats). It seems to work!

And if you want to see ecocriticism done entertainingly and reasonably and in a way that might actually interest “lay readers” and American historians (not just professional literary criticism), check out this book about how we see (or don’t see) what goes on in the National Parks.

No, I haven’t stopped blogging, nor have I been thrown into a semi-permanent pit of despair by the paralysis in Washington the Democratic Party the structural impediments to government– to any government at all– created mostly by the filibuster. Perhaps we’re doomed. But literature proceeds; so does lit-blogging.

For example, I see that Sina Queyras, who writes poems I like and who compiled one of my favorite contemporary anthologies, has started blogging at Harriet. So has Craig Santos Perez, whose book about Guam I liked. (I’m not sure if he’d want me to say “about,” though unlike Silliman, I do think poems are about things.) There’s something antithetical to the literary itself about blogging as such, since the former aspires to condensation and lastingness (for me, fading coal notwithstanding) and the latter to immediate, clear response: but in a time when other kinds of reviewing are (to put it quietly) under the weather, thoughtful blogging should be praised.

What else should be praised? The new fables, or prose works, or something (I don’t think they’re prose poems) by Craig Teicher. It’s called Cradle Book, and the first two sections (of three) are more like Kafka’s parables and anecdotes than any short prose I’ve read that’s not actually by Kafka or maybe by Lydia Davis. They are bleak, they have the legato arcs and the diminished minor chords of adult life, they are elegant, they should be read. By you, if you can.

Also recommended: that first book of prose poems by Alison Benis White, in retrospect perhaps the first book of the year; this superb collection of prose (not poems) by J. Robert Lennon, which will form one pillar of an essay about the difference between “prose” and prose poems if I ever get around to writing it (maybe this fall); and the Bikini Kill blog. If this band changed your life, tell them why. I might (I haven’t yet).

I have been writing reviews: of Samuel Menashe in the new TLS (review itself not online, sorry), of Mark Bibbins in the irreplaceable Cold Front.

And poems. When I figure out what the heck to call the next collection of poems, I’ll tell you; you can hear a couple of the new works (they are short, and some of them rhyme) at the Fordham event on Feb. 25, where I read with Eamon Grennan. Turns out the event’s on Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus: till recently I thought it would be in the Bronx.

Close Calls, the book, is an NBCC Award finalist. I’m honored and taken aback to be in such good company.

It’s an extremely good week around here for nonacademic nonfiction, by friends and by famous strangers:

Douglas’s five-minute explication of Kant with reference to Wolverine and Reed Richards, available here as embedded video, isn’t just a very funny, and very useful, explication of Kant: it’s also a good quick show of how to give an effective lecture in the arts and humanities, how to know your audience, and how to use images well.

Sara’s book about Riot Grrrl isn’t out yet, but the site that promotes it is, with teasers for the book and links to her earlier writings. Also recommended.

This morning I finished the big detailed book on Sesame Street that’s been getting publicity everywhere: it’s worth your time if you ever cared about Muppets, and it makes a neat contrast with some very poorly crafted reported nonfiction I’m supposed to review at great length next month.

The first season of Friday Night Lights, the television series, must be the best writing ever done for TV, or at least the best I’ve ever seen– better than seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy, better than Aaron Sorkin’s best moments, better than The Singing Detective, better than the first three seasons of that show about Mafiosi in New Jersey. Jessie and I have been watching it– well, avidly, isn’t the word. (Virginia Woolf’s comments on George Eliot, as compared to her peers in the mid-Victorian novel business, might be the word.) I recommend the second season, too, though maybe not with such buttonholing, over-the-top enthusiasm, and I’m now reading the well-known nonfiction book that generated, first a film, then the TV show. It’s hard to put down.

But you have to put it down if your three year old wants to go play in the snow, and by “play” in his case we mean “play music”: Nathan spent much of the morning and part of the afternoon pretending a big stick was a contrabassoon, then pretending a medium-size stick with a clump of snow (played with a smaller stick) was a viola, and that a set of thin trees were tubular bells. Now that’s outdoor fun I can get behind. Fortunately, when asked, we can find and watch some great punk rock violin. And some smoking rock viola. Merry holidays to everyone; watch out for the freezing rain; and enjoy the new year.

I’ve been out having fun with Jessie and Nathan holed up in a cave proofreading the next two books doing stuff, while far away these things happened:

I have an essay about comic book superheroes in poetry in the most recent Michigan Quarterly Review, which also has a thoughtful and counterintuitive piece on the future history of reading by my colleague Leah Price. My essay has something to say about poems by Bryan Dietrich, and by Ray McDaniel, who has been writing about the Legion of Super-Heroes, who would take a long time to list explain.

The Harvard Crimson decided to run a story about my science fiction course. People seem to like it.

Slumberland Records has a website with a beautiful series of podcasts, but where’s the track listing?

WHRB’s Record Hospital, the Harvard-based rock show that runs each weeknight from late to way-late on 95.3fm in Cambridge and on the web, is running a 25th-anniversary retrospective this week. I just taped an hour of air devoted to 1991, the year punk broke and indiepop got in between the pieces.

I’ve just finished writing about David Baker’s way-uncool– but very good– new book, and I’m excited about Karen Weiser’s first full-length out soon from Ugly Duckling. I really hope I’m not the only reader in America who likes both of these books a lot.

There’s a new book by Michele Leggott which I’m going to have to order right now: did you know that there’s quite a lot about her online?

Oh, and about those books I’ve been down a rabbit hole proofreading: the Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by Ben Mazer, is now available for reading-about-in-the-catalog, and for pre-order, I think; and The Art of the Sonnet, which David Mikics and I wrote together, is too.

Whatever you’re doing, stop doing it; whatever you’re reading, stop reading it, and look at the essay by Ange Mlinko in the current issue of Poetry. It is an essay I know I could never have written, and not only because “father” doesn’t mean what “mother” means (though that too). Nonetheless, it’s in some sense an essay I have long been trying, and always failing, to write, and not only because it describes some of my favorite not-yet-world-famous poets and poems.

If you are a parent yourself (or, hey, just someone who sometimes tries to get people to do stuff that they inexplicably won’t do: a teacher, for instance) you might also appreciate this explanation of how to get people to do stuff. Psychological research: useful, no?

Maybe not so useful, but fun for me to write: I’m in the new London Review of Books on the new D. A. Powell. John Freeman turns in his own vividly laudatory review of the same book for the L.A. Times. Dan Pritchard delivers a mixed verdict at The Critical Flame.

Yesterday I said I’d been enjoying Nicholson Baker and Mark Bibbins, and I nearly promised enjoyable examples: I am almost as good as my word. Baker’s The Everlasting Story of Nory is a book you will find either charming beyond belief or so irritating you’ll close it as soon as you open it, since it is narrated (if “narrate” is really the word) by a cute-as-a-button nine-year-old girl:

“In Shakespeare’s plays what they would do, according to the drama teacher at the Junior School, is they would have an outfit on and they would sew a pig’s bladder in a little tiny place under the outfit that would have a little mark on it so that the person knew right where to stab… ‘But wouldn’t they run out of pigs quite quickly?’ Nory though to herself. ‘And therefore run out of pig’s bladders, and therefore could not do another play?’ Shakespeare would have to go on stage before the play and say, ‘As you may know, we cannot do any of the blood we were going to do tonight, because we have run out of our lovely pig’s bladders. We checked in the cupboard this morning, but due to good business, and a number of highly gruesome plays, we have run out. Please enjoy the show. You can have your ticket refunded if you would rather not see the show without blood, since early next week we will have more fresh pig’s bladders shipped to us. We are also going to be getting some big, fat, juicy cow bladders in stock that we will be using for some extremely disgusting effects in a play I will be finishing soon.’”

Also from Nory, on the practice of literary criticism: “Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give the person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?”

(The solution to which dilemma, squarely faced, might be– as Jarrell said of Marianne Moore’s prose– to make book reviews just “quotations and a few conjunctions.” But then perhaps no one would read, nor solicit, book reviews.)

And from Bibbins’s new one, the second half of a poem entitled “Redemption”:

That was ages ago, when everyone’s predilections
could spread unchecked and without consequence.

We flourished, all dirty and dazzling
as tranny hookers under the Manhattan Bridge.

Yes, but can you [activity] when you’re not [adjective]?
What if you were slightly [adjective]?

Today, in the great corporate slideshow
of the heart, the bullet points are blanks.

Today, though I am feeling positively artisanal,
I’m letting you do the work, like you

like to: I’m letting you pretend you’re still
the sun, drawing an infernal line through everything.

If you are a teacher of literature, and if you teach at an institution with a graduate program in literature, and if that graduate program has oral qualifying exams (a.k.a. generals), and if you have anything to do with those exams, and if those exams cover many fields and periods for all comers (rather than just the field in which a given student expects to specialize), then you will find yourself at some point reading or rereading works at least two centuries and one genre away from what you normally read or read, and you might remember with some small distress how long, or how difficult, some of those works can seem, but you might also discover, or rediscover, such wonderful passages as this one, from Julian of Norwich: it’s chapter V from “A Revelation of Love,” in which she has a vision of “our good lord”:

“And in this he shewed a little thing the quantity of an haselnot, lying in the palme of my hand as me semide, and it was as rounde as any balle. I looked theran with the eye of my understanding and thought: ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvayled how it might last, for methouight it might sodenly have fallen to nought for littlenes. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lastesth and ever shall, for God loveth. And so hath all thing being by the love of God.”

And then, also from the medieval list, Hugh of St. Victor, with sobering advice: “There are those who wish to read everything. Don’t vie with them. Leave well enough alone. It is nothing to you whether you read all the books there are or not. The number of books is infinite: don’t pursue infinity! Where no end is in sight, there can be no rest. Where there is no reast, there is no peace. Where there is no peace, God cannnot dwell. ‘His place,’ says the Prophet, ‘is in peace, and his abode in Sion.’” (Translated from the Latin by Jerome Taylor)

No time to post more now, but do check out the just-launched site for the Harvard UP New Literary History of America, for which I had the privilege of serving on the editorial board. The Press is also running a contest for bookstores around the volume, for which I also wrote a couple of the 200-plus entries. You won’t see my essays on the site, but you will see Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison; Arnold Rampersad on W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington; and Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors on Hurricane Katrina, which is in this extended sense a literary event.

My previous critical book, The Forms of Youth, just got a very thoughtful review at H-Net.

Harvey Hix has been this week’s guest blogger at the Best American Poetry site. Today he was good enough to print my Obama poem, a loose imitation of Virgil. Or maybe it’s my loosely Virgilian poem, an imitation of Obama. My version of Pollio has his own blog, too. The poem will appear again soon (and disappear, at that time, from the BAP blog) on the Web-only lit-journal InDigest magazine.

At the New York Review of Books (!) Charles Rosen &examines my edition of Jarrell’s lectures on Auden. Hannah Brooks-Motl, who coedited that edition,</a> is an associate editor of Gallous magazine, a print-and-Internet journal out of Liverpool whose new issue appears to be out now!