Randall Mann, a poet much influenced by Thom Gunn, remembers Thom Gunn.
Adam Roberts at Strange Horizons, which I should read more often, turns in a fine review of a fine academic book, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr’s, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, which I’ve just reviewed for a reliable but slower-moving academic journal. Anyone with any interest both in academic lit-crit matters and in sf as a literary genre pretty much needs to stop whatever he or she is doing this morning, find Csicsery-Ronay’s book and start reading it now. (Note: both-and, not either-or.)
Jessie and I and Nathan stayed up on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks and the pops orchestra on television a couple of weeks ago, and we found ourselves wondering: how did a piece of music associated with Napoleon’s retreat from Russia become so strongly associated with a US patriotic holiday? Andrew Duckenbrod at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the story.
I’ve been asked to chat about my summer reading at the fine National Book Critics Circle blog, but I wanted to put in a link to it in advance of said chat: it’s always full of suggestions. As I think about what to say and do there I’ll be reading Phoebe Putnam’s week of contributions to the Best American Poetry blog: she’s somebody who thinks about graphic design and other visual matters all the time, incisively, and she’ll be discussing book cover design over there.
And on Thursday I’ll be watching the critic and editor Willard Spiegelman at Porter Square Books. Maybe you will too.
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.
…and their friends and allies, and anyone who has just signed a book contract.
I’ll be attending the Small Animal Project reading this Tuesday, with David Blair, David Rivard and Sam Witt: see you there?
We’re off to Greenfield, Mass. for the weekend– almost but not quite coincidentally, the home of one of the two very good 19th century American poets most people who read contemporary American poetry have never read. (Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt being the other.) See you next week.
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.
