February 2009
64 posts
Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion →
Bill’s Review for Under Which Lyre
January 2009
89 posts
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - “Old Panda...
"Writing" by Howard Nemerov
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters these by themselves delight, even without a meaning, in a foreign language, in Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve all day across the lake, scoring their white records in ice. Being intelligible, these winding ways with their audacities and delicate hesitations, they become miraculous, so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s...
“We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that...”
– Simone Weil
“My Girls,” Animal Collective
Arrested Development Movie is On →
[via Greg]
“I don’t think I’m over-anxious about the future, though I do quail a bit before...”
– Auden in a letter to Ursula Neibuhr, 1947
[thanks, Wes]
The Poet and the Saint →
From the Poetry Foundation’s Podcast Series, “Poetry off the Shelf.” [via Benjamin]
"Requiem," John Updike
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it...
On "Fundamentalism."
We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this...
Super Obama World →
The game. [via poursoi]
Muxtape is back. →
[via alaina]
Painting with Words →
John Updike, 1932-2009 →
A very sad day
Nathaniel Hawthorne on knowledge and novelty
“It is a hopeless - and to me generally depressing - business to go through an immense, multifarious show like this glancing at a thousand things, and conscious of some little titillation of mind from them, but really taking in nothing and getting no good from anything. One need not go beyond the limits of the British Museum to be profoundly accomplished in all branches of Art, Science, and...
Loney, Dear drops a new album →
via Benjamin
“Flume,” Bon Iver
Add Tumblr to your Facebook →
A few years ago, that sentence would have been completely unintelligible.
An excerpt from the trial of Joseph Brodsky (who...
Judge: And what is your profession, in general?
Joseph Brodsky: I am a poet and a literary translator.
Judge: Who recognizes you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Joseph Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of humankind?
“Reading Auden on Dostoevsky, or Trilling on Henry James, and then reading Lacan...”
– Arthur Krystal (via viz)
Donald Hall
…
Do you remember our first January at Eagle Pond, the coldest in a century? It dropped to thirty-eight below— with no furnace, no storm windows or insulation. We sat reading or writing in our two big chairs, either side of the Glenwood, and made love on the floor with the stove open and roaring. You were twenty eight. If someone had told us then you would die in nineteen years, would it...
'We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence' →
Simon Hoegsberg’s 100 meter long photograph.
[via Kottke]
“Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl,” Loney,...
Roger Lundin has a new book →
Barth, Auden, and Milosz apparently play prominent roles…
“How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of...”
– Samuel Barber
That Road Sign Means Something Else....
CRAPSTONE, England — When ordering things by telephone, Stewart Pearce tends to take a proactive approach to the inevitable question “What is your address?”
He lays it out straight, so there is no room for unpleasant confusion. “I say, ‘It’s spelled “crap,” as in crap,’ ” said Mr. Pearce, 61, who has lived in Crapstone, a one-shop country village in Devon, for decades.
Disappointingly, Mr....
"Short Order Cook," Jim Daniels
An average joe comes in and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries. I wait for him to pay before I start cooking. He pays. He ain’t no average joe. The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three. I slap the burgers down throw two buckets of fries in the deep frier and they pop pop spit spit … pass … The counter girls laugh. I concentrate. It is the crucial point- they...
Tweeting in Class
Already, there are some professors struggling with the fact that students use the internet during class, but they’re not at all happy about the idea that they might not just be using the internet to surf around — but to report to others what’s happening inside the classroom. The issue is discussed in detail by Mark Glaser in his latest MediaShift column after an NYU professor...
Fiction Reading Increases for Adults →
Obama's Oath and the Split Infinitive
On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.”...
“Since the French Revolution, there have been great public poems in English, but...”
– Adam Kirsch (via viz)
“La Vie en Rose,” Edith Piaf
[via...
"Under Sirius," Auden
Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus: The heather lies limp and dead On the mountain, the baltering torrent Shrunk to a soodling thread; Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain, Vacant the scholar’s brain Under his great hat, Drug though She may, the Sybil utters A gush of table-chat. And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach, Lying in bed till noon, Your bills unpaid,...
“Like most products of the Midwest, I can’t abide people who fuck off and...”
– Charles Bowden, from his essay, “The Bone Garden of Desire.”
Black Fur by Fredrik, continuing the tradition...
