December 2011
33 posts
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"To See The Queen" - Allison Seay
“To See the Queen” Since I was the one who had been ill, it was me she came to see. Everyone wanted a glimpse of her. The people emerged from their houses toward mine and with such caution. They made a visor of their hands. It was as if they were to be accounted for, wading the long uphill, little moving triangles all I could distinguish at first. But the queen came to see only me...
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George Marshall's Racist Redskins →
Larry Brown, who barely made it on the squad.
Michael Tomasky concludes:
‘The team and its fans still often point to a 2004 survey by the Annenberg Center, which found that by a margin of nine to one, American Indians took no offense at the name Redskins.2 They have bigger problems to worry about. I admit to a mild curiosity about whether they’d feel differently if they knew the name was...
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Two Lefts
“Something different,” Thomas Struth
This article from n+1, on the 2008 occupation of the 65 Fifth Ave. building of the New School, contrasts nicely with this article on focused Fire Island aimlessness in The Rumpus.
From the former:
Most of the meeting’s attendees were graduate students in the Social Research division, notably more interested in radical politics than, say,...
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"Rushing through the Night," by Dean Young →
“Rushing through the Night”
by Dean Young
What you wait for rushes through the night. Darkness rushes through the summer night so fast, now it is nearly light. He holds her hand, presses as much as he can see over her sleeping body. The owl rushes back to its nest to regurgitate mice. So many cars rushing through the night into the city with its buildings stuck in the ground. He...
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Helen Vendler v. Rita Dove v. Poetry v. History
Helen Vendler, in the NYRB, takes Rita Dove to task for the supposed mis-editing of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove fires back.
Here’s the play-by-play in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.:
In November in The New York Review of Books, Vendler faulted Dove for a dubious and incoherent selection from the country’s last century of verse, and for poor...
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And now he's dead: Christopher Hitchens
Katha Politt posts on the gender inequalities of ol’ Hitch by “complicating the picture [of all the RIP tributes] even at the risk of seeming churlish”:
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest...
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Self-Portrait after Paul Morphy's Stroke
Self-Portrait after Paul Morphy’s Stroke
By Josh Wild
Paul lost his footing, turned out a spectacular corkscrew.
It looked like he was acting out a series of renga
in the air. The general theme was prevenient grace.
But the white rim broke his form, and he hit
the bathtub water like a big charred bough of a tree.
A semicircle of his shoes—Oxfords, monk straps,
bluchers, a lone...
Steve McQueen
via
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Old Men, Young Ladies
Three excellent pieces on the post-coital push-and-pull between Joan Williams and an aging (and presumably loaded) William Faulkner.
First, there’s Glen David Gold on the transactional nature of blurb-seeking and bedding:
So what we’re seeing is not just an established writer responding to a younger one. Williams had had an affair with Faulkner. It had lasted five years. And that’s...
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From "Tape for the Turn of the Year," by A. R....
ecantwell:
I devour the sunlight off leaves, the sound out of jet engines, I devour the whistle out of the bird, bust his guts open and devour their churning: where is the source? I eat the wind, frilly as a nap, off the mossbeds: I get down &...
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On Narrative Bias in Poetry
And things of that nature, by Joe Weil.
Feat. Hart Crane’s “mustard scansions.”
And also this excellent bit of thought:
“John Ashbery, the darling of many poets opposed to story telling and narrative, is an intensely narrative poet. His narratives shift from line to line, moment to moment, disappearing and dissolving in the current of the poem. He is the master of...