Delightful: the temperature drops. I’ve realized off late that whenever I have a massive mound of critical projects, I watch a monstrous amount of reality T.V. (ideally of the competition variety) and nonfiction T.V. On the docket for today: mountainous amounts of Man v. Food and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations as I work on transforming a stubborn, reluctant paper on Plutarch, Cavafy, and historicism into what I actually want it to be; I’ve been watching Top Design since Saturday while I tear through Coleridge’s Kubla Khan; Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers are solid, too, especially for reading the new John Serio collected Wallace Stevens alongside the not-so-new Library of America collected Wallace Stevens.
June 19, 2009 • 7:24 pm 1
Jibber-jabber-ish
From the department of Small Talk, specifically the sub-department called “When in doubt, talk about the weather”: this wet flannel blanket weather that we’ve got here is driving me insane; it’s very “sweat lodge.” I continue to be fairly bad at the simple act of returning books to any and all libraries. My reclusiveness hit a special high point this morning when, upon leaving my place for errands, a very nice-seeming person waved and said “hey”: I returned the greeting, and then promptly turned around and went back inside. Close enough. I will have to prod my reclusiveness into seclusion (ha, ha) this evening to a drinks party in order to bid an adequate farewell to a gal pal of mine who is, devastatingly enough, moving out of MA: bye, Ro! In other news, I think Patricia Longwood’s funkily-titled poem “The Pro-Vivisection Poems” is fantastic. I have nothing really to write here today, but popular blog mythology says that if I only write here when I think I have something to say, I’ll never write at all, which defeats the purpose. I have now written approximately 200 words, none of which actually needed to be written. What an experiment . . . !
June 18, 2009 • 7:37 pm 0
Another take
A few ramshackle things about the past six months . . . I’ve discovered a fascination for the show Ice Road Truckers, and am eagerly awaiting the new season of that Everest show on the Discovery channel. I’ve also discovered fabulous furniture stores, Eddie’s in Somerville and his brother’s store Metamorphosis on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. I’m more reclusive than usual off late. At the same time, though, I’m busy concocting elaborate plans to get in to this winter’s New York Fashion Week (the plans involve impersonating celebrities and police officers, imaginary foreign languages, imposing sunglasses, and most certainly will land me in jail if executed), and I’m writing about the problems and advantages that come with the idea of a “speaker” in poetry, especially contemporary poetry. I’m loving the assistant poetry editor gig at AGNI, and I cannot possibly be happier with the existence of a new BerryLine location a mere two blocks away from my digs. The very fine people over at Salamander and Free Verse have taken one poem of mine each, to be printed later this year, and I’ll have a microreview coming out in Boston Review some time soon. My little Mac is falling apart: one key is utterly bust (it’s the right arrow key, if you can believe it), and a gentleman caller had to essentially manufacture a new charger for me. I’m amazed that no one was electrocuted during the process, and even more amazed that the makeshift charger works; battery life is dwindling; oh, also, occasionally I get these fun little white lines that run all up and down my laptop’s screen, and the warranty’s long gone.
I’ve gone and wiped all the (six or something) entries from this blog that I’d written in 2008. In the next coming days, I may or may not (leaning right now toward “may not,” but who knows) post my clips on this under original pub. dates. (A friend of mine and absurdly brilliant critic, George Scialabba, does this on his site . . . I think it’s a swanky idea, and I also think that instead of reading my things, if and when I post them, you will have so much more fun reading his work at georgescialabba.net. Oh! Also! Definitely order his fabulous new book, “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” is gloriously reviewed in many swashbuckling places, like here and here.) So it’s a new slate for “Deliberately”; a fresh start, or no start at all? Or an un-start? You decide. Speaking of the “you decide” phenomena, how on earth did Susan Boyle lose Britain’s Got Talent?
