Accommodatingly

Nathan and Jessie and I spent the morning on a whale watch with Grammy and Kevin, had lunch at the place that says it invented fried clams, and– rather than dinner– had something better than dinner: a rock show at the Lowell Spinners field, with K and W (friends), and with Conor Oberst, whose work I still love, and Wilco, whose new record is just fine. We are having a summer!

During the brief interval of inaction at home this afternoon Nathan lay down in a dark room on a “beach” made of pillows and told me, and then told Jessie and Grammy, all about the African hawk seagull, whose friends are regular seagulls, but who is different from the regular seagull species: the African hawk seagull is purple and orange, has a light in the tail like a firefly, eats blowfish which it finds by diving into blowfish schools, and lives on the moon. I hope this sort of imagination persists into adulthood. Or else I hope for something very like it.

Nathan turns three today! It seems like just weeks, sometimes, since we brought our little guy home from the hospital– and now he speaks in complex sentences, distinguishes conifers from deciduous trees, and asks us whether sushi is Chinese (for informational purposes only, I suspect– for all his curiosity about the world he still has trouble eating new things). He’s the best. Jessie made apple-ginger cake for his school friends (those not out sick) this morning, and I’m about to go home so he can have (what he’s apparently requested) pizza. But before I do, and since we haven’t done such a thing here in a bit, a couple of literary and musical timelinesses that ought not pass without notice:

Daniel Karlin in last week’s TLS had the best piece of literary criticism I’ve seen so far this year, a convincing re-evaluation of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. You can’t read Karlin’s piece online, but you can read an editor’s summary here.

Second best: the essay about Jane Austen, Emma and care-giving from the current (it just came this morning) Michigan Quarterly Review. Again, the essay itself appears not to be online, but here’s the question it asks: does Emma Woodhouse’s father have what we, in the 21st century, call dementia? How much of Emma makes more sense if he does?

Mick Imlah, the Scottish poet and critic who since 1994 was my editor at the TLS, has died. I knew him primarily via email, as an editor– we only met in person once: nonetheless he was as generous, patient and attentive to me as I could have wished– and I recommend a look at the poems as well.

His last book was widely expected to win Britain’s Eliot Prize; instead, the prize went to the last book that he sent me for review, Jen Hadfield’s Nigh No Place. I recommend it, and Hadfield’s prior book too.

Merge Records are finally, finally going to reissue (the CD goes on sale in two weeks) two of my favorite indie-rock records: the first two discs by the Volcano Suns. You can download two of their best songs at this absurdly copious and apparently wholly legal MP3 blog (which also has lots of other songs I mean to check out soon).

I learned about the Volcano Suns and about thousands of other obscure indie bands in the early 1990s at WHRB’s Record Hospital, which, L. informs me, now has its own Wikipedia entry. L. also informs me– I’m shocked, really– that a blogger in the employ of the Boston Phoenix has posted a story about Record Hospital’s two-decade archive of handwritten playlists and comment books: if you want to know what I spent most of 1992 thinking about, you can just click that link. The Phoenix has wisely chosen to reproduce the handwritten comments of Patrick Amory, whose handwriting my own grew to resemble after a couple of months at WHRB.

Rae Armantrout, that is, reading today Tuesday Oct 7 in the Plimpton Room of the Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, on the Harvard campus, at 6pm, for free. (Warning: link above goes to PDF.)

Unforeseen, should-have-been-foreseen problem in deciding to write about 50 sonnets in less than a year: if you begin with the twenty that you know best, of whose shapes and implications you feel most sure, and put off the ones that require new research, your rate of progress will seem rapid at first, then slow greatly as you reach the last fifteen. By “you” I mean “I.”

It’s too bad the Milwaukee Brewers aren’t even more like Barack Obama. And it’s too bad I don’t do personal blogging more often, because then I would have linked to Jordan’s fun piece on that team before the Phillies eliminated them. On the other hand, now I get to link to his latest Slate piece, about probability, gambling and the financial crisis.

I was almost ready to stop worrying so much about the upcoming election, given the latest polls, till I read this. Now I guess I’ll worry for four more weeks. If you click the link, you can worry fruitlessly too!

Jessie says Nathan’s been reading the development books, just so that he knows what to do. Now more than ever that seems to be true. Downside: he’s stunningly contrarian on occasion– a two-and-a-half year old trying to get in, after a slightly late start, his full quota of one million times saying “No!” before he turns three. Upside: Monday night, after I lay in the dark with him for a couple of minutes (something we do after we finish reading stories and turn out the light) he said “I’m a different person. I’m not you!”

Last week Jordan accomplished a great deal of David Foster Wallace memorial blogging. You should go read it. I wasn’t quite as deeply affected as Jordan was by DFW’s sudden, grim passing, but I was very deeply affected by Infinite Jest when I read it, perhaps a year after it came out– I took it with me on trains, couldn’t put it down, found it not daunting but completely absorbing, and I think that if I reread it I’d still find it so. The intellectual games served a temperament; they were fun and sad and they got me to say “Life really might be like that.” What if it is?

When you’re done reading Jordan’s blog, but before you tear yourself away from the Internets, you should go look at Forrest Gander’s new writing on the Poetry Foundation blog– and at the rest of the fall team of bloggers there, too, especially Javier Huerta, whose verse I did not know at all but whose short piece about privilege will go on provoking talk for some time.

This week I don’t know which of the two desiderata I want more intensely, or more often: for Barack Obama to win this election, or simply for the election and its attendant news blitz to end, so that I can clear the mental real estate now devoted to such questions as whether cell phone-only voters skew polls (turns out they do) and what happens if there’s a 269-269 tie (if Obama has won the popular vote, Obama probably becomes President; if McCain has won the popular vote, it’s a national tangle that makes Florida 2000 look like a slice of pie).

If you too are way too close to the election, and if you have a couple of slices of time in which you can do something (other than write a check– checks are nice) to affect the outcome, and if you too would like Obama to win, you can use his state-by-state tool in order to learn where to go and what to do, even if you live in an uncontested state. If you live in Massachusetts and want to do something from home, you will almost certainly be asked to call New Hampshire.

Not political news– there’s enough of that elsewhere, and I have nothing to add to the best of its writers– but good news anyway: Elixir Press appears to be back in action. This was a good smallish literary press and magazine based in Minneapolis that became hard to contact right around the time they published Tracy Philpot’s stunningly good third book, which I reviewed a while ago. (They also published her cracklingly good second book. I don’t recommend her first.)

I knew the press had moved to Denver along with its chief operator, the poet Dana Curtis; I knew that it had continued to accept and publish books, but I wondered whether the books would become widely available… and today they sent me a big stack of their recent pubs, as if to say: we’re back! I look forward to reading the rest of them, and encourage you to have a look. It’s not avant-garde, it’s not “mainstream” (whatever that means), it’s usually energetic and serious, and it’s always work Dana genuinely likes.

Also in Denver: Monica, whom we haven’t seen for a while because she’s been busy trying to get Barack elected, tells Slate what it’s like on the convention floor. “Sweet trusting Coloradans… Enjoy your time in the tar pits!”

As for the fruitless distraction that ensures from my own, and others’, quasi-obsessive following and parsing the speeches, the polls, the pols, the windbags, the winds, and seeking reassurance therefrom, this letter to Josh Marshall nails my recent mood. I want our guy elected, and the Republicans gone. But I don’t really know how to bring it about. Maybe the people who are making plans around Obama do. I’m glad I’m not one of them. I would be pretty terrible at doing politics for a living, except maybe in a verrry specialized, writing-intensive capacity, and I’m glad it’s not my job.

Summer school is over! I’m sure I would teach either class again– but perhaps not both at once. We wrapped up Intro to Poetry by spending the morning looking at MSS in Houghton Library. Robert Browning’s handwriting was small, neat and legible; so was Keats’, at least on what looked like a fair copy of “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” It looked a lot like the version we know, except that “fair serene” came later: here the line was (if I remember correctly) “Yet never did I know what men could mean.”

Jordan praises the current scoring system for gymnastics, and I’m convinced. Ron Silliman praises something called Theory, and I am surprised to find that I largely agree! I praise Juan Felipe Herrera, in a piece that has generated some neat positive feedback and at least one blogger’s disbelief.

Jenny indexes her book. That’s not the way I did it…

Nathan, seeing me eat gooseberries last week, and then learning their name, told me “They go quack! quack!” He’s also started to say, at the start of a mealtime, “Thank you [or "Thank you, mommy"] for making dinner,” and when he’s done, “I’m all done” (pushing himself away from the table, or walking away and then) “It was really good though.” Could our little guy be more adorable?

Still sad about our dignified, and now departed, kitty. Nathan reacted (last week) not so much with his own sadness, as by asking, fascinatedly, whether and why Mommy and Daddy were sad. Right now he’s playing with his friend W and with one of his teachers from last year, H, who comes over here to hang out with him some summer mornings: if I were an ideally responsible teacher I would be assigning grades to summer school papers all morning. Since I am not such a teacher, here are some things we found on the Interwebs lately, things we thought our friends might want to see:

At Rain Taxi Online, Eric Lorberer, Roger Gilbert, and a lot of other people tour John Ashbery’s house. It’s a big deal, a beautiful layout, and rather a coup for Rain Taxi– go poke around.

At the PoFo site, there’s a newly-reprinted prose poem by the inimitable C. D. Wright, a good introduction to her casual intensities. (I say “inimitable” advisably, since so many young poets have started trying to imitate her– mostly a welcome development, about which I may have more to say in print.)

Douglas has just won an Eisner! This post-Eisner interview makes me wish we were in San Diego too– though it’s not so much a comics year for me. More of a sonnets year. Or a library year.

We live on the worst street in Belmont. By “street” I mean “paved, or semi-paved, road surface,” and by “worst” I mean that it’s pretty bad.

But we like Belmont anyway. Here’s a great photo of Nathan, Bubbe and Zayde at our local pool. (You may have to click on “Related Photos” to see the right pic after you click the link.)

Last week we saw Tilly and the Wall. The first true rock and roll show we saw this year, it was also one of the four or five best rock shows I’ve ever seen. And not just because there was tap dancing. We knew there would be tap dancing. We didn’t know there would be a wall-pounding encore of “Lost Girls.”

It’s Time to Grade Papers. Soon enough it will be time for new poetry books: among those I have not, or not yet, written about anywhere, I’m especially excited to re-open and re-scrutinize Craig Arnold’s vivid, fierce and sexy Made Flesh (it’s not much like, and it is better than, his well-crafted first book), and the brand-new, came-in-the-mail-yesterday third book from the prose poet Donna Stonecipher.

Rebecca introduces James K. Baxter!

Several new poetry-related blogs, among them XPoetics, from Robin Tremblay-McGaw and others: I’ll be coming back to it, esp. since I’m teaching Niedecker for the first time this fall, and advising a thesis on Stein: how would an account of 21st century poetry with those two as giants of the 20th century look? (It’s not quite the account I would want to give, but I think it’s the account that some poets I really like right now– e.g. E. Treadwell– want.)

Last night we had fun dinner guests, some of the people I miss most from Macalester, though they left Minnesota years before we did: Henry and John and Laura, who now live in Pittsburgh. In more good news, Laura, who studies 18th- and early 19th-c stage performers, now has an essay on muffs and their meanings forthcoming in Fashion Theory, a journal I hadn’t known, to which I will probably never contribute, but which I now hope that I am likely to read.

You know, I’m enjoying this summer, I am. But I wish each week were ten days long: seven just doesn’t seem like enough, right now.

who was on the Leonard Lopate show explaining A. Rod’s salary, Steve appeared on the Bryant Park Project this morning sharing his thoughts about the Women’s Final Four.

So how long before Sports Center snaps them up?

Jessica Bennett is now the second female wrestler in Connecticut history to win a state-level medal; her coach credits “technique, vision and dedication.” More technique, vision, and dedication, as always, at Beacon Broadside, where– among recent posts– I was especially struck by this one, which begins: “It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child.”

New work by Steve online in the last few weeks: on Robert Creeley, on DC history (thanks, Zach!), on science-fictional poetry, on several poems (with two poems of my own) in the brand-new Drunken Boat, on poetry in general (up since December). I’m also in the new Pleiades, though not online, and I’m coaching high school swimming in Winona, and rowing in New Zealand. I don’t know where I find the time. (The things you learn when you sign up for Google Alerts.) UPDATE: I’m also in the current issue of Modern Philology, though you may need to sign in through certain academic websites in order to see the articles there.

Alison Frank, whom I knew in grade school, and whom we see all the time at Nathan’s school (because she has a child there too), appears as a reviewer on H-Net, more than once, and as the author of a book reviewed. Go Alison!

And finally– I should have linked to this blog months ago, but better late than ruined by inappropriate ethics rules: if you are at all interested in the taking of oral histories, the conduct of research in history, folklore and the social sciences, and the weird rules that threaten all those things, you ought to be reading Zach’s Institutional Review Blog. I know I will be.

Among Nathan’s new cool behaviors this week alone:

One of the things he wants to do his “own self!” (as he puts it) is read books. Typically he will let us read him a book and then insist on reading it all his “own self.” He flips through the pages and recites, sometimes all, often most of, the words, in order, matching them to the appropriate pictures. This is– how can I put it?– way cool.

Also cool: toddlers still acquiring lots of language are metaphor-generation machines. Metaphor dynamos. Metamos, if you will. Many of them have to do with the moon. Since last week we’ve been hearing that when the moon isn’t visible in the sky it’s hiding. “Moon hiding,” Nathan says, almost whenever he’s outdoors during the day.

Also on the metaphor front: tonight he identified the pictures of snowflakes in this book as moons. Then he began counting them. One moon, two moons, three moons!

And tonight, tonight, he told his first (self-conscious, verbal) joke! (He’s done physical humor for a while.) Nathan pointed to a green cup he had filled with water (during his bath) and said “Nathan elephants in cup… no!” I laughed, he repeated it, I told him he had told a joke, and then he announced to us, proudly, “Nathan joke! Nathan joke!” We think the humor had something to do with this book, which he has been reading his own self.

Maura, who has been one of my favorite people since the years when Holiday were touring, has a great piece at the Chronicle about the attractions of a library career. Required reading, I’d say, for anyone on their way to a Ph.D. who isn’t quite sure she/he wants to move absolutely anywhere to take absolutely any job in a given academic field, and wonders if there’s a life path that could make more sense: for many such folks, there is. And she explains it.

If posts have been light around here, it’s (still) because we’re blogging here and here. And because I’m about to fly here. Apparently I am staying on the Queen Mary, which is not the same ship on which the Olympic basketball teams stayed.