Accommodatingly

I have some. Here’s what I think of Camille Paglia’s new book. And here’s what I think of this weekend’s huge WNBA trade. Jessie’s opinions may differ.

Another very favorable opinion: do you enjoy realistic (as opposed to sf/ fantasy) young-adult novels at all? Sara Ryan has written a beautiful one. I hope she finishes the sequel soon.

Ryan is also a fun, if terse, Portland (Oregon)-based blogger, focused at least as much on comics as on prose fiction: sometimes she works with comics artist Steve Lieber.

“Do you know what dying is?”
Thought the horse promptly, “Certainly. No-horse.”
“Do you know what life is?”
“Yes. Being a horse.”
“I’m not a horse,” thought Casher O’Neill, “but I am alive.”
“Don’t complicate things,” thought the horse at him.

–Cordwainer Smith, “On the Gem Planet”

Check out this Smith fan site, maintained by his daughter.

And yes, I am working on an essay about him: with luck, later this year, it will see print here.

Via another one of these Valve people, a large group of small pictures which I found howlingly funny. It must have taken forever to construct. (It’s also a parody of this silly right-wing project, with acknowledgements to this master parodist.)

What do Darkseid and Joseph de Maistre have in common? (Maybe more than you’d think, though it’s not my field.)

Because they’re just too nice and too humble, of course. Unfortunately their humility means I have to discover their work via strangers (just as I would with neat work by people I don’t know). Case in point: as part of my continuing search for neat blogs by people I don’t know personally, today I clicked through from Ron Silliman to Ray Davis, a.k.a. pseudopodium who turned out to have close links to something called The Valve.

Some of the people who run it have something to do with the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a methodologically (but not politically) conservative organization which publishes the pretty good journal Literary Imagination. [UPDATE: the Valve is not, as I first thought, officially linked to the ALSC, and some of the Valve folks are not even ALSC members: my mistake.]

The Valve itself gets its title and its presiding spirit from William Empson, one of my heroes (more for his critical writings than for his poetry). Among the Valve’s contributors, I see Jenn Lewin and Matt Greenfield. How cool is that? Go read their work. (Also featured on The Valve: Mark Bauerlein, who wrote one of the angriest, and one of the best, what’s-happened-to-lit-crit? books of the 1990s.)

I should add that most of what I see on The Valve so far concerns academic literary criticism, the structure of academia, and debates about critical methods: it is not, primarily, a poetry site.

If I know you and you’re blogging somewhere on a regular basis and you haven’t told us about it, well, why not?

Jessie and I are in DC for my mom’s birthday. We and six other Burt relatives took her and my grandma (her mom) out for dinner. Many of us ordered pannacotta for dessert. Even a subpar pannacotta is tasty pannacotta. Happy birthday, mom.

My brother Jon is a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering in Ann Arbor, and my uncle Ira is a consultant with an engineering background. When they are in the same place, they talk about technology issues (in this case, fuel cells, fuel efficiency, and hydrogen cars) in very enlightening ways.

Ideally we would have been able to eat pannacotta, travel to DC, celebrate my mom’s birthday with her, and still somehow get to the Target Center for tonight’s big Lynx win.

Oh, for a time-turner…

Unless ours is the only blog you read, you’re probably somewhere near up-to-date on Rovegate. (You can follow the story here, and here and here.) Two political stories you may have missed:

First, how Costco proves that big discount stores can turn a profit while treating workers decently, or even better than decently. (Via David Sirota, another political blog generally worth reading.)

Second, how hard it is to be a journalist in the Phillipines, where reporting means having to carry a gun. (Via Pop Matters, a site that wants to be, and maybe can be, the New Yorker for people my age and younger, though it was recommended to me by, of all people, Geoffrey Hill.)

I debate someone who hates women’s basketball at the Huffington Post.

Jenny says you should read Jane’s book– you really should. A prestigious committee in Britain thinks so too.

I have a new poem (about living in St. Paul) in this neat Canadian magazine. (The poem itself isn’t online, though.)

Some very, very good poets I had never heard of have poems in this neat Canadian anthology.

From New Zealand, a legal controversy involving a very unauthorized– but non-parodic– literary novel about Tarzan. In Nigel Cox’s Tarzan Presley, published in 2004, Tarzan is born in New Zealand, moves to the United States, and becomes Elvis.

The Edgar Rice Burroughs estate has allowed Victoria University Press to sell existing copies of Tarzan Presley, but only within New Zealand, and threatens to sue if the book is ever reprinted. Victoria University Press appears to have agreed to those terms. But now the book is a finalist for a big NZ fiction award.

Cox protested earlier this year: “What was I going to do, write a letter to � whom, I couldn’t imagine � saying, ‘I think I might be going to write a book in which a character from one of your books might appear, though in radically changed form � is that okay?’”

Copyright in New Zealand last just fifty years from the death of the author, meaning that characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) have entered the public domain there; the Burroughs estate apparently bought a copy of Tarzan Presley over the Internet, then contemplated legal action in the U.K. or the United States, where it can still own Tarzan. At least the apes are still in the public domain.

Dobby Gibson lands at Poetry Daily. Good poet. Good guy. Check it out.

While awaiting the bus to Macalester this morning, I saw an unusual vehicle pull up next to me: it was a big red truck tractor (as in tractor-trailer, not as in Farmer Bob) attached to a sturdy, low-riding flatbed (as in flatbed truck, not as in futon), maybe twelve feet long. The flatbed had metal rails near the back and something like an oversized winch built in, the shape and size of a ship’s rudder, but on its side. I think the flatbed was meant to carry motor vehicles, either several cars or one larger vehicle, but without its cargo it reminded me of a barge or an open freight car, the kind hobos used to ride.

And I thought, as the tractor-flatbed stopped at its light: couldn’t somebody just jump onto the flatbed and ride, all the way to Minneapolis or Duluth or Chicago or New Orleans? Who knows where that flatbed truck could go? Who would want to go with it? Not me: I both lack the courage and like the life I have. Still, it’s tempting to imagine somebody else escaping her life that way…

…and then the light turned green, and the flatbed-tractor-truck drove off.

In order to finish the middle third of the academic book I am trying to write, I have had to spend hours or days, here and there, over several years, reading and describing poets whose work I usually dislike, in order to set up the cultural contexts for the other poets– such as Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Paul Muldoon, John Tranter and Ange Mlinko– who are the real reasons for writing the book. I find that description tiresome and irritating; fortunately, it’s almost done now. I’m not sure what that has to do with the foregoing, but maybe one of you-all can guess.

Oh, and I’m currently filling in at Andrew’s poetry-and-criticism site. I had no idea how hard it was to find a high-quality, brand-new or nearly-so, piece of poetry criticism available on the Web on a Monday morning. Maybe Tuesday and Wednesday will be easier.