I haven’t done anything at the Huffington Post in forever, and so I’m going to experiment by cross-posting these updates both at accommodatingly and over there.
Taking a cue from Mrs. Coulter, some bullets of recentness, and a couple of links:
+ Nathan no longer seems fascinated by empty plastic tubes meant to hold bundled-together electrical cords. Instead, he likes pushing his new “car” across the room, which is a definite advance on pulling mommy or daddy across the same room.
+ He said “hi” this morning and seemed clearly to know what it meant (also that it goes together with a wave). Does that make “hi” his first word? Could be. But words for babies seem to coalesce gradually out of protolinguistic babble: how can anyone be certain what a baby’s first word (that is, the first phoneme in a native language to carry a referent) is? But Nathan’s may well be “hi.”
+ Silliman blogs Project Runway, supports Uli over Jeffrey, points out that reality television has scripts too. Silliman watches the same television shows we watch. (Most of the readers whose taste in contemporary poetry more nearly resembles my own seem not to watch television at all, or else they don’t admit it.)
+ Last night I hit a criticism-writing wall: it’s time to put together a fifteen-minute talk about William Empson, later to become (with luck) a full article, and though I know what I want to say, have all the quotations in a big file, and do believe my argument, I just. couldn’t. do. it. I’ve felt quite like this before but not for, oh, months. (With luck, Empson gets back on track tonight.)
+ Due to complications involving former co-workers and our being a one-car household, I missed Sarah and John’s reading. I bet it ruled.
+ The more of you read this interview with Sarah the less bad I’ll feel about having missed the reading.
+ Due to houseguest and school stuff, we also missed the Micawbers reading with Alex Lemon and Amanda Nadelberg. We would go see them read together in December if we had a time-space-continuum altering machine; an earlier version of this post misread this announcement of Amanda’s reading in Nebraska, conflating it with this announcement that Alex read there last year.
+ Ange’s blog is back.
+ The new volume of Finder isn’t as good as the others, but if you like the series as much as I do you will want it anyway– there are cute sequences, fun Jaeger-characterization moments (it’s almost all about him and his sex life), and an eye-opening set of endnotes having to do with author-artist-creator Carla Speed McNeill’s having had her second baby. Future issues of Finder will apparently exist only online (that is, no more single comic-book-format issues), though the trade paperbacks will still be trade paperbacks.
+ Want an intro to Finder? Here’s the first intro page.
+ I think I have finished a poem about Breaking Circus.
+ If Democrats don’t in fact take back the House of Representatives, people will blame Howard Dean, or give up on the party, or throw up their hands in despair, all of which would be really silly reactions: if we don’t in fact take back the House, the fault will lie either with Republicans’ decade-and-a-half’s worth of infrastructure-building state by state (the same process Dean has started belatedly for the good guys) or perhaps with the New Jersey Supreme Court.
+ If you don’t have election day plans, or you want to spend just an hour or two helping Dems, consider MoveOn’s Call for Change. You might not even have to leave your house! (Or: get in touch with your state democratic party. In Minnesota, that’s the DFL.)
+ An earlier version of this post claimed that Jessie wrote it. She did no such thing; all errors are my own.
