First of all, and perhaps most consequential: we have some stuff we took with us from Minnesota, stuff we realize that we will not use again. Does any one of our readers want any of: two neat, slightly plush, retro pink chairs (soft ones for living rooms, not deskchairs for offices); one comfortable if unprepossessing wooden chair with black vinyl back and armrests (for living rooms, but could be used in a home office); a big but recent and snazzy home-theater system, with speakers; folding lounge chairs (for living rooms); small wooden folding tables, the right size for a plate and a bowl, or for a few books; dozens of narrow shelves, suitable for holding CDs if you are the brick-and-board-shelf type; a wicker bench? There’s almost enough here to construct an entire graduate student apartment. If you want to pick it up and we know you, get in touch. (A few days from now we will post the remainder of our unwanted furniture on Craigslist or someplace like that, and in more detail– but we wanted to give our loyal readers first crack.)
In other news, Nathan continues to coin words. Last week he told me that the water going down the bathtub drain was “snoring.” He may have meant “snorting,” which is almost as cool. (He said it was snorting earlier this week.)
Madison’s paper of record interview Jordan Ellenberg! Jordan responds to the article here, and refutes anonymous detractors here. And he’s right about Joss, of course.
Speaking of Joss: I am having real trouble waiting until this evening (when Jessie comes home from Beacon) to watch the second episode of Doctor Horrible, whose first episode was one of my favorite televisual entertainments this year– though indebted perhaps to Austin, since great supervillains minds think alike. Yay Joss! Yay Austin! (I had no idea that Austin was speaking at the San Diego Comicon.)
And speaking of comics: more comics content (graphic novel autobiography, not superheroes, of course) from Dylan Edwards at the Beacon Blog. That’s a graphic novel I’ll put down a lot of other books to read– once it comes out.
The month so far has consisted of playing with Nathan, teaching two summer school classes, and trying to write 50 essays about 50 sonnets for a book of 100 sonnets, commissioned and now in progress, with 50 more such essays by my stellar coauthor David, whose new book from Yale Press appears to be out now. If you have a very favorite, and relatively obscure, sonnet, send it our way now. What spare time we had in June I spent trawling Victorians, with truly expert advice: it turns out that Michael Field (pseudonym for an aunt-and-niece collaboration who lived openly as lovers in the 1890s) was sometimes very, very good at writing sonnets. He/she/they will go in. A. M. F. Robinson, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, and John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley, wrote sonnets worth reading as well, though perhaps nothing that makes a Top 100 list: it’s truly melancholy-making to see how much late-Victorian poetry (and how much mid-20th-century poetry, too) just misses, how much of it seems talented, well-shaped, or thoughtful, but… not enough.
It’s exciting, on the other hand, after several months of Buying No Music, to see how much cool music there is about. Recommended so far, in a more-or-less rock vein: the still new-ish Dinosaur Jr, where J’s reunion with Lou bears songwriting fruit; the very pretty Maryland outfit Wye Oak; the latest Hold Steady; and the 2006 record from Franklin Bruno and the Human Hearts, which has been in heavy rotation around here now that we finally have one of our own (a copy of the record, we mean, not a human heart).
