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.