As some of you know, these are my favorite receptionists. And speaking of My Favorite… did you know Michael Grace from My Favorite had a new blog? There’s a new band, too, called Secret History, but it looks like they have yet to release anything… I’m looking forward to the EP (same name as the blog) called Desolation Town.

And speaking of indiepop reception history– I discovered this summer that Mary Wyer, half the songwriting duo from Even As We Speak, had a newer (not truly new) indiepop act called Her Name In Lights. They sound superb (and a lot like EAWS, with the same sweet voice and the same caustic undertones) on the Internets, but my attempts to order their record have so far been balked… developing…

I had the idea that I’d spend the morning writing letters of recommendation, and instead spent the morning cleaning out hundreds, yes, hundreds, of old emails, making sure I knew what recommendations I owe and for whom and when they are due. It’s much, much better than not knowing. I’m starting to think that John Freeman’s forthcoming book (click here for his take on Jarrell, then scroll down for his own book) will have something to say to me.

And speaking of people with something to say to me: Boston-based poet and critic Dan Pritchard reviews my critical book about adolescence.

Election euphoria still hasn’t worn off around here, I think: said euphoria hasn’t even been derailed by the repeated, and scary, realization that the economy is in the tank– and that the economic collapse explains the size (if not the fact) of the good guys’ win. Time for a letter to Pollio, while the hope lasts.

More seriously I am worried about last-minute surprises, and about the robocalls which have been flooding key states; will robocall slime outweigh the vast advantage Obama has in enthusiasm and volunteers? I and many other Dems are having flashbacks to Kerry, who was “supposed to win” due to his slim lead in key states despite trailing by a couple of points in national polls: we remember that he almost did win (while losing the popular vote, as McCain surely will), but more than that we’re just having bad flashbacks.

I felt a lot better yesterday after, unable to do much else in any free moment but twitch and worry, I decided to make some phone calls for Obama. You can do it from home! (And you can do it pretty late at night, even if you live on the East Coast– you’ll be calling Montana or Nevada!)

Fortunately the only thing I must do professionally between now and the time that polls close on Tuesday is… write half a lecture about Robert Lowell. Which should be fun.

I’m in the current LRB on Frank Bidart, though you may need a subscriber log-in to read the piece on line.

Nathan is typing on the cardboard “computer” Jessie made for him. Cutest bedtime comment this week: “You know, kangaroos can be friends!”

Two poetry books I’m enjoying, by people I’d never heard of, books I might or might not write about in a couple of weeks, but books worth your time: Mark Irwin’s concisely lyrical Tall If,and Gary Copeland Lilley’s bluesy Alpha Zulu, which includes poems set on nuclear submarines.

Next Thursday (two days post-election) I’m reading in Ann Arbor. See you there?

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!

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.

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.

The Fresno Bee, paper of record (at least en ingles) for the region where Juan Felipe Herrera grew up, runs a story about him because I reviewed him.

Jenny has more to say about indexing, and about, er, um, me.

Jacket magazine reviews my book of poems. Thanks, Michael Aiken!

If there were some way– a pill, perhaps– I could prevent myself from following poll numbers and other micro-level, insusceptible-to-my-action political news right now, I would accept it (I’d take that pill). As it is, the micro-following of micro-political news, while it’s probably bad for my writing, my life and our household, does mean I can enjoy, even before it hits the airwaves, wonderful pieces of televisual rhetoric like this one, from an ad released today.

Also televisual, and also wonderful: Sesame Street videos, some new (Norah Jones on the letter Y), some with added nostalgia points. Nathan and I especially like, so far, the sock-puppet-ish Sesame Martians, who say “yep yep yep” and think telephones are people too. No, not those Martians, and certainly not those Martians– though they make as good an excuse as any to note that this book holds up extremely well. I wish somebody had released it in the States. And I wish I didn’t need sleep– but, really, I do.

*Readers much older or younger than I am may not recognize the allusion to a TV ad from the early 1980s; odd, and sad, what seems to stick in the mind.

Old poets foster’d under friendlier skies,
..Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,
..At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes;
And you, old popular Horace, you the wise
..Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay,
..And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,
Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;
If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere
..That once had roll’d you round and round the sun,
..You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,
You should be jubilant that you flourish’d here
..Before the Love of Letters, overdone,
Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

Tennyson added the title years after he first published the sonnet: how much snarkier, or more surprising, would the ending seem were its complaint not so focused in advance?

Also fun, and also unlikely to make it into our anthology (though who knows, as yet?): Eugene Lee-Hamilton. And– does anyone know much about Emily Pfeiffer, or want to suggest favorite poems by Anna Seward, Edmund Gosse, or Alice Meynell? I don’t like the work of Meynell’s that makes it into contemporary Victorian-Women-Poets anthologies, but there’s a sonnet in this 1895 anthology that’s rather powerful: when I’m done grading summer school papers and get some time back in the library stacks, I shall have to see if there’s more.

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?

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.

This is my favorite picture of LaBelle. She came to us by way of Helene, a petite French lady who lived downstairs from us in New York. When Helene died, she left us LaBelle in her will, along with a small stipend for her care.

LaBelle took a while to adjust to her new home: three other cats competing for territory and attention made for a tough transition. But she eventually established herself as alpha cat (particularly after Cleo passed), and her hostility towards us abated. She would sit in laps at inopportune times (at the dinner table, while we were on the computer) and purr at decibels high enough to be heard across the room.

LaBelle lost a lot of weight earlier this year, and after many trips to the vet and trying lots of avenues of treatment, we decided today that she’d grown so thin and lethargic that it was time for us to let her go.

So long, LaBelle. I always felt badly that I couldn’t sing to you in French like Helene did. I hope that you find each other in the beyond.

Also I keep listening and listening, and pumping the occasional fist along with, the latest Hold Steady. Tens of thousands of indie-rockers, I’m told, now do likewise.

Also our friends keep writing litcrit books: I’m halfway through Heather Dubrow’s, and hoping soon to start Heather Clark’s. And Marit’s. (Work while you can…)

My summer-school intro-to-poetry class was unalloyed pleasure this morning: we made up “extra” lines to the famous passage from “Jubilate Agno” about Smart’s cat, and then decided which lines would fit, and why, and then spent the rest of the class on Emily Bronte (”Remembrance”) and “Milkweed and Monarch” (Muldoon).

As you might expect, given his current tastes, Nathan loved it. Loved it so much, in fact, that he started to play and sing “City of Immigrants” (the title, which is also the chorus) on his guitar while Steve Earle was playing the song.

So after dinner, we watched the official video, which he loved, and which is quite kid-friendly: black and white shots of newcomers to New York, of several decades and several skin tones, intercut with Steve Earle and company playing the song (it has a lot of hand-played drums).

After watching it twice we looked for other Steve Earle videos that seemed like they would be kid-friendly. First we found what seemed to be the video for his song “Galway Girl.” We love the song, but it wasn’t a video, just a still shot of a title with the song playing.

Then we watched this live acoustic version of “Jerusalem,” a song I adore and admire (in fact, the song that, when I first heard it, caused me to like Steve Earle). Nathan liked it. He noticed that I liked it too. He noticed, as well, that Steve Earle sounded rather passionate about something.

Nathan: “What’s he singing about?”

Me: “He’s singing about a place called Jerusalem. I like the way he sings. There are people there, and he really, really wants them to stop fighting.”

Nathan (after a beat): “Like our cats!”

And then we watched “City of Immigrants” one more time. After which he made up new words for it in the bath.