The Future of Iraq
Texts & subtexts sketch a pallid nightmare in this NY Times story: Grozny is the Baghdad of the future. Hasn’t this been the real plan all along?
Three years after a wave of guerrilla and terrorist attacks caused many analysts to say that Russia’s war against Chechen separatists could not be won, the republic has fallen [...]
Burma
I’ve been thinking about Thich Quang Duc in Saigon in 1963 when Diem’s thugs attacked the monasteries & about the ongoing situation in Burma. James Wimberly catches the moral & political issues clearly in this post at the RBC. I’d go further than Wimberly in my defense of the Vietnamese revolution, but that’s not really [...]
Can Mere Language (Without Pictures) Be Obscene?
An American court will decide. It is apparently an unsettled legal question. In any case, bluenose Pennsylvania prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan, employing the awesome power of the federal government, has indicted dangerous porno queen Karen Fletcher, “a 56-year-old recluse living on disability payments . . . for writings distributed on the Internet to about [...]
Literature as Handbook for the Genteel Warrior
That is what Elizabeth D. Samet appears to have written in her forthcoming book, excerpted here in the NY Times Magazine. I find her her eerie coolness about the Iraq War deeply unsettling. I suppose it is a good thing that the young officers she describes carry Wallace Stevens or Andrew Marvell into the gibbering [...]
Best Name of a Place to Work
Donald Lamb is the fortunate soul who gets to print on his business card that he is the director of the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago. I actually wrote a poem once about a cosmic gamma ray burst, though apparently this is a different phenomenon from the one described in [...]
The Frost Medal
Inside Higher Ed reports that some members of the Poetry Society of America are peeved that John Hollander has been awarded the Frost Medal:
Board members of the Poetry Society of America — many of them professors — are quitting and fighting over fallout from the society’s decision to give the Frost Medal, one of its [...]
New Species Found In Vietnam
When I was living in Vietnam in 2000-2001 I remember reading reports about several new species, including a kind of antelope, I think. Now eleven more species have been found in central VN. There is something rich & eden-like about Vietnam: rivers & mountains & everything in between.
Encouragement
The last three groups of poems I have sent out to journals have come back with the “This is not our standard rejection slip” rejection slip. I guess I should take this as a compliment, especially since I’ve gone quite a while without trying to publish poems, but it feels vaguely patronizing. (That’s not exactly [...]
Franz Wright
Helen Vendler, writing in the NYRB, [subscription required], doesn’t think much of the poetry Franz Wright (son of the poet James Wright) has written after coming back from alcoholism & psychosis & converting to Catholicism. I think the problems she identifies were there before the conversion, which is to say that I can’t blame religion [...]
Checking Things off the List
This morning I finished writing a proposal for a small grant. I also wrote the first sentence of a conference paper that I don’t have to deliver for five weeks. The first sentence is always — well, usually — the hardest.
Now I’m going to print out a bunch of my poems & look at them [...]
