One museum opens
in a new location
while another
is perilously close
to flickering out

§

A review
of Boston’s ICA
suggesting
that the architecture
outshines
the art

(You’re not alone,
SF MoMA!)

§

Bruce Langhorne,
one of the great musicians
of the last half century
needs your help
(a note from Jonathan Demme)

§

What Gerard Van der Luen
was doing
in December
26 years ago

(with an odd sighting
of old NY School poet
Jonathon Cott)

§

Look who wants
to extend
©
now

§

George W. Bush
announced on Friday
that William Safire
will be honored
with the
National Medal of Freedom
for
”polishing the language”
which raises the question:
how would Bush know?

§

No fan of
Project Runway
can fail
to note the passing
of fashion genius
Van Smith

§

Jack Krick
has been adding
new pages
to the
Electronic Poetry Center’s
roster of contemporary poets
(322 to date)

Some recent additions:
Charles North
Jimmy Schuyler
Lorenzo Thomas
George Oppen

§

A new collective blog
worth noting is the
International Exchange for Poetic Invention
(Charles Bernstein & Ton van 't Hof, proprietors)

 

§

For all of the great books
by living authors
Green Integer
has published,
it would appear
that just one of its
”best sellers”
is by or about
a living writer

Thomas Pynchon
speaks out
on the question
of plagiarism

§

Norman Mailer
tries to head
such charges off
at the pass
with a bibliography

§

A New York Times
editorial
on this very subject

§

The Getty has an idea:
why not try an
arts professional
to run the place

§

Do Brits
suffer for their art
needlessly?

§

Wind-powered
sculptures
that walk

§

Keeping jazz alive

§

500 jazz albums
you need to own
listed by
year of release

§

The future of writing
beyond books

§

We-think
& just maybe
we do

§

“Seeing as the rise
of the book
coincided with the rise of
humanism itself,
it is not idle
to worry
that abolishing the first
will mean
abandoning the second.”

A review of the Sony
ebook Reader
and the book as technology

§

A book contest
with serious money

§

First
”USA artist grants”
are announced
(Meredith Monk,
the Kuchar brothers
& Ali Akbar Khan
among them)

§

“The Aeneid
should have been burned”
(Why Harvard grads
can’t read)

§

Grading the critics
in NYC

§

Claudia Rankine
on Lyn Hejinian

§

Out of Character:
a video
vispo
from Geof Huth

§

Bernard Heidsieck
reading
in Paris
(in French)

§

An article on
Rose Auslander

§

Bjork’s
Pagan Poetry
will leave you
in stitches

§

A unique poetry contest
aimed at Konkani
people
(advertised here
in English
in Kuwait)

§

Russell Jacoby
on
Hannah Arendt

§

The limits of
cultural imperialism

§

The difficulty
of writing well
whilst being
super rich

§

Hal Meyerson
is the best political columnist
in America
& this is the best piece
on the implications
of the November elections
I’ve read yet

Terry Riley,
Robert Creeley & Steve Swallow
and Kiss
all in one
(admittedly disjunct)
discussion?

§

kari edward’s
first
posthumous
ebook
is a beauty

§

Broken Angel’s
days
are numbered

§

Interviewing
Tony Lopez

§

Adrienne Rich
on
film and form

§

Iranian poetry:
the early years

§

Sasha Frere-Jones
on Joanna Newsom
in The New Yorker

§

“the selection was bewildering at best” –
a quietist’s view of the
National Book Award
poetry shortlist

§

In search of
the “goodish”
(on judging lit prizes)

§

Tomma Abts
wins
Turner Prize

§

The Quietist
on his custom
”six-figure
999FO5 factory Superbike racer,
one of only eight made every year,
… built for him in Bologna by hand”

§

Walter Mosley
on wealth

§

LitCrit
online

§

Joan of Arc:
fashion icon

§

Music as
spiritual mathematics

§

Ghost maps

§

13,000 novels
written
just in the last month

§

As Kathy Acker once put it,
”great artists don’t
appropriate,
they cop”

§

“Andrew Lloyd Webber
is to
Shakespeare
as . . .”
(finish this sentence)

§

Fiction
from the new
South Africa

§

Fractals
in the work of
Jackson Pollock

Is Dia MIA?

§

A new Museum
of Contemporary Art
opens
in Detroit

§

Of Wharton Esherick.
the great
modernist wood-carver,
also a resident
of my home town

§

In praise of
Sylvester Pollet
& his
Backwoods Broadsides

§

Nate Wiley,
a saxman
who used to play
with Gil Ott
& who had his first CD
at the age of
75,
has died

§

Self-published
Canadians
break into
the nation’s largest
retail chain,
but only on its
(not inexpensive)
terms

§

The path
from Robert Creeley
to the Flaming Lips
leads thru
Mercury Rev

§

More Creeley
set to music

§

Mário Cesariny
has died

§

Ferlinghetti’s
beret

§

The “incomparable”
(primarily in the gap
between hype & substance)
Poetry Archive
begins to add
Dead White Guys
to the collection

§

Miller Williams
& his daughter
Lucinda

§

“If you like bad poetry,
welcome to heaven”
(on Ginsberg’s early work)

§

Dancing with anyone
other than
Emmitt Smith

§

“tough-guy poet-criminal”
(that’s fiction)
amidst the
Whitbread
shortlist

§

Interviewing a writer
who makes
$50 million per year

§

Defacing
a work of art
that is also
a train station

An excellent piece
on New Western
poet-painter
John Brandi

§

Chax Press
receives
a 60-day
reprieve

§

Alice Notley
in
Poetry Daily

§

Having won
the Governor General’s
poetry prize,
Oolichan Press
rushes John Pass’ book
into a new print run
of 300 copies

§

A review of a new
Steve Swallow-Robert Creeley
CD by someone
who likes the idea of poetry
but doesn’t actually
read much

§

Four hours
of Steve Reich
MP3s

§

Boston’s take
on Reich
is muted

(But the bit about
his shock
at the response
to Four Organs
is nonsense –
I saw people stomping
out of the West Coast
debut of Violin Phase
at UC Berkeley
in 1967 –
the first to go
was Mario Savio)

§

Anger in art criticism

§

Cecil Balmond
architect?

§

Rethinking Rem

§

Stuart
is an online gallery
and an instant
hit

§

Curating globalism

§

Remembering
Jamaican poet
Gwyneth Barber-Wood

§

P.K. Page,
the poet at 90

§

Poetry in the schools:
(1) In Edinburgh, Scotland
(2) In Lincoln, Nebraska
(3) In Lincoln, Nebraska
from another point of view

The favorite artist
of British artists
ever

§

And the top rated
woman artist

§

Brice Marden
at length
in the New York Review of Books

§

Peter Schjeldahl
on
Kiki Smith

§

Designating a painting
historic

§

Mel Bochner
on
The Joys of Yiddish

§

An “auto-bug-offery”
by James Laughlin

§

Plagiarists of the past
alas

§

Yet another poem
entirely in questions,
this time
by Galway Kinnell

§

“Whitman’s exactly the right patron
for a poet like Kinnell”
(one more attempt
to make an SoQ
interesting
by placing him
into an avant lineage)

§

Hooking up
thru the
London Review of Books

§

Why Melville matters
even if he’s still not popular

§

A second
New York Times
review of
Against the Day,
this one positive

§

“The biggest surprise,
not counting the space devoted to Lake Baikal,
white slavery, Tamerlane's tomb
and Jonah and the whale,
is an astonishing excess of
ukuleles.”
John Leonard on
Against the Day
in The Nation

§

There are exactly
four books of poetry
among this year’s
New York Times
”100 Notable Books”
list, by
Louise Glück,
Allen Ginsberg,
Galway Kinnell
&
Ishmael Reed

(Glück,
who is 63,
is the “baby”
in this quartet)

§

“The pen is edgier than the blade”:
a poet-in-residence
for a cricket tour

§

UbuWeb
has converted all
of its rare and out-of-print
film & video holdings
to on-demand streaming formats
a la YouTube,
which means that you
can view everything
right in your browser
without platform-specific software
or insanely
huge
downloads

(There are still some exceptions,
such as Frank Mouris’
Frank Film,
still my favorite instance
of film as poetry)

§

The subtitle of this review
of Ginsberg’s biography
describes him only
as the
”Poet who wrote ‘Howl’”

§

The trouble with Ted

§

Andrew Motion
on being laureate

§

The poet laureate
of Brownsburg, Indiana

§

A new story
by
Eugene O’Neill

§

That low-fi sci-fi
trading as “speculative poetry”

§

A test of translation
concerning
Fagle’s Aeneid

§

A little piece
on
Creeley’s Collected
(with Zukofsky
spelled with an ‘S')

§

John Timpane
on all the new books
concerning
Allen Ginsberg

YOU CAN GET ANYTHING YOU WANT…

 

Arlo Guthrie
sings
Alice’s Restaurant

 

Here’s Alice

 

& the late Officer Obie

 

Obie portrait by Stockbridge resident
Norman Rockwell

 

The church where Alice lived

 

A trailer for the movie

 

Wikipedia’s history of the Massacree

 

“The story behind the song”
(Arlo on NPR)

 

My Life as a Restaurant
by Alice Brock

 

Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook
by Alice Brock

 

Mooses Come Walking
by Arlo Guthrie & Alice Brock

 

A map to the restaurant
(now the Main Street Café)

Joanna Newsom,
folk-rock poet
with a harp of gold

§

Evicting Chax

§

Poetry, prizes & markets
in Canada

§

Happy 80^th birthday,
Frank

§

Art & inner space

§

Christopher Sorrentino
on Thomas Pynchon’s
Against the Day

§

Carlin Romano
also on
Against the Day

§

”What was he thinking?”
Louis Menand
on
Against the Day

§

“the sort of imitation of
a Thomas Pynchon novel
 that a dogged but ungainly
fan of this author’s might have written
on quaaludes”
(Michiko Kakutani)

§

Illustrating
Gravity’s Rainbow

§

Selling Philadelphia’s
most famous painting
to Wal-Mart

§

“When poetry
lays its hand on our shoulder”
& other platitudes
to make you cringe

§

A completely different
set of poetry
clichés

§

A piece
on Alice Walker

§

Modernism
in Australia
looks suspiciously
American

§

The life of Susan Sontag
in the age of
photographic reproduction

§

Two views
of the world of publishing:
(1) Alice Denham
(2) Al Goldstein

“The most important
postwar painting
that is not in a museum”
changes hands
for a mere
$137.5 mil

§

If Kevin Smith, Matt Groening or Michael Moore
were writing a parody
of neocon poetry perspectives,
this interview
is what they’d write

(My favorite part
is the description of FSG
as ” an imprint of Germany's
Verlagsgruppe
 Georg von Holtzbrinck
GmbH,”

a phrase more poetic
finally
than the cliché-ridden
poem “The Hearth”
with its “plastic coffee cup…
uncertain what to do”)

§

Further question:
why do neocon poets
always compare themselves
to the avant
poets of the past,

why not compare
C.K. Williams
to Edward Arlington Robinson,
instead of to a poet
like Whitman
antithetical to his project?

§

The New York
Art Book
Fair

§

Charles Olson
in Persian

§

R&B great
Ruth Brown
has left the building

The only
Thomas Pynchon
reading
you may ever hear

§

CNN’s film
of Pynchon
walking down the street

i n
  s l o w m o

(Winner:
Creepiest Analysis Award)

§

On finding a letter
by Pynchon
in the Library of Congress

(What is Elmer Fudd
doing in
Against the Day?)

§

The New York Times
weighs in
on the anniversary
of Howl

§

The Nation
arguing for
”the last antiwar poem”
prefers
”Wichita Vortex Sutra”

(it is a better poem,
but that’s not the point)

(the online version here
totally screws with
spacing & linebreaks)

§

Philip Glass’ setting
for
”Wichita Vortex Sutra”

§

On the
“Downtown”
literary scene
1972-92

(Note the use of Ginsberg
as a Times photographer)

§

Alan Ansen has died,
a curious link
between Auden & the Beats

§

Reading not much of anything
in Tehran

Nate Mackey
has won
the National Book Award
for Splay Anthem

§

Norman Mailer
in Texas

§

A letter from Günter Grass

§

Poetry & the politics
of the Middle East

§

Dos amigos
(Bill & Sam)

§

Eric Bentley at 90
(not about to
write a novel)

§

Jack Williamson has died
after a sci-fi career
of 80 years

§

Dalkey Archive
& U. of Rochester
cancel the wedding
(with a great quote
from Richard Kostelanetz)

§

 “The man who saved
the NEA”

§

Hiding public art

§

What is the name
of this (§) mark?

§

How can you tell
if a poem
is iconic?

They throw one
freaking
birthday party
after another
for it
on its 50^th
birthday!

(Name one other
American poem
that has received
this treatment?)