Yonge Street, Toronto.

BirminghamMail.net

Well it was St. George’s Day in New York.

They’d dyed the Hudson with cochineal and chalk.

Bulldogs were arse-to-mouth in Central Park.

from The Twang. Listen here.

Helen Vendler on Simon Armitage in The New Republic (via Powell’s):

There are poems in Tyrannosaurus Rex that repeat earlier achievements of the Armitage style: the lists, the tough Northern stance, the pathos of the poor and the abandoned. But there is also something new: the willingness not to make a point, the willingness not to be witty. The best poem here, I think, is not the arresting one on the King’s Cross bombing "KX" (good of its kind though it is), but an altogether stranger evocation ("Horses, M62") of the breaking of a dozen horses into freeway traffic, bringing the cars to a confused halt. Its short lines are reminiscent of Plath, but it has a restraint that lightens the effect of the lineation. The sheer surreality of the event is enough for Armitage, as he tracks individual horses, then sees the flank of one horse pressing against the glass of his car, its matted hair seeming like worms glimpsed through an aquarium glass wall:

and here alongside
is a horse,
the writhing mat of its hide

pressed on the glass–
a tank of worms–
a flank

of actual horse…
It bolts,
all arse and tail

through a valley
of fleet saloons.

The horses clatter away, then, "spooked by a horn," they double back into traffic and go intently in their own direction, charging the cars:

a riderless charge,

a flack of horseshoe and hoof
nto the idling cars,
now eyeball, nostril, tooth

under the sodium glow,
biblical, eastbound,
against the flow.

The horses cannot be tamed into joining the directed flow of traffic. We could draw an ecological moral — nature and machines are at permanent odds; but such is the wayward movement of the group of horses, and the wayward movement of Armitage’s lines tracking them, that no such general rule can be plausibly deduced. The irruption of the horses — illustrating their farness, their closeness, their threat, their beauty — shows them to be, as Armitage says, "unbiddable." The scene is so unlikely that it becomes fascinating to the eye as animals and machines mix and unmix, converge and split, in wholly unpredictable ways. In the regulated order of the modern state, the unpredictable is the ultimate aesthetic desire. But none of this is said explicitly. This poem rides on its own melting, as Frost said a poem should. It nicely exemplifies the perceptual fineness of this talented poet, an aspect of his work as yet too little recognized."

***

Here are some notes I took during a talk Armitage gave in Ottawa a year or so ago.

Devon, mid-1990s

Stendhal once wrote: I have found consolation in a beautiful view of the sea

Jessa Crispin is editor and founder of Bookslut.com " a monthly web magazine and daily blog dedicated to those who love to read. We provide a constant supply of news, reviews, commentary, insight, and more than occasional opinions." Author Jana Martin describes her this way: 

"Certainly she’s a reader, a great reader, and she knows how to make one good party after another, whether in a beer-poster-clad upstairs room at the Hopleaf or Bookslut. She’s a hostess for all of us, a sundress’d impressario. In that way she belongs on the same hearty category as Mike McGonigal: self-made, peripatetic, generous but with standards and boundaries. The other thing is that, like McGonigal, she gives off a slightly timeless vibe: a bit San Francisco 1950s, a bit Chianti in Greenwich Village, a bit rockabilly, a bit Christina’s World."

We met at her home recently in Chicago, and talked about, among other things, the origins of Bookslut, her underemployment at Planned Parenthood, ex-boyfriends, blog advertising, hiring writers, shrinking book review sections, writing for oneself, inexplicable successes, the name ‘Bookslut’ and thoughts of changing it, Somerset Maugham, favourite novels, and the future of blogs.

Subscribe to Nigel Beale’s Biblio File Podcast here.

Please listen here: 

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aesopsfables.us

Leafing through Mortification (edited by Robin Robertson) last night, and this from James Wood:

"For those who make a living from writing, getting things wrong constitutes the formal, not to say canonical nightmare. To publicize error is to multiply it infinitely. And how much more acute is the embarrassment of error for one whose job, as a critic, is to correct others’ fallacies?…Like most writers, and certainly most journalists, I work, and work most happily, from memory. Memory is organic. The notorious fact-checkers of The New Yorker are irritating not only because they often prove how fallible are our memories, but because they seem to mechanize what ought to be a natural, unmediated, fast-moving process."

This, because I’ve been thinking about blogging lately, in part due to this pedantic assault, in part because of this charming retort, from which:

"An intellectual congratulates himself upon being centripetal, not meandering; he does not “come across” or “happen upon” something, he goes looking for it. A good part of being a hedgehog involves feeling superior to foxes…."It [the fox] borrows what is true and rejects what is false, and assembles the truths into a temporary dwelling. It looks with suspicion and disgust upon the sort of education in which a pupil submits to the authority of a recognized master, replacing it with a kind of serial discipleship—sitting at the feet of this one and that one. It licks the icing off books."

This clearly isn’t The New Yorker here. What ‘we’ are is, as plainly indicated at the top of this web page, a space which holds:

"Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile. In short, a commonplace book blog: A place to quote, abridge, and commonplace passages of rhetorical, dialectic and factual interest, mix them with comment and reflection, and index them to facilitate retrieval and use, notably in the composition of my own prose."

As D. G. Myers again, in referring to commonplace bloggers and Isaiah Berlin foxes, aptly and melodiously tells us:

"These are writers united not by doctrine or ideological commitment, but by an ambition to copiousness and eloquence—and the secret handshake that passes between those who have spent a life among books. They are proud to be foxes. They don’t avoid hedgehogs; they just don’t want to be one. They are happy knowing many small tricks. Or, rather, such knowledge brings them great happiness."

If in the reader this blog’s magpie collections and musings in any way stimulate thought, motivate response, result in pleasure – so much the better.

I was in Chicago recently and met with Keith Michael Fiels, Executive Director (since July 2002) of the American Library Association. According to  The ALA Constitution  the purpose of ALA is “…to promote library service and librarianship.” Stated mission is “To provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.” In 1998 the ALA Council voted commitment to five Key Action Areas as guiding principles for directing the Association’s energies and resources: Diversity, Equity of Access, Education and Continuous Learning, Intellectual Freedom, and 21st Century Literacy. Subsequent strategic plans added to these: Advocacy for Libraries and the Profession, and Organizational Excellence. 

Keith and I talk here about, among other things, these principles, the benefits of belonging to the ALA, simple actions librarians can take to improve their libraries, the future of the book, the future of libraries, video games, copyright, digitization, the recent Google settlement, library fines, libraries as social centers, amalgamation of libraries and archives, access to databases and dead links, the importance of libraries as purchasers of non best-selling books, and the bounce-back of literary reading.

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Please excuse this lapse into sentimentalism. 

Compare this

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7RVymaTMkc

To this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgTPH5y1-ZI

Much talk on the Internet of Updike’s graphic sexual depictions, but little evidence. So this, from Rabbit is Rich:

…To think, all along that Lotty was sitting there itching to be fucked. It wasn’t just him. She was holding a dirty yearning between her legs just like the lavatory walls said, those drawings and words put there by the same kids who magnified the ants to death, that little sticky pop they died with, you could hear it, did girls too make a little sticky noise when they opened up? The thought of her knowing when she raised her hand that her blouse was tugged into wrinkles all pointing to the tip of her tit and that an edge of bra peeped out through  the cotton armhole with those little curly virgin hairs and that he was watching for it all to happen does make blood gather. In the fumbly worried dark, with Ma Springer sleeping off her sulk a thickness of plaster away, Harry as if casually presents his stiffened prick to Janice’s hand. Hot stuuuuff.

But wanderings within her own brain have blunted her ardor and her touch conveys this, it is too heavy, so in a desperate mood of self-rescue he hisses "Suck" in her ear, "Suck."

Can’t say that curly virgin armhole hairs make my blood gather…but the sticky pop business is pretty good.