The comments on my post regarding Adam Kirsch’s essay have been quite interesting. It’s clear that I didn’t convey my point particularly well and that some responded without reading Kirsch’s whole piece, relying instead on my clippings. Those that did read the whole piece found other things to disagree about! I want to look more [...]

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[photo by midorionna]
I can’t decide if Adam Kirsch really, really gets it or if he’s so wrong that he’s almost bent back around to righzt, wormhole fashion. The whole essay on writer’s aspiration, fame, and the age of blogs and the Internet is worth a read, but here’s a taste that made me think:
The [...]

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[1955 cover from WikiMedia Commons]
Dolores Haze– the “nymphet” of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest novel (rightfully found in many lists of best novels)– would be 62 this year… in America at least, where Lolita wasn’t published until 1958.
[photo via David Zellaby]
What would Dolores/Lolita be like today? Would she be a brassy, hyper-sexualized doyenne? A dolorous, [...]

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[photo shamelessly cadged from this profile of Carruth]
“I think that Hayden’s idea of a livable life is a life that has affection in it– a life, to give it the fullest scope of his art, in which the things you love are properly praised and properly mourned. What I most value Hayden for and [...]

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A favorite author of mine has some sage advice for bloggers and people participating in social networks and why it can be a valuable activity:
[An account of a trivial event] would be rather pointless were it not for the instruction that I derived from it for myself [...] Now as Pliny says, each man is [...]

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[from the New Yorker]

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The fine folks at MODOFLY make incredible, customized Moleskines. A few samples of at least 50 designs, one of which I’m not showing here despite its Simian nature:

[linktribution: iconolith]

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(about poetry and being a poet)
1. A word assemblage isn’t a poem just because someone says it is; no one really knows what a poem is.
2. Most readers of poetry are poets; no one reads poetry anymore.
3. Calling oneself a poet is to call attention to how one doesn’t fit; poets are one of the [...]

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And not just my skin, though we are down to just over 4 hours of daylight and not a lot of that is quality time with The Great God Sol. After a few weeks of rumination, scheduling and unscheduling, re-prioritizing, reading and sleeping, I am emerging from anti-social, introvert Cave 1.0 and re-joining the land [...]

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I’m at a crossroads that I’ve long suspected was coming. A few years ago I made a conscious decision to focus on my work in education and technology at the expense of my writing. I put my notebooks away, gradually withdrew from online art communities, and greatly reduced the amount of fiction and poetry [...]

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As anyone likely to read my ramblings already knows, Charles Simic is the new Poet Laureate. I’m glad I dropped most of my poetry blog reading list and picked up only a select few I could remember because I can just imagine the working-over that Simic, the choice of Simic, and the position and idea [...]

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Says Sven:
“For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet.”
Read the rest of Birkert’s rumination [...]

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I feel a little dirty even linking to the Bulwer-Lytton Contest results, but some of the entries are too horrible to pass up. You’ll have to go there yourself to see the winner, but here are a few selected runners-up and dishonorable mentions:
From the science fiction category:
Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt. Dimwell [...]

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Via First Draft a snippet from Mark Taw’s This I Believe entry:
I could say that I believe in America because it rewarded my family’s hard work to overcome poverty. I could say that I believe in holding on to rituals and traditions because they helped us flourish in a new country. But these concepts are [...]

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Noted on Harriet, this quote by Christian Bök:
“Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for “improved” products; nevertheless, we have to find a new way to contribute by generating a “surprise” (a term [...]

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I have real trouble with the assertion of a separation between ethics and aesthetics that doesn’t recognize their essential co-dependence. The nature of the relationship can (and should) change… I see it as a pair of opposing forces that swing in vast, strange shapes like an imbalanced pair of planets whose mass changes as one [...]

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Another good one gone.
Like many, I met Kurt Vonnegut through his much anthologized story, Harrison Bergeron. I was at the perfect age to read it: old enough to understand that this was a different kind of story– one of philosophy and moral and dark humor– but young enough not to be so jaded as to [...]

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In the Good News for Poetry People dept., Barry Spacks is blogging. Check it out at Poetry Matters.

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Joshua Sowin has compiled and synopsized some of the better advice about writing. The two appendices are classics. Know the rules so you can be confident in breaking them…

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Yet another story on the death of the book… My sagging bookshelves and the joy that can be seen on the faces of bookstore cashiers when I walk through the door attest to my own love for books. When I see a story like this I always assume that it’s another of those stories wrongly [...]

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