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What I’ve been reading
This blog’s silence lately has been partly due to the fact I’ve been more interested in reading than blogging this year. Here’s a list of books I’ve read so far: Breezeway and Three Poems by John...
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What I’ve been reading
This blog’s silence lately has been partly due to the fact I’ve been more interested in reading than blogging this year. Here’s a list of books I’ve read so far: Breezeway and Three Poems by John...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Six Examples of Perfection in the Arts
El Greco, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1595, WikiArt It’s not a large painting, and it’s not complicated. It may be a study for a more complex painting, and it may even be a piece of a larger painting,...
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John Fante’s Road to Los Angeles
The one for whom I write…. will have to weep out of compassion…. then he will laugh, for he has recognized himself…. I offer him a puzzle: his greatest danger? would it be to weep—or to laugh? or to...
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Another Sweet Disorder
I’ve been working on some prose fiction for the past couple of weeks, for me a frustrating process of leaving the commas out, putting them in, taking them out again, then putting them back in and...
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The Poetry of Kenneth Fearing
I’m falling in love with Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems, a book I stumbled across in a used bookstore. Fearing’s name was familiar to me from a couple of anthologies, but they had only given me a...
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The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett
Anyone who is as interested in Beckett as I am will have to have a copy of The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, but those with a less intense interest would do better to buy the fourth volume of the...
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Robert Wyatt: Different Every Time
You know that saying, the devil is in the detail? I think the devil runs the show, and God is in the detail. —Robert Wyatt* Robert Wyatt’s music has been a source of nourishment for me since the very...
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Badiou on Beckett
rest then my mistakes are my life the knees draw up the back bends the head comes to rest on the sack between the hands my sack my body all mine all these parts every part —Samuel Beckett, How It Is, p...
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Fredric Brown: A Pal For Life
When I was in 7th grade I met a boy who, like me, enjoyed writing stories and poems. He and I were awarded pens for our work on the school magazine. Later on, in high school, we worked together again...
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Three Books by Seann McCollum
1. shoplift a six-pack of love from the plaid pantry of my heart The 49 short prose pieces in this book will make you laugh and they just might put a hairline crack in your little heart. I can’t...
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Robert Vaughan and Breathless
Breathless for Robert Vaughan I dreamed that you had died and there would be no more from you but that what you had given we’d take and parse and continue to chew passing from mouth to mouth, as we...
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Francis Ponge in English Translation
New readers of Francis Ponge are advised to go first either to Selected Poems or The Nature of Things, both of which are in print and readily available. I say this even though they are two of the four*...
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A Review of Robert Vaughan’s Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits
Preamble Looking through a catalog of books last week this title caught my eye: “Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces”. I wondered what kind of book would have the title, “Secrets to Drawing Unrealistic...
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A Review of John Ashbery’s Quick Question
Quick question: do you prefer Ashbery early or late? OK, that’s a trick question, since Ashbery has returned, in his late poetry, to the fast and loose writing of The Tennis Court Oath, albeit with a...
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Best Reads of 2013
Becoming Judas by Nicelle Davis, Red Hen Press. In this collection of poems, Nicelle Davis blends personal history (involving, among other things, the Mormon religion) with popular mythology (John...
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A Review of Gemini/Scorpio/Capricorn
Gemini/Scorpio/Capricorn (ALL CAPS PUBLISHING) gets you three poets—Shay Caroline Simmons, Kelli Simpson and Joy Ann Jones—in one volume, so if quantity matters to you, you’ve got it here. All three...
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Nicelle Davis: Becoming Judas
What if we thought about the gospel story of atonement in terms of a children’s game? — I don’t wanna play Judas. You play Judas. — I don’t wanna play Judas. You play Judas. But somebody’s got to play...
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Georges Bataille On A Life of Bullshit
I thought: “How cruel my suffering is,—no one is more talkative than I am!” —Georges Bataille, The Tomb of Louis XXX The Little One and The Tomb of Louis XXX—the two meditations by Georges Bataille...
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The Man They Love to Hate
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to smell some degree of collusion in the fine art world when it comes to prices. I sometimes wonder when watching Antiques Roadshow if something similar (less...
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