Oh man, remember hyperlink novels? My favorite is 253 by Geoff Ryman.  It offers up a heavy dose of gamesmanship a la Cortazar, but written by a science fiction novelist, in HTML.  Because nothing expands the horizons of what the novel can do like being able to click on blue underlined words.  Really though, I do love that one.  I’m just glad we’ve come so far since then.

~ "The long white beard makes you look like Santa or a wizard." There’s a timely valentine to Darwin in the latest issue of A Public Space.

~ Colm Toibin writes on Edward Carpenter’s fearless nineteenth century homosexuality and socialism. Toibin, remember, will be one among many great speakers discussing Obama’s literary influences in our store this Friday.

~ Leonard Lopate spoke to belgian novelist Amelie Nothomb on Wednesday and yes she was charming and casually arrogant, but not nearly as entertaining, I promise, as she will be in our store this Thursday evening.

~ Look, Mr. Gaiman, I know you have a new movie to sell us on, but could you please be less British?  It’s creeping me out.

~ Here’s Frank Kermode discussing Milton. Think of it as a dry digestif of smart to follow the course of stupid just below.

~ "But then, Jedediah Killinger III was not an ordinary man.  He was a man who made his own rules and called his own game." The Pitch presents "Killinger!", your new favorite book.

~ Bookslut has a lengthy interview up with Brian Michael Bendis, the comics writer who spilled John Hughes in your Spiderman.

~ We haven’t posted much about Updike’s death here, but last week  The New Yorker ran a series of short but lovely remembrances, the best being this by Eugenides. 

~ See also Adam Gopnik’s brief tribute to the man and, behind a subscription wall, a magnificent collection of excerpts from Updike’s own writing for the magazine.

~ Should we trust Google with the entirety of our textual history and intellectual output? Whoops! Too Late!

~ Lou Anders, one of the best SF editors today, fawns over Adam Roberts, one of the best SF writers today.  I’d like to mock him for his adoration, but it’s too damn deserved.

~ Stephen Colbert would like his Newbery medal now please.

~ What is the worth of the statement if it cannot protect the man? Amartya Sen discusses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the latest New Republic.

~ For more on that great statement of shared value, here’s an animated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which turned 60 this past fall.  Good font work, too.

~ Does taking a photo entail an obligation toward its subject? Vollmann discusses photography and social contract in the latest Bookforum.

~ Poor T.C. Boyle. He showed up to the party wearing the same dress as Nancy Horan.

Peter Cole is a man of letters in the enlightenment sense.  He is an acclaimed translator from Hebrew and Arabic, both modern and medieval.  He and his wife Adina Hoffman co-edit a small belles lettres press, Ibis Editions, which focuses on the literature of the levant.  And he is a poet of great insight and power.  It is in this last role that Mr. Cole was in our store recently, along with his longtime friend Forrest Gander, to read from his recent collection Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions, $14.95).  The book approaches issues of translation, religion, aging, and Israeli politics among many others, all with impressive grace.  I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

McNally Jackson: In the book you call yourself "a modern poet of a medieval kind" seemingly in reference to your work’s tendency to strive for truth and divinity.  In this and in other ways–their often surprising wit and sensuality, their dense layers of quotation–your own poems closely resemble the work you translated in your anthology The Dream of the Poem.  Is this a result of conscious emulation or some more complicated cross-pollination?

Peter Cole: It’s more a matter of cross-pollination, or maybe percolation is a better term at this point. The medieval Hebrew poetry of Muslim (and also Christian) Spain has given me such pleasure and nourished me so deeply that it is now an elemental part of me—informing the way I see the world and certainly my sense of what it is that poems might do. We are what we eat, literally and figuratively, and a great deal of this poetry has passed my lips in both directions and in both languages.

"Truth and divinity" makes it sound a little monkish, though I see why you’d put it that way. And you’re not wrong to. But the lines about being a "modern poet of a medieval kind" in that particular poem have more to do with a fascination and intense engagement with medieval notions of artifice in the service of essence and a kind of second-nature, or re-creation. "Strange how I’ve become a modern / poet of a medieval kind, / making poems for a different diversion, / as they point toward what’s divine." Some of that "artificial" medieval Hebrew poetry is dismissed as ornamental, a diversion, mere "entertainment" (though the word derives from a root meaning "to hold the attention," something you’d think poetry should do). Whereas I see the rhetoric of medieval poetry as doing double duty: giving, as Chaucer put it, "sentence and solace," and as it redirects our attention encoding all, or many, good things—including a capacity for wisdom, satire, and an appreciation of the sensual, as well as an exploration of what is true and how the sacred might be manifest. "What’s divine" there enfolds the quietly ironic idiomatic usage—as in "that’s divine!" So I’m also making fun of myself here for taking it all so seriously. Which of course I do.

McNJ: There is a thread of the hidden or buried in your poetry and, conversely, of exposure or discovery.  This is most notable in the title poem, which makes use of faded fragments of Hebrew text–gall ink on cloth and vellum–found in a geniza in Cairo, but is evident, I think, throughout your book. You praise "the normal/ mysticism of clear words in a row" but even your moments of great directness sometimes seem like "Five fine covers" shielding an inexpressible inner text. Do you imagine these moments of reticence and difficulty to be necessary to the subjects you describe? Is this something you see in your work at all?

PC: That’s an interesting observation, and I’m afraid my answer to your questions might also seem partly hidden and partly revealed, because this isn’t actually isn’t something I’ve given a lot of thought to. But I’ve always been drawn to pairings of that sort—the object and its edge; abstraction and figuration; hymns and qualms; home and abroad (or native and foreign); and so on. So you’re probably right, and hidden and revealed is simply another one of these doublings. It also happens to be the subject of one of my favorite essays in the history of Hebrew literature—"Revealment and Concealment," by the great modern Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik (whose book of by that title we published at Ibis).

I’m interested in the movement between all these poles and especially in the way their gravitational fields intersect—when you can’t quite tell which direction you’re heading in. So with the notion of "stumbling" in the title poem you mention and even in Joel Shapiro’s woodblock print on the book’s cover—which seems to be, at once, uplifted and falling.

The history of Jewish textual commentary would suggest that there is always more to what is before one than meets the eye and ear, and certainly I would say the same thing about life itself: what’s marvelously concrete and present is, in part, marvelous because of what has gone into it and because of what it’s next to and what links up with it in all sorts of ways. In short, I don’t try to be reticent or difficult; on the contrary—I try to be clear. But as Gertrude Stein once said, or as I think she once said: A writer should always try to make it simple, but only as simple as it really is.

McNJ: I’d like to ask about the structure of your poems. You make use of a variety of classical forms to shape your poems, always with enough plasticity that they don’t become, well, formal. Most American poets use such conventions–the villanelle, linked sonnets–sparingly now, and when they do it tends to be with a hint of irony or humor. I think we’ve come to associate seriousness with rupture, an uncontrolled confessional outpouring. You, however, are at your most controlled when discussing some of the most serious topics in the book: Palestinian displacement, for instance. What, if anything, do you think these topics gain from such treatment?

PC: Forms function as equipment or tools that help us translate raw sensation or perception into articulate expression. In this case I’d like to think that the traditional forms you mention lend the poems both perspective and an element of surprise, which in turn increase their leverage. Humor is also a part of that scheme, and the book contains rhymed couplets and taut epigrams that try to pierce the rhetorical fog surrounding these "serious" topics (though the wit is every bit as serious as the topics are).

Particularly charged content that has long frustrated comprehension sometimes stands a better chance of being apprehended not by a formal strategy that replicates its elusiveness and volatility but by one that conducts those qualities, diverting and transforming their energy. The artifice of these forms, their systems of sound in reaction with this material, helped me, initially, move beyond or around my own well-rehearsed positions on these topics, and that in turn took me to a much deeper and at once more complex and simpler sort of expression.

We like to think, in organic fashion, that form should be an extension of content. But in a no less organic way, content can also be seen as an extension of form–since the formal figures also precipitate content. So the "control" is employed to increase freedom—freedom of movement within the recalcitrant subject matter. It’s also applied to help me make sense of what so often seems like a senseless and certainly a confusing situation.

McNJ: Again in your title poem you spend time with seemingly mundane fragments of text–shopping lists, personal correspondence–that were cached along with the word of God in the Cairo geniza. Many Ibis titles also seem to be concerned with the fragment, the remainder, the trace. I’m thinking here specifically of Lost Ladino, Saraya, Qasida, Stations of Desire. What is it about such things that draws your attention?

PC: This would seem to take us back to your question about the hidden and the revealed. I’ve already mentioned the medieval Hebrew tradition of commentary, wherein the whole or essence is often best perceived and experienced by means of the part or the fragment, which is itself then cracked open and ransacked for meaning or traces of meaning. And in pre-Islamic Arabic literature, as later on, the trace of the beloved or remains of the abandoned campsite are central to the construction of value—to, that is, the composition of the poem. There’s also a Wittgensteinian dimension, of not trying to say more than can be responsibly said. All these ways of reading and understanding jibe with my experience of the world, and so they draw my attention. And of course the modernist legacy is also operative here, though I’m much more concerned with the aggregation of parts and their contribution to a larger vision than in their being indulged as the marker of a radical style, or shored against some notion of ruin. Brokenness interests me, but so does connection.

Photo by Lynn Saville

One problem with being a curious, literate human being is time allotment.  Should you read that novel, the latest issue of your favorite magazine?  God forbid you subscribe to a newspaper.  Maybe you should just throw your time away watching grainy videos of baby foxes playing on a trampoline.  It certainly couldn’t be any less worthwhile than the thousands of other diversions out there, right?  I pull out some things of interest from the internet for you and put them on our front page, but I know better than anyone that they just add to your burden, so I’m sorry.  And here ya go.

~ Maira Kalman paints, revels in, the inauguration.

~ The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future, in which are discussed Gagarin, Levinas, Heidegger, James Bond, St. Joseph, quivering flesh in a can, and the single best reason you’ll ever find for subscribing to the Journal of Hand Surgery.

~ The world of Rae Armantrout’s poetry is "someting we recognize intimately - and at the same instant montrous," writes Ron Silliman.

~ Trees into books into trees once again.

~ Wait, you mean Bolaño may not have taken heroin or been imprisoned by Pinochet? Disgusting. I’m going to take his worthless and utterly unreadable books to the curb right now.

~ John Updike died today.  He was 76.  Who is fit to eulogize a writer of his voice and stature?

~ What do women want? Daniel Bergner discusses the complex science of female desire in the Times and, on February 2nd, in our store.

~ Adam Kirsch is a bit relieved that Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem was not soaring, or even memorable.  It was, he writes, "not public but bureaucratic."

~ "spent my hours in town in cough on pillow  sigh sigh  but back now". All interviews should be conducted by email, with no caps, and their subject should always be poet Abraham Smith.

~ Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children, discusses his next novel. He’s going to be a wealthy wealthy man.  See him talk with editor David Ebershoff in our store this Monday.

~ W. D. Snodgrass is dead.  Maybe now is a good time to hear what he has to say.

~ And yes, of course, baby foxes on a trampoline.  Glee.

The Book Doctors Are In

To Read In Case Of: Heartbreak

We’re asking our favorite authors and readers to make recommendations for those moments when a good book is the only cure. For the month of Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: what’s the best book (or books) to read in times of heartbreak?

Larry Smith is editor of SMITH Magazine (smithmag.net) and co-editor of Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.

"These books revive my heart every time:

If We Ever Break Up, This is My Book by Jason Logan

I kept this bizarre book of hand-scrawled doodles, pie charts, Venn diagrams, and lists in my bathroom for years. At least, I figured, the folks who had to pee in my apartment would know about Jason Logan’s genius little book about love and how it messes with all our heads. To be sure, the author’s brain does not work like all the others. But his outward expressions of his internal musings about his relationship ought to be somebody’s Bible; on some days it’s mine.

Here is New York by E.B. White

Once a year I check in with E.B. White’s well known, much loved, 56-page love letter to New York, a girl I’ve been crushing on my whole life; and one who can bring you back from your lowest depths just by stepping outside to see her.

Mortified: Love is a Battlefield by David Nadelberg

From the Mortified web and print project, a collection of old diaries and love letters, with reflection by the writers’ "adult self." We’ve all been there, and watching others go back there is an instant de-funkifier.

Twenty Love Poems And A Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

There. I said it. Pablo Neruda. The most obvious person possible to include on a love list. And at the risk of obviousness to a crowd in the world’s top 1 percent of lit-i-ness, I’ll just say this: Each time I look across the room and see that my wife keeps the book I sent her during a time when we were separated (unwillingly) for 13 months by her side of the bed (or maybe she’s moved it next to the computer for a few days), it makes my heart grow a little bigger."

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   to order any of these titles from McNally Jackson via email, or pick them up in the bookstore.

As an editor for Yale University Press in 1992, Jonathan Brent flew to Moscow to discuss the possibility of publishing key documents from newly opened Soviet-era archives.  He returned throughout the 90’s and into the new millennium, gaining access to stunning papers–including records of the interrogation of Isaac Babel and Stalin’s own scribbles–and meeting some characters torn right out of the pages of Gogol.  Now the editorial director of the press, Mr. Brent has written a new book about the process, Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas & Co., $26.00).  In addition to presenting some of the more intriguing things researchers discovered in various archives, the book is also a beautiful and thoughtful discussion of the transition from desperate post-Soviet poverty to the New Russia of Putin and Vogue magazine.  Mr. Brent will be talking about the book with his own editor and publisher James Atlas in our store today, February 4, but he was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book beforehand.

McNally Jackson: First, your book covers quite a lot of material, both personal and historical, and because of this seems to defy easy description.  How would you characterize it?  As travel writing?  Memoir?  History?

Jonathan Brent: I don’t quite know how to characterize my book, either.  It is certainly memoiristic as well as historiographic.  I am convinced that the only way truly to understand the connection between concrete action and historical process is through the lives of individuals.  Consequently, I tried to structure the book in such a way that whatever abstract conclusions I came to–whether about Stalinism or Putin–came out of actual lived experience–whether that of Mariana, Vladimir Naumov, or Nataliya Tomilina. Heisenberg has taught us that there are no "objective" facts in atomic physics–that the observer adds something to every observation–and therefore I felt it necessary to reveal something of my own, personal involvement and background.  How else could I answer the question, "How did this project come about?"  And without this project (Annals of Communism), how could we have learned about Yezhov’s now famous last words, or Stalin’s famous 1937 toast, etc.?

McNJ: In describing your first trip to Moscow in 1992 you have some striking passages about the relative shabbiness and fragility of everyday objects in a Russian home.  Rykhlyi is the word you use, and it  reminds you of a period of postwar deprivation in your childhood in Wisconsin.  Do you see similarities between your nostalgia in that moment and the current widespread Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era, or is theirs more strictly political?

JB: My feelings about the rykhli nature of the world I found myself in became complicated once I realized that this weakness and frailness proved stronger than Stalin’s Terror.  It was something he couldn’t ever abide and tried desperately to eradicate.  He hated weakness in people and things.  But there I was in this bed that might collapse if I snored too strongly, in a cab powered by levers on the steering wheel because the driver had no legs, in restaurants that had no menus, in bathtubs without water…and at the same time at the nexus of the most powerful historical forces of the 20th Century–and perhaps beyond.  It posed for me a great paradox that was both very concrete–how to flush a toilet?–and theoretical–what is the nature of power? And that paradox, I believe, is at the heart of my book.

McNJ: Some of the more enticing archives, including those of the FSB, have begun to restrict access more heavily again in this decade.  Do you think this is due to a "fear of analogies" at higher levels, as you mention in your introduction, or a more general return to a mentality of secrecy, S.D. Ignatiev’s konspiratsiya, within these establishments?

JB: There are several reasons for the greater restrictiveness which began, by the way, in the Yeltsin period and the effects of which are only now being felt. About a week after YUP published The Secret World of American Communism in 1995, the FSB came to the archive and demanded to know how YUP got the documents we published.  The director explained that while access to the documents was restricted in FSB the copies of those documents in his archive were not restricted.  They were immediately reclassified.  Today, nobody could have access to what we published in 1995.  Why?  This had to do with "sources and methods"–that is, the documents we published revealed much more than the FSB would have wanted about how they operate, and although the FSB is NOT the KGB the institutional life of those organizations is continuous and "sources and methods" have remained largely unaffected by the demise of the Soviet Union.

Access to top Presidential archives was ALWAYS restricted.  In fact, I have had more success in recent years in obtaining this material than I did in the early 1990s because I have come to know well the very few number of archivists and historians who work in the Presidential archives and have been granted access. Therefore, my book Stalin’s Last Crime makes considerable use of such materials because my co-author, Vladimir Naumov, had access.  The forthcoming book on the Terror of the 1930s will have much new material from this source for a similar reason.

Materials in Stalin’s Personal Archive to which YUP does not at present have access are classified largely because they deal with espionage or very sensitive international matters.  Here there may be reason to think that a "fear of analogies" is at work, but until I can see what these materials are it’s hard to make the case.  Easier is to argue that the espionage material will reveal "sources and methods" and that the international material might cause difficulties is PRESENT regimes–perhaps in Poland, Ukraine or other East European states–possibly with the U.S.

The return to konspiratsiya is happening in different ways, largely through making the government’s behavior inaccessible to public scrutiny, shutting down the opposition and the liberal press, killing journalists, muzzling academics.

McNJ: How have Yale’s archival publications been received within Russia?  Is  there wider interest, or are they perceived as ephemera, of interest  only to specialists in Soviet history?

JB: Some of the publications have been well-received, such as the volumes on the Romanovs, the Gulag, the peasantry, and the volumes of letters between Stalin and Kaganovich, Dimitrov, and Molotov.  Other volumes have not been well-received, such as The Unknown Lenin, that was thought to be unbalanced and Spain Betrayed that was also thought to be so unbalanced that it wasn’t published in Russia at all.  By unbalanced, they mean that the documents exposing the duplicity, cruelty, cynicism or fraud of the Soviet government or its leaders needed to be balanced with documents showing the good side.  It’s a little like balancing 1+1=2 with 1+1=3.  Many in Russia don’t see it that way which is why studying the persistence of the Stalin cult is important in understanding present day attitudes and dispositions toward historical truth.

There is wide interest in publications such as those on the Terror or the Gulag, but most of the others are seen as largely scholarly and of little value in relation to present concerns.  Just as most American kids don’t know anything about the Vietnam War, let alone WWI, most Russian kids, born in the 90s, know nothing about Stalin or the Soviet Union.  For them it’s a kind of uneasy kitsch.

Here’s a baker’s dozen of previous links from our front page.  Some might be a little stale by now, but all have a gooey filling of literary interest that make them worth visiting or revisiting if you tried them the first time around.  And yes, I would be a terrible baker.  Always count those donuts, folks.

~ Time Out interviews Paul Maliszewski, a connoisseur of and dabbler in plagiarism, hoaxery, and literary snake oils.  He’ll be reading in the store February 18th.

~ The classiest book you will ever read.

~ Arne Næss, your favorite Norwegian ecological philosopher, died this Monday at 96.  n+1 has reposted an essay on his legacy.

~ Hear Robert Frost’s recitation of two poems at Kennedy’s inauguration, one from memory and one, thankfully, aborted because he couldn’t read the page on which it was written.

~ Thank God for the long tail.  Scott Esposito talks to New Directions’ Declan Spring about running a small press under the storm clouds.

~ DC will be sold out of cupcakes. Not so our cafe!  Come watch the inauguration with us, fellow bookworms and tea-junkies, projected live and large in our cafe this Tuesday morning.

~ Matt Taibbi wants to see Thomas Friedman cry salty well-deserved tears into his silly porn-stache.

~ Bush and Cheney each plan to write memoirs highlighting some of the tough choices they were forced to make in office.  Don’t bother guys, I think this Harper’s Index sums it up pretty well.<

~ Verlaine, Rimbaud, and the lice they loved to share, all in an excerpt from Edmund White’s incredible new biography of the boy genius.

~ Morton Smith, Carpocrates, and the possible forgery that points to Christ the libertine magician.

~ When storytelling is survival, your vocabulary becomes sexy. Seed Magazine interviews Denis Dutton, author of "The Art Instinct".

~ The NEA says adults are reading more, particularly fiction. I guess that’s good news, though I’m unnerved to learn that there is anyone at all who doesn’t regularly read for pleasure.

The Book Doctors Are In

To Read In Case Of: Heartbreak

We’re asking our favorite authors and readers to make recommendations for those moments when a good book is the only cure. For the month of Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: what’s the best book (or books) to read in times of heartbreak?

Daniel Bergner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of two books of nonfiction:In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; and God of the Rodeo, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Bergner’s writing has also appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Talk, the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.His most recent book is The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco), which he reads at McNally Jackson on February 2.

"Literary antidotes for heartbreak? The Catastrophist by Irish novelist Ronan Benett — it never got much attention on this side of the Atlantic, but it’s a story of tortured love set in the Congo that is impossible to put down.

"And then there’s Greene’s The Quiet American – how to have your rival rubbed out and reclaim your lost lover.

"And Wharton’s Ethan Frome – a gorgeous little book that we all read in high school when we’re too young to recognize how perfectly it’s made…

"As the author of The Other Side of Desire, I should probably be recommending something kinky, but I can think only of books that are beautiful and sad."

Here are some more links we’ve had recently on our front page.  That doesn’t mean they’ll be entertaining or anything, I suppose.  It’s not as if we were arbiters of all that is funny or worthwhile on the internet. (We are arbiters of all that is funny or worthwhile on the internet.) Stil, if you’re going to be clicking on things anyway, these things will do as well as any others.  Have at ‘em.

~ Emily Dickinson takes a stroll therough the uncanny valley.

~ Will Sheff of the band Okkervil River reads Tolstaya’s "Okkervil River" and all is right with the world. 

~ Here’s a short but enticing book trailer for a new anthology about money in relationships, "The Secret Currecy of Love". See Hilary Black and contributors discuss the book this Monday in our store.

~ Inger Christensen, one of the greatest European poets of our time, died last Friday.

~ We’ve taken the plunge and created a Facebook page.  Come scribble on our wall.

~ "If I don’t win, I won’t really mind not having the acclaim, it’s not getting the money that I will mind. Because I’m always terribly broke, and how wonderful it would be to get that lovely cheque". Diana Athill, who has indeed won the Costa Award and the accompanying check at 91, as interviewed in The Guardian.

~ Dr. Johnson turns 300 this year. To celebrate, Yale’s Beinecke library has started a word-a-day blog of words from his marvelous dictionary.  Today’s entry: a’fterwit.

~ Jessa Crispin has a long and wonderful interview with Clayton Eshleman, poet and translator of Vallejo among others, up in this month’s Bookslut. 

~ The latest issue of Words Without Borders features fiction by Indonesian women. One of the more interesting: "Maybe Not Yem" by Etik Juwita.

~ Here’s a recording of Amitav Ghosh reading from his new epic "Sea of Poppies."

~ Arthur Conan Doyle believed in voices from beyond the grave. Now hear his, along with Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin and others, all sounding more pompous and ridiculous than you could ever imagine.

It’s not too far removed from the turn of the year, still a good time for resolutions, improvement.  What better resolution than to Be Perfect?  There’s a gentleman who would like to tell you how.  The only problem: he’s a poet. 

We’ve fallen away from an ideal of poetry as an agent of self-perfection, I think.  Even widely read poets, even those whose gentle proclamations may very well have bettered the lives of their readers, not to mention those poets who speak in anger for an entire voiceless people, become agents of justice and outcry, even they are heard, I think, with indulgence only.  We do not expect those around us to read poetry, and might not think well of them if they do.  I love poetry and my own reactions really are not so far from that quiet condescension, that scorn buried under the culturally ordained platitudes of respect we all mouth when someone close to us, or a stranger even, mentions a love of poetry.  We certainly have no expectations that poetry might better us, might be necessary to the sort of person we’d like to become.  I’m often convinced that my own consideration for poetry might be a weakness. 

Poets, most poets, do not think this way, and that’s for the best.  We want our craftsmen, our teachers, masons, executioners, to have faith in their work.  They are better for it.  But we are, I am, not a poet.  I can afford not to ignore how very silly and worthless poetry can be.

Ron Padgett, simultaneously one of the funnier and most heartfelt poets writing today, believes that poetry is worth something.  He also understands just how ridiculous that belief is.  His poem "How to be Perfect", part of which you can find after the jump, is a miracle of balance.  Straightforward platitudes abut absurdities and deprecation, all in Padgett’s characteristically simple voice.  The full poem is much longer, but I’ve chosen two passages from it to give you a taste.  It may not make you perfect, but, if Ron is right and our unthought dismissal is wrong, even reading it could make you better than you are now.

Click here to read How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett

Art by George Schneeman (with Ron Padgett) circa 1975

Here are some links we’ve posted recently on our front page.  I didn’t want to put them up again after they’d been bumped down, but your mom called and told me how torn up you were, so here you go.  You big baby.

~ John Bolton and John Yoo are my new favorite comedy duo. They’re so zany!

~ Charles Olson reads "The Librarian", an excellent advertisement for the chemistries of scotch and American poetry, but it left me wondering, who’s Frank Moore?

~ From the VQR blog, two views of Bush’s departure. Somehow the National Review cover seems the sharper mockery.

~ John Clute is the greatest living critic of genre fiction, and I’ve rarely seen him better than in this dissection of Jo Walton’s "Small Change" series in Strange Horizons.

~ David Grossman remains the most reasoned commenter on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  He also remains ignored.

~ Ariel Levy reviews the newly revised "The Joy of Sex" in the latest New Yorker. Conclusions?  Less hairy, much less offensive, and maybe less fun. 

~ Win McCormack, author of "You Don’t Know Me: A Citizen’s Guide to Republican Family Values,"  gives advice on the classiest ways to torpedo a political career.  One tip: hypocrisy. Win will be reading in our store Tuesday at 7.

~ Bernard Madoff’s literary predecessors.

~ Hillary Mantel has an excellent piece of memoir about her time in Saudi Arabia in the latest LRB.

~ Americans are still terrified of and outraged by penguins. And why not?  Their waddle is so lewd, don’t you think?

~ Rwanda has become a nation dominated by women.  It cannot help but be a better place for it.

~ Thousands of Americans fled to Russia to find some relief during the (first) great depression. Some of them found a gulag instead.  Adam Hoschild reviews "The Forsaken" by Tim Tzouliadis.

~ I will never ever fall out of love with  Roberto Bolaño.  Exhibit A: "And then there is no choice but to write."

~ "I sold my hair to buy you these BRAINS."

~ Harp & Altar has posted their fifth issue. Of particular note, poems by G.C. Waldrep and Claire Donato and three excellent stories by Robert Walser.

~ And it is Mark and Scott — not "Chad and Ted” — who partake of cigarettes and “furtive man-on-man action.”

~ It’s about a month old, but I quite like this interview on the Granta site with Nigerian priest and writer Uwem Akpan about his twinned vocations. 

~ Maud Newton discusses the tropes of "atrocity kitsch fiction" with short story writer Anya Ulinich.