Via Josh: The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us academics that if you ever want a job, don’t blog. This is excellent advice, which I will add to other excellent job-seeking advice I have received over the years: Don’t be a vegetarian. Don’t be married, have a partner, or date. Don’t have a baby. Don’t get pregnant or even think…
London
The north wall of my study in Chicago is dominated by an enormous, framed map of the London Underground, of about the same size you would see posted in an actual station. I’ll confess to being a bit of a public transit junkie, so the map was one of my most prized souvenirs of a month in London a few…
5 Years of Clean Hair
I’ve been meaning for weeks now to put up something about the 5th-anniversary issue of SHAMPOO, and have finally decided to overcome the twin bugbears of laziness and fear of self-promotion. Mostly because SHAMPOO deserves the attention. It’s hard to believe it’s been around for five years–in the world of literary journals (especially online ones), that makes it something approaching…
Starbucks Doesn’t Think I’m Sexy (IV)
A few weeks ago I posted a few comments about a Starbucks Frappuccino commercial in which an Asian man is transformed into white singer Michael Buble, with follow-up posts here and here. Since then I’ve received a truly ridiculous amount of traffic from folks searching for information on the commercial–a motley group of advertising geeks, Buble fans, and even one…
Death to Reviews! (II)
The reviewing thread seems to have turned largely to a discussion of ethics/back-scratching, which I think is okay but, come on. This is a small world; nobody’s going to review us poets but us poets. The marketing value of any review is that it mentions the name and title of a book and gives maybe some sense of what it’s…
Pamela Lu Has Arrived in Blogland
But we had banded together to begin with out of a common knowledge and desire, and we would work this commonality to the ends of the earth, if there were in fact anything to be had there, and we would shape our work as the collective autobiography that it could only be, outside of the invasions and ambushes that throttled…
Death to Reviews!
Jordan wonders if we need a new “poetry paper of record,” one that would do the job the NYT and Poetry aren’t capable of doing anymore. “The issue is that there is no robust national discussion of poetry.” True enough. But is the antidote more reviews? Is the culture of reviewing relevant anymore to the culture of poetry? Reviews and…
Printers Row Book Fair Report; or, Li-Young Lee’s Big Suit
It didn’t start well. I busted my butt to get downtown in time for Ann Lauterbach’s 11 a.m. reading–an absolutely uncivilized time. Apparently Lauterbach agreed: she didn’t show. Oh well. I meandered over to the fair itself, set up along Dearborn Street in the South Loop. Summer is festival season in Chicago: just block off a street, throw up some…
Bernstein’s Blog
Since when does Charles Bernstein have a blog? And is it a blog? I’m not really sure. It says “Web Log” at the top but it’s organized more like a traditional “what’s new” page, with categories like “video,” “essays,” “reviews,” etc. No daily entries telling us what readings Bernstein went to last night or how many papers he has left…
Smells Like Chinese
From “Stinky Town,” in this week’s New Yorker: Later, after driving through crowded Chinatown streets with his window down (“Smell it! Smell the air!”), Anderson parked near the Manhattan Bridge…”This is where at night everyone–if you’re going to put it in the paper–urinates,” he said… “A fishy smell, the smell of Chinese food, garbage, street, stagnant water, urine,” he went…