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WINNER OF THE POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA’S
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD (2012)
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a… .
[100 years of Poetry magazine; pet death; biodiversity portraits; coming-of-age as a Chicago journalist; a lost Arthur Conan Doyle manuscript; Mies van der Rohe; the science of cycling; prehistoric sex; against fairness; urban ecology; electronic reading; new works by Foucault and C. K. Williams; Rousseau’s political writings; an epic Robert Schumann bio; and about 350 pages more]
Our blog spam is becoming TRANSCENDENT. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates might be garnering all the awards, but is it really as good as Elderberry Wine?
What follows below is a list of proper nouns mentioned by Alan Gilbert, author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, during an interview with 3 AM magazine:
Richard Gilbert, United States, Harvard, World War II, Wobblies, Schenley Industries, New York, Ayub Khan, Pakistan, Little Rock, Central High, New York Times, South Africa, Emma, Democrats, Taj, Americans, Adamjee, East Pakistan, West Pakistan, Ashraf Adamjee, Wouter Tim, Marx, Indian Ocean, Chestertown, Maryland, Freedom Summer, Walden School, New York, Andy Goodman, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Vietnam War, Bernard Fall, Denis Warner, Jean Lacouture, Stanley Hoffmann, Barrington Moore, French, German, English, Government 1a, Carl Friedrich, Max Weber, Adam Smith, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, David Hume, I. F. Stone, Herbert Marcuse, McGeorge Bundy, May 2nd Movement, London School of Economics, Ralph Miliband, Labour Party, Ecole Normale, Paris, Althusser, Montesquieu, Das Kapital, England, Michael Walzer, Dita Skhlar, Artistotle, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, Dick Boyd, SDS, Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation, Norm Daniels, Cornell, Nick Sturgeon, Richard Miller, David Lyons, American Council of Learned Societies, Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Leo Strauss, Karl Loewith, the Right, Adolf Hitler, Plato, Thomas Hobbes, J. J. Rousseau, Alex Rosenberg, the Iliad, Simone Weil, Chicago, Africa, Obama, Bin Laden, Goldman Sachs, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Occupy, Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, Karl Loewith, Constitution, Bob Goldwin, Mike Malbin, Dick Cheney, Scott Horton, Eugene Shepperd, Michael Zank, William Altman, Shylock, Fagin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Brown vs. Board of Education, Charles Percy, Cuba, the American President, Bradley Manning, Iraq War, Americanism, Evangelicism, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Awlaki, Jack Balkin, Ron Paul, British Tories, Andrew Sullivan, Bob Barr, Condi Rice, Democratic Individuality, Magna Carta, Law Lords, Catholic Church, Spirit of the Laws, Gilbert Harman, Socrates, Meno, American South, Ku Klux Klan, John Woolman, John Laurens, Thomas Peters, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, Lincoln, Thomas Hobbes, George Washington, Gabriel Prosser, the Republic, Thrasymachus, the Adamjee Jute Mill, Brian Leiter, Bangladesh, Hilary Putnam, Democratic Individuality, Martin Luther King, Thich Nat Hanh, Vienna, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Taylor, Vichy, the Riviera, G. A. Cohen, the Communist Manifesto, Engels, the Eighteenth Brumaire, Genealogy of Morals, Politics as a Vocation, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Mayor Bloomberg, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, National Labor Relations Act, Flint, San Francisco, Harry Bridges, National Guard, Wisconsin, May Day, the Second International, Haymarket, Civil Rights Acts, Vincent Harding, Memphis, Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy, International Working Men’s Association, Hans Morganthau, George Kennan, Robert Gilpin, Robert Keohane, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel Foucault, A Theory of Justice, Rupert Murdoch, Jacopo Arbenz, Guatemala, ITT, Salvador Allende, Law of Peoples, David Levine, Blackwater, Xe Corporation, Yitzhak Perlman, Stradivarius, C. P. Snow, Henry Giroux, Max Planck, Denver, Koch Brothers, National Public Radio, Mitt Romney, Michigan, Libya, Hilary Clinton, Class Struggles in France, Gaza, Tom Farer, J. J. Cohen, Edward Said, Desmond Tutu, John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, the Alien and Sedition Acts, French Revolution, Saint Domingue, Bordeaux, Jacobins, Patriot Act, Andrew Goodman, Freedom Summer, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Toussint L’Ouverture, John Woolman, Quakers, Geneva, Continental Congress, Michelle Alexander, Samuel Hopkins, First Rhode Island Regiment, Moors, Federalist Papers, Shays Rebellion, Gary Nash, Race and Revolution, Barrington Moore, Robin Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Noam Chomsky, Diane Coyle, Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, Barbara Deming, Revolution and Equilibrium, Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Eyes on the Prize, Youtube.
Dear Mr. Elliott:
I have discovered that I have been writing you under false pretenses, although stealing from myself more than from you. I have stolen from myself the opportunity of seeing the dream of every rejected author come true.
The dream of every rejected author must be to see, like sugar plums dancing in his head, please-can’t-we-see-your-next-manuscript letters standing in piles on his desk, all coming from publishing companies that rejected his previous manuscript, especially from the more pompous of the fatted cows grazing contentedly in the publishing field. I am sure that, under the influence of those dreams, some of the finest fuck-you prose in the English language has been composed but, alas, never published. And to think that the rare moment in history came to me when I could in actuality have written the prose masterpiece for all rejected authors – and I didn’t even see that history had swung wide its doors to me.
You must have known that Alfred A. Knopf turned down my first collection of stories after playing games with it, or at least the game of cat’s-paw, now rolling it over and saying they were going to publish it and then rolling it on its back when the president of the company announced it wouldn’t sell. So I can’t understand how you could ask if I’d submit my second manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf, unless you don’t know my race of people. And I can’t understand how it didn’t register on me – ‘Alfred A. Knopf’ is clear enough on your stationery.
But, although I let the big moment elude me, it has given rise to little pleasures. For instance, whenever I receive a statement of the sales of ‘A River Runs Through It’ from the University of Chicago Press, I see that someone has written across the bottom of it, ‘Hurrah for Alfred A. Knopf.’ However, having let the great moment slip by unrecognized and unadorned, I can now only weakly say this: if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole remaining author, that would mark the end of the world of books.
Very sincerely,
Norman Maclean
(a letter from Maclean to Charles Elliott, his would-be editor at Knopf, on the heels of A River Runs Through It’s success in 1981)
— from Sergio De La Pava’s 700-page debut novel A Naked Singularity (Gaddis fiddles while Rome burns, waving a laser-pointer that sergers Norman Mailer into Mary Kay Place’s role from the Big Chill; Joseph O’Neill and Good Old Neon wax cavalier in the background, interspersing reruns of Law & Order: Criminal Intent with HBO’s World Championship Boxing)
Happy 106th birthday, Samuel Beckett.
May the next leap be the leap home?
“And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.”–The Unnamable (1953)
Close-up of Georg Herold’s (b. 1947) Ohne Titel (one of his many caviar paintings).
Looks like Mark Lombardi met Mr. Pollock’s action-painted cicada carcass and then they had a drink with Hanne Darboven. Herold has been making these material-conceit paintings (against “inflated mysticism” and petits bourgeois aesthetics) — with fish eggs as medium — for the past two decades, painstakingly numbering each caviar piece once added to the canvas.
More on Herold in Gregory H. Williams’s forthcoming Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art (along with Rosemarie Trockel, Isa Genzken, and others — we’re geeked).
Three poems from Susan Stewart at the Nation (some culled from Red Rover and The Forest).
I mean, I knew she was a good doctor, but a poet! This is some William Carlos Williams-level TRICKERY right here.
As the World Turns. As the World Turns:
![GET DMITRY.
Dopplegangers, a new series hosted by 57th Street Books at the legendary? [why not?] Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. Dmitry reads from Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab in the company of fellow cabbie & Hard Case Crime-writer Jack Clark. We whistle & drink & make jokes about Lacan & mirrors, ka & John Donne.
57thstreetbooks:
Sketch from our Doppelgangers reading with Adam Levin and Sara Levine by the fantastic Dmitry Samarov. Dmitry will read on May 8th at 7pm at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap with Jack Clark for our second Doppelgangers event. Guess we’ll just have to get Joe Peterson to sketch during Dmitry’s reading…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2dep8OvEp1qgbdcmo1_500.jpg)
Dopplegangers, a new series hosted by 57th Street Books at the legendary? [why not?] Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. Dmitry reads from Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab in the company of fellow cabbie & Hard Case Crime-writer Jack Clark. We whistle & drink & make jokes about Lacan & mirrors, ka & John Donne.
Sketch from our Doppelgangers reading with Adam Levin and Sara Levine by the fantastic Dmitry Samarov. Dmitry will read on May 8th at 7pm at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap with Jack Clark for our second Doppelgangers event. Guess we’ll just have to get Joe Peterson to sketch during Dmitry’s reading…
(via samarov)
