As of 11:30 this morn­ing, this blog-​like entity is on hiatus for the better part of the next month. I’ll be out of the coun­try, and I trust I can leave it to the rest of you to wrap up this elec­tion with­out any nasty sur­prises. Please don’t disappoint.

–The Management

I recently received in the mail a copy of Kent Johnson’s newish book from Shears­man, Homage to the Last Avant-​Garde. It’s some­thing of a selected poems in minia­ture, col­lect­ing work from other books like Epi­gram­mi­ti­tis and I Once Met, as well as one poem, “Into the Heat-​Forged Air,” which first appeared in the last issue of Chicago Review.

Anyone who knows Kent at all will rec­og­nize that the advice he offers his son Brooks in “Sentimental Piscatorial”—”stay low, walk slow, / and lay the fly right along the veloc­ity // changes”—is not advice that he seems ever to have much trou­bled him­self with, a fact the world is richer for. His poems are full of prose, indi­rec­tion, and fun, and his jaunty mock eru­di­tion (like the appear­ance of Roberto Bolaño’s vis­ceral real­ists in a foot­note to “A God”) is pos­si­ble only because he’s got more than enough of the real thing.

I like Kent’s work because he refuses to hide the ambi­tion and earnesty that drive him, but what sets him apart from his peers is that he also does not mask the embar­rass­ment and self-​recrimination that those twin qual­i­ties inevitably inspire. This alone makes the book worthy of rec­om­men­da­tion, and it’s just barely enough to for­give the fact that dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion didn’t make it into “Poetry Blogs (of the Fourth Gen­er­a­tion) in Zürich.”

If you’re still not con­vinced, read Linh Dinh’s take on the book here and then buy it here.

Bloomberg is report­ing, and Drudge is blar­ing, that Ital­ian Prime Min­is­ter Silvio Berlus­coni dis­cussed a plan by the world’s polit­i­cal lead­ers to sus­pend the finan­cial mar­kets and “rewrite the rules of inter­na­tional finance.” Which would obvi­ously be rather fright­en­ing, on many levels, if it were true. But as far as I can tell, it simply isn’t.

Lay this one at the feet of Il Coglione him­self. Five min­utes after he spoke of the sup­posed plan, he was forced to admit: “Someone advanced the hypoth­e­sis of rewrit­ing the rules. We were only talk­ing about it, but there’s noth­ing yet.”

An hour later, Pier­luigi Bersani, Italy’s shadow min­is­ter of the econ­omy, said, “We already have enough prob­lems with­out Berlus­coni adding others. To speak of sus­pend­ing the mar­kets, and then, after just three min­utes, to con­fus­edly take back what you just said only adds uncer­tainty to uncertainty.”

And sure enough, it turns out that by “someone” Berlus­coni meant “someone on the radio”:

“I heard it on the radio,” Berlus­coni said about an hour after his ini­tial com­ments, his spokesman con­firmed. “The hypoth­e­sis wasn’t put for­ward by any leader, includ­ing myself.”

This morn­ing, White House spokesman Tony Fratto denied that any such plan had ever been discussed.

So, those tiny bright spots I men­tioned this morn­ing? Not so much.

From Nouriel Roubini, who titles his post “The world is at severe risk of a global sys­temic finan­cial melt­down and a severe global depression”:

The U.S. and advanced economies’ finan­cial sys­tems are now headed towards a near-​term sys­temic finan­cial melt­down as day after day stock mar­kets are in free fall, money mar­kets have shut down while their spreads are sky­rock­et­ing, and credit spreads are surg­ing through the roof. There is now the begin­ning of a gen­er­al­ized run on the bank­ing system of these economies; a col­lapse of the shadow bank­ing system

And from Bloomberg: