I’m back in Chicago for the week, which is lucky, because it means I got to attend Christo­pher Ricks’s work­shop and lec­ture at the U. of Chicago yes­ter­day. I don’t think anyone has ever doubted Ricks’s bril­liance, but the great delight of the day was dis­cov­er­ing just how damned funny he is. And not only funny in gen­eral but funny on sub­jects like “Geoffrey Hill’s rela­tion­ship to T.S. Eliot” and “Milton and Blasphemy,” which, let’s be honest, don’t imme­di­ately offer them­selves as veins of poten­tial hilar­ity. Fear of you-had-to-be-there syn­drome keeps me from trying to dupli­cate his efforts in prose, but suf­fice to say that a cer­tain exchange about the porno­graphic impli­ca­tions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had, within hours of its utter­ance, already entered the canons of U. of C. legend and lore.

I can, how­ever, pass along Ricks’s ref­er­ence to Skin­head Hamlet, the news of which he was clearly eager to spread (he men­tioned it in both work­shop and lec­ture). Ricks described it as a bur­lesque ver­sion of Hamlet in which every scene is reduced to one person telling another to fuck off. “It seems odd at first,” he noted, “but if you think about it, it actu­ally works.” The effect of this reduc­tion was sup­posed to resem­ble, in the words of the editor’s note that heads the play (words Ricks was charmed to recite) “something like the effect of the New Eng­lish Bible*.”

As it hap­pens, there’s a script of the play (written/edited by Richard Curtis) avail­able online, and while Ricks’s descrip­tion of the dis­til­la­tion process wasn’t exact, his judg­ment of the play’s suc­cess is spot on. Here’s Curtis’s ren­der­ing of Polonius’s death in Act III, Scene II:

As Randy Newman sang: “I love L.A.”  Well, so do I.  I am 24 years old, and I can assure you that some­day I will live there, prob­a­bly when I am 40.  Just not yet, not so fast.  The good news is, there are so many ways to go to L.A. with­out actu­ally going—of course, the movies come to mind first, and then you can always slap a Steely Dan record down on the player and drive west on Sunset just like that.  L.A. is a mag­i­cal place.  Also a savage place, as one UCLA grad stu­dent who bears an uncanny resem­blance to a totally rav­aged Jim Carrey told me.  But what about L.A. books?  There are many, indeed—after the jump, I begin an anno­tated list, and I would be grate­ful for fur­ther con­tri­bu­tions, just chuck them in as com­ments, please.

Mayday Mag­a­zine, a new online pub­li­ca­tion, is pub­lish­ing a round­table of responses to Kent Johnson’s reply to Jason Guriel’s “Going Negative” (which showed up in the March Poetry). The site is set to go live May 1, but most of the responses are already avail­able here.

I’ve got a con­tri­bu­tion up, as do DE con­trib­u­tors Joshua Adams and Michael Rob­bins. It’s a big group, and I haven’t yet read any­where close to all of the others, but so far I’ve appre­ci­ated the replies of John Latta, Mau­reen McLane, Barry Schwab­sky, and Ange Mlinko. Check them out…

This arti­cle is worth read­ing in its entirety, but a small sample pretty much says it all:

In a series of high-​level meet­ings in 2002, with­out a single dis­sent from cab­i­net mem­bers or law­mak­ers, the United States for the first time offi­cially embraced the brutal meth­ods of inter­ro­ga­tion it had always condemned.

This extra­or­di­nary con­sen­sus was pos­si­ble, an exam­i­na­tion by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. offi­cials who were push­ing the pro­gram, not the senior aides to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, not the lead­ers of the Senate and House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tees — inves­ti­gated the grue­some ori­gins of the tech­niques they were approv­ing with little debate.

…Read More…