There’s a cer­tain kind of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism that takes as its task the cut­ting and brand­ing of lit­er­ary live­stock into herds that are easily com­pre­hen­si­ble to jour­nal­ists and under­grad­u­ates. This mode of crit­i­cism has never much appealed to me, either as reader or writer, because it is so reg­u­larly use­less to every­one except the critic doing the naming.

Qual­ity con­trol is another prob­lem. What begin as well mean­ing exer­cises in gen­er­al­iza­tion all too often end with Pro­crustean cat­e­go­riza­tions, friend­ships con­fused for formal like­nesses, and sim­plis­tic ideas about influ­ence and affil­i­a­tion mis­taken for actual lit­er­ary his­tory. Spend a few days in the vir­tual com­pany of Ron Sil­li­man or Seth Abram­son and you’ll see what I’m talk­ing about.

But set­ting generic reser­va­tions aside, I don’t think anyone would dis­pute that Stephen Burt is far and away the best critic work­ing the mode today, and anyone inter­ested in the cut-and-brand style of crit­i­cism prob­a­bly already knows that he has an essay in the new Boston Review on what he’s call­ing “the New Thing.” (I’m guess­ing–hoping–that’s a bit of know­ing self-​parody.) Burt describes it this way:

The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, them­selves) with a self-​subordinating con­ci­sion, so much so that the term “min­i­mal­ism” comes up in dis­cus­sions of their work, though the false analo­gies to ear­lier move­ments can make the term mis­lead­ing. The poets of the New Thing eschew sar­casm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for inter­pre­ta­tions to fit.

Around the CR offices we always talked about this kind of poetry as Flood poetry, after the press run by the poet whom Burt names the prime exem­plar of the ten­dency: Devin John­ston, who also hap­pens to be one of our local favorites. (Graham Foust, Eliz­a­beth Tread­well, Mau­reen McLane, and Joseph Massey are a few of the other poets Burt iden­ti­fies as New Thingrates.)

I’ve been on the road all day and my brain is soft from eighty ounces of cherry limeade slush, so instead of a con­sid­ered response to Burt’s pro­posal,* I’ll offer only a quib­ble.

Explaining to people how I came to hold degrees in both mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing and the­ol­ogy is never an easy rhetor­i­cal trick, but by far the best response I’ve ever had came at a party in Key West. A guy there heard me tell my story, thought a minute, and then said, “Huh. Maybe you can engi­neer a just religion.”

Pretty good, no? That’s what I thought, too, until I saw this video, which makes me think that maybe that guy got his idea of reli­gious engi­neer­ing exactly backward:

It looks like Richard Posner is now hawk­ing his blame-the-guvmint thesis over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

The low inter­est rates of the early 2000s pushed up hous­ing prices both directly and indi­rectly. Directly by reduc­ing the cost of hous­ing debt–and hous­ing as I men­tioned in my last entry is bought mainly with debt. Indi­rectly by push­ing up the value of common stocks. The low inter­est rates, as I said, caused asset-​price inflation.

…

[T]he basic fault lies with the Fed­eral Reserve in having pushed inter­est rates too far down, and kept them too far down for too long, during the early 2000s, and with the dis­man­tling of reg­u­la­tory con­trols that had for­merly reduced the incen­tive and abil­ity of banks to lend into a bubble.

I’ve talked about it before, but I want to come back to Posner because I’ve pretty well con­vinced myself that his thesis is going to be the stan­dard con­ser­v­a­tive expla­na­tion for the eco­nomic crisis going forward—if and when, that is, they get their intel­lec­tual act together. I mean, let’s face it: it sort of has to be, since it’s the only halfway cogent expla­na­tion they’ve offered.

The prob­lem, of course, is that Posner’s thesis is only halfway cogent.

Spring photos from Crip­ple Creek and St. Louis after the jump.