I don’t consider myself easily impressed, but this is pretty sweet. My buddies in the red-dirt-country band Cross Canadian Ragweed are included in the new Rock Band Country Track Pack performing the Chris Knight song “Cry Lonely.” Check out the video above, and then click below the fold for a full list of the other songs in the expansion pack.
(P.S. For anyone in the area—anyone? anyone?—CCR is playing at the Tractor Tavern here in Seattle next Tuesday, August 4.)
The consensus of macroeconomic forecasters is that [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] contributed roughly 3% to annualized growth rates in the second quarter. This means that absent its effects, economic performance would have resembled that of the previous three quarters, when the economy contracted at an average annual rate of 4.9%. In short, the recovery act turned this quarter’s economic performance from disastrous to merely bad. This is no small achievement, but with even more public relief and investments, the U.S. economy could do much better.
The TLS is out with an essay on Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, a new entry in a debate I’ve found intermittently fascinating. For those who haven’t been following the story, the question at its heart is how much what we think of as Carver’s writing was actually the work of Lish, his editor. It’s been known for a long time that Lish’s editorial interventions were extensive, but not until some of Carver’s early drafts appeared—first in a 2007 New Yorker feature and then in Beginners, a pre-Lish version of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love that’s included in this year’s the Library of America Carver—did the reading public learn just how much Lish had altered Carver’s original work. (James Campbell, author of the TLS piece, notes that Lish had cut most of the stories in Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by more than 50%.)
As with every literary debate, there’s a significant personal backstory to the Carver-Lish drama. It began with Lish’s original championing of Carver, which inspired him, it seems, to claim a proprietary interest not only in the author’s subsequent career but also in the minimalist style on which it so famously thrived. And the drama continues to this day, nearly twenty years after Carver’s death, with an argument between Tess Gallagher (his widow) and Knopf (his publisher) over how much of the pre-edited work should be released. (Lish seems to have stayed out of the fight, at least publicly.)
But the debate over the authenticity of Carver’s stories—the efforts to nail down to the third decimal place what percentage of “his” work was really his, and what percentage Lish’s—obscures what for me is the more interesting question: what if it’s simply the case that in writing, as in so many other areas of life, several people working together can produce better work than a single person working alone?
Having found myself positioned by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books and Ange Mlinko in The Nation as a representative of the party line on the kajillionaire provocateur poet Frederick Seidel—& cited with rather more subtlety by Harper’s senior editor Christian Lorentzen (writing for unfathomable reasons in the United Arab Emirates’ National newspaper)—I am pleased to be able to report that my review of Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009 appears in the August 6 issue of The London Review of Books
