BEZOAR, a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine pub­lished in Glouch­ester, Mass. from 1975-1981 that I knew noth­ing about until this morn­ing, is now avail­able online. It looks ter­rific, and besides the news­pa­per clip­ping above (in the March 1978 issue) you can find John Taggart’s “Slow Song for Mark Rothko” (July 1978), Quito street songs trans­lated by Eliot Wein­berger (Decem­ber 1977), and John Weiners’s “Home Duty,” from the final issue, which—I beg their indulgence—I couldn’t resist pinch­ing in its full type­script glory:

Fathers, Chicken, and Cities Wes­leyan Archimedes. New Spit (TV, dist.), $22.95 paper (80p) ISBN 000-0-000000-00-1

From the Buddha to Elvis, from frus­tra­tions with the inter­net to the art of but­ter­ing bread, the answer is always yes. The book con­tains the Nor­we­gian en face, in dark, aban­doned urban or sub­ur­ban spaces, which speaks both for and against its author, con­tend­ing, in what may be his best book: “[look­out post].” Either way, the act of connecting—to one’s own mind, to the world out­side of the mind and to both simultaneously—is enter­ing into a feel­ing of absolute chaos. While the self-​awareness can become exces­sive, there’s some nasty muck beneath the sur­face. Add to this a mal­prac­tice case—artistic, polit­i­cal, social and beyond— which has per­pet­u­ally taken place by a river (the Hudson, Nile or Seine), and it is impos­si­ble to resist par­tic­i­pat­ing in this non­cha­lant adven­ture in meta­phys­i­cal per­cep­tion.  About half of these poems are set in single long-​lined columns. There’s an ele­giac tone through­out, and read­ers may be reminded of Ken­neth Rexroth. This is an impres­sive first effort made by some­one who is also back in town, pur­su­ing the life of a painter in his par­ents’ garage. (Sept)

For what­ever reason, I’ve been on a bit of an n+1 kick lately. I’ve been flip­ping through their web archive and paging through issues past and present, reread­ing some arti­cles and read­ing others for the first time. The other day I reread an essay Marco Roth wrote on the occa­sion of Jacques Derrida’s death.

Roth calls the piece an “autothanatography,” which more or less cap­tures the fact that it’s a hybrid, part elegy—a genre Der­rida mas­tered—and part coming-of-age story. It’s no com­plaint to say that the piece is more inter­est­ing as the latter than the former. As the title makes clear, Roth’s dis­il­lu­sion­ment, his fail­ure to find in Der­rida the life-​changing mentor that he wanted, is the real story here*; it far out­shines any par­tic­u­lar insight on the philoso­pher himself.

But I’m get­ting off track–I don’t mean this post to be any­thing like a review or cri­tique of Roth’s essay, only a chance to tell another story on the back of one of his. So:

From today’s Times:

The chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has writ­ten a sear­ing cri­tique of gov­ern­ment efforts at “strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tion” with the Muslim world, saying that no amount of public rela­tions will estab­lish cred­i­bil­ity if Amer­i­can behav­ior over­seas is per­ceived as arro­gant, uncar­ing or insulting.

The cri­tique by the chair­man, Adm. Mike Mullen, comes as the United States is widely believed to be losing ground in the war of ideas against extrem­ist Islamist ideology….

“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to com­mu­ni­cate our actions and much more about what our actions com­mu­ni­cate,” Admi­ral Mullen wrote in the cri­tique, an essay to be pub­lished Friday by Joint Force Quar­terly, an offi­cial mil­i­tary journal.

“I would argue that most strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems are not com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and exe­cu­tion prob­lems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arro­gant Amer­i­cans the enemy claims we are.”