First of all, note to Bill: I’m not that young. But thank you. I am rec­on­ciled to living in a world where useful crit­i­cal work gets done in blog com­ment streams.

I am a bit more than halfway through Flow Chart, & while cer­tain themes can be traced with­out difficulty—Ashbery’s inti­ma­tions of mor­tal­ity (his major sub­ject since A Wave), his child­hood awak­en­ings to sex­u­al­ity, his own poetic devel­op­ment & recep­tion, the long mid­night of Reagan-Bush—much of it does not make any sense. (I real­ize this is not a par­tic­u­larly shock­ing crit­i­cal rev­e­la­tion.) Don Share has elu­ci­dated some of the poem’s allu­sions, & John Shoptaw has pro­vided a hit-&-miss read­ing, but mostly the poem resists what it calls “very chewy advanced propositions.” But I’d like to know what strate­gies others found to make their way through the for­bid­ding ter­ri­tory, “for it is writ­ten that what­ever is not glue may be pressed into ser­vice as such.” Me, I found it help­ful to read the poem’s fourth sec­tion as a parody of Dorn’s Slinger.

My review of Keith Waldrop’s Tran­scen­den­tal Stud­ies: A Tril­ogy is up at Book­fo­rum. Check it out…

A pause in our reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming to offer a hearty con­grat­u­la­tions to my friend Blake Thomp­son, who just won $1 mil­lion from ESPN for pick­ing the Queens Park Rangers to tie or beat West Bromich Albion in a minor league soccer game. (They played to a 2-2 draw.) Blake made it to the finals by making 29 cor­rect picks in a row. He won the com­pe­ti­tion with a nine-​pick streak, and now he’s a mil­lion dol­lars richer. Go Blake!

A banner ad I came across that takes you to this Israeli Min­istry of Tourism site (click image to enlarge):