A Ques­tion Mark Above the Sun: Doc­u­ments on the Mys­tery Sur­round­ing a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara 

Sports­man and DE alum­nus Kent Johnson’s provoca­tive spec­u­la­tions about the prove­nance of “A True Account of Talk­ing to the Sun at Fire Island” are joined in a new volume with his “critical novella” on con­tem­po­rary British poets, Cor­roded by Sym­bol­ysme, which orig­i­nally appeared in Chicago Review. I would pay the $20 that Punch Press is charg­ing for one of its 100 lim­ited edi­tion copies just for a print of the cover alone, which I hereby nom­i­nate pret­ti­est of the year. When you throw in the charm of Pro­fes­sor John­son, you have quite a deal. Sub­scribe here.

Investigators are trying to figure out how it hap­pened that a com­mer­cial flight car­ry­ing 144 obliv­i­ous pas­sen­gers simply sped past its des­ti­na­tion last night––by 150 miles. Not only did the pilots miss their land­ing strip, they missed every attempt by ground con­trollers to con­tact them over the course of an entire hour. The excuse the pilots gave, after cir­cling back and land­ing safely but a little later than expected, is not very reas­sur­ing (from the Times.)

the pilots told the Fed­eral Bureau of Investigation and the air­port police that “they were in a heated dis­cus­sion over air­line policy and they lost sit­u­a­tional aware­ness,” the safety board said, citing infor­ma­tion from the Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Administration.

The good news is that the pilots even­tu­ally got their sit­u­a­tional aware­ness back!

So, just two screw-​ups, right?

I’ve been mean­ing to throw two or three cents into Michael Robbins’s inter­est­ing recent post on form and ide­ol­ogy. But the post is old now, and I think I might ramble on too long for a com­ment stream. Here’s a new post instead.

I’m not as famil­iar with the tra­di­tions of Marx­ist intel­lec­tu­al­ism (espe­cially of the cur­rent vari­ety) as are some around DE, so I’m happy to think of this as a set of ques­tions as much as a set of claims.  Still I think even I’m safe in saying that “form” and “ide­ol­ogy” are two words that one ought to be care­ful with. They are bloated and multi-​purposed and, well, mostly empty. While I’m inter­ested in Michael’s ques­tion about the con­nec­tion between form and ide­ol­ogy, I think we ought to be cleaner in posing it. (Not a crit­i­cism, Michael, just clar­i­fi­ca­tion: I know you were posing it in a bloggy way.)

Ask a room full of grad­u­ate stu­dents in hip glasses what form is and you will get a mess.

Apolo­gies to anyone who’s seen this already (it’s being passed around), but I want to do my part to make sure every­one gets the chance.

Here’s a logic map to help you make it through the mind-​blistering dis­play in Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) unmask­ing of a bill that pro­tects against “discrimination” on the basis of so-​called “sexual orientation”: homos; sex with ani­mals and dead people; pedophiles; Obama; the Negro Pres­i­dent issue broadly con­ceived; homos’ attack on lib­erty; homos and Hitler the Car­toon, the “ultimate hate monger”; homos.