Garbage Boyz James Fred. Hit! Press, $12.95 paper (176p) ISBN 000-0-000000-01-6

Brix­ton sen­sa­tion Fred, in this peppy novel about a pair of cousins — Hesh, 17, and Mar­lick, 19 — who spend a week­end throw­ing a bunch of garbage off “Grammy’s ter­race” while their girl­friends are away in another coun­try sell­ing con­doms, tells a mem­o­rable tale of late teenage angst. The cousins drink car­tons of brandy in the bath­room together, take turns with the punch­ing bag while lis­ten­ing to Simon & Gar­funkel, and spend sev­eral hours sit­ting on park benches “chew­ing gum, kick­ing pigeons, and star­ing at the female passerby.” The ter­race is stocked with a great range of objects suit­able for chuck­ing, and all is shap­ing up to be “an entirely mad” week­end. The only prob­lem is that early Sunday morn­ing they hit an “elderly police­man on the head with a crate of tulips.” This leads to their arrest, and the rest of the novel is set in a “little prison” where the cousins are sub­ject to var­i­ous “little unpleas­antries, mostly involv­ing feath­ers and mis-​prescribed eye­glasses.” Garbage Boyz is a rol­lick­ing depic­tion of stu­pid­ity and dis­tress, and a fine addi­tion to the relent­less line of paper­back orig­i­nals that Hit! Press is spray­ing into the mar­ket­place. Read­ers look­ing for some­thing to glance at while on the can should turn else­where; Fred has cooked up some­thing a little more seri­ous here, which most office work­ers will enjoy over the course of three or four lunch hours.

A few weeks ago, Ange asked:

Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own dif­fi­culty as well as its plea­sures (prosodic, sen­sual, scenic) to max­i­mize its poten­tial as a unique cul­tural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?

Today I came across a week-​old arti­cle in the Boston Globe that sug­gests one way to start answer­ing the ques­tion. Drake Ben­nett reports on research in cog­ni­tive flu­ency, “a mea­sure of how easy it is to think about something.” A fair amount of the research sounds like the sci­en­tific for­mal­iza­tion of common sense, and the pri­mary result of the stud­ies can hardly count as novel or sur­pris­ing: our brains like to take the easy route when­ever pos­si­ble. “Fluency is an adap­tive shortcut,” Ben­nett writes. “According to psy­chol­o­gists, it helps us appor­tion lim­ited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our atten­tion and we have to quickly figure out which are worth think­ing about.”

More inter­est­ing is the way dis­flu­ency can be put to pro­duc­tive use, which smacks more than a little of Adorno’s defense of artis­tic and philo­soph­i­cal difficulty:

From Jack Shafer’s response to Luke Mitchell’s defense of Scott Horton’s arti­cle about the Guantánamo suicides:

The pre­dictably yawn-​inducing results (by which I mean I pre­dicted the top six in my sleep—check my dream jour­nal if you don’t believe me—& the reason I was asleep is that I had been lis­ten­ing to the top six) are in for the 37th (or, I insist, 38th) Vil­lage Voice Pazz & Jop music poll. Here’s my ballot:

And some of my com­ments here (note that I pro­vide the tag line). As usual, this list doesn’t reflect my cur­rent think­ing about