Update: Now with 100% more self-​promotional links!

Our own Michael Rob­bins has two reviews out this week:  a wickedly hilar­i­ous take­down of Robert Hass’s selected poems in the new issue of Poetry mag­a­zine, & a less wickedly hilar­i­ous appraisal of John Ashbery’s latest in the London Review of Books (sub­scriber only, but per­haps a copy could be pro­vided backchan­nel), which con­tains the first cita­tion of our own Oren Izenberg’s forth­com­ing Being Numer­ous. Please check ‘em out.

The fall issue of Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine includes a pair of excerpts from Amer­i­can Idol, the novel I’ve been writ­ing in fits and starts during this long slow slog through grad­u­ate school. The novel tells the story of an Amer­i­can anthro­pol­o­gist who lives South Amer­ica and stud­ies Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies, though the latter don’t appear in either excerpt here. I was espe­cially pleased and grate­ful to see that on their front page the good folks at Nar­ra­tive had nudged my mug up next to my friend and mentor Annie Dil­lard, whose stun­ning Pil­grim at Tinker Creek is excerpted in the issue as well. Anyway, check it out…

This week Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press is pub­lish­ing The Heart of William James, a selec­tion of essays edited by my friend Bob Richard­son. Bob is the author of a tril­ogy of tremen­dous biographies—on Thoreau, Emer­son, and James—and to cel­e­brate the pub­li­ca­tion of this new book he’s got a guest post up at The Second Pass today on James’s “war against war.” Here’s a bit from the start:

By 1910, James was against war itself. His notion of a “war against war,” as he puts it, had been build­ing for at least a decade. His posi­tion, unusual still today among peace advo­cates, rec­og­nizes that war is a deeply attrac­tive thing for many of us, and that we do not in fact want peace—at least not entirely. He wrote before D.H. Lawrence observed that “the essen­tial Amer­i­can is hard, iso­late, stoic, and a killer.” And long before Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force,” James noted that “the Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes, and Ajax, Sarpe­don and Hector killed.” It is the great­est strength of James’ argu­ment that he seri­ously rec­og­nizes the grip war has on us and will con­tinue to have. Rather than say we all love peace, let’s not fight, James instead tries to har­ness the war-​spirit and turn it against itself. We will have to kill war.

While you’re over there, be sure to check out the rest of TSP’s William James week. Good stuff.

Dear Poetry Foundation:

You’ve always been good to me per­son­ally, and I hope you know that I appre­ci­ate much of what you do for the world at large—not least this, of course, but also this and this and this. And yet while I don’t want to get sen­ti­men­tal about what was always, except for a brief run, an uneven forum, it makes me a little sad that the old Har­riet had to die so that posts like this one could live.

I know that anno­tated link aggre­ga­tion is the wave of the inter­net future—er, let’s say present to near-past—and I rec­og­nize that you have far higher hopes for the Huff­in­g­ton Post’s book sec­tion (with PHOTOS!) than I’ll ever be able to muster, but I still can’t help but think you gave up a format that was orig­i­nal and often inter­est­ing for one that every­one else is repro­duc­ing ad infini­tum. (Though I didn’t rec­og­nize it at the time, it now seems strange to me that you cited Twit­ter and Face­book as rea­sons for retool­ing the blog to do pre­cisely those things that Twit­ter and Face­book are already good at: com­ment­ing on exist­ing material.)

And it’s not just format. Pos­si­bly I’m under­es­ti­mat­ing the ways in your schaden­freude about the Paris Review’s rejec­tion mis­take, the nau­se­at­ingly triv­ial “debate” over Ron Silliman’s com­ment policy, and Anis Shivani’s unal­loyed hack­i­tude are making the world a better place for poetry, but if so, I’ve yet read the argu­ment that con­vinced me. Like­wise with the run­ning record of poetry’s pop-​culture appear­ances. Poetry—the abstrac­tion, not the magazine—is not a star­let whose every public appear­ance has to be cap­tured for pos­ter­ity; if the art is to sur­vive, it will do so in the hands of read­ers, not paparazzi.

Anyway, I’m sure if we had the old Har­riet back tomor­row it wouldn’t take long before I ate these words, and that’s not the only reason I’ll prob­a­bly regret post­ing this note in, oh, about 43 min­utes. But still, and with sin­cere respect for your hard work, there’s my $0.02.

xo,

rpb

UPDATE (8/10/10): Well, it took a bit longer than 43 min­utes, but regret has come as pre­dicted. It’s not Harriet’s fault that the inter­net has gone sil­lier than usual lately, and it’s not her fault that it’s August and I’m chained to my desk with any kind of parole still at least a month away. I would like a higher class of ephemera to read in my off-​minutes online, but it’s no one’s respon­si­bil­ity to serve that up to me. Apolo­gies to all, espe­cially the Har­ri­eteers, for the grumbling.