For those who fol­lowed Craig Arnold’s dis­ap­pear­ance in the spring, this arti­cle will be a refresh­ing change: a look at his life and poems rather than a minute-by-minute nota­tion on knowns and unknowns. I’m late in post­ing it. It was writ­ten after a recent memo­r­ial for Craig held at the Uni­ver­sity of Wyoming, where he taught.

Any inter­ested read­ers in NYC should know that a sep­a­rate memo­r­ial read­ing will be held there on Novem­ber 1. Another is planned for next year’s AWP in Denver.

Quite Busy: Auto­di­dac­tic Man­ager Kelsey Armway. Westch­ester Univ. (OKAY, dist.), $37.75 (183p) ISBN 000-0-0000-0000-2

“Who do I really think I am? Not myself in movies but myself?” asks B. in his third col­lec­tion, a Cap­tiva Island-​based song of the swim­ming pool that whole­somely mas­tur­bates the rela­tion­ship between geog­ra­phy and iden­tity. B, who is also a taxi­der­mist, mer­rily his­tori­cizes his life-​experience in the con­text Donald Fagen’s solo records: “I have lived through three albums these twenty-​six years”— and his ego takes on a most unseemly shape, con­stantly express­ing a desire to uncover the mean­ing of a city life he never knew and, so instead, the non-​smoking sec­tion of his pan­cake restau­rant in Sani­bel  (“Inside every grid­dle another grid­dle exists. Under every flap­jack another flap­jack”). B. recounts his entre­pre­neur­ial tri­umphs in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order, in lists of cal­cu­la­tors bought and knives sold, and the book’s 72 sec­tions are each named after a town he plans to open a hot cake house in.  His meth­ods impose a flac­cid nar­ra­tive rubber band around the entire text, and tend to jumble the reader’s already spu­ri­ous sense of time. B. exploits the cat­a­clysmic events of his youth to nau­se­at­ing effect; he writes of his time spent as a paper­boy in Gulf Breeze: “I was in exile, wear­ing badly torn under­pants in a totally empty apart­ment with my homi­ci­dal brother in law.” This is an entirely fatu­ous work, every crevice seep­ing with dull med­i­ta­tions on batter mix­tures, humid­ity and what it feels like to be a suc­cess in the U.S.A. (Jan.)

The first CD I bought was But­t­hole Surfers’ Locust Abor­tion Tech­ni­cian. I was 15, 16, con­ced­ing to the mar­ket­place despite my sus­pi­cion that the com­pact disc was, in Steve Albini’s semi-​prescient phrase, the rich man’s eight track tape. Many of the first CDs I bought were, of course, trans­fers into the new format from back cat­a­logs of bands I liked. Over the years, I—& prob­a­bly you, too—have bought the same albums sev­eral times over, becom­ing some­thing of a con­nois­seur of the usu­ally infin­i­tes­i­mal dif­fer­ences among var­i­ous remas­ters. The second remas­ter of Sticky Fin­gers, for exam­ple, cuts off Mick Taylor’s solo at the end of “Sway” just a half-​second before it actu­ally fades out on the record. Only a crazy person would buy each new edi­tion of a novel. But I appear to be exactly as stupid as the record com­pa­nies hope I am. (At least until recently: these days most of my music takes the form of gifts from the inter­net.)

(Photo via; by Justin Sul­li­van of Getty Images)