In lieu of orig­i­nal thought, a few items of pos­si­ble interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writ­ing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ web­site–reminded me to men­tion it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the clas­si­cist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He suc­ceeds bril­liantly at cre­at­ing a living, con­tem­po­rary Sopho­cles. His ver­sion is a chill­ing mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker inter­views the Flood fel­lows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Con­fused and obnox­ious, but not really angry.”

+ Auf­gabe’s edi­tors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thank­ful or irri­tated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for her­self on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent John­son is still not sure about “A True Account of Talk­ing to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mys­tery, that poem.’”

Today’s edi­tion of the New York Times includes a half-​page ad by the National Ital­ian Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion that’s mostly about A. Ken­neth Ciongoli doing his best William Donohoe/Abe Foxman impres­sion. (He’s wor­ried, it seems, that some NBC announcer has slurred Rocco Mediate’s “unsurpassed ethnic heritage” by saying he looks like Tiger Woods’s pool cleaner.) Dumb, but it includes these price­less sen­tences, retyped here for your elec­tronic view­ing pleasure:

[Johnny] Miller seems not to know that in his pro­fes­sional life­time, the pres­i­dents of George­town, Har­vard, Tufts, and Yale uni­ver­si­ties as well as sundry other Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions are cul­tural and ethnic cousins of men named Rocco. In addi­tion, the recent CEOs of IBM, Intel, McDonald’s, Brooks Broth­ers, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, the New York Mer­can­tile Exchange, the Philadel­phia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade have been Ital­ian Amer­i­cans with rel­a­tives named Rocco.

From Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in next month’s Atlantic:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncom­fort­able sense that some­one, or some­thing, has been tin­ker­ing with my brain, remap­ping the neural cir­cuitry, repro­gram­ming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s chang­ing. I’m not think­ing the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m read­ing. Immers­ing myself in a book or a lengthy arti­cle used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the nar­ra­tive or the turns of the argu­ment, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case any­more. Now my con­cen­tra­tion often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fid­gety, lose the thread, begin look­ing for some­thing else to do. I feel as if I’m always drag­ging my way­ward brain back to the text. The deep read­ing that used to come nat­u­rally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time online, search­ing and surf­ing and some­times adding to the great data­bases of the Internet….

For me, as for others, the Net is becom­ing a uni­ver­sal medium, the con­duit for most of the infor­ma­tion that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advan­tages of having imme­di­ate access to such an incred­i­bly rich store of infor­ma­tion are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded…. But that boon comes at a price. As the media the­o­rist Mar­shall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just pas­sive chan­nels of infor­ma­tion. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chip­ping away my capac­ity for con­cen­tra­tion and con­tem­pla­tion. My mind now expects to take in infor­ma­tion the way the Net dis­trib­utes it: in a swiftly moving stream of par­ti­cles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the sur­face like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one.

No, friend, you’re not, which is why I’m happy to intro­duce a new fea­ture, pre­vi­ously avail­able only on air­planes and in movie the­aters, right here on dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion: an emer­gency exit door. It’s up there on the right at the top of the page, just under the sub­scribe link. Use it early and often. Who knows? The brain you save could be your own…

If I knew how, I would ask for­give­ness, but of whom? Of Aeore? The Sky? Myself?
Who else?
Are you afraid?
Not of death.
Of what?
Of that enor­mous sky.
You’re going to die.
Well, kill me then, says I.
You’re going to die then.
…
Well I said kill me then or else be quiet.

+++

(This pho­to­graph was taken by Glei­son Miranda of Brazil’s National Indian Foun­da­tion [FUNAI] on a recent fly­over of an uncon­tacted Indian tribe in the Brazil­ian state of Acre. The quo­ta­tion is from Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord.)