I like the Bryan twins as much as the next guy—I even knew one of them a little back in the day—but you really have to wonder whether we need two in-​depth pro­files of them in the same week:

From The New Yorker:

From the Times Magazine:

I guess it’s not news that William Logan is a jerk. Espe­cially on the blog cir­cuit, he’s the critic that people love to hate. After all, it’s here that poets (and their friends) can turn the lights back on him after he’s pub­lished one of his phe­nom­e­nally mean-​spirited reviews. Usu­ally, they con­demn his poetry rather than refute his reviews, which seems like a good strat­egy: he’s a pretty bad poet.

But (and I write this with the loud, imag­ined sound of booing in my ears) he’s not such a bad critic. Really, he’s not–he’s just a lot crustier than he needs to be. Even though he loves to get per­sonal, and even though he appears to like almost noth­ing he reads, he almost always has a few really insight­ful thoughts about the book he’s got before him. I may as well admit it: he’s one of the only crit­ics I can’t resist, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. In the tepid world of public (as opposed to scholas­tic) poetry crit­i­cism, Logan is refresh­ing. When I see his name on copies of mag­a­zines at the local book­store, I pick them up, shake my head, whis­per “asshole” to myself under my breath, then read the review. Over and over I do this. Why? I think I can explain it.

Given his fame locally as an agi­ta­tor for the apos­trophic rights of ter­mi­nal sibi­lants and abroad as a defender of my middle ini­tial, I would be remiss were I not to note that Michael Rob­bins has a poem, “Alien vs. Predator,” in this week’s New Yorker. It must surely count as one of the strangest (in a good way) ever hosted by the pages of that august pub­li­ca­tion. For a cheeky inter­view with Michael about the poem that includes links to more of his work, see here.

UPDATE (1/23): You can also check out Michael’s inter­view with the Vil­lage Voice, in edited and unedited ver­sions, and, some­thing I forgot to men­tion ear­lier, a review in four parts that he did for Poetry a month or so back.

UPDATE (1/29): The Vowel Movers have a poetry crush on Michael, and have anointed him the “Taylor Swift of Poetry.” There’s some ques­tion about how Jane Dark will take this news, but I’m pretty sure Michael is enjoy­ing it.

The New Yorker’s spe­cial fea­ture on Ray­mond Lush and Gordon Carver—sorry, Ray­mond Carver and Gordon Lish—is full of little sur­prises, but the main event is def­i­nitely the pub­li­ca­tion of “Beginners,” an unedited ver­sion of the story first pub­lished as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

Now the mag­a­zine has posted a com­par­i­son draft of the two ver­sions at their web­site, which makes for an inter­est­ing case study in fic­tion edit­ing. Here’s a sample (bold indi­cates Lish’s addi­tions; era­sures his deletions):

Mel Herb stopped talk­ing. “Here,” he said, “let’s drink this cheapo gin the hell up. Let’s drink it up. Then we’re going to dinner, right? Terri and I know a new place. That’s where we’ll go, to this new place we know about. But we’re not going until we finish up this cut-​rate, lousy gin. We’ll go when we finish this gin.”

Terri said, “We haven’t actu­ally eaten there yet. But it looks good. From the out­side, you know.”

“I like food,” Mel said. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d be a chef, you know? Right, Terri?” Mel said. “It’s called The Library,” Terri said. “You haven’t eaten there yet, have you?” she said, and Laura and I shook our heads. “It’s some place. They say it’s part of a new chain, but it’s not like a chain, if you know what I mean. They actu­ally have book­shelves in there with real books on them. You can browse around after dinner and take a book out and bring it back the next time you come to eat. You won’t believe the food. And Herb’s read­ing Ivan­hoe! He took it out when we were there last week. He just signed a card. Like in a real library.”

“I like Ivan­hoe,” Herb said. “Ivan­hoe’s great. If I had it to do over again, I’d study lit­er­a­ture. Right now I’m having an iden­tity crisis. Right, Terri?” Herb said. He laughed. He fin­gered twirled the ice in his glass. ¶ “I’ve been having an iden­tity crisis for years. Terri knows. Terri can tell you. But let me say this. If I could come back again in a dif­fer­ent life, a dif­fer­ent time and all, you know what? I’d like to come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wear­ing all that armor. It was all right being a knight until gun­pow­der and mus­kets and twenty-​two pis­tols came along.”

Second-​guessing is, of course, the point of the exer­cise, though what the edits really show is that nei­ther Lish nor Carver were infal­li­ble. For exam­ple, push­ing the story away from the Library/Ivan­hoe bit seems smart, but it’s a little dis­turb­ing to see Lish so insis­tent on declass­ing things (”let’s drink this cheapo gin the hell up”).

If this kind of thing strikes you as fun, there’s lot’s more to be had here.