I know: the last thing you need is another excuse to spend more time on the internet. But trust me on this one. Wyatt Mason, one of the very best practical critics working today, has started a blog at Harper’s called Sentences, and it’s going to be good. Here’s how Mason describes the blog’s focus:
Appearing several times a week, Sentences will not patrol the publishing industry, nor other literary blogs. Rather, it will be devoted, for the most part, to things I’ve been reading lately, new and old, and the ideas such reading stimulates.
Particular attention will be paid to the particulars of writing, the pieces and parts upon which the enterprise depends for its effects. General questions, too, about literary endeavor, will crop up, questions I’ll try to address in a useful way. My aim is to make the posts a continuation, if in a different form, of the writing that I’ve been doing in Harper’s and elsewhere for the past few years.
Mason’s profile page at Harper’s has links to much of his previous work. If you don’t know it, check it out.
From a U. of Chicago email announcing the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute:
The Milton Friedman Institute will occupy buildings that currently house the Chicago Theological Seminary on the north side of 58th Street between Woodlawn and University.
From Raymond Geuss’s very nice little elegy on Richard Rorty, quoting Aeneid 1.277-278:
“His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono / imperium sine fine dedi”…that’s what they all think (in their prime), the “rerum domini et gentes togatae.”
Deep down I know—I simply know—that the American people love me. After all that I’ve done for them and given to them, how can they help but love me? And I know that it is only a very small percentage that have given up, who have lost faith.
Who said it? (Answer after the jump.)
A) George W. Bush
B) Hillary Clinton
C) Lyndon Johnson
D) Britney Spears
From John Wilkinson’s fan letter-cum-review of Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy,” a long poem first published in Chicago Review’s British Poetry Issue (53:1) and republished as a chapbook by Barque Press:
The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remarkable poem in English published this century. Having seen the shell-shocked response of two very different audiences I am at a loss to account for the speechlessness unless we’ve been outdone in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assuming there is some kind of operative ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonetheless. A passion for new British poetry was admitted to me more than a year after this poem had been detonated in their heads, by some graduate students on a major poetics program in the US. But given the absence of print or internet commentary, I feel compelled to write a fan letter rather than a critique, and to say a possible poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can go and grow vegetables.
Forese’s second poem to Dante refers to three buildings: Santa Maria a San Gallo, an old (in Dante’s time) Florentine hospital; the Altrafronte Castle, on which Dante may have supervised on some construction work; and the hospital of San Paolo a Pinti, which was founded and maintained by the Donati family. Tana and Francesco were Dante’s half-sister and -brother, i.e. offspring of his father’s second marriage. Belluzzo was a (presumably ignoble) relative of Dante’s.
The earlier poems are available here, here, and here.
++++++++
Forese to Dante
Go pay back San Gallo before you waste
your words on others’ poverty,
for this last winter brought you
too much pity from its patrons.
And besides, if we’re as poor as you say,
why do you keep bothering us for handouts?
You’ve carved so much out of the Altrafronte Castle
that I’m sure you’re eating just fine.
Really, some work would do you well—
and Tana and Francesco—if (God help you)
you wouldn’t be stuck with Belluzzo.
But I’ll bet you end up at the Pinti hospice—
yes, I can see you at the table there,
the third, after Alighiero and his shirt.
+ + +
Va’ rivesti San Gal prima che dichi
parole o motti d’altrui povertate,
ché troppo n’è venuta gran pietate
in questo verno a tutti suoi amichi.
E anco, se tu ci hai per sì mendichi,
perché pur mandi a noi per caritate?
Dal castello Altrafonte ha’ ta’ grembiate
ch’io saccio ben che tu te ne nutrichi.
Ma ben ti lecerà il lavorare,
se Dio ti salvi la Tana e ‘l Francesco,
che col Belluzzo tu non stia in brigata.
A lo spedale a Pinti ha’ riparare;
e già mi par vedere stare a desco,
ed in terzo, Alighier co la farsata.
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