Stepping shamelessly onto the path laid clear by the New Yorker, digital emunction is now welcoming entries for the first (and probably last) edition of the New York Times Photo Caption Contest. The photos of the day, by Jay Mallin and Caleb Jones, appeared on page A12 of today’s NYT.

Send your entries here. The best entries will be posted in this space and the winner will take home a prize of unutterable value.

1/ From the cover of the November 2007 Harper’s. Photo by David Graham:

2/ From “The Mission,” in the October 29, 2007 New Yorker. Illustration by Steve Brodner:

With characteristic lucidity, and allowing himself more righteous anger than his print persona normally lets in, George Packer goes after Brian De Palma’s new movie Redacted on Interesting Times, his blog at The New Yorker:

So “Redacted” doesn’t merely offer a frisson of Godardian self-consciousness; this is irony with a revolutionary point, a return to De Palma’s origins in the New Left cinema of the late sixties. And what is the point? That we’re all the same, Zarqawi, Lynndie England, the rapists in Mahmudiyah, CNN, Ashley Gilbertson, the readers of the Times, yours truly—we’re all accomplices in the great act of violation that is the Iraq war. The distinction between perpetrator and witness, crime and its documentation, has been obliterated. And you thought you were just trying to find out what’s happening over there? Pas du tout! Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère.
…
“Redacted” is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi’s homemade videos are war porn, “Redacted” is film-theory porn—a stylized snuff film inside a meta-critique of the media.

Yesterday Ron Silliman jumped into the discussion of Charles Simic’s review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems. Not surprisingly, Silliman comes down firmly on the side of those who saw the review as an attack on a whole tradition of poetry. Echoing Mark Weiss’s original sentiment, Silliman writes “[Simic] uses Creeley to make a larger—and much more pernicious—argument. His real target is the post-avant.”

Nothing in the discussion on the POETICS listserv that followed my original post convinced me on that point, though Simic’s hand in this year’s National Book Award nominations has certainly made me reconsider it. But since no one seemed especially interested in the point I was actually concerned with—the effect of Creeley’s social standing in certain circles on the reception of his work—it didn’t seem worth carrying on, especially since I wasn’t much in the mood to defend a poet (Simic) whose work I don’t particularly care for and whose idea of good poetry seems blinkered at best.

Silliman’s post takes apart the Simic review paragraph by paragraph, (more…)

Chicago Review’s Autumn issue (53:2/3) is back from the press and available now for only twelve dollars. Buy a copy today!

POETRY in the issue includes Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (entitled “The Book of Adam”); “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” the second half of CD Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war (the first half of which was published in CR 51:3); and poems by Larissa Szporluk, William Fuller, Sarah Gridley, Roberto Harrison, Mark Tardi, John Peck, Erín Moure, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Elisa Sampedrin.

FICTION includes five short stories by Peter Markus and Jedediah Berry’s “Minus, His Heart.”

CRITICISM in the issue includes a defense of realism by Georges Perec and a long consideration of Hart Crane by Allen Grossman.

The issue also includes a three-part conversation on gender in contemporary poetry, with an essay by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, a response by Jennifer Ashton, and a note by Joshua Kotin and Robert P. Baird.

REVIEWS in the issue include:

(more…)

1/ From James Fallows’s response to Peter Navarro in the Letters section of the October 2007 Atlantic Monthly:

Readers should certainly read Navarro’s book to see his argument in its full version. The notes section of his book begins, ‘Much of the research conducted for this book was done over the Internet.’ All of the research for my article was done on-scene in factories and trading companies in China.

2/ From Caitlin Flanagan’s response to Mike Males in the Letters section of the October 2007 Atlantic Monthly:

In reporting this essay, I attended an eye-opening presentation at my children’s elementary school.