On the off chance you take your reading cues from rock stars, here’s something from an interview with Radiohead at the Observer Music Monthly:

Thom’s reading Q by mysterious Italian anarchist group Luther Blisset. I tried to read that once, I tell him.

‘Oh it’s fucking ace! But my missus, that’s her specialist field, so she’s been explaining it to me all the way through. Medieval church carnage. It’s mental. I want to get it made into a film. That’s my next mission.’

Using the In Rainbows profits?

‘Mmm-mm,’ says Thom Yorke, shaking his head. ‘I doubt it. That would cover basically the catering.’

Not to spoil the mystery, but “the mysterious Italian anarchist group” who wrote Q comprised four of the five members of the group currently known as Wu Ming, the authors of 54, Manituana, and the two stories I translated for Chicago Review 52:2/3/4.

The Radiohead/Wu Ming connection is actually apt, since Wu Ming makes all their work available as free downloads.

For the record, here’s what the rest of Radiohead is reading:

Colin is currently reading Piers Brendon’s new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny’s re-reading Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed’s just finished Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel (’Brilliant. He’s an Auschwitz survivor’), Phil’s reading Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.

I’ll be frank: I got interested in the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog right around the time that Harriet got interested in Chicago Review, but since then it’s become clear that the blog is the happiest new product to come out of the infamous Lilly millions.

Harriet is basically an Op-Ed page for poetry, with all the attendant charms and frustrations of that institution, including bizarre pronouncements (Major Jackson’s New Athenians Manifesto, Christian Bök’s plan to spawn a literal poetry plague), autocathartic provocations (A.E. Stallings’s brief for New Formalism, Bök’s challenge to the enemy of his genius), and year-end lists (e.g. by Major Jackson and the PoFound staff).

What makes Harriet’s success so intriguing is that despite important precursors like the back pages of Sulfur and Silliman’s blog, it was never obvious that poets needed their own Op-Ed page—private letters and public reviews seemed to cover the field. And yet Harriet seems to be working. Just check those comment boxes: there’s Ben Friedlander, Joshua Clover, and many others weighing in weekly.

Harriet has fast become the most interesting thing at the Poetry Foundation website, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from checking out two articles by Peter O’Leary that they’ve now posted elsewhere on the site. The first is a review of W.S. DiPiero that appeared in the November Poetry. The second is an essay on Robert Duncan’s poem, “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” Also, today on Harriet Michael Marcinkowski named Peter’s Depth Theology as his pick for 2007. It’s a great choice: check it out.

There are fish in the water, but when they are not hungry, there is no way to catch them.

Scott Horton has a post on the state of the torture debate at his Harper’s blog. Horton argues that we now have actual evidence that the CIA was able to invoke the personal authority of George W. Bush to sanction its use of torture:

This week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate.

Horton goes on to speculate about how Attorney General Michael Mukasey fits in to the picture:

As I noted previously, there is a strong basis to fear that Mukasey came up through a litmus test under which he was required to do two things: (1) to give his commitment to continue to provide cover for the torture system, and (2) to block any effort to have a meaningful criminal investigation that would disclose the torture system or any of its details. As things now stand, it looks like Mukasey is delivering on these test points.

Here are some excerpts from the transcript of the Kiriakou interview:

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Filed under Journalism + Politics on December 16, 2007
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In an article on the dollar’s depreciation in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so drastic, it has seeped into the popular consciousness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flashing not a stack of Benjamins, but a fistful of euros.

The implication seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bundchen] and Jay-Z realize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anecdote is to add color (no comment) to the story, to break up more mundane sentences like the one that follows. (”The dollar had been at relatively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask yourself: by what standards does Jay-Z count as a representative of the popular consciousness? Consider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ According to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 million in income during 2005 (more…)

Filed under Economics + Journalism + Music on December 15, 2007
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An ode for Paula Dobriansky, John Baird, and all the other nihilists in Bali who press on toward a “triumph where all things falter.”

++++++++

A Forsaken Garden
Algernon Charles Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

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