As of 11:30 this morning, this blog-like entity is on hiatus for the better part of the next month. I’ll be out of the country, and I trust I can leave it to the rest of you to wrap up this election without any nasty surprises. Please don’t disappoint.

–The Management

I recently received in the mail a copy of Kent Johnson’s newish book from Shearsman, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. It’s something of a selected poems in miniature, collecting work from other books like Epigrammititis and I Once Met, as well as one poem, “Into the Heat-Forged Air,” which first appeared in the last issue of Chicago Review.

Anyone who knows Kent at all will recognize that the advice he offers his son Brooks in “Sentimental Piscatorial”—”stay low, walk slow, / and lay the fly right along the velocity // changes”—is not advice that he seems ever to have much troubled himself with, a fact the world is richer for. His poems are full of prose, indirection, and fun, and his jaunty mock erudition (like the appearance of Roberto Bolaño’s visceral realists in a footnote to “A God”) is possible only because he’s got more than enough of the real thing.

I like Kent’s work because he refuses to hide the ambition and earnesty that drive him, but what sets him apart from his peers is that he also does not mask the embarrassment and self-recrimination that those twin qualities inevitably inspire. This alone makes the book worthy of recommendation, and it’s just barely enough to forgive the fact that digital emunction didn’t make it into “Poetry Blogs (of the Fourth Generation) in Zürich.”

If you’re still not convinced, read Linh Dinh’s take on the book here and then buy it here.

Bloomberg is reporting, and Drudge is blaring, that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi discussed a plan by the world’s political leaders to suspend the financial markets and “rewrite the rules of international finance.” Which would obviously be rather frightening, on many levels, if it were true. But as far as I can tell, it simply isn’t.

Lay this one at the feet of Il Coglione himself. Five minutes after he spoke of the supposed plan, he was forced to admit: “Someone advanced the hypothesis of rewriting the rules. We were only talking about it, but there’s nothing yet.”

An hour later, Pierluigi Bersani, Italy’s shadow minister of the economy, said, “We already have enough problems without Berlusconi adding others. To speak of suspending the markets, and then, after just three minutes, to confusedly take back what you just said only adds uncertainty to uncertainty.”

And sure enough, it turns out that by “someone” Berlusconi meant “someone on the radio”:

“I heard it on the radio,” Berlusconi said about an hour after his initial comments, his spokesman confirmed. “The hypothesis wasn’t put forward by any leader, including myself.”

This morning, White House spokesman Tony Fratto denied that any such plan had ever been discussed.

So, those tiny bright spots I mentioned this morning? Not so much.

From Nouriel Roubini, who titles his post “The world is at severe risk of a global systemic financial meltdown and a severe global depression”:

The U.S. and advanced economies’ financial systems are now headed towards a near-term systemic financial meltdown as day after day stock markets are in free fall, money markets have shut down while their spreads are skyrocketing, and credit spreads are surging through the roof. There is now the beginning of a generalized run on the banking system of these economies; a collapse of the shadow banking system

And from Bloomberg: (more…)

Things on the economic front still look very bad out there, what with a stock market in free fall, Iceland on the verge of bankruptcy, and, oh, did you hear that we’re pumping another $38 billion into AIG? It’s all ugly, and it’s probably going to get worse and stay bad for some time.

But there’s a few little tiny bits of good news that Yves Smith rescued from the rubble yesterday. (more…)

Megan McArdle, responding to the Obama campaign’s new attack on McCain’s Charles Keating links, writes:

[I]n fact I think that the Ayers connection is too tenuous to be interesting. But there is a nugget of a real critique at its heart, which is that the academic culture Obama belongs to thinks its just fine to be a former active terrorist who has refused to renounce support for the violence committed by his group; that culture has rewarded Bill Ayers with prestigious employment and other positions in a way that it wouldn’t dream of rewarding a similarly “idealistic” abortion clinic bomber. I know it’s hard to imagine, but if you’re conservative, that seems like a real problem.

So McArdle thinks the academy is to blame for not only accepting but even cosseting Ayers, and Obama is implicated because he’s a member of that same morally bankrupt institution, the university.

But if you look at what actually happened when it came to Ayers’s social (which is not, obviously, to say moral) rehabilitation, the key factor is pretty clearly his father, who was the former chairman of Commonweath Edison, one of the Midwest’s major energy companies. Here’s a bit from a Nov. 11, 1985 LA Times article about Bernardine Dohrn’s (Ayers’s wife) attempt to join the New York bar:

(more…)