Apologies for that last. Rather than waste your time on William Kristol and Leo Strauss, can I instead suggest you ease your Monday-morning procrastinations with John Latta on William Logan on Frank O’Hara? Thanks.
Enchanted by this little mystery over at John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti, I set myself to poking around Google Books, which coughed up this page and its delightful list of the “key words and phrases” in Kenneth Koch’s Selected Poems 1950-1982:
sleeping with women, circus girls, Thesmophoriazusae, Poros, asleep and sleeping, Frank O’Hara, O’Ryan, Saint Ursula, Fernand Leger, Jane Freilicher, Art of Love, John Ashbery, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, limburger cheese, Amba, poetry, brassiere, Larry Rivers, Strangler
No, kids, it’s not flarf; it’s just a little fun.
Jedediah Berry’s “Minus, His Heart,” a short story that first appeared in Chicago Review 53:2/3, will appear in this year’s Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
(via Mumpsimus)
Should it ever happen that the sacred poem
to which heaven and earth have set their hand,
such that I am made lean after all these years,conquers the cruelty that locked me out
of the sweet sheepfold where I slept as a lamb,
enemy of the wolves who brought it war,with another voice and another fleece
I shall then return a poet…
—Dante, Paradiso XV.1-8
The Telegraph reports that the city council of Florence has voted to revoke the sentence that sent the Italian poet into exile for the remainder of his life. The March 1302 condemnation promised death by fire were Dante ever to set foot in the city.
This is not the first time that Florentines have tried to achieve formal reconciliation with the man they would later honor as “the highest poet.” Wikipedia gives this account of an early effort:
In 1315, Florence was forced by Uguccione della Faggiuola (the military officer controlling the town) to grant an amnesty to people in exile, including Dante. But Florence required that as well as paying a sum of money, these exiles would do public penance. Dante refused, preferring to remain in exile. When Uguccione defeated Florence, Dante’s death sentence was commuted to house arrest, on condition that he go to Florence to swear that he would never enter the town again. Dante refused to go. His death sentence was confirmed and extended to his sons. Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honourable terms.
The Florentine resolution, which passed 19-5, restores Dante’s full citizenship in the city. The five naysayers not unjustly called the process “a stunt,” and Vittorio Sermonti, one of the most famous readers and commentators on Dante in Italy today, was likewise skeptical. “Well,” he told La Repubblica, “now they can start the rehabilitation process for Brutus and Cassius as well.”
1/ Donald Barthelme, “For I’m the Boy” (1964):
The bottle was old and dirty but the brandy when Huber returned with it was tasty in the extreme.
2/ Grateful Dead, “Brown-Eyed Women” (1971):
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
This is one way to look at it.
Here’s another: Gawker is to Keith Gessen what Gary Baum was to Dave Eggers.
Granted, the analogy is a stretch, since Gawker professes none of the open adulation that Baum had for Eggers. But consider this, from Gessen’s 2001* article on Baum and his FoE! Log. Not only does it read like a recipe for Gawker, but it’s further proof–as if Gessen’s novel weren’t proof enough–that the fate of sad young literary men has always been his subject:
The Log was about fame: the fame that Eggers had and the fame that Gary wanted. It was about the wages of such fame, its conditions, its uses. There were occasional literary quotations in the Log, but they were not from Eggers’s books; there were references to literary figures, but only insofar as their careers were concerned. Larger questions were being dealt with here. How does one take the enormous apparatus of celebrity-creation and force it to do one’s bidding? How does one, to put it more succinctly, conquer the world?
It was a good question, a Balzacian question. And one was struck by the optimism of it, the innocence. I kept asking Gary whether he’d become disenchanted by the dirty secrets of the literary world, whether he still thought it a world worth conquering. He wasn’t, and he did. Because though Gary proved beyond the doubt of any reasonable reader that literary fame, and literature, is a vast and intricate conspiracy, the trick of the Log was that it wasn’t a conspiracy he abhorred. He wanted in, he merely wanted in.
+++
*Note: The article was originally written for the Atlantic, but for reasons Gessen explains in the postscript, it didn’t appear in print until the first issue of n+1, in the fall of 2004.
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