In lieu of orig­i­nal thought, a few items of pos­si­ble interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writ­ing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ web­site–reminded me to men­tion it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the clas­si­cist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He suc­ceeds bril­liantly at cre­at­ing a living, con­tem­po­rary Sopho­cles. His ver­sion is a chill­ing mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker inter­views the Flood fel­lows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Con­fused and obnox­ious, but not really angry.”

+ Auf­gabe’s edi­tors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thank­ful or irri­tated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for her­self on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent John­son is still not sure about “A True Account of Talk­ing to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mys­tery, that poem.’”

This week’s New York Times Book Review fea­tures a number of books that have appeared here­abouts in the last couple of months:

+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, call­ing it “a mas­terly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, per­sonal, metic­u­lous, deeply lay­ered work of nar­ra­tive journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.

+ Ben­jamin M. Fried­man reviews Gre­gory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Fried­man seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypoth­e­sis even though he can’t find much evi­dence for it:

One frus­trat­ing aspect of Clark’s argu­ment is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mech­a­nism by which the sur­vival of the rich­est fos­tered new human attrib­utes and insists on the Dar­win­ian nature of this process, he repeat­edly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actu­ally genetic…. Nor does he intro­duce any evi­dence, of the kind that nor­mally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capac­ity for hard work are her­i­ta­ble in the sense in which biol­o­gists use the term.

Click here for my pre­lim­i­nary take on Clark’s argu­ment, which Ken Sil­ver­stein men­tioned favor­ably on his Harper’s blog.

+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleep­ing and Waking, which he describes as “a qui­etly star­tling col­lec­tion that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-​world atten­tion, but actual readers.”
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Photos from CR’s 60th anniver­sary party, which hap­pened Novem­ber 17 at Around the Coyote, are now avail­able. Lisa Robert­son, Tom Raworth, John Wilkin­son, and Devin John­ston read at the event, and the John Lennox Band sup­plied music.

Poetry by Lisa Robert­son, John Wilkin­son, and Devin John­ston. Music by The John Lennox band. Beer by Peroni.

When: Friday, Novem­ber 17, 7p-11p.

Where: Around the Coyote Gallery, 1935 1/2 W. North Avenue, Chicago.

Free admission.