Updates + Microreviews
1) Latest Kenyon thing here. Not sure it holds well, or makes tons of sense, but there we are (but for real: that new Orner's crazy fantastic). Same obsessions, new year.
2) Poem in the latest + always-great DIAGRAM.
3) Here's Erika Wright's blog. She's the poetry editor at Guernica, which is a great venue for good poetry, and she's apparently gonna choose one poem each week to focus on. This week, the inagrual week, she chose one of mine. Pretty rad.
4) I'll post, in the next few days, an interview with Tom Zoellner, but just know that his latest book, A Safeway in Arizona, is now available, and even if you, like me, have decided that in 2012 you need to spend more time reading fiction and poetry and less reading nonfiction, you still need to read this book. This book, unless criminally neglected, will be on lots of year-end lists in 11 months. For real.
Microreviews
Is that a Fish in Your Ear by David Bellos
The Poetry of Thought by George Steiner
Both of these books are ultimately about language and thought, and the valences of strangeness and difficulty that obtain in considering language and thought. Frustratingly, I don't know how to clearly or well talk about these two books (here's maybe the background: I realized, on coming up to the new year and tallying [very roughly] books read and attention paid in the preceeding 12 months, that I'd read *way* too much nonfiction—like a toxic amount, like I'm not sure how to talk about nonfiction anymore and not all that clear how to read fiction and poetry well at present. After this many books of nonfiction, all I feel I can end up saying is: this book is good and it's about ______.). I will say this: Bellos is a translator, and any black-and-white notions of that art or skill you currently possess will be wiped, colored clean by his work—though if you've no interest in translation, that's fine; ultimately the book's about language and communication and thought.
Steiner's book's thicker (though shorter) and less bouncily playful and fun than Bellos's (I'd love to know if there's such a thing as a bouncily playful Steiner book). You know Steiner: he's hard and fervently worth it; his books are delicious challenges, things which make your brains seethe good heat in effort. The Poetry of Thought tries to consider ways we're presented language, and what the structural aspects of the presentation of language de- and connotes and makes happen to the language, and the book has exactly the same sort of he-was-made-to-write-it whiff that Didion's Blue Nights did—in other words, this is Steiner's most Steiner book. Just get the thing and read it.
American Desperado by Jon Roberts and Evan Wright
A bit of a ploy, the set-up of the book: it's Evan Wright writing Jon Roberts' story. Here's the subtitle: My Life: from Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset. If you've seen the easily Netflixable Cocaine Cowboy, you know Roberts; if you haven't seen that movie, imagine a character similar to the lead in Blow, that old JDepp movie. Regardless: this book's a yankingly riveting thing, and Wright's exactly perfect for the thing: dude writes gorgeously but has always clearly had a hankering and not-secret love for pulp and gunsmoke that makes this thing just a fucking blast. Get it and go.
Best Music Writing 2011, edited by Alex Ross
This is a Call: the Life and Times of Dave Grohl by Paul Brannigan
The former book's just a necessary purchase—Da Capo released Best Music each year, but A Ross's editorship is fantastic—they maybe haven't had this fun and clever and readable and sensible an editor since back in '01 when Hornby did it. The latter book's just (to quote Sleater-Kinney) good rock and roll fun: Grohl's apparently the nicest guy in rock on earth, and even if you're not some fanatic for Them Crooked Vultures or Foo Fighters (or if you're not dork enough to care that Grohl drummed for Tenacious D), you'll still have a hard time not enjoying yourself.
The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein
Do not read this if you're at all prone to conspiracy theories. Just don't. I don't even know how much is wise to get into here. The book's subtitled Inside the Global Arms Trade and it's just fucking terrifying—you will be compellingly convinced that the arms industry is just hands-down the scariest thing on earth, and its influence + pull is shockingly terrifying (to say nothing of the massive corruption involved). What's that you say? What about the oil industry, or the pharmaceutical industry, or something like that? Here's the only answer that matters: the arms industry's the only one in which, as soon as the customer's purchased his good, he can literally instantly kill whoever sold him the good. This is a harrowing book. Read it, for sure, but have someone around who can talk you down from believing the whole world's some f'ed set-up.
