Destroyer — Creeley — Betjeman — Jealousy

1.
Destroyer mastermind Dan Bejar is interviewed about his involvement in the group Swan Lake, at Radio Free Canuckistan (via Zoilus):

Did making this record illuminate anything in your own work that you hadn't realized before?

Those guys, especially after having to learn all those Your Blues numbers, seem to think I gotta lot of songs in the key of B, or maybe it was E. Anyway, I never realized that till it was pointed out to me in their usual brutal manner. They also like to point out how numbingly simple my songs are, which is something I've been suspecting for a while now.

2.
Double poetry reviews (triple, really) at the Buffalo News:

Jeff Simon looks at the recent double-volume collection of longtime Buffalonian Robert Creeley—dig the Western New York spin:

All you have to do is take a later poem clearly related to a Buffalo occasion—the playful, homonym-stuffed "Breath" dedicated to Susan Rothenberg and clearly inspired by the exhibit of her work at the Albright-Knox gallery—to know that the poem, like the horse painting it celebrates, is "a gift to all that lives/ and looks and breathes."

And Michael D. Langan looks at A.N. Wilson's new Betjeman bio (as well as a collection of JB).

[Betjeman's Oxford mentor C.S.] Lewis thought him deeply superficial and wrote him in a letter, "I have never heard you speak of any serious subject without a snigger. It would, therefore, be odd if you expected to find gushing fountains of emotional sympathy from me whenever you chose to change the tune. You can't have it both ways..."

Incidentally: How do you pronounce "Betjeman"?!

3.
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow reviews Was She Pretty? at Salon. (I like that she mentions Noah Baumbach's underrated Mr. Jealousy.)