Lazy Literary Gleanings™

Levi comes right out and says it: "There's a reason this is my favorite book in the world, folks; I'll be reading and re-reading it for a long, long time to come."

Read his two posts on re-reading Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

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Two excellent things from the new issue of Triple Canopy: David Levine's "Matter of Rothko" and Claire Barliant's "The Hanging at Mankato."

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Wow: Stephen Burt has a great review of my old teacher Bruce Smith's latest book of poems, Devotions, in the NYT.

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Not done with this yet, but Douglas Wolk's "Comic-Con Strikes Again" is really good. It's an Amazon Single. (Has anyone read the Vollmann Amazon Single?)(Does anyone read this blog anymore?)

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday, July 23

I keep saying "woah" while reading this piece on Sontag by Eliot Weinberger.

It is a Hollywood cliché that a beautiful actress needs an element of ugliness to become a great star, and one might say that a genius needs an element of stupidity, or something wrong, to become a great imaginative writer. Sartre certainly had his. But Sontag seems to have had nothing stupid about her at all. Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, she may ultimately belong more to literary history than to literature.

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Our "Title Bouts" are over, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a recent submission from the great Poundstone. Dig in!

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"It’s sort of like a surrealist game." —Alison Bechdel on web research (what a beautiful way of thinking about it! I am always playing surrealist games these days!)

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Love this poem: My old teacher Bruce Smith's "Devotion: Baseball" is featured in the summer issue of Poetry.