My disappearance from the blogosphere

Now my old posts at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet are being attributed to other writers—e.g., Christian Bök on Harry Stephen Keeler.

(It turns out I am a big CB fan—but this is a disturbing trend!)

And my post on Gossip Girl is now attributed to "Poetry Foundation."

(I actually can't remember the topics of my other posts...but there were a bunch!)

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UPDATE (6/9): Thanks to Travis Nichols at the Poetry Foundation, my "classic" Harriet posts from 2007–2008 have been restored!

Wait, here are some more!

Let's revisit this one, from June 4, 2008:

Wavy celery

Reading Lucian this morning*, I came across this:

“She said that Stratonice the wife of Seleucus had done something much more ridiculous….She set up a poetry contest with a prize of one talent. The theme was ‘an encomium of Stratonice’s hair’….

“Actually, she was bald and hadn’t a hair of her own. Even so, though this was the condition of her head and everyone knew that it had happened because of a long illness, she actually listened to the wretched poets calling her hair ‘hyacinthine,’ braiding curly ringlets and using the wavy celery as an image for the non-existent locks.”

— "In Defense of Images” (transl. Keith Sidwell), ca. A.D. 169

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*Do you like how casually I introduced this information?

Only revolutions

The Chicago Tribune reprints—free of charge!—my Astral Weeks column on Matt Kindt's Revolver. They lopped off mention of Alice Sola Kim's story (understandable, I suppose, since the issue of Asimov's is no longer on the stand)...but they also lopped off the last graf of the Kindt review. It now ends on this rather non-end-y sounding note:

“Revolver,” on the other hand, unfurls at breakneck speed, with an unhinged, almost drunken vigor to the deliberately rough drawings. Though the plot is fairly involved, it never feels claustrophobic. Thanks in part to Kindt's unadorned, noir-inflected writing, Sam's existential dilemma is as exciting as watching him and Jan kick in doors and elude snipers.

Here's the ending as it appeared in the L.A. Times:

As I read "Revolver," I couldn't help thinking of the more famous "Revolver," the Beatles' landmark 1966 album. Devin McKinney's description of it, in "Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History," as a sort of pop schizophrenia, seems not irrelevant to the subject at hand:

"'Revolver' is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings. … By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming."