Here’s a poet with wit and heart, and here’s a great Canadian magazine. Check both out. Lynes is the author of three books, Girl on the Antikokan Highway, Left Fields, The Aging Cheerleaders’ Alphabet and a chapbook I have yet to see, but love the title of: inglish prof with her head in a blender...

Amazing! This is even better than joy boy for a buzz of human potential for joy. Ya, ya, it’s a feel good flick. Go, feel good! Go Yomairia! Go Kelvin! Go Jatnna! Go Cyrus!

Who knew that Bjork would sound like that?? The odd thing about this is that her voice reminds me of my Icelandic grandmother attempting to do an English accent…or maybe it’s just that she talks about “marrow” and my grandmother had an odd obssession with marrow. The eating of marrow….but I digress. It’s a great...

You too can spend a weekend at Woolf’s childhood home and pine not to go the lighthouse, but “for” the lighthouse. It seems that soon enough the lighthouse will be put out of commission. (See post below). I have been reading Suzanne Zelazo’s Parlance again, and I think it’s great. Particularly the first series of...

Wow, what an amazing woman… Here she is talking about the fact that no one outside of the academy knows who Zukofsky is: What this means is that the fans owe it to their audience and each other and to the audience outside the walls of the university to explain what’s so great about their...

I’m reading Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy and loving it. What a lucid, accessible and intelligent academic writer. I’m fascinated by the discussion of accessibility, and of course thinking of Stein as an immigrant writer, the detailed comparisons of sentence structures to that of ESL speakers. There’s clearly some kind of connection…but more as I read. Here’s...

Martine Bellen & Karen Weiser Another great belladonna last night. I know Martine Bellen, who also teaches at Rutgers, but hadn’t heard of Karen Weiser. Loved her reading and look forward to her new work. Here’s an intriguing snippet from Lungfull. Martine read from a new chapbook, as well as from the belladonna chapbook–a do-si-do–one...

The ongoing battle to save Woolf’s lighthouse, or “the lighthouse” at the center of To The Lighthouse. I wondered if this was the trigger for Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping, which has a rather pointed blend of references to both Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, and the Woolf novel. But I digress: By Chris Court and Sam Marsden, PA...

Unbelievable…they’re banning hoodies? I’ve recently fallen in love with this particular fashion. Once the hood is up and the sunglasses are on one can glide anonymously through the subways undetected. So now I’m a hood? “I’m wearing a hood, and I’m not even a thief,” said one teen in Liverpool in a CBC interview. “I’m...

Saw the portrait at the Met on Sunday, and the face really is intense. Here’s her portrait of Picasso…can’t recall which came first but I’ll get back to you on that. And here’s a little something else, thanks to UPenn: Gertrude Stein, “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb” (1946) They asked me what I thought of...

Two Ladies at the Automat, 1966. Diane Arbus. What’s immediately shocking about this exhibit is how familiar these images are. And the curators know this. The first dozen images or so are her most famous. Things go more chronologically otherwise. The earlier photos–such as this one here in NY, and others on benches, in parks,...

Max Ernst at the Met. Okay, this was good. Amazing to see so much of the work. And though the paintings themselves are wonderful it’s the smaller collages and drawings that are wonderful to see up close and in the original.