I forgot about this, and only remembered because I did a little search to find his email address online. My good friend Charlie in Cyprus was published: he beat me to it, basically, getting a contribution into a book about his favorite football club and the horror of its fate at the hands of moron greedmongers. There’s a page about the book he was published in here, but I’ll excerpt the bio below: Charlie grew up in Wimbledon and followed Wimbledon FC from around 1980. He is a member of the WISA Committee. When he’snot talking far too much about …

Hugh Kenner is dead. I remember reading a lot of his The Pound Era when I was studying modernist lit with Andre Furlani at Concordia University. Kenner was probably the most interesting and evocative literary scholar whose work I’d ever studied. It made Pound’s world, and the world of his cohorts, so lucid for me, in a sort of mythic way, anyhow. I don’t know what he’s done of late, and I won’t mourn his death personally, for I know little of him personally. But on his passing it’s only fitting to stop for a moment and think of how …

Well, last night I finished reading a very interesting book by Vandana Shiva called Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. While I’m usually quite pro-technology, pro-science, and pro-“development”, Shiva’s book is a reminder of how deeply codependent science has become with business interests. And what businesses they are: I have always been deeply distrustful of agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill, and now I’m even moreso. The picture Shiva paints is quite shocking, and provokes a great deal of discomfort with the kind of strategies that companies like those I mentioned use to take control of something absolutely …

Here’s a poem I mentioned once to Sun Hwa in Seoul over coffee, talking about how writers excel most when they know which details to mention and which to leave out. While cleaning up my apartment I ended up looking through my copy of Rimbaud and found the poem. Seems I misrembered a detail about whose boots Rimbaud was describing, but anyway, it’s still a beautiful detail, better still in the French despite the wonderful translation by Wyatt Mason. This poem is taken from his translation, Rimbaud Complete. Enjoy. At the Cabaret-Vert, Five P.M. by Arthur Rimbaud Eight days of …