Beantown Bound Again

Back from my too-quick foray into the middle-west of America. Initial thoughts: deep dish is just exquisite; the urban architecture in Chicago is amazing and unparalleled by any place I've ever been; midwestern niceness seems to be mythical; the city's use of and commitment to green space ought to be seen as an urban model; and, wedding television is nutso ('whore cards'). Busy at work, here are a few tidbits.

• In The New York Times this week, Daisy Fried reviews the new collection from Franz Wright: 'Franz Wright’s frank self-­absorption, combined with his ­poems’ structural vivacity and oddball precisions, may make readerly response to his poems dependent on readerly mood. Those who believe constant self-reference is the wrong procedure for poetry — those who are strenuously traditional or strenuously hipster — won’t cotton to “Wheeling Motel.” [. . .] Wright is uningratiating, bumptiously witty, inexhaustibly joyless and routinely surprising. Individual moments — this line break, that bit of syntax — fascinate even when individual poems fail to assert themselves as memorable. But Wright’s dark epiphanies, surging sincerities and ironic outbursts build incrementally from poem to poem.' The review seems to me to be a fair, if perhaps generous assessment of Wright's style in broad strokes; it also quotes at length from the title at hand, though often only to show the indicative qualities therein. Not much ground-breaking, but a generally good piece on a well-established poet.

• Very, very funny; from the Quarterly Conversation: 'Notoriously lengthy, difficult, and full of bizarre digressions, Moby-Dick practically invites abridgement. It was no surprise then when Orion Books did just that, offering readers Moby-Dick in Half the Time, a book that chopped Melville’s public domain masterpiece into a far tamer psychological novel. Enter author and translator Damion Searls, who decided to create a text composed of everything cut from the Orion edition of Moby-Dick. The resulting text was published as ; or The Whale in the Summer issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (exceprts available here).' Ha! Hilarious.

• Also at The New York Times, word of a lost visionary book by Carl Jung: 'This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say Liber Novus, which is Latin for New Book. Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.' I have always had a soft spot for Jung's humanistic insights into patterns of myths and symbols across cultures — I'm very curious to see this new volume.