Month: April 2005

  • The lasting monument for the last day of Poetry Month

    The Latin poet Horace wrote this as the final poem of the third book of his Odes. (He later published a fourth book. We had one of those poems earlier.) Horace’s poetry has been the inspiration for poets through the ages. Dante, Dryden, Housman, Yeats and Auden all cribbed from him. He was the one…

  • Uncle Jumbo: The Proverbial Turd In The Punchbowl

    I had an incredible time at the ballpark tonight –and, yes, I’m in a good enough mood that I’m going to go ahead and refer to the Metrodome as a ballpark. It was a strange and amazing game, and a seriously gutty, inspired, and lucky performance by Carlos Silva. There was a point in the…

  • Great Blurbs From Book Jacket History, Part One, And Other Miscellaneous Nonsense

    –The day of Samuel Beckett’s Funeral. December 26, 1989. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. The Spam hat was my own humble offering. This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl. –Dylan Thomas’s blurb on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Walker…

  • Rage

    Forgive the late entry today. I was busy with the day job. I had the pleasure of meeting Betsy Brown last week. She’s a real poet, and I tried to get her to stay for another glass of wine and recite a bit for me, but she had to go. She graciously sent this along…

  • There's A Cancer In Twins Territory, And Its Name Is Brad Zellar

    Back in the day –this was in 1987– I used to have this Nancy and Sluggo tee-shirt that I believed was some sort of magic talisman for the Twins. Whenever I wore it to a game the Twins won, and somehow I figured out, or thought I figured out, that when I didn’t wear it…

  • Whistle While You Work

    It is certainly true that music magazines remain committed to music criticism without a lot of strong evidence that anyone is all that interested anymore. But I couldn’t let Pete Carbonara’s dismissive comments about our mutual former employer go unanswered. Someone needs to defend Spin’s honor, I think. First, no one expects Spin to be…