Silliman's Blog: 11/8/09

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Labels: Ocho

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Friday, November 13, 2009

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Ryan Adams, Hello Sunshine, Akashic Books, New York 2009

Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend 2009

Adrian Blevins, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 2009

Ana Božičević, Stars of the Night Commute, Tarpaulin Sky, Grafton, VT 2009

Neeli Cherkovski, From the Canyon Outward, R.L. Crow Publications, Penn Valley, CA 2009

Jeff Clark, Ruins, Turtle Point Press, New York 2009

Alison Hawthorne Deming, Rope, Penguin, New York & London, 2009

Graham Foust, A Mouth in California, Flood Editions, Chicago 2009

Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature, Penguin, New York & London, 2009

Matt Jasper, Moth Moon, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Amy King, Slaves to Do These Things, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Hayden Saunier, Tips for Domestic Travel, Black Lawrence, Brooklyn 2009

Jordan Stempleman, Doubled Over, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Terese Svoboda, Weapons Grade, University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville 2009

Novica Tadić, Assembly, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref & Maja Teref, Host Publications, Austin 2009

Anne Valley-Fox, How Shadows are Bundled, foreword by V.B. Price, U. of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 2009

Liz Waldner, Play, Lightful Press, New York 2009

Books (Poetry Anthology)

Billy Collins, Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, Columbia University Press, New York 2010. Includes Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, John Ciardi, Amy Clampitt, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Annie Finch, Carol Frost, Linda Gregerson, Linda Gregg, Eamon Grennan, Daniel Halpern, Seamus Heaney, Bob Hicock, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, John Hollander, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Marianne Moore, Carol Muske-Dukes, Howard Nemerov, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Plumly, Lawrence Raab, Kay Ryan, Delmore Schwartz, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Wallace Stevens, James Tate, John Updike, David Wagoner, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, many more.

Mark Weiss, The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, UC Press, Berkeley 2009. Includes Nicolás Guillén, Eugenio Florit, José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Samuel Feijóo, Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Fina García-Marruz, Lorenzo García Vega, Carlos Galindo Lena, Francisco de Oraá, Roberto Branly, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Fayad Jamís, Heberto Padilla, José Álvarez Baragaño, César López, Antón Arrufat, José Kozer, Miguel Barnet, Belkis Cuza Malé, Nancy Morejón, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Lina de Feria, Delfín Prats, Excilia Saldaña, Raúl Hernández Novás, Amando Fernández, Soleida Ríos, Lourdes Gil, Reina María Rodríguez, Abilio Estévez, Iraida Iturralde, Ruth Behar, Ángel Escobar, Ramón Fernández Larrea, Roberto Méndez, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Ismael González Castañer, Juan Carlos Flores, Pedro Llanes, Sigfredo Ariel, Frank Abel Dopico, Alberto Rodríguez Tosca, Omar Pérez López, Antonio José Ponte, Heriberto Hernández, Pedro Marqués de Armas, Damaris Calderón, Alessandra Molina, Carlos A. Aguilera & Javier Marimón. Translated by many hands.

Books (Other)

Archestratos, Gastrology or Life of Pleasure or Study of the Belly or Inquiry Into Dinner, translated by Gian Lombardo, Quale Press, Williamsburg, MA 2009

Tony Green, Poussin’s Humour, Paravail, Somerset, UK 2009

Kevin Killian, Impossible Princess, City Lights, San Francisco 2009

Brian Kiteley, The River Gods, FC2, Tuscaloosa 2009

Red Pine, Lao-Tzu’s Taoteching, with Selected Commentaries from the Past 2000 Years, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend, 2009

Aram Saroyan, Door to the River: Essays & Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age, Black Sparrow, Boston 2010

Helen Weaver, The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties, City Lights, San Francisco 2009

Journals

Gerry Mulligan, no. 1, Red Hook, NY, 2009. Includes Stephen Jonas, Mary Ferrari, John Godfrey, Rae Armantrout, Jack Collom, Simon Pettet & Elio Schneeman, Raymond Queneau, Steve Malmude, Tony Towle, Lewis Warsh, David Rattray, more.

Aufgabe, no. 8, Brooklyn 2009. Includes Matvei Yankelevich, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Epstein, Keith Gessen, Peter Golub, David Hock, Yuliya Idlis, Christopher Mattison, Max Nemtsov, Eugene Ostashevsky, Natasha Randall, Stephanie Sandler, Simona Schneider, Zachary Schomburg, Elena Fanailova, Dmitry Golynko, Linor Goralik, Sergey Kruglov, Dmitry Kuzmin, Kirill Medvedev, Anton Ochirov, Andrey Sen-Senkov, Aleksandr Skidan, Maria Stepanova, Dmitry Vodennikov, Sergey Zavyalov, Igor Zhukov, Tatiana Zima, Olga Zondberg, Diane Ward, Kimberly Lyons, François Turcot , Nathalie Stephens, Karen Weiser, Ari Banias, Alan Mills, Dolores Dorantes and Jen Hofer, Phil Cordelli, Corina Copp, Matt Reeck, Nathan Austin, Elisabeth Whitehead, Akilah Oliver, Geoffrey Detrani, Sarah Gridley, Damaris Calderón, Laura Sims, Tyrone Williams, Rachel Levitsky, Tim Peterson, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Inti García, Román Luján and Brian Whitener, Paula Koneazny, Eduardo Milán, Garrett Kalleberg and Laura Solórzano, Suzanne Jacob, Dana Ward, Jasper Bernes, Paolo Javier, Catherine Mavrikakis, Alan Davies, Kimberly Lyons, Noah Eli Gordon, Trish Salah, & Margaret Ronda

Still a big stack of books
waiting to be noted here

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Alas, it turns out that I’m a better forecaster of Project Runway than I am of baseball. To wit:

If I had to guess today (and that’s why I’m writing this), I would project an all-female finals consisting of Althea Harper, Carol Hannah Whitfield & – most likely to win – Irina Shabayeva.

I posted that sentence here on October 15, and I turned out to be exactly right. Not that it was as easy as it seems in retrospect. Althea sort of fell apart on the final challenge and was nearly taken out by Gordana Gehlhausen. The other final contestant eliminated on the cusp of going to Fashion Week was Christopher Straub (the Shakopee, Minnesota, designer who deserves the Where’s Andre? award for the contestant most likely to shed tears at the eensiest provocation). Straub was, to my eye, no better than the third strongest of the male designers & even he seemed to shocked to be, in his words, “the last boy standing.”

All three of the finalists had made it top the top three in at least six of the show’s twelve episodes to date. Shabayeva – “Meana Irina” to at least one of her competitors – has finished in the top three seven times, winning three episodes, Althea has been in the top three six times, winning twice & Carol Hannah has also been in the top three six times, winning once. No other designer won more than once, nor finished in the top three more than three times, and the two who managed that were Gordana & Christopher.

So the three showing at Fashion Week had 19 of the 36 top-3 finishes. I still think Irina is going to win – I think she’s heads above the other two women, and if you don’t believe me, check out her collections on her own website. One could reasonably argue that she’s the best female designer the series has had to date. But it’s a feature of the competitive pressure and simple constraints of Project Runway – the final challenge included a “tour” of the Getty museum that lasted all of 30 minutes(!) – that none of her designs for the show have come close to what she can do working by herself.

Which may be one reason why this has been the most tepid season Project Runway has ever had. They really need to rethink the challenges. One wonders what will become of this show if its standard sink any lower. Runway has been a huge hit, at least by basic cable standards, and there are now knock-offs of it in 13 other countries. But as Tim Gunn likes to remind his protégés, they need to make it work.

Labels: Project Runway

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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Alexei Parshchikov 2008 (photo by Eugene Ostashevsky)

Back in the early 1980s, before I had heard such names as Zhdanov, Kutik, Iskrenko or Kondakova, I twice used the term “realism” to describe what has come to be known as language poetry, first in Ironwood in 1983, as the title to a selection of poems by my peers. My preface to In the American Tree, published in 1986, is entitled “Language, Realism, Poetry.” In both instances, I was trying to underscore the fact that there was nothing un- or anti- realistic about this new American writing, but rather that it was questioning, here directly, there obliquely, much that we had been taught to think reactively about realism, and indeed about the real.

When I learned through Lyn Hejinian that there was a group of poets in the then-Soviet Union who were known as “metarealists,” I was immediately intrigued. The realism I got, and also the meta-. Metarealism is one of those terms – social formalism is another – that I have always thought could have just as easily, and just as accurately, been deployed to characterize language poetry.

Labels: Alexie Parshchikov