Send that statue tumbling.

Ron Silliman has gone and blogrolled me at his enormous poet/ry blogroll under my real name.  Imagine this is an effect of my (still extremely hilarious) being reblogged by the Tea Party and through that highly unlikely mechanism, coming to visibility in the poetry blogosphere, briefly and faintly.  Not sure how I feel about that.  On one hand, I'm kind of awed and titillated by the notion of people reading a poetry blog, and by people who have poetry blogs that get read, and in theory the idea of having a poetry blog that people read ought to appeal to me, but I do a fairly good job of keeping my name Google-dissociated from my scurrilous opinion-having and neurosis, some of which does take a home here.  I figure that people who know me, or who somehow happen to search my posts' content, it's fine if you all see me moping about not having a future or ranting about arts scenes or gushing about orchids and fountain pens or whatever other inane thing gets my attention on any given day, but it's not stuff I'd get out at a job interview.  So.  Silliman's blog and my name.  And I know at least one person has clicked through.  It's a thinker.

On the other side of ephemeral publicity, MSA put up all our abstracts on the program this year!  I have no idea if they've done this previously, since this is my first time doing MSA, but I just discovered it the other day.  Look: Epiphany at the Edges of Modernism.  Our panel sounds really good, if I do say so myself, and reading through it again was a nice reminder that my ideas are at least potentially interesting, at least a little.  Plus if someone's read my job materials enough to have an idea of what I work on, they'll now be able to find that and see evidence of a larger context for my dissertation -- a critical perspective.  Imagine!  So, thanks, MSA.  I'm unconvinced your conference is worth the $130 it cost me just to register (fuck's sake, huh?) but I do like that you put all that online.  I'm sure the primary purpose is to give attendees a better way to find out what the panels are about, but it also gives those of us who are presenting a nice little unexpected slice of web real estate.

One of our former (or something; I don't know what his relationship to the program ended up being) poetics PhDs today sent the listserv a notice of a new interview with him, out today, in which he discusses "mobile poetic forms, microseconds, wakefulness, neighborliness, introspection, dialogue, and love," and which also includes a clip of one of his new projects which "features improvisatory sidewalk dialogues." He's not joking; this is what he does, is have banal conversations with people, record them, and type that up, and call the recordings and/or transcriptions poetry.  It's sort of a Kenny Goldsmith thing, but not with the ego (thank goodness).  I wince.  He's not a bad human being, at least what I know of him, but criminy.  I also remember him telling me once that he knew he and one of our modernism professors weren't going to get along because they met to talk about an independent study, and our sidewalk-conversating poeticist told the professor he wanted to read some novel, I forget what one, but a novel.  For a semester-long graduate class.  The professor said, "ok, sure, and what else would you read?"  End of that discussion.

And this, for those of you outside English studies, is why literature programs are wary of poets when they're hiring -- that is to say, this is why they're wary of me.  That I have the book out and even continue to write and publish poetry suggests I might be like that, and reading one novel for an entire graduate class doesn't testify to an ability to conduct meaningful, publishable research, or to teach high-calibre classes, which is what departments want from job candidates.

Poetry Band Bandmate gave me an issue of some recording magazine he gets today with an interview inside with Brian Eno.  Along the way, he reveals that the teachers at his art school thought he was too brainy for art, with one of them having entered the comment somewhere into his record that he was "hampered by intellectual considerations."  At least I'm in good company with being a double-ended peg.  Apparently his old school had given him an honorary doctorate right before he happened to give the interview.  Maybe decades down the road someone will give me an honorary job, since I'm probably going to get the doctorate on my own.