Posted on: September 27, 2011
Well, not quite. But we do have an expressive report from Robert Mueller regarding his evening on the town and a concert performance of New York musicians/composers. As George Spencer mentions in the comments, Robert seems to sync his prose meter (quite naturally) with the music he heard — without stretching the metaphor.
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On a different note: Brian O’Nolan, otherwise known as Flann O’Brien, was born a century ago as of October 5th of this year. The author of The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds is one of my all-time favorites, and deserving of quite a big ruckus on his centennial. An excerpt from an article on the subject by Mark O’Connell, from The New Yorker:
September 23, 2011
The Flann O’Brien Centenary
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Posted on: June 23, 2011
Review of
Alan Gilbert, Late in the Antenna Fields
by Robert Mueller
The writing in Alan Gilbert’s volume of poetry, Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books, 2011), feasts on sarcasm and dispirited bitterness, not to mention a certain snagging anomie. Putting it better or worse, the reader might think to assimilate it to some kind of art adhesion. One is led, or profited, to hear, and to sense and to pick at, a general vaguely petulant and vaguely disinterested and yet persistent patter of ambient petrified displeasure. There is thus less of a danger than a foregone captation in this approach, inherently. So far so good if it sticks; so far so good so long as it educates even, guides, charts and winnows. But when notes of whining and griping swirl in, as they sometimes do, the reader may well wish to give pause.…
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Posted on: June 21, 2011
New poetry from Joseph Milford graces our front page now, along with an essay by Robert Mueller on the poetry of Alan Gilbert. Both bring in a touch of the surreal, which is always welcome here. Because, poetry is like … a simile. Or, as Ernest Hemingway would say, “Do you want to box?”
Which reminds me of the film I saw last night, Woody Allen’s wonderful “Midnight in Paris.” An ode to the city of light, an ode to love, and a trip through time with Scott, Zelda, Stein, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel and a host of great artists, writers and composers. Why? Why do we go with them, through the streets of Paris, into the cafes and nightclubs? Ultimately, perhaps, to learn that there is no place like the present for love, and that without it time and place matter not at all.…
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