Tuesday Menagerie

I came across another blog, Nerd Litter, that posted (via a guest poster) about last month's Lucinda Williams concert at Radio City Music Hall. Read it here. It's a nice complement to my review here.

Micah alerted me to a recent review by Charles Simic of Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems in The New York Review of Books here. Oh. Just realized, the full review is only available to subscribers. Micah must be a subscriber because he excerpted one of Herbert's poems, which I will share here:

Report from Paradise:

In paradise the work week is fixed
at thirty hours
salaries are higher prices steadily
go down
manual labour is not tiring
(because of reduced gravity)
chopping wood is no harder than
typing
the social system is stable and the
rulers are wise
really in paradise one is better off
than in whatever country


At first it was to have been different
luminous circles choirs and
degrees of abstraction
but they were not able to separate
exactly
the soul from the flesh and so it
would come here
with a drop of fat a thread of
muscle
it was necessary to face the
consequences
to mix a grain of the absolute with
a grain of clay
one more departure from doctrine
the last departure
only John foresaw it: you will be
resurrected in the flesh

not many behold God
he is only for those of 100 per
cent pneuma
the rest listen to communiques
about miracles and floods
some day God will be seen by all
when it will happens nobody
knows

As it is now every Saturday at
noon
sirens sweetly bellow]
and from the factories go the
heavenly proletarians
awkwardly under their arms they
carry their wings like violins

(Trs. by Milosz and Scott from The Collected Works of Zbigniew Herbert; The New York Review of Books April 26, 2007)

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced.



Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and Natasha Trethewey has won for poetry.



New York Times article here.

I am fiddling with the good folks at Amazon, as I continue to sell out.