December 2006

  • On Jazz
    • by Bud Parr on 12/07/06 (0 comments)

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Contributors +

Jeff and Trevor have posted their 2006 edition of the Underrated Writers Project.



My nominee for underrated writer? You.

Birnbaum prints the full P&W interview with poet Donald Hall at Identity Theory:



“…we were tremendously full of poetry and there were few of us but we were intensely in love with it and that was what we were doing—that’s all we were doing. It was not something we did among other things.”

The Times on the trend toward downloading classical music: “it’s an irritating act of philistinism that every piece is called a ‘song’.”

They’re right and I’ve decided to go on hunger strike until iTunes changes “song” to “piece” or “movement” or some such thing for classical music. Someone get me a water.

From Frank Wilson I see that Finn Harvor has a new blog, Conversations in the Book Trade and it looks interesting.

All of Mozart’s 600 Scores Available Online at the Mozarteum. More of academic interest than anything, but interesting for the rest of us to be able to peruse. (article at Playbill Arts)

Winning the neatest office award, Soft Skull Press is profiled in the journal ”Beyond Race.”

Jamelah at LitKicks has some advice for would-be makers of chap books.

The Paris Review’s editor Philip Gourevitch quoted in a Guardian profile on his emphasis on non-fiction:

“We’re living in complicated and dramatic times, and I feel that our literature, especially the periodical fiction, is rarely up to the wildness and boldness of the times, that it seldom expresses the outlandishness and range of the actors and actions that are shaping our world…”

comment The Paris Review

Eric Griffiths says in the Guardian, regarding Sean O’Brien’s translation of the Divine Comedy, “This book is not ‘a verse translation’ but, like O’Brien’s hills, a mirage. Nobody needs it. Italian is a nice and easy language, it’s no trouble to learn and is worth learning for the Comedy alone…” Griffiths, interestingly given this statement, is the editor of ”Dante in English.”

comment Dante

This NYTimes article on blogs covering 70’s and 80’s jazz is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while and leaves the door open to exploration.

Looks like I win the #1 spot on Google for the search ”difference between a mouse poop and rat poop.” I’m feelin’ good about myself right about now.

A pleasant coincidence: As I sit here reading Richard Holmes’ biography of Shelley, called ”Shelley – The Pursuit” I found that book’s publisher has a blog. Introducing ”A Different Stripe,” The blog of NYRB Classics, one of my favorite publishers.



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