Andrew Ervin is offering a copy of John Banville’s Kepler, signed by Banville, to the person who can correctly identify the most books in his milk crate bookshelf posted here. Send your list to our email and Andrew will find the winner tomorrow night.

The Amazon crew are being such infantile shitheads with the whole Macmillan thing.  Aw, Apple is going to make your ugly, stupid Kindle obsolete?  It’s like when a new baby comes home and the older, less cute kid throws a tantrum.  (Analogy via my roommate.)  Wipe the oatmeal off your chins and grow up.

RIP Sweetie Niedenthal (1999-2010)

This is my favorite dog-death poem. It is tearing me up right now. What are your favorite pet-death works, or pet-death moments in works?

[Via Christopher Newgent] Here’s a call for submissions from Booth, a handsome looking journal made by the MFA program at Butler University. (more…)

‘I present this tidbit of an interpretation to show not only that Stanley Kubrick directed the Apollo moon landings but also to ask NASA to release all of Kubrick’s Apollo moon landing footage in their original, glorious 70 mm film.’

(1) I read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets yesterday afternoon. That book is a serious bruiser, and beautiful. “That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.”

(2) SPD has a few copies of Maldoror and The Complete Works of Comte de Lautremont from Exact Change for almost 50% off. You should really own this book.

An enterprising individual has come up with a list of ten reasons why poetry is bullshit and folks have added to the list which is now a whopping 93 items long. It’s worth reading, chuckling over, agreeing with or railing against.

Fucking fuckers fucking little symbols eat equations and questionnaires and pedigrees while president Obama makes face catch a thousand swords knowing carnal little yodels, yodels, frantic little margarine telephones televisions and capitalized specimens.

The first sentence of a new Marvin K. Mooney piece. Which reminded me of the Marvin K. Mooney hub, which has been redesigned–kid poem, dragon, another video, and a countdown at the bottom.(?)

So Mike Young won the Literary Death Match in Baltimore. I know it was my post here that cinched it. Congrats, Mike! Hopefully there will be videos and so on soon.

Just now walking on Wall Street near the stock exchange I saw a guy leading an excited crowd and carrying a white binder with the words “AYN RAND TOUR” printed on it.