Gary Shteyngart reads/performs a bit from Gogol’s Dead Souls; he first reads in English and then in Russian. Really fascinating to hear it in Russian. The reading was part of 92Y Poetry Center’s celebration of Gogol’s 200th birthday on March 30th.

I needed a new bookshelf. before breaking down and ordering one from Staples.com ($49.99 for a wooden 5-shelf) I decided to try the thrift store next door to my apartment. They have a ton of bookshelves, apparently NONE of which are for sale. Probably this is because they’re covered in books which ARE for sale. I didn’t need any books. In fact, books are why I was having this whole shelf-problem in the first place. But then, there, sitting on top of a pile (and btw, if you’re just going to pile the books anyway, why not sell me the shelf? piles work even better on floors than on shelves) I spotted Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry edited by Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann. Mine for one hot crumpled dollar bill. No tax. From the back cover: “It is a statement by example of the ‘Pound critical canon’ and, as such, a short course in the history of world poetry…” It will have pride of place on my new bookshelf, which Staples will be delivering sometime tomorrow, along with the pink plastic pencil case ($.50) I ordered to tip the total price over the $50 line and therefore earn free shipping.

The Center for the Art of Translation has a new blog, Two Words.

Yale University Press is publishing a book about the Danish Mohammed political cartoon controversy from a few years back. But, for fear of violence, this academic study of a dozen political cartoons is being published without the cartoons it is studying. Assholes. But don’t let me get all pissed about this. Here’s Hitch at Slate, pissed enough for all of us.