AWOL

Culture Industry has been more or less dark for a while now, & may remain that way for a bit longer. A lot on our plate here in the space station: 1) Our department is hiring no fewer than three positions this year, so we have no fewer than nine prospective colleagues visiting over the three weeks; and since I’m chairing one of the search committees, I need to be on board for at least three of those visits. 2) Of course it’s the first couple weeks of classes with attendant panic, dysfunction, & frantic rereading of texts on the instructor’s (read my) part. 3) And I’m in the midst of reviewing copy-editing changes – and making bunches of my own – on a 600-page manuscript which I thought I knew by heart, having written it myself & worked it over in detail at least four times, but now I find full of major & minor infelicities, grammatical solecisms, idiomatic gaffes, and outright idiocies. And this due back to the publisher in less time than it takes Homer Simpson to fulfill his conjugal duties.

So I haven’t been blogging, or even reading blogs much. I’d love to chime in with Josh Corey on “postmodern baroque,” am enjoying discovering how Reginald Shepard’s mind works, especially when he’s thinking about “difficulty” in poetry, and wish that someday someone would do to a book of mine what Ron Silliman is doing to Bob Perelman’s latest – but there just aren’t enough hours in the day right now.

So back to page 253, and a query that will send me on what I hope isn’t a wild goose chase into the tottering stack of papers & folders that I call my “files.” DV, will emerge someday.