fish are jumpin'

Okay, so here’s how the summer is going so far: we’re taking long weekends (Thursday thru Sunday) in Manhattan, and spending the rest of the week on Fire Island, where I’m doing my damnedest to get some “work” done. Yeah, I know, that’s not the point of vacation, is it? But I can count my blessings in that “work,” for me, is often equivalent to “really solid & deeply satisfying intellectual labor – as is the case with this particular piece I’m working on. Stay tuned.

Time seems to stand still on the Island. We’ve been here since Sunday afternoon, but it seems like we’ve never been anywhere else. There’s no internet connection in the house, so checking e-mail or Facebook is something we do by walking the laptop down to the community library, which has free wireless. But who wants to actually get up from one’s chair in the shade, where you can hear the surf in the distance, watch the folks walk or bike by on the boardwalk “streets,” & lovingly nurse that 2nd cup of coffee (or that 3rd Scotch & soda)?

Been reading a good deal of poetry, most recently Elizabeth Robinson’s Apprehend and Janet Holmes’s F2F.

The next to the last thing I knocked out before leaving Florida, my review of Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven, is now up at The Rumpus. Do drop by and read, if you like. Caution: This review is pitched quite intentionally for the non-Bernoscenti, so don’t expect a hyper-theoretical post facto analysis of the anti-hegemonic tendencies of Language Poetry in general – it’s a vade mecum for those who might not otherwise have encountered Charles’s work. As I said to myself about the LZ bio, somebody’s got to write it, & why not me?