THE BIG (SORT OF) SUPERCOLLIDER BEST LIST 2010 Monday, December 27, 2010

Earlier in the semester, Peter Gizzi asked me which contemporary poets I had been reading lately. I was embarrassed to tell him I was still catching the buzz from my friends and near aquaintences' recent books, and so cobbled together an answer composed of Graham Foust, Geoffrey Nutter, which I stand by.

In fact, this was the year it seemed I had a personal connection, however small, to nearly every book I was interested in. Gizzi's own long awaited collection of Jack Spicer's collected work came out this year, after all. Brandon Downing, my old neighbor from Astoria, hit with the art-collage poetic statement of Lake Antiquity, a book which owes more to Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann than to the arms-length half-measures of your typical Flarf effort. Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foriegn Seceretary was finally released after a bit of back-and-forth about who would publish it, and it is great, a survey of nearly everything we forgot was great about post-Romantic English letters wrapped in a contemporary package. I really liked Dottie Lasky's Awe, but Black Life, released this year, was sort of like that moment in Star Wars when the Star Destroyer kept coming and coming, inch after inch-- white, silent, detailed, frightening and beautiful-- and you're just a kid tensely sinking into the fold of the seat and thinking what could possibly come after this? By contrast, Paul Killebrew released Flowers, the poems in which cycle through humor and pathos on the surface (reference: "John Fucking Ashbery") but turn toward the deeper clockwork of politics and shared value within--he's our best new poet in the vein of Pope and Dryden. Finally, John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems is insouciant, smart and fun, and I have told him so myself, because he's my buddy. To top it off, this was the year my old neighbor Sam Lipsyte wrote a book about Astoria and my old roommate Bryan Charles wrote a book about Kalamazoo (by way of New York). In short, this is the year everyone at or around my last birthday party released a killer book, leaving me thinking yes, it's over, my time has passed, the market can't bear another buddy by the name of Purcell. So I recuse myself. Consider these last titles all lumped together into a single category: Non-Objective Best Books of 2010.

Most of what else I've read this year was written before 1950. That leaves me with little to say in terms of keeping up a tradition of ranking best books on a blog, a consumerist model I'm fine with, and which seems to have been adopted universally this year. So here I'll present a different catalog for 2010, in no particular order. I am proud to present SUPERCOLLIDER'S BEST OF 2010: WHATEVER, SOME MOMENTS.

--A poet I do not know and had never met came into Northampton this fall and blew everyone away. His name was Aaron Kunin and his book was called The Sore Throat and Other Poems. The central text of this book uses a vocabulary of 200 words to "translate" Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly into Kunin's disaffected but still emotionally rousing idiom. On paper, it's good, but read aloud, it was mesmerizing.

--I caught up on some of 2009's best science fiction in 2010, including standouts The Windup Girl and Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock. Both books answer the current fad for retconned Steampunk by illustrating the actual Steampunk world we can look forward to inheriting once the oil runs out. Stay tuned next year, when I'll finally get around to reading Mieville's Kraken, Banks's Surface Detail, Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Valtat's Aurorarama and Cronin's The Passage.

--Northampton has a bookstore to beat them all. It's Flying Object, which just opened this year down the road from Grey Matter, which combined with Troubador Books, which is just down the road from Amherst Books, Food for Thought, and Raven Bookstore. All of which put Hampshire Township, population 150,000 or so, on a par with New York City when it comes to bookstores (and at a severe deficit when it comes to Duane Reades and bank branches).

--My experience with gaming might require a separate space. For now, Best moment: discovering the vast complications of the Arkham Horror board game using the distributed intelligence of a Halloween Party.

--MAJOR BUMMER of 2010: Too many funny poems. Or let me refine that. There are some poets who have made a study of humor and are therefore funny. There are other poets, usually very young poets, who will say any insouciant or sloppy thing in a poem to get a rise out of their friends, and I have sat through so many of their readings this year I don't think I'll ever laugh again. I used to think I hated self-seriousness in poets, but I hate insecure anti-seriousness much, much worse.

The Last Three Months Tuesday, December 7, 2010

No action on the weblog lately. My experience in the last three months of full-time teaching and writing simply might have allowed for it--hell, it allows for nearly anything--but I've been enjoying myself so much I haven't really thought to post. Is there a link between misery and weblog posting? Is there joyful blogging?

The graduate school experience runs parallel to an experience of culture without ever quite intersecting it. This is a good thing. The experience of culture as I've experienced it is lots of work and scrabbling with an occasional trip to the movies. Here, I read.

Had the weblog been caught up, here's what you would have read--my wrestling with modernists I hadn't thought about in a decade, specifically Pound, who I hate less now, via his Homage to Sextus Propertius, and Stevens, who I love less, just a little, via The Auroras of Autumn. The problem is this: while our bipedal, primate faculty for abstraction is the one extraordinary thing about us, and possibly the last consolation for the loss of the metaphysical, it is, after all, just a function, like opposable thumbs or relatively large braincases. We would not look kindly on a thumb fetishist, would we? So why the abstract qua abstraction? This is a problem poetry shares with politics and everything else. Certainly our bipedalism will not see us through global warming: why should our syllogisms? I'm not Derek Jenson's biggest fan, but maybe he's right. Maybe we should smash our way out of global warming, with sticks and projectiles... and so with literature, too. Pound in this context is less abstract, Stevens more. But then there's Harmonium.

In either case, there were mindblowing readings this semester by Aaron Kunin, Ben Lerner, China Mieville, not to mention a visit from my buddy John Beer, who read with Ish.

There would have been a hell of a lot on Minecraft, which may be 2010's watershed cultural moment. Even more on my rediscovery of the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, GURPS, which was 1986's watershed cultural moment, and which is no less than an algorithmic parallel universe simulator. I am totally engrossed with their supplement for Transhuman Space and GURPS Mysteries. This is not to mention the semi-regular games we've hosted of the super-complex board game Arkham Horror. This is the year gaming completely surpassed film as my medium of choice for getting out of the literary hothouse and enjoying the cool breezes of the outdoors.

There have also been a lot of bike rides, and the natural beauty of Western Mass, about which, more in time, especially as winter sets in...