Another day dissing, immersed in the versions of mimesis propounded by Benjamin and Adorno and trying to figure out how to bring the introduction (if 40+ pages can still be called an introduction) to a graceful close. Also re-read Benjamin's "The Author as Producer" and realized that his ideal is more or less mine, as I've described it: the utopia of a transformed relation between literary producers and consumers. I ought to read more Brecht. Need to connect the environmental imagination with the social somehow; should probably spend some more time with the Eclogues themselves. Almost all my thinking about pastoral has come from or at least corresponds with these lovely, odd little poems that somehow founded a genre that compels the Western imagination to this day. Or so I say.

I'd like to call your attention to a blog new to me, Rhubarb Is Susan. I like the title (from Stein) and I like the concept: microreviews of poems from journals. Actually, they don't seem all that micro. You have to click where it says "full review" to read the actual review. I like what he has to say about Laura Glenum's The Eggs of My Amnesia. I'm also glad to have had my attention called to this rather extraordinary document, Laura's Manifesto of the Anti-Real. An ethos of emergency—though I perhaps prefer Frank O'Hara's.