Ben Friedlander (he/him/his)

Yes, he has fans. @nicksturm.bsky.social, for example, and Mark Johnson.

Holiday camaraderie in the long line at the grocery store

No email from a library system stirs the imagination like a notice my scan is ready to download through WORLDCAT. The great cat that surrounds the world? That nuzzles the roots of the world-scratching-tree? The great world cat who is and was and shall be? That cat???

Annoying as hell when submitting a letter of recommendation requires ranking the student in numerous categories, but good god the school that has a drop-down menu for each one.

I was going to tag my Wtg Studies colleague for an actual answer but she appears to have deactivated her account

I don’t either but it seems to mark a field-wide shift in emphasis from the humanities to social sciences

I’m at a public uni and not sure the program even has a name! It’s not on our website anyhow. The course is called College Composition and the faculty most involved with it speak of their field as Writing Studies, def not Comp/Rhet.

When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all.

Zohran Mamdani has entered the chat.

She Drives Me Crazy, by Peter Stampfel from the album Peter Stampfel's 20th Century

If it’s good enough for Peter Stampfel… louisianaredhotrecords.bandcamp.com/track/she-dr...

I also think rhyme that doesn’t have that bounce can still contribute to a poem’s overall effect, its sense of musicality or eloquence, as so often happens with assonance and consonance. Which is not the case, obviously, in his prose version of Millner.

I like his distinction between rhyme and the rhyme effect, though I think I’d credit the latter’s “bounce” (as he nicely puts it) to positioning in general—“rhythmic set-up” for sure, but also syntactic and spatial positioning.

I was thinking just that!—how her revisions disrupt the very distinction Hollander is making.

Another example, this one closer to Hollander’s, is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Mrs. Small” (here’s the first page). It raises the question of what exactly counts as free verse, slipping in and out of something that looks like metrical regularity (and GB herself was moving toward free verse then).

Page from James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure” with three rhymed “haiku” embedded in prose.

Here’s one that comes to mind—James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure, a Japan travel diary that occasionally breaks off into rhymed 5-7-5 stanzas, sometimes mid-sentence. The effect is hardly Ogden Nash-like.

I’ll try to think of examples.

It’s like saying William McGonagall proves metrical rhyme ridiculous. Also, he’s assuming that rhyme means end rhyme. I suspect free verse has more truck with internal rhyme. I know my own does.

There are traditions of rhymed prose in other languages so there must be critical writing that could offer some guidelines. Personally, I don’t see any defensible principle behind his claim that rhyme is only appropriate for metrically regular verse. I mean, what does his example really prove?

I stopped reading the New Yorker because of this.

That makes sense!

Do kids still make crank phone calls? I haven’t received one in god knows how long. Not counting spam and robocalling—institutionalized crank.

“deskilling students AND stealing their data” says it all and with the succinctness of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.”

I don’t understand a journal interface that only lets me print ten pages of an article but does let me download a PDF—which I can then print in full.

Saying the unspeakable part out loud.

Tying up loose ends on a long chapter isn’t impossible, but then neither is tying a cherry stem with your tongue.

POST-CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA

Blank checks
and imbalances.

“‘The banana plant’…wears the autumn wind and is broken by the autumn wind”—Dōgen

Yikes!

Edited an article with a long passage attributed to the wrong person (and much made of that misattribution). Didn’t even get an acknowledgment when it later appeared in a book.

The Democratic Party: “When they go low, we go high. But when they go right, we follow.”

I managed to reserve ten pounds of sour cherries from what I thought was a local farm, but it turns out they’re in Ohio (not Maine). The search continues…