James Schuyler - greatest poet of the everyday?

A new poet for me. The reviewer, Mae Losasso, makes a bold assertion in the headline (though it may have been an editor). I’m going to add his Collected Poems to my stack of summer reads.

In 1952, back in New York, Schuyler befriended Ashbery and O’Hara—two Harvard graduates who had recently arrived in the city—and he began to apply himself seriously to writing. Yet his poetic career would be marked by belatedness: his first major collection, Freely Espousing, would not be published until 1969, when he was forty-six years old, and he would not give his first public reading until 1988, just three years before his death. A further four major poetry collections would follow Freely Espousing—The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poem (1980), for which Schuyler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and A Few Days (1985).

Schuyler’s poetic style is marked by its attention to the daily. His poems are diaristic, often registering times and dates, with a relentlessly observational eye that comes to rest on what he calls “the said to be boring things / dreams, weather, a bus trip.” His compositions oscillate between intensely truncated lineation and long, page-spilling lines of Whitmanesque excess—both formal strategies that capture the rambling and digressive immediacies of a mind at work.

October

Books litter the bed, 
leaves the lawn. It 
lightly rains. Fall has 
come: unpatterned, in 
the shedding leaves.

The maples ripen. Apples 
come home crisp in bags. 
This pear tastes good. 
It rains lightly on the 
random leaf patterns.

The nimbus is spread 
above our island. Rain 
lightly patters on un-
shed leaves. The books
of fall litter the bed.

More than a whiff of William Carlos Williams in that with a smattering of leafy metaphor for us to rake into piles and jump into them.

Via The Yale Review

Are fish sentient?

It seems natural after reading David Foster Wallace’s tremendous essay, “Consider the Lobster”, that naturally the studies he reviewed for that article in The Atlantic would extend to the lobster’s finned cousins.

…[A] growing body of scientific work now suggests that fish experience pain — that in fact, their biological mechanisms for experiencing pain are “strikingly similar” to that of mammals — and that they exhibit other dimensions of sentience, like experiencing pleasure from a massage, becoming pessimistic after a breakup, and recognizing themselves in a mirror.

The article goes on to qualify that none of these findings are going to prove fish do feel pain until we have a chance to communicate with them. Don’t hold your breath for an answer, in other words. However, steps are being taken by fish farms and, more slowly, setting standards for wild-caught fish, to ensure our food sources are dealt with humanely.(?) It’s an odd goal for a species that too often treats its own kind humanely.

Via Offrange

What if your president was elected by lottery?

The ancient Greeks figured out that elections favored the wealthy. Flaws: excluded women, foreign born persons, and their slaves. All sounds like another nation’s history.

Via Aeon

"Echoes of Everywhere" - paintings by Sylvia Trotter Ewens

In “Echoes of Elsewhere”, Trotter Ewens’ fragmented environments are shaped as much by lived experience as by distance and imagination. Born in Honduras, Trotter Ewens was adopted as an infant and has long felt a sense of dual belonging. The works assembled here explore the lingering impressions of environments and relationships that persist across time and were created from photographs taken of both Honduras and Québec—the two sites/distinct geographies merging to reflect Trotter Ewens’ own experience of being “neither completely of here nor there”.

If only we had the wall space, this is the type of art I’d be looking to obtain and enjoy. Ewens’ website can be found here: https://www.sylviatrotterewens.com/

Via BOOOOOOOM

Joe Macken Spent 21 Years Hand-Assembling a Model of NYC

I wouldn’t know where to begin a project like this, which is currently on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. The sheer enormity of it is impressive and the value immense as an historical artefact. From the immense structures in the financial district and midtown to the begrassed homesteads of the outer boroughs, nothing appears to be left out.

Macken began working on the 50-by-27-foot model in 2004, first in Middle Village, Queens, before moving to Clifton Park, New York. It comprises 340 individual sections, each built from everyday materials like cardboard and glue, with many of the buildings constructed of balsa wood and detailed with pencil and paint. He completed the structure in 2025, and it’s now on long-term view at the museum, where visitors can walk around it and are encouraged to use binoculars to find familiar buildings and neighborhoods.

Via Colossal

Chronicles of a NY Locksmith

A touching small feature from The New Yorker about a small locksmith shop in Brooklyn, NYC. Three immigrants of different backgrounds and eras collaborate and learn from one another while finding their ways forward. It doesn’t get more New York (or American) than this, despite what the hate-spewer-in-chief and even less savory figures would like to promulgate.

Growing up in China as a White Man in the 50s

Michael Crook, son of David Crook, a British Marxist who spent most of his life teaching in China, and noted anthropologist Isabel Crook, who studied the Yi minority, talks about growing up in China in the 1950s.