National Middle-brow Radio officially fell to National Low-Brow Radio today with Terry Gross's interview of minor celebrity ex-spouse Tom Arnold. He had nothing interesting to say about his dysfunctional life. Rose briefly to highbrow with a discussion with Wendy Steiner and Arthur Danto on beauty in art--flawed because noone seemed to be asking the questions that I would have asked. The panelists seemed to assume that modernist art and literature were ugly by definition and that we needed to return to beauty. Back to National Middle-Brow Radio with an interview with Jonathan Franzen, a rather dull and earnest novelist, most famous for snubbing Oprah (a middle-brow gesture if ever there was one) plugging his book of essays. That's what I get for having to spend five hours in my car.

***

I owned the Ellman-O'Clair Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry as a teenager. It didn't necessarily occur to me at the time that major poets would be absent from this sort of book. At different points in my subsequent life, I discovered William Bronk, Jack Spicer, and Barbara Guest, three of the most flagrant omissions. It is curious that those three are also missing from Poems for the Millenium. I can imagine an inexperienced reader thinking that this huge volume pretty much covered the anti-Norton tradition. Maybe it's better to discover one's poets more randomly, in any case.