May 9

When the critic Martin Seymour-Smith called Edwin Arlington Robinson "a most courageous, honest, and exemplary poet -- and a lovable one," he was right on the mark. He is a very gratifying poet to teach. I can tell you for a fact that high school students in the 21st century can still be shocked by the suicidal last stanza of "Richard Cory," and that it provokes the most engaged sort of discussion, both concerning subject matter and poetic technique. The Guardian Books Blog looks at another excellent and moving Robinson short poem, "Eros Turannos," as its Poem of the Week:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/03/poem-week-eros-turannos

Elsewhere at the Guardian, John Mullan -- who has a knack for compiling good lists with unexpected items -- considers some of the best elections in literature:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/08/ten-best-elections-john-mullan

Shakespeare, Smollett, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Henry James, Jose Saramago -- as I say to my cat Claire when I feed her Fancy Feast, "That's the good stuff!"

Turning from the good to the decadent, consider renting the perverse 1973 exploitation film The Sinful Dwarf. Or just read these accounts of it. Possibly as much to the point.

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1763

http://mmmmmovies.blogspot.com/2008/01/sinful-dwarf-1973-or-dont-sell-danes.html

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/sinfuldwarf.php

http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn-z/sinfuldwarf.htm 

http://ludicdespair.blogspot.com/2009/11/i-have-seen-sinful-dwarf.html

I'm not sure whether the story that this movie was re-discovered "in a janitor's closet at the Danish Film Institute" is apocryphal or not, but really, it should be true.

More unseen cinema: Of the 15 features directed by "underground" film-maker Robert Kramer (1939-1999) (under-financed is more like it), three have fewer than 5 viewer ratings at the IMDB; eight have between 5 and 13 ratings; none of the other four has more than 83. (For comparison, Avatar has 230,360 ratings.) Like some jazz artists I've discussed, Kramer had to move to Europe to work, and I'm assuming more people have seen his films there. The Auteurs found a poster for the 1980 Guns, which Kramer made in France:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1798

The Harvard Film Archive ran a Kramer retrospective a decade ago that included eight of the features and a short:

http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2000janfeb/kramer.html

Anthology Film Archives in New York showed six Kramer features and two shorts last summer (all but one of the features overlapped the Harvard selection; these shorts had not played there).

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/07/17/nyc-the-films-of-robert-kramer-retrospective-begins-tonight-at-anthology/ 

A haunting obituary from the New York Times of Forties folk singer Susan Reed, who withdrew from the public eye partly because she was associated (through her family) with political radicalism (as Robert Kramer was also):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/arts/music/02reed.html

British author Will Hodgkinson writes about his own folk music odyssey across the English counties in The Ballad of Britain:

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/the-ballad-of-britain-by-will-hodgkinson/

Stephen Bowie at Classic TV History offers a warm tribute to the late actor Peter Haskell (1934-2010), a familiar face from series television of the Sixties and Seventies. Bowie does an excellent job at analyzing the Haskell persona:

....on Bracken’s World [Haskell] was convincing as both an intellectual and a sensitive creative type....[He] was a whisperer....someone who solved problems by taking people aside....and talking to them calmly and cleverly.  That may not sound like such a big deal, but American TV heroes who work this way remain anomalous; just count the number of gratuitous brawls entered into by the protagonists of Route 66 or Lost, ostensibly “smart” shows four decades apart, and you begin to see how against the grain it is in our mainstream culture for affairs to be settled with logic rather than violence. 

http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/peter-haskell-1934-2010/

The Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary has evolved a remarkably subtle and rewarding style. Her own website, the last link below, is exceptionally well designed:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37799

http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/#/exhibitions/2010-04-29_shirazeh-houshiary/

http://www.shirazehhoushiary.com/

Among notables born on this date are novelist/playwright James M. Barrie, fantasy novelist Richard Adams, science fiction novelist William Tenn, poets Charles Simic and Mona Van Duyn, playwright Alan Bennett, philosophers Jose Ortega y Gasset and Lucian Blaga, activist Daniel Berrigan, conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, mezzo-soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter, singer/songwriters Hank Snow and Billy Joel, architect Rafael Moneo, baseball player Tony Gwynn, broadcaster Mike Wallace, film director James L. Brooks, and actors Richard Barthelmess, Pedro Armendariz, Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson, Candice Bergen, and John Corbett. Encouragement for struggling authors: Richard Adams's first novel Watership Down, which I read soon after its American publication in 1974 and absolutely adored, was rejected by 13 publishers before it found a home; in its later paperback edition, it is now Penguin's best-selling book of all time.