The TV Had One Channel, Showing Highlights from My Worst Performance in Every Sphere

• There are over 2600 songs on my iPod, I'm not sure how the shuffle works, but last night songs 577, 578, and 579 on this trip from start to end were these three Tindersticks songs. This is not a complaint, just a happy curiosity. Plus I owe you links.
• Reminder: freedom to is different than freedom from.
• To hell with protecting the public.
• Rowdy Yates rides again: on Eastwood's American Sniper.
• The life and death of the seas.
• We are all the news.
• Charlie versus Theo.
• Google knows where you've been.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Stendhal, Sebald, Beckett....
• Jacob has review copies of his new novel available. What's a digital ARC?
• Lispector, for those of you who do.
• This Marilynne Robinson essay on Edgar Allan Poe makes me want to read both: His stories are often shaped to bring the narrator and the reader to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the experience it evokes are explored or by implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that is not characteristic of major literature in general. Clearly Poe was fascinated by popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial. Popular obsessions are interesting and important, of course. Collectively we remember our nightmares, though sanity and good manners encourage us as individuals to forget them. Perhaps it is because Poe’s tales test the limits of sanity and good manners that he is both popular and stigmatized. His influence and his imitators have eclipsed his originality and distracted many readers from attending to his work beyond the more obvious of its effects.
• Scherzer, Zimmerman, Strasburg, Gonzalez, Fister? I'm not a Giobeliever, but holy fuck. (Though yes, odds that Zimmerman or Strasburg and/or Desmond are traded are large.)

LUMSDEN HOTEL

Roddy Lumsden

The kilted porter shook my hand in welcome,

drained it of blood and gave me back my luggage.

I signed the register in my own name

for the first time in my life of low celebrity.

In the lounge bar, there were pictures by Margarita

but no sign of margaritas by the pitcher.

All night, the couple in the next-door room

failed noisily to make love even once.

The signature tune of the air conditioning

was a surface B-side for any one-hit-wonder.

Weary, I ordered up the late night menu

from room service, but sleep wasn’t on it

so, after an hour of mentally undressing myself,

I donned the pyjamas with the killer bee motif

and there on the bed I wrote a dozen

identical postcards to friends I’d forgotten.

No doubt to keep the cold tap company,

the hot tap had opted to be a cold tap too.

Funnel-web spiders wove their lazy way

toward each other across the scarlet ceiling

and when I solved the riddle of the shower,

no blood came gushing, but no water either.

By the bed, a Gideon Bible in Esperanto

and a phone-book listing Lumsdens of the world;

in the mini-bar, flat Vimto and a half-pint

of someone else’s mother’s milk, turned to fur.

The TV had one channel, showing highlights

from my worst performances in every sphere.

At three, in the courtyard, a chambermaid choir

sang a barbershop version of ‘I Will Survive’.

The only time I dared to close my eyes,

dervishes under the bed began to talk dirty.

When I left at nine and settled my check,

they told me clearly Don't come back.