Catullus 7

I've recently become interested in the word "middlebrow."  According to Wikipedia, Virginia Woolf  said middlebrows, "select and read what they are told is best."  I certainly do that a lot of the time.  I respect my own opinion, but I have accepted the guidance of those whose recommendations have worked well for me in the past.  In junior high school I read Phil Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life which included a lot of information on Phil's Wold-Newton Family Tree.  Phil hypothesized links between characters in a lot of (mostly adventure) fiction.  I loved that book and the Doc Savage and Sherlock Holmes books, so I read a lot of the books relating to that family tree.  In junior high I also started reading Galaxy magazine.  If I believed in fate, I might see its hand in the fact that my first issue of Galaxy included columns by Spider Robinson, Richard Geis, and Jerry Pournelle, all three of whom would have a massive influence on me.  Spider (Ghod bless Spider Robinson!) wrote the book review column, and I learned that if Spider said he loved a book, I usually loved it.  That led me down several wonderful paths over the ensuing decades.

At seventeen I started reading Musician magazine, and similarly I discovered that if Rafi Zabor said he loved an album, I usually loved it.   (Remember albums?)  In a few years I started reading Ezra Pound (because Bob Wilson recommended him).   (And I started reading Wilson largely because Spider recommended him.)  Now, I didn't necessarily love what Ez recommended, but his overview of world poetry made sense to me, and I wanted to understand it, so I kept reading.

I also started reading Louis Zukofsky (largely because Bob Creeley recommended him), and Zukofsky's recommendations often echoed Ezra's.  Both of them loved Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid (although Basil Bunting finds him overrated by his two friends).  The ASU library had a copy, and I checked it out a number of times, but I never made it very far into Douglas's blend of Scots and English.  As I've gotten more into Zukofsky in the last 17 years, I've desired to give Douglas another try, but none of my local libraries had a copy.  Well, it came back into print, and I got my copy this week.  I have not put a bookmark into it, however.  I've mentioned before that a few years ago I decided that I had started too many books of poetry and not finished them.  I took the bookmarks out of a number of the volumes in the Empress.  (I decided to name my poetry bookshelf the Empress back in the 80's after the prize winning giant pig in Wodehouse's Blandings novels, as well as the tarot trump.  Ishmael Reed advises readers to "Feed the loss," and he often uses the number 22,  inspired in part by his February 22 birthday.  Well, 22 suggests the tarot trumps, and reading poetry seemed one way to feed the Empress.)

Anyway, I decided I only wanted to only have as many active poetry books as the given year: nine in 2009, 10 in 2010, etc.  I got back down to 14 a few months ago, but I found myself in a doctor's waiting room without a book for a few hours, and I gave in and started The Collected Poems of Robert Herrick on my wife's iPhone.  And today I put a bookmark in The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies since I start teaching my Shakespeare Comedies class on Monday.  And I plan to start "A" again on December 1, 2014.  Perhaps I will finish my Anne Sexton book and/or my Ed Dorn book and get down to my arbitrary limit again.

Catullus 7?  It discusses the importance of kissing, of which I approve.