Don't tell me what the poets are doing.

This morning I did my favourite thing in the universe, which is to get up, go to yoga, come home, eat breakfast, and go back to bed. Seriously, going back to bed feels better than free pie and free cake and free comics combined. When I woke up for the second time, I finished reading The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, and I am so glad that I did. See, I am a huge literature dork. The only reason I got through my undergrad degree in English, wading through classes filled with aspiring Atwoods and Harold Blooms and professors engaged in the kind of desperate intellectual masturbation you only get at schools that call themselves "The Harvard of the North" (begging the question, does Harvard call itself "The U of T of the Eastern Seaboard?"), was my completely nerdy and lifelong devotion to reading. Whenever I got pissed off at the misogyny/unfairness/laziness/complete incoherence of one of my professors, I just sat back and kept reading. I got a whole hell of a lot out of it, in the end.

Anyway, The Anthologist is pure literary academic candy, with a side of hilarity. The narrator is a professor-slash-poet whose girlfriend has completely given up on him, and for good reason: the guy is a mess. He's stuck trying to finish an introduction for an anthology and just generally hold his life together, but seems to be plagued by the disease that befalls so many research-oriented people: complete obsession with his work, which in this case, is poetry. Not much really happens in this book, but in between all the nothing is so much lovely, hilarious, informative, tender, and genuinely passionate description and exposition about poetry and its importance. That might sound cheesy and boring and possibly snooty, but seriously, this book will make you think about poetry in ways you probably never dreamed of, and will make you laugh out loud while doing so. There's just something so sympathetic and naive about this guy, and something very real about the way he bounces from references to Ezra Pound to Ray LaMontagne to wondering about getting into podcasting ("I could never keep it up. You have to hand it to those podcasters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody's listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.") that is just very real and random and engaging. I can't say much more because it's the voice and the tone that sells this book, the sharp wit and the irreverent quipping and all that, and as much as I'd love to sit here and quote it ad nauseam, I'll just strongly urge you to go out and get yourself a copy. Even if you've always hated poetry and you thought all your profs were blowhards, I guarantee you'll find something to admire in this lovely book. You may also end up requesting for your library to buy the complete letters of Sara Teasdale, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Bogan. Don't worry, residents of Kingston, I'm gonna do everything I can to get them into your hands.

So yeah, in spite of what Gord might say, I WOULD like to know what the poets are doing.