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When Walt Whitman picked up the work of his older contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was a carpenter, framing two- and three-room houses in Brooklyn. He had been a journalist; he had written some mediocre fiction -- he looked to be someone who would never amount to much. After reading the great essays, Whitman purportedly said: I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Antipodian Euphorism, Myths, Realities and Plain Facts
Three recent books on Australian politics - one brilliant and infuriating, one worthy but narrow and one just plain vacuous.
Margo Kingston's Not Happy John is already into its third print run. It deserves to be. It is superb - if you can read the damned thing. It should have gone through three editors before it went to three editions.
Margo pinpoints everything that's wrong with the Howard Government - but, being Margo, wants to talk about more. Much more. Too much more.
Eighty odd pages of brilliant polemic on matters ranging the corruption of the system supposed to protect the integrity of Australia's electoral system downwards is obscured by 350 pages of tangents. It's so Margo. Passionate, captivating and utterly infuriating all at once.
• Read the damn thing [via Crikey ]
• · Rob Schaap with an open eye on irony writes: There once lived a writer who gazed into the future and made a name for himself tracing the bewildering sojourns of hapless little individuals as they fall into the gargantuan maws of pointless rational organisations, pointlessly and rationally executing the bureaucratic and totalitarian procedures they are there pointlessly and rationally to impose Kute of the US Navy Kafka
• · · New Kafkas on the Web, Gianna, James Cumes, Tim Dunlop and Other unexpectly rich Amerikan or Viennese villages or Antipodian country towns: Calling a weblog literary does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature: Imagined Community of Instant Publishing; [NY Times: Can't wash politics out of art, but you can avoid a hard sell]
• · · · Get the books you want to read through Progressive Book Club and help restore balance to the public debate by supporting progressive voices and ideas
• · · · · Dan Gillmore placed his book in PDF version under Creative Commons at OReilly: We The Media Dragons Reading, you hear, is necessary to maintain democracy. It can produce informed citizens
• · · · · · Pecking Order NYTBR editor: I like to think I feel sympathy for writers [Australian Iron Bark and Monk; boxers, tacklers, shouters All the bathroom graffiti was about Abbott, but Latham was inhaling it all it!