For Christmas my parents gave me a Kindle. I've been downloading all sorts of bad-for-the-brain but oh-so-fun fiction by Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher, etc. Haven't thought boo about Russian poetry for more than a week.

What to write about then? Inspired by Alec Hanley Bemis's recent post, I've decided to offer my own end-of-the-year list. Maybe others here at Arcade will do the same?

Here, in no particular order, are a selection of the artworks, performances, and texts that made a deep impression on me during 2009:

(1) Andreas Gursky, Uni Bochum (1988). I spent much of 2009 in Germany on a Fulbright teaching at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Technische Universität Dormund. RUB has an aggressively modernist campus from the late 1960s; it is a monument to a utopian moment when people believed that a clean start, good planning, and functional design would renew humanity. Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2009) celebrates Gursky's carefully composed work almost purely on aesthetic grounds; having lived in Bochum, though, I cannot help but read Gursky's photography as an ambivalent response to postwar German intellectual, architectural, and urban history.

(2) Francis C.B. Cadell, Interior--The Orange Blind (1928). I first read about the Scottish Colorists in Ian Rankin's Doors Open (2008), but Rankin's hyperbolic praise didn't move me. He seemed to be describing a bland belated provincial modernism. Then I saw Cadell's Orange Blind at Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum. Wow. You can detect Matisse in the choice of colors and the use of ornament, but the handling of space is extraordinary, and the "blind" of the title exhibits a bowl-you-over disconcerting pure luminous flatness. That obstructed window is also a self-aware painterly statement, reminiscent of Jasper Johns's Shade (1959)--Cadell announces that he won't be providing transparent access to an imagined reality.

(3) Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of the Damned (1620-21). A visit to Munich's Alte Pinakothek converted me to the Rubens cult. A canvas such as The Fall of the Damned surpasses in scale and excess anything painted by Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, and it makes the point, better than Francis Bacon, that paint and human flesh share a gross sensuous uncanny materiality. Rubens's otherworldly swirling orange-red waterfall of fire and fat ambivalently seduces and repels: the topos of the Last Judgment gives the painter, just as it did Michelangelo, an opportunity to envision impossible fantasy spaces populated by, made out of, a promiscuous polyamorous blur of bodies.

(4) Sharon Mesmer, Annoying Diabetic Bitch (2008). I, too, dislike it: I have been bad-mouthing the literary movement called Flarf since I first encountered it in 2002. The Flarf poets' limited use of internet search engines when composing verse has been overhyped, and their programmatic embrace of archness, tackiness, and abjection has resulted in a body of work that is rather one note. But--but--in 2008-09 enough Flarf finally appeared in print for the collective's members to emerge as distinct voices. It has become possible to appreciate, say, Nada Gordon as someone seriously engaging Renaissance humanism, Gary Sullivan as a master of contemporary vernacular English, and Katie Degentesh as a savvy theorist of the first-person lyric. I spotlight here Mesmer. Her Flarf writings are execrable by usual standards--but she is also an emphatic audience favorite everywhere I have lectured on twenty-first century poetry.

(5) Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74, "Pathétique" (1893), performed by the Seattle Symphony and conducted by Arild Remmereit. It was a revelation to hear the "Pathétique" live for the first time. Five French horns. Eight or more cellos. Gongs for days. The variations in volume during the piece were extreme, from a barest whisper to shake-the-foundations loud. Contemporary music rarely runs that full gamut: it stays stuck at full volume, as in a dance club, or it meanders within a narrow band, as on the radio. I’ve had to delete compositions such as John Adams’s In Harmonium (1980) from my I-Pod that go back and forth from soft to thunderous since my headphones just can’t do justice to every point on that continuum. In our PowerBook-and-ProTools era one can easily forget the flexibility and power of the orchestra as a noise-maker, as well as the uniqueness of the symphony hall as an acoustic environment: if I had a stereo capable of playing the "Pathétique"as loudly as the Seattle Symphony, and I did so, my neighbors might shoot me.

OK, that’s enough. My next posting should return to business as usual -- even as I type this, I’ve been eyeing Evgenii Baratynskii’s Collected Poems over on the shelf . . . .