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Within the last hour or so, the books department at The New Yorker launched The Book Bench. It has a blogroll in the lefthand column with about two dozen links -- one of them, as it happens, to Quick Study.

So I learn from my friend Emily Gordon, who has made kept a close watch on the magazine over the years. Thanks for the bulletin, Emily.

Well, I certainly did not see that coming. So far this month, posting anything to this blog has been a pretty low priority -- nor have I been doing much at either Crooked Timber or Critical Mass lately. It has not been a matter of going on hiatus so much as being very preoccupied with the sort of considerations described by James Baldwin in that passage quoted here recently.

In any case, I've been meaning to pick up the pace again -- and now there's more incentive to do so. No idea who at The New Yorker reads Quick Study, or how this came to pass. But welcome to any new visitors. By all means look around in the archives.

In 1985, a friend lent me a 4-song, 7-inch EP song by Billy Bragg. The name didn't ring a bell. But a couple of years earlier I'd read Christopher Hill's book about the underground groups that had emerged during the English Civil War (the Diggers, the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchy Men) some of which were putting forward a revolutionary socialist vision in religious language -- and here was Bragg bringing that tradition into the present day....

My nominations for the most recent NBCC Good Reads list have now been posted at Critical Mass. My longer review (for Bookforum) of the title by Richard Sennett was reprinted at the Powell's website. An earlier piece on Victor Serge is here.

In the interest of accuracy, I should make clear that the photo at Critical Mass was taken before the gray hair started taking over (in particular, the beard). My days as a sad young literary man are well behind me.

As a matter of fact, I sometimes carry around a piece of paper containing an extract from an essay by James Baldwin, written in his mid-forties:

"Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between what one wishes to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one's final margin, one's last opportunity, for creation. And between the self as it is and the self as one sees it, there is also a distance even harder to gauge. Some of us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make a study of this baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the determination that the distance shall not become any greater."

I must have gone over this passage a hundred times now. No maps available for navigating through "this baffling geography," alas. But it's good to have one's location so precisely identified.

The latest list of recommended new books from the National Book Critics Circle has just been posted. I must admit that I have read a grand total of one of them:

FICTION

1. Richard Price, LUSH LIFE, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, Knopf
*4. Charles Baxter, THE SOUL THIEF, Pantheon
*4. Peter Carey, HIS ILLEGAL SELF, Knopf
*4. J. M. Coetzee, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Viking
*4. James Collins, BEGINNNER'S GREEK, Little, Brown
*4. Brian Hall, FALL OF FROST, Viking
*4. Roxana Robinson, COST, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
*4. Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE, Nan A. Talese: Doubleday

* tied for this position

NONFICTION

1. Nicholson Baker, HUMAN SMOKE: THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II, THE END OF CIVILIZATION, S. & S.
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, Knopf
3. Mark Harris, PICTURES AT THE REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, Penguin Press
4. Honor Moore, THE BISHOP'S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR, Norton
5. Susan Jacoby, THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, Pantheon

POETRY

1. Grace Paley, FIDELITY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Frank Bidart, WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
3. Eric Gansworth, A HALF-LIFE OF CARDIO-PULMONARY FUNCTION, Syracuse University Press
4. Marie Howe, THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME, Norton
5. Robert Pinsky, GULF MUSIC, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Once again, the titles I nominated did not make the cut. But then again my nomination for best nonfiction book last time was Julian Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Which, by the way, rocks.

The books I suggested this time were, perhaps, slightly easier to find at your nearby strip-mall, but still....I won' t say any more about what they were for now, since the nominations will be posted at Critical Mass at some point.

UPDATE:  Here are my recommendations

Thanks to Shane for the tip....

On this day in 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker appeared, promising to take seriously the church's program to "reconstruct the social order" according to the teachings of a certain revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and egalitarian organization from the Palestine, long ago

An email message sent to the listserv of the Association of American University Presses by its current president, Sanford G. Thatcher, encourages AAUP members to contact newspaper editors to try to persuade them to publish reviews by local writers, rather than just using syndicated material.

Yesterday, there were more than 7,000 visitors to Quick Study. Nearly half that many have already come by just today, and it isn't even noon yet. That is quite a lot of traffic, at least by local standards.

What happened is that on Thursday morning Andrew Sullivan linked to last week's post "Yo, Yo I'm a Cowboy Now", which seems then to have been picked up by two or three social networking sites. None of this did I seek out. In fact, I could not have made it happen if I'd tried.

For that matter, it's been kind of frustrating to look at the site log and find that barely one visitor in a hundred then looked around at other Quick Study content. The whole thing makes for a very striking bar-graph -- with Monday through Wednesday being little molehills in front of Himalaya Thursday. But it leaves QS itself no better situated relative to what I guess could be called "mainstream blogging."

So it goes. And on that note, we return to our usually scheduled broadcast. Or narrowcast, rather.

Presented for your consideration: An interview with left-wing country singer Steve Earle, from the pages of Socialist Worker newspaper.

Yeah, now that's more like it....