Nathan's favorite word this week is "meta." A dollhouse inside a dollhouse is meta, but a food item does not become meta simply because it has its name ("bread") on its package. Sophisticated stuff.

Also sophisticated: book blogger Neil Verma, who devoted a graf to my Boston Review piece last month, and Canadian culture bloggers The Mark, who put Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden on a decade's-best list.

That would be the last decade. I'm having trouble concentrating, right now, on the literary...