And it’s not even April yet. Is Ruth Lilly behind even this somehow? Anyway, like most nattering nabobs of negative capability, I could go on about Dana Goodyear v. David Orr for hours (and have been in email exchanges yesterday and today, and in my head as I read blog entries like this, this, this, this, and this), but I think I’ll just ask: Hey, David (I get to call you that because we met at a Gawker party), what did you mean here?

In an especially confusing decision, [Goodyear] includes a cutting remark by the writer Joel Brouwer about the marketing of poetry, and claims the comment was “an obvious … reference” to the Poetry Foundation. But Brouwer, as he confirmed by e-mail, wasn’t talking about the foundation at all. Which makes sense, of course, since Brouwer is a regular contributor to Poetry, a detail Goodyear’s readers wouldn’t know.

We wouldn’t? How can you be so sure, omniscient narrat-Orr? All the people linked to above read Poetry, The New Yorker, and the NYT, and so do I. Sometimes it means tackling some very long articles, certainly, but we seem to be up to it.

Controversies are so often short-lived, but if you’re still following the annals of Essjay, here’s Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in PC World on the whole mess Wikipedia’s in; Essjay (Ryan Jordan) has since resigned his position there at Wales’s request.