Two happy pieces of news on the culture front

1. After 30 Years, a No. 1 Album for Dylan (from NY Times)

Step aside, Christina Aguilera, OutKast and Jessica Simpson: Bob Dylan has a new album. Mr. Dylan’s “Modern Times” took the top spot on the Billboard chart this week by a healthy margin, giving him his first No. 1 since “Desire,” 30 years ago. Aided by a media-savvy promotional campaign that included a television commercial for iTunes and the premiere of the album on XM Satellite Radio, where Mr. Dylan hosts a radio show, “Modern Times” sold 192,000 copies in its first week at stores, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

2. $100,000 Poetry Prize Winner ($100,000? Fuck me with a sonnet)

Michael Palmer has been named the winner of the annual $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets. Mr. Palmer is an experimental poet, born in New York in 1943, who has lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years.

This perfect half-moon
of lies in the capital
Crooks and fools in power what’s new
and our search has begun for signs of spring
Maybe those two bluebirds
flashing past the hawthorn yesterday
Against that, the jangle of a spoon in a cup
and a child this day swept out to sea