Whimsy Speaks Again

Junie arrived via DIA and promptly began to attack The Atlantic Puzzler.  By the time we had driven down to Walsenberg to spend some time with Ally and John, we had finished everything except the final message (we had the ID (Muskie), but not the profession (Senator?)).  Ally and John had asked us to bring an extra Scrabble set and an egg timer.  I found a complete Scrabble set at the Aries Thrift Store for $2.49 and Junie found an egg timer at one of the stores in the opulent Flatiron Crossings Mall.   You know, Nordstrom's, Restoration Hardware, Williams Sonoma, that kind of thing.  Even their food court had a little joint that sold specialty crepes that you could eat at your own faux-Parisian cafe table.  It turned out that Ally had Speed Scrabble in mind, a diabolical invention in which you spread two Scrabble games' worth of letters face down in the middle among four of you at a dinner table.  You don't need a board, you don't need what John called the Scrabble Pews to hold the letters on.  We brought white tiles and Ally had brown ones, so it looked like an upturned bowl of Moros y Cristianos.  Everybody takes 7 letters as usual, and then you proceed to make your own intersecting Scrabble layout, also as usual.  Whoever uses their letters up first yells "GO!", and everyone has to take another letter from the pile.  You can change the arrangement of your letters as often as you wish.  When the pool is out of letters, whoever is the first one to use all their letters wins.  We went around the table awarding points a la "Who's Line Is It Anyway" to the words with the most panache or chutzpah.

I picked up a copy of Wired somewhere on the trip, here's what's doing:  The $100 million Super-Kamiokande subatomic particle observer is back from the dead, after 5 years of work to replace the zillions of light-bulb-like detectors that blew when the massive chamber was filled with fluid to facilitate observing the decay of neutrinos.  The newest thing is free-range sushi, premium yellowtail raised near the Big Island under tethered nets.  Among the 10 Most Stupid Engineering Mistakes is the Purity Distilling Company's molasses tank that was 50 feet tall and 90 feet in diameter, which when it split it seams, created a15-foot tsunami of molasses that killed 21 Boston residents in 1919.  To the survivalists:  stockpiling Tamiflu won't help because you will have to take it so long that its toxic effects will start kicking in.  Another badly disguised plug for Pixar's Cars.  You can retrofit a convertible top for your Hummer H3 for only $1,600.  Yeah, I've seen it but does anyone actually drink Coke Blak?  The next fear is payola on the 'net, as top bloggers get cash for pumping up corporate brands.  The price of Hi-Def TVs and gear are dropping much faster than other new technologies in the past.  World of Warcraft (also called World of Warcrack) now has 6 million users of the massively multiuser RPG, 12 times what Everquest achieved at its peak.  Daniel Wilson, who has a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon, show us 6 ways to survive a robot uprising (carry a crowbar).  Crowdsourcing is the use of large numbers of amateurs to outsource your needs.  Examples include iStockPhoto who have undercut professional photographers badly with stock images for as little as a dollar.  The Five Rules of the New Labor Pool includes "The crowd produces mostly crap".  The rise of crystal meth and the War on Terror has Feds closing down companies that sell science experiment kits and supplies. 

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Alas, no poetry today.  I did get a Smithsonian in the mail, along with requests to re-subscribe from  the Smithsonian folks, Time, Cook's Illustrated, Wired, Spin and BusinessWeek.  I ended up with all these magazines by responding to an offer from NorthWest Airlines to convert my mileage to subscriptions.  I didn't have that much anyway — maybe one-quarter of a round-trip fare — and I was amazed to see how far the miles went:  500 miles for this, 750 miles for that.  I think I'll check the United program online tonight to see if they have something similar.  I have a fair number of United miles and as I detest that airline, I might as well get some good out of their frequent flier program.    But, I digress.

The cover article of Smithsonian is "First People of the Grand Canyon:  Who Were They?".  Smithsonian doesn't have article titles quite as camp as Reader's Digest (e.g., I Am Jane's Breast), but they run a close second.  From Wild Things:  there is archeological evidence that Vesuvius erupted even more violently 2,000 years before the Roman Era outburst and geologists reassess the current peril to Naples, which lies within the older blast zone;  Costa Rican Polybia paper wasps routinely bite each other to prod slackers into foraging, an understandable disciplinary measure as foragers have average lifespans of 6 days as opposed to the 30 days of the slackers who hang around the nest.  The largest mammal migration on the planet is that of zebra, gazelle, wildebeest and antelope each June on Tanzania's Serengeti plains.  An interview with Neil Shubin, University of Chicago paleontologist, who recently discovered "the missing link" — what is believed to be the first vertebrate to crawl from the sea to land (yes, everything on land at that point was in the leadership of the Democratic Party).  Very interesting article on Smithsonian paleontologist Douglas Erwin's new book, Extinction, which describes The Great Dying, a finger-snap of geologic time spanning 160,000 years in which 95% of all ocean life and 70% of all land life became extinct.  It was a close call for Earth life, ourselves included.  The University of Nebraska has recently borrowed 330,000 scarab beetles from the Museum of Natural History (presumably for display, not cuisine or jewelry making).  Now here's my kind of vacation:  Smithsonian Journeys offers Murder On The Orient Express, in which you luxuriate on the OE accompanied by mystery writers and fellow enthusiasts from London to Venice.  This Month In History:  25 years ago, the first report of what was later to be known as AIDS;  100 years ago, Josephine Baker, The Black Venus, is born;  105 years ago, art critic Félicien Fagus heralds a brilliant newcomer to the Paris art scene, Pablo Picasso.  A wonderful pictorial essay on Andrew Wyeth, whose Christina's World has launched 1000 poems.  Amazing pics of the new Berlin, including the last graffiti'd section of The Wall.  In 1984, photographer Peter Feldstein photographed every person in Oxford, Iowa, and is out to do it again.  Who Was Mary Magdalene attributes characterization of her as a prostitute as historically inaccurate, "discrediting sexuality in general and disempowering women in particular". And those people of the Grand Canyon?  Archaeological remains date back 8,000 years along the Colorado River, the "most abundant source of water in the Southwest" for all of that time.  Smithsonian artifacts include 500 split-twig figurines, all made the same way over the course of 60 generations.

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I received another contributor's copy of Iowa Review today, a pleasant surprise and good read.  Phillip Lopate's keynote address to the Nonfiction Conference is therein, interesting as I never did understand what creative nonfiction was and now I think I do.  It "allows the nonfiction writer to user literary techniques ... such as scene-setting, description, dialogue, action, suspense and plot".  Huh.  That would be an interesting addition to a treatise on global warming mayhaps.  I read all the poetry, really.  There were no poems I thought were entirely successful, but what of that?  Going through again, I decided to look for the interesting metaphors.  And similes, her subordinate and unsubtle cousin.  Here's what I found:

Margaret Gibson, Fuel:  "I am, said the voice in the oil spill of rainbow radiance".  (actually, I would have dropped the radiance).

Joshua Kryah, Neverbody:  "Bone, ivory, dentin — / the body's bright Braille to sift through"

Arthur Vogelsang (which always reminds me of birdsong, and for good reason), I Don't Know:  "A fan is an unlikely bird unmuscled"

Gregory Galloway, insominia in:  "she dragged the spoon along the bottom of the cup / until it sounded like a train pulling out of the station"

Tod Marshall, Ars Poetica IV:  "Love is peasant.  Love is find.  It lends me, it is unlike toast, it is prow."

Bruce Bond, Madam Zero:  "She saw her image everywhere / as the thing that was missing / the eye in the stone, the sleeper's stare, / the clock's dice clicking in the fist."

Stephanie Ivanoff, Point of View, or Submersible:  "A mood of oyster / Conspires in an oyster bed, // A mood of lead, / Even as these, newly-wed // Lean stone sober / Over the wall-eyed cake."

There's also a dandy article by David B. Morris called Eros Modigliani, which includes what would have been in my youth called dirty pictures.  Apparently all of Modigliani's models were large-breasted.  By contrast, all of the bare-breasted woman of my youth were African.  Bound between the covers of National Geographic.   I remember one particularly regal woman with a large gourd of water balanced on her head, pointing out something on the horizon.

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I received the June issue of Poetry today and wondered immediately if I was losing time like beach sand through a pocket hole.  Didn't I just receive an issue of Poetry a week ago?  Still, I sat in the garage in the only good chair and drank my wine and read.  My God, I thought, I like this stuff.  That's when it dawned on me how different this new blog feels.  Uncommitted.  Uninformed.  Unconnected.  I don't have my old blogroll, so I don't look up my friends.  I don't know what Jimmy is up to.  I don't know how CDY's post-wedding feeling lean to.  I can't appreciate Jordan's view of NYC, Joshua's take on world event, what flowers Suzanne is planting, what escapades Rebecca is up to.  I don't have a hit-meter, so I don't know who's checking in or from where. 

I'm luxuriating in ignorance.  It's wonderful.  You should try it.

As for this month's Poetry, Wiman allows as how it's all about poetry, no prose.  That's true except for the Letters to the Editor, which serves as such a mercurial barometer of poetic tastes that you'd be hard put to exclude it.  Marie Kinzie starts off with a long poetic sequence (atypical for Poetry) from California Sorrow (is there 1 poet in 100 who celebrates joy?) which I found quite readable.  Eliot and Koch and Daryl Hine and ED and Henry Thoreau and Emily Hale and even Henry James make an appearance and though I didn't love it, it was serviceable as Hercule Poirot might describe a pair of English shoes.  Joshua Mehigan is up next with Cold Turkey, which might be a pantoum but in my current state I don't care enough to look it up.  I liked "The god is gone tonight".  Kay Ryan, a Poetry workhorse, offers up a couple of small gems.  Dana Levin seems, as usual, over her head, but then I've never been able to understand what the responsibilities are of being of Glück's Apprentice.  I liked Robin Robertson's small Homewards with its close "I dreamt I was the needle in a compass / some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart". Bruce Smith's Starring John Wayne was OK, and I liked the simplicity of Michael Chitwood's Don't Complain, which starred trees, bees, fruit, winged seeds and spunk.  Marianne Boruch actually pulls off yet another Moon Poem, followed by a quite nice The Body, which is alternatively, section by section, excellent ("bones — femur, spine, / the tribe of them") and derivative ("the first thing / in the morning the eye longs to see").  I liked Eamon Grennan's Signland for its mix of music and strangeness ("The signs are not propitious, though locked / two-by-two in turquoise glimmerflight / the dragon and damsel-flies rise and fall, / thrusting and trusting each other / over water").  Nice effort by John Hodgen called High Summer whose storyline involves barn-full of amputees and Whitman who conjures up visions of sweethearts for each of them who would "kiss them into silence / the way that he had, / would name their little boys after him, would set them out walking, / sun-colored, in circles / little Whitmans, dizzy in the wheatfields ...".  W. S. Di Piero has a poem of a similar theme, 1864, describing the dead boys in a "O'Sullivan's photograph" (Gettysburg?  Antietam?) that segues into modern times. 

OK, not a sabbatical actually.  Just a respite.

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For some reason, Amazon is recommending poetry books by Jennifer L. Knox, Vijay Seshadri, D. A. Powell, Tyehimba Jess and Maile Meloy.  I don't think their Consumer Analysis Engine is smart enough to actually track the poetry genres that I like, and I've bought a lot of poetry books from Amazon that were all over the aesthetic map anyway.  They are probably just recommending books that are popular that I don't yet have.  Actually, Jess's leadbelly looks interesting.

Michael Hayden, the candidate for the top CIA job, is on the cover of Time (natch, it's a slow news week).  He was head of the NSA (which is one of the many intelligence operations of the Defense Department) and must have been pretty good at his job, as getting your 4th star is not a common occurrence nowadays (there hasn't been a 5-star since Omar Bradley).  By all accounts, he's a very bright cookie, but he also headed up most of the programs that have outraged civil libertarians, including the recent disclosures that all the major phone companies except Qwest handed over millions of phone records to the NSA.  There is also some nervousness at the CIA about his background, which excludes any experience in human intelligence gathering.  10 Questions for Mary Cheney, Big Dick's openly lesbian daughter, who has written her memoir at age 37 (doesn't anybody wait until they're in their dotage anymore?).  Don't get your hopes up, she's about as Republican as they come.  Protests against the Da Vinci Code include:  complete banning in the Faroe Islands; a threatened lawsuit by the Vatican; planned sermons by U.S. Christian pastors.  The same corporations with enlightened policies regarding same-sex couple benefits have been donating to candidates opposed to gay rights, including Merck, McDonald's and Morgan Stanley.  Joe DiMaggio's stuff is for auction, including a signed love-note from Marilyn Monroe  and his Babe Ruth Sultan of Swat crown.  The U.S. has the second highest infant mortality rate in the developed world at 0.5%, trailing only Latvia.  The price of metals has increased so much in the past two years that it costs 1.23 cents to make a penny and 5.73 cents to make a nickel.  45% of all Americans under the age of 5 belong to a racial minority group.  Expect Karl Rove to go on the offensive in the upcoming mid-term elections, using Christian values and anti-gay messages to rally the base.  There is speculation that he will be playing the race card as often as possible, targeting the outspoken and often embarrassing John Conyers and Charles Rangel.  Six experts opine on what it will take to fix the CIA, including promotion of field-proven agents instead of the usual ass-kissers.  An article outlines the pros and cons of talking with Iran, noting that direct negotiations would absolve the international community of it responsibility.  GM seems to be doing a little better with winners like the Saturn Aura, Buick Lucerne and Chevy HHR, but it still struggles of the legacy medical and retirement costs of two retired workers for every one now employed.  The gangs of New Orleans contributed to the highest murder rate in the country before Katrina, and police are worried that they may come back.  Big spread on Cars, Pixar's summer animated film with voice talents including Larry the Cable Guy, Owen Wilson, and Paul Newman.  Paris Hilton has a new video game called Diamond Quest.  William Hurt, who is in fact the grandstepson of Time's founder, will play a "well-to-do Christian minister in Texas whose life takes a sudden turn towards the unholy".

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There's another great Q&A session with my favorite wise-guy Bob Hicok at Smartish Pace.  Here's a sample:

D.R. from Germany: I think poetry would be more prominent if there were a way to attach a commercial to it, but that doesn't seem possible. Do you think that dooms poetry or saves it?

Bob Hicok: Mortuary ads seem a natural.

Bob's just gotten his bio up at poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.  There's a page where you can find a poem by Movement, Theme or Media Type.  This kind of cracks me up.  I can just imagine waking up in the middle of the night and craving a poem of the Dark Room Collective genre about Chanukah and now knowing just where to go.

There's little in the way of a catalog more decadent than one from Dean & Deluca.  Not that I can afford much from it except on Christmas, when I send D&D baskets to my best clients.  Should you hit the lottery, here's some items you might want to try:  2 pounds of Fresh Florida Gulf Shrimp, $95;  Humboldt Fog chevre, $26;  4 pound New Zealand rack of venison, $140; 3 one-ounce jars of Iranian Imperial, Asetra and Seuruga caviar, $675; Chicken Pot Pie, $14;  Aceto Balsamico di Moderna (vinegar), aged 25 years, $180; Coconut Layer Cake, $55.

This month's Poetry has contributors from their A-List (Kay Ryan, W. S. Merwin, Geoffrey Hill, A. F. Moritz, John Koethe) alongside J. Allyn Rosser, Stefi Weisburd, David Mason, Rebecca Hoogs, Kathleen Lynch.  As much as I've heard about Hill, I don't know much about his work, and was pleasantly surprised with his informality and observation, reminiscent of Goldbarth.  Stefi Weisburd's Mittelschmerz Near Menopause was so good that I was surprised to find it in these normally staid pages: "The moon wishes in my ear / then the astral shearing // along the body's guy-wires. / I lumber through the day's // dregs accruing in the pelvic / pit.  I want to drown // in bed, birth the damn cabbages / ...".  Everything else was competent and fairly narrative.  Merwin sounded like Merwin, which is a kind of diction I've never quite understood the point of.  Brian Phillips reviews two of Geoffrey Hill's books in this same issue, Without Title and Scenes from Comus.  Kay Ryan, who is every bit as good a prose writer as poet, pens A Consideration of Poetry, touching on a number of points, including how the hidden nonsense in poetry gives it "much of its secret irresistibility".  D.H. Tracy provides balanced (no, not "Fox balanced") and generally favorable reviews of books by Brian Swann, Pattiann Rogers, Geoffrey Brock, Richard Howard, Marilyn Nelson, William Logan,  Kay Ryan, and Anne Stevenson.  The Letters to the Editor include, as usual, roughly equal numbers of people who love or hate what Poetry has been doing lately.

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I know, it still looks pretty anemic, but I'm trying to repair the last site to bring up a fully operational battle-blog (apologies to The Emperor). 

Harper's has some pretty good stuff this month.  The feature article is by Art Spiegelman of Maus fame, and reviews outrageous cartoon from the past 300 years.  The most interesting of them are the horrifically anti-Semitic cartoon that regularly show up in the Middle East, many of them depicting the Holocaust as a fraud in one way or another.  Ben Metcalf has taken over Lewis Lapham's editorial with On Simple Human Decency in which he discusses the history (and lunacy) of "presidential threat" laws passed early in the last century, and then proceeds to walk the line with statements like "Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?"  New Library of Congress subject headings introduced last year include "Fear of death in literature", "Motion picture theatre etiquette", and "Video Wrestling Games".  There's a fascinating excerpt from Sergeant Jonathan Trowern-Trend's Birding Babylon, in which his bird sightings are interspersed with descriptions of battles in the Iraqi War.  A sidebar article quotes a portion of a lecture by Hassan Bolkhari, cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, wherein he explains how Jerry of Tom and Jerry fame is the end result of a Jewish conspiracy to link Jews to mice, and then make them seem clever and dominant.  Kevin Baker relates 75 years of the right-wing's program to ascribe all military failures to enemies within (the media, the academics, the nattering nabobs), and predicts we'll see it again with Iraq.  An amazing article that follows Stevie Wonder's troupe around during Super Bowl XL, but ultimately demonstrates the monstrous scope of Super Bowl preparation and execution, which involves tens of thousands of people and as many dollars.  The Annotation section reports graphically on Hugo Chávez's attempt to have Venezuela's oil reserves quadrupled (based upon difficult-to-reach tar-oil), thus displacing the House of Saud on OPEC — the interesting (or perhaps scary) thing is that at these prices, the vast quantities of hard-to-extract oil in Canada and Venezuela may yet make them the largest producers on earth.  A sad and hilarious article on the planeloads of American men who come to interview and possibly wed Ukrainian brides-to-be.  From Harper's Index:  Number of illegal Irish immigrants in the US:  25,000; Price for which China will rent out Beijing's Great Hall of the People:  $12,000;  Chances that an American says he or she uses the word "fuck":  2 in 3.

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Perhaps not aliens, but it feels that way.  I've been buried under a project for work that has had me going 12-14 hours a day, every day, for two weeks.  Now I know what CDY felt like as an intern.  I'm going to knock off at noon and make a huge lasagna from a recipe in one of the Silver Palate cookbooks.  Mountains of grated fresh buffalo mozzarella and aged parmesan mixed with whole-milk ricotta, ground round, fresh steamed spinach, and homemade tomato sauce (plum tomatoes, red wine, onions, garlic, oregano, fresh parsley, and a hint of nutmeg).  I bought a to-die-for bottle of Barolo (RP rating of 95) at auction online.  Also a T-shirt that says "I'm kind of a big deal" from NoiseBot.com.  Then, I'm driving to Cath's and making the rest of dinner for the mother of my sons, one of whom will be there to make a huge dent in the lasagna monster.

I'm going to roll over to our new shopping center and get a Giant Lasagna Pan, Scott Turf Builder, and some decent shorts.  I can do that because all of my favorite places are there:  Bed Bath and Beyond, Lowe's, and Ross Dress For Less.  It's like they interviewed me before finalizing the leases.

As you can imagine, I haven't had time to read much, except 15 exhausted minutes just before sleep every night.  The cover of APR features Jean Senac that accompanies an article and translations.  David Lehman has an interesting article on Archie Ammons, whose poetry I've never been able to get into, but Lehman's comments make me reconsider.  A wonderful interview with the ageless Stanley Kunitz, as wise and gentle as we all have come to expect.  Alan Williamson bemoans the New Age of Cynicism (principally among younger poets).  I would tell you about the poetry (and there is some good stuff in the issue) but it would necessarily lead me to criticizing a half-dozen poets by name — something I would prefer to let Ron and my other betters do.  Much of the poetry in this issue is just appalling.  I can only think of cliché's (diary entries, lineated prose, maudlin maundering, ...) to describe the banal work in much of this issue. 

The Atlantic's cover article is Life After Roe with a picture of a jaunty Chief Justice Roberts and academic-slouchy Sam Alito coming down the steps of the Supreme Court.  The article itself discusses the likelihood of Roe v. Wade's erosion in coming years, concluding that Choice will lose to Life in many red states.  Stoking the Beast punctures the myth that you can "starve the beast" of Big Government by cutting taxes (just look what the last 4 years has brought).  Hunkering Down is one author's term for what the U.S. military will have to for many years in Iraq as sectarian violence goes on and on and on.  A former founder of a large management consulting firm waxes treasonously by suggesting that most of management theory is bunk and all those business books at Borders contain nonsense.  The book review section has a fascinating discussion of the morality of Allied area bombing of Germany:  over half a million civilians were killed in raids on non-military targets (and almost 50,000 airmen died in the process).

Just got a new Poetry and Harper's.  More on that tomorrow.  Really, I promise.

~~~

OK, I lied.  It turned out that I mangled my SQL Server along the way, and now I have to rebuild everything.

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