Hurricane Bob
Well,
they got it back. Everyone calls the work by Edvar Munch "The Scream", but
of course it's real name is Norwegian (Skrike). As a translated
word is seldom exactly the same word as the original (same cultural
context, same emotive value, ...) , I wonder if "Scream" is the best or only
alternative.
TriTrans says skrike can be translated as clamour, cry,
shout, squall or yell, for example. Anyway, they caught
the gunmen who waltzed into the museum and ripped it off the wall, but had not
yet recovered the actual painting until yesterday. The convicted men were
ordered to pay $122 million in damages. That's going to be a little hard
to raise while in prison.
I was getting to like the new batch of Hurricane/Himmicane names: Yolanda,
Sergio, Zeke, Fabio. Then along came John. John? What's
next? Bruce? Bob? Reginald? Jim?
The world-class clusterf*ck that is the JonBenet affair continues. In case
you've been off the planet for the past 10 years, this is the most
sensationalized murder case since the
Black Dahlia, and
once again, they have no suspects now that John Karr has been let off the hook.
In a cheap shot that we expect in this election year, Colorado Republican Governor Bill
Owens has stated that Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy "should be held
accountable for the most extravagant and expensive DNA test in Colorado history"
and Lacy has been getting criticized for causing Karr to be arrested and
transported to the US for DNA testing (which he passed). Here you have a
guy who apparently knew details about the murder scene that only the medical
examiner and an inner circle of law enforcement knew, faces charges of child
pornography in California, expressed sexual interest in young girls at a Thai
school, and oh, by the way, confessed to being with JonBenet when she died.
What was Lacy going to do, leave him in Thailand until all the I's were dotted
and T's crossed?
Here's the ever-irascible John Bolton, whom Bush slid under the U.N.'s door as
our Ambassador when Congress was out of session, in his be
st imitation of Mark
Twain's intelligence and wit. Bolton's in the news today for venturing
that "Unanimity is not necessary on Iran". Sounds a lot like the run-up to
the Iraq War, when 72 days after 9/11, Bush was
quoted as asking Rumsfeld "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?
What is the status of the war plan?" As if I weren't worried enough, I had
to listen to Michael Ledeen's spooky babble about how we Have To Do Something
About Iran yesterday on
Fresh Air.
Naturally, Ledeen works at the American Enterprise Institute and I could almost
hear his eyes rolling wildly in his head like some kind of conservative
Mad-Eye Moody.
He's not actually advocating invasion (yet), just spending a lot of money
to convince those poor misguided Iranians to overthrow their despicable regime.
Maybe they would even put another Shah in place, like we did when we
ousted an
elected leader in 1953, helped (with the Mossad) to train the brutally effective
Savak secret police, and generally reaped the benefits of a Middle East ally.
That's got to be a better plan than actually letting those Ay-Rabs elect their
own leaders, which didn't work out so well in Lebanon and Palestine. BTW,
my favorite Iran quote this week is from Newt ("!'m Baaaack!") Gingrich, who
said
"When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10
years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: 'If North Korea were to ship them a
nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?"
Why is he worried about Iran? What if NK shipped a nuke to Belgium?
Can you imagine how uppity they would get all of a sudden after two centuries of
having one neighbor or another run over them? Or how about Iceland?
Or St. Kitts & Nevis? God, what if OPRAH had the bomb?
The news about Lucia Perillo's Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award got me thinking about Ms. Perillo again. I once clicked on
her web page's button that says:
Buy my book and diminish the supply in my storage locker. She
returned The Oldest Map with the Name America to me with a lovely note in
a spidery hand. Ms. Perillo was diagnosed in the 80's with multiple
sclerosis, a condition about which she has written in The Body Mutinies.
I am often bewildered (and a little envious) when the MacArthur folks label
somebody a genius and give them a half-million bucks. In Ms. Perillo's
case, it seems that somebody got it right. Here's A
Simple Campsong from Verse Daily.
It looks like a new APR just got thrown over the transom. More on
that tomorrow.
I
was out getting victuals for a staff meeting of A Certain Literary Journal to
take place this afternoon when I spotted these sunflowers. For the first
five decades, I would have thought nothing of them, except that Der had the
artistic instincts and presence of mind to pick a few and bring them to our last
dinner get-together. So, I drove home, found a pair of kitchen shears and
a serviceable vase, and did the same. We are apparently never too old to
learn new tricks. Meanwhile, Frank of the now famous Frank's Title Service
was explaining to our poet's email loop how A Governor for Your Flippancy
got its name. In my one and only 5-day stint of poetry education, I was
blessed to have Mary Jo Bang as the instructing poet. Somewhere in the
analysis of my work, she intimated that I needed to put the brakes on my impulse
to wax whimsical in the middle of a poem. This was duly communicated by
means of daily reports to my poetry buddies, Frank included. Thus spracht
the muse that offered up the perfect title to a perfect poem.
I also received the latest 
There
are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each. But they only
make up 5% of the mass of the universe. The rest is dark energy and dark
matter, the latter of which we have
e-Marie Cusac for Silkie.
The Runner-up was Cynthia Arrieu-King for
People are Tiny in Paintings of China. Veronica Patterson was awarded
an Honorable Mention for Close. Finalists included Sheila Black, Lisa Lewis, and Renato Rosaldo. Details on the contest and complete list of semi-finalists
can be found
Well,
Alejandro is back in Spain and Junie is back in Wisconsin, and I've caught up
with work and washed the laundry and slopped the hogs. So, I guess I'm
back.
hibit
with mummy stuff (grave artifacts, coffins, a couple of real mummies) which I
always get a kick out of, particularly the long spoon they used to scoop out the
dear deceased's brains through his/her nose prior to The Big Journey.
Apparently, although the other main organs were either separately mummified or
corked into canopic jars, the brain was thought to be something you can do
without in the afterlife. Kinda reminds you of the current administration.
most
without. That means that every person on earth could have 30 stars to call
their own. Our galaxy is large beyond comprehension. To get from one
side to the other at the speed of light would take 100,000 years. To get
an idea how long that is, consider that Homo sapiens first colonized
Eurasia and Oceania only 40,000 years ago, that recorded history in any sense is
less than 10,000 years old. Most scientists believe that we will never
travel outside our galaxy. Ever. (we may be able to deploy quantum
state separation or folded space or other wild phenomena to communicate or send
small inorganic objects somewhere, but even that is doubtful). The center
of our galaxy is believed to contain a supermassive black hole that has already
consumed millions, perhaps billions, of stars. Of the hundreds of billions
of stars that still remain, billions of them hold planets within their
gravitational grip. Of these planets, millions of them could be have the
properties (distance from their star, mass, composition) amenable to supporting
life. A couple of weeks ago I saw the Milky Way in a moonless sky and was
considering the unthinkably vast nature of our galaxy. Then the fact hit
me: there are another 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
My
buddy Alejandro is coming from Spain next week. I still haven't figured
out what fun stuff we can do, but Junie's flying in too, so we'll think of
something. The tail end of the 
my
dad was posted twice) might
In case you're curious what the color "Happenstance"
looks like, it looks like that slate blue in my bathroom.
The fish watercolors I got in Hawaii, by the way. The one
on the top is a
Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, about which Rachel once wrote a
I
only just noticed that my comments are working. My apologies to those whom
I have inadvertently been ignoring. I wonder how the curry recipe worked
out for Rebecca. Speaking of Ms. 
Henri
Cole, C. D. Wright, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, Robert Pinsky and Yusef Komunyakaa,
and then were given the inner pages of 6 Whitman winners, most poets could
connect the dots. No less so with Ms. O'Reilley's work, which has
much of the soft, serious, spiritual/pastoral, mainly plainspoken overtones of
Mary Oliver's work, this year's judge. O'Reilly is an English professor at
the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic university in the Twin Cities.
She professes to be active in the Quaker ministry and a lay practitioner of
Buddhist precepts. A quick Google gives you links to reviews by
Spirituality Practice, quakerbooks.org, and spiritualityhealth.com, which should
give you a hint. Her picture on the back of the book, cable-knit sweater,
kind but serious visage, about my age I would guess, strikes me as an
unpretentious poet's photo, a nice lady who is probably someone's
favorite aunt. Ms. O'Reilley has written 5 previous books of essays (but
none of poetry), and the credits for the poems in this book are rather thin.
Not to worry, though, the work in this book is engaging and readable. One
thing that I like about it is that there are almost 60 poems in 60 pages.
Like me, here's a gal who knows how to get in and get out. Even at a page
apiece, the poems tend to be short, sometimes only a couple of words per line
and often leaving a lot of white space below the close. This isn't really
my most favorite kind of verse, but I'll give you an idea of some of the ones I
liked: