WhimsyLand

I'm off to Silicon Valley tomorrow with a 70-pound suitcase that will cost me extra to throw on the plane.  It turns out that you can have two 50-pound suitcases, but the airlines dreamed up this new rule two weeks after I bought this monster so I wouldn't have to lug two pieces of luggage onto the plane (natch).  What's in this suitcase that weighs 70 pounds?

• The Possibility of An Island (which Claudia said I had to read), plus the new Le Carré, both in heavy hardback
• Another half-dozen other paperbacks and technical documents
• BAP 2006 that I'm still taking notes in (and, SA,  I haven't forgotten, the extra BAPs are in a box ready to ship)
• Binders full of source code of this polynomial model that requires tricky scaling
• Underwear and socks for 8 days (all great-looking name brands from Ross Dress for Less)
• Business-class blue jeans, which pass for Dockers in San Jose
• Nice shoes, just in case I get invited to speak to a venture capitalist
• Long-sleeve and short-sleeve jerseys and shirts, since I have no idea what the weather will be like
• One nice leather coat my parents bought me in Silverton when we went skiing
• My killer Sony camera and all its stuff in its own bag
• USB keyboard and mouse for my portable (I hate typing on laptop keyboards)
• Toiletries and related stuff
• Magazines and poetry books I haven't read
• One "travel corkscrew" that you can't carry on anymore
• Other stuff at the bottom I have already forgotten

I will be staying at Linny and Roy's (my sister and BIL) for the weekend, trying to avoid getting stepped on by a horse.  That's the current Palomino with my sweet Junie, who sadly will not be with me this trip.  After a couple of days in the wine country outside of Arroyo Grande, I'll be back with my nose to the grindstone in the San Jose area.  Except the part where I probably drink too much wine, if there is such a thing, at Casa Paulsen one of those nights.  I'm sure something exciting will happen and you, Dear Reader, will be the first to know.  I'll be alarmed up at 4.30 tomorrow, so maybe I'll give a few of my friends a call on the way to airport.  You just can't get up too early, you know.

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This is just too good.  Kermit in the Matrix.  Miss Piggy as Trinity.  Rowlf as Morpheus.

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There's something discordant between the GOP's leveraging of anti-gay marriage initiatives and mainstream America:  witness the mini-ad on Travelocity I saw when making a reservation for Junie and I to have Thanksgiving in SLO.  It said "Check into San Francisco's Gay-Friendly Hotels".  I read recently, in, of all places, Fortune, that the legal legitimacy of same-sex marriages would add $2 billion to the "marriage industry" (think flowers, planners, churches, reception halls, tuxedo rental places, ...).  As venal as it may be, the good thing about free enterprise is that dollars tend to change minds.

I've gotten a number of emails over the years about my BAP posts and webpages.  They usually take the tone of "WHY are you doing this?" and "What could be so important about BAP that you subject it to microanalysis?"  and "It's only an anthology, what's up?".  I guess my answer is:  why do millions of Americans follow baseball, and hundreds of thousands of them know who played second-base for the Reds in 1946?  In fact, I take BAP way less seriously than Green Bay fans view the Vikings.  I don't know, offhand, how many majors Woods has racked up.  The last televised football game I saw was USC vs. Texas for the Rosebowl, which was a hell of a game, and, besides, I spent 10 years getting an ridiculous number of degrees at USC.  My point is, could it really be sillier to do BAP stats than to memorize the pole positions of the current NASCAR guys?

In case you're thinking of moving to Colorado, it was a drop-dead gorgeous day in the low 70's with blue skies and the mountains just beyond the Front Range are snowy and clouded.  Nice homes are available in what has become the same buyer's market as almost everyplace else in country.  That means if you're coming from San Diego, Naples or Atlantic City, you can buy two or three of them.  Somebody has compiled a list of "cities with overpriced housing".  There's a whole lot of cities in California and Florida, in fact the first 30 on the list.  However, New Jersey and New York show up, too, and there's a smattering of Arizona, Maryland, Utah and Massachusetts.  The calculations that go into the Overpriced Calculation tend to involve two things:  the percentage of the local population who could actually afford a mortgage (which in San Diego, is less than 20%) and the factor by which a mortgage payment exceed rent for an equivalent home.  There gets to be a point at which, even with the Fed's permitted deduction for mortgage interest, it just doesn't make sense to buy an $600,000 fixer-upper in Escondido when you can rent a nice two-bedroom for $850 a month. 

News short:  Clinton has the balls to go on Fox News and say he got closer to killing Bin Laden than the current administration has achieved.  Somehow, God knows how, Jackass Number Two took that top box office spot.  A classified intelligence report states that the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat to the US (well, duh).   Jerry Falwell states that Hillary Clinton running as the Democratic candidate for U.S. President would motivate the evangelicals greater than if Satan himself were running.  I will probably get a huge ration of shit for this in email and comments, but I agree.  I've listened to enough right-wing talk radio to know that, to conservatives, Hillary is the sensory equivalent to a shot of adrenalin administered via hypodermic to the heart.  As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing special about Hillary (OK, she's smart and competent, but that's not enough) and we need to find a candidate like Republicans John McCain or Colin Powell, who even moderate Democrats think about voting for.

Hey, the weekend is about over.  You guys have as good a week as possible.


 

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The ever-amusing Tricia is holding an Internet costume party in honor of Wallace Steven's Birthday.  Send Tricia pix of yourself in your WS getup!

~~~~~~
 

Unlike last year, there is less of a relationship between age and gender, although the older the BAP poet, the more likely that he is male.

It is a convention that poets state their year of birth in the Contributor's Notes and Comments, and everyone has done so since 2003 (stricter enforcement?).  Prior to that 30 poets declined to state their age, 9 men and 21 women.

Only 28 of the 75 poets this year were women, or 37%.  That's less representation than most recent years, in which women tend to make up 40-45% of the contributing poets.

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I have been seduced into signing up for Netflix.  Once you do the math, it's a no-brainer.  If I go to Blockbuster more than twice a month, I'm even.   Anyway, I put the return Netflix envelope in my mailbox, put the flag up, and at about 3 PM my mailman (who must plan his entire day around making me the last stop) picks up the little red envelope.  From there, it presumably goes back to the post office to be sorted.  Here's what completely amazes me:  the next morning, I get an email from Netflix acknowledging receipt of the very film I dropped into my mailbox 18 hours before.  How in the hell do they do that?  The only mail I've ever seen move faster are rejections from New American Writing.

~~~~~

I've got the new BAP Stats up, detailing the poets and publications featured in BAP since 1988.  There's a lot to comment on, other than the aesthetic issues, but let me give you a short introduction:

The New Yorker continues to lead the all-time BAP inclusion list with 84 poems, followed closely by Poetry.

The big litmag winners this year were Kenyon Review and Five Points, both with 5 poems;  Cincinatti Review (which was never in BAP prior to last year) with 4;  Margie, Gettysburg Review and Georgia Review with 3;  New England Review (way to go, CDY), Michigan Quarterly Review, LIT and APR with 2. 

Publications that seldom miss being in BAP include Ploughshares, Yale Review, New Republic, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, but they were batting .000 this issue.

First timer literary journals in BAP include Hayden's Ferry Review, Subtropics, The Hat, Iodine Poetry Review, MiPoesias, Nightsun, Endicott Review, Failbetter, Ecotone, and Atlanta Review.

Though Donald Hall had held the record for years as the most included poet, John Ashbery overtook him in 2002, and continues as the most cited poet in BAP.  Hall and Charles Simic now share the second place with 12 BAPs, followed closely by James Tate with 11 (including one this year).

There was a time when online journal had no chance of getting a poem into BAP.  This year we find The Hat, Failbetter, and MiPoesias.

First-time contributors to BAP included

Ball, Jesse
Benjamin, Krista
Bernstein, Ilya
Brewer, Gaylord
Christopher, Tom
Cronk, Laura
Gannon, Megan
Gorham, Sarah
Grennan, Eamon
Gutstein, Daniel
Gwynn, R. S.
Hawkey, Christian
Kapovich, Katia
Kasischke, Laura
Kraushaar, Mark
Larios, Julie
Livingston, Reb
Newman, Richard
Pawlak, Mark
Phi, Bao
Retallack, Betsy
Rosenberg, Liz
Rosser, J. Allyn
Seshadri, Vijay
Thompson, Sue Ellen
Towle, Tony
Townsend, Alison
Webb, Charles Harper
Yezzi, David

That's a pretty good percentage for any BAP.  Congrats, of course, to our blogmates Reb, Laura, and Laura.

More tomorrow.

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It has occurred to me recently that the most important part of being in love with someone is not the incidental benefits of companionship and stimulation.  The greatest part is the gift of hope.  Notwithstanding what may be behind us, there is always that dark future that awaits.  Hopelessness is a burden that accumulates slowly, unseen and unnoticed, like road dust on a long journey.  One day, you awake and the morning doesn't hold the same magic it once did.  It astounds me to find out how simple is the antidote.  Thank you, Junie.

Speaking of whom, my sweet has been copy-editing a novel that rehashes shamelessly every major point in every right-wing nutcase novel:  black helicopters, New World Order, Skull & Bones, corrupt government agencies funding every notable assassination of the last 40 years, you know.  After laughing over her descriptions of this particular tome of paranoid fiction, I sat down to read the Wall Street Journal.  Here's what I found:

DaimlerChrysler's mustachioed CEO, Dieter Zetsche, star in all those crash-dummy commercials, allows as how their sales have suddenly gone South, just like Ford and GM.  It seems that even the Jeep Commander and Chrysler 300 can't keep people buying V8 cars with 18 miles per gallon.  It was thought that Chrysler had some sort of German juju that was preventing them from facing up to a fuel-efficient buying class and the same labor costs as the rest of the Big 3.

It seems that the Chairman of the Board of HP hired a consultant who hired a detective to use scams and deception to intercept emails and tap phones of her fellow board members.

Yes, it's a good year for Democrats, given that Bush's ratings are somewhere south of Nixon's and Carter's.  However, the truth is there is little up for grabs.  The unprecedented gerrymandering by both parties that has gone on for two decades makes it almost impossible for incumbents to lose.  California, for example, holds 53 of the 435 House seats and even in this time of GOP angst, very few are actually competitive.  California is not alone;  states with entrenched incumbents include Alabama, Alaska (even with all the recent scandals), Arkansas, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island and Utah.

While the majority of the elected leaders of Thailand were out of town, the Thai military, with the quiet support of the King Bhumibol (frequently attributed to be a "quasi-divine figure"), took over the government.

There has been so much un-scientific infighting by industry-funded members of the IEEE standards committee on WiFi standards, that the group voted to remove the leadership due to blatant self-serving moves by technical representatives who work for Intel, Qualcomm and other firms.

The Department of Homeland Security will announce the awarding of a $2 billion contract to "secure America's border" to Boeing.  The contract was particularly open-ended.  Michael Jackson (no, not that MJ), deputy secretary of DHS told the firms that this year he wanted them to "come back and tell us how to do our business".

Monster Worldwide (God, what a great name) and Broadcom are some of the many firms facing investigation by federal prosecutors for backdating stock options for their executives and most-valued employees.  The scam was to retro-issue options at exactly the date at which their stock hit a low.  An independent analyst said that the likelihood that Monster's supposed random selection of option dates would hit their minima was 1 in 9 million.

Real estate specialists say that the federal government is paying way too much, at $59 a square foot, to move into 16 floors of the soon-to-be-built Freedom Tower at the former World Trade Center site.  There is speculation that politics is swaying an otherwise simple economic analysis.

I mean, there's this perfectly wonderful collection of shenanigans in the Wall Street Journal.  Why is it necessary dream up reactionary fantasies?

~~~~

OK, I'm starting my BAP analysis tomorrow.  For reals, as Ky used to say when he was 3.

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Junie and I were in the local liquor store and I spotted a case of Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon.  It occurred to me that the last time I ever saw that much Jordan in one place was at Big John's house, a couple of cases dwarfed by hundreds of cases of Bordeaux, all in basement of his large Ladue home.  How they got there is quite a story.  I was Director of Technology, based in Belgium and one of my responsibilities was computerizing the recently acquired copper foundry in Bilbao.  Big John was on the board of the copper conglomerate and the badass American CEO of the company's U.S. foundry near Alton, IL.  John had slowly acquired power within the family-owned company and had moved his young American honchos into management positions of the Bilbao plant.  The plant itself was an old, sprawling collection of brick structures housing furnaces and holding tanks for molten copper.  I remember noting that fully 20% of the shift that collected for the company-supplied mid-day meal had eye patches, prosthetic limbs, horrible burn scars and other evidence of long tenure at a plant that OSHA wouldn't have stepped foot in.  The Bilbao operation also had a tankhouse and a commercial section.  The tankhouse was basically an Olympic pool of conductive fluid in which thousand-pound copper plates were turned into 99.9% copper sheets by electrolysis.  The commercial operation was run by Kenny, a wild-eyed Illinois boy who was one of John's favorites and spoke a smattering of Spanish at breakneck speed.  He ran a crew of 15 women who called all over Spain buying copper scrap for smelting in the foundry:  mountains of water meters, door knobs, old plumbing, and even a 20-foot high pile of old Ethiopian pennies.  Commercial was also responsible for shipping the hundreds of tons of slag, the lava-like black tailings from the smelting/refining process, in barges from Spain to Illinois, where it was then sold to be used in highways and for sand-blasting.  John had instructed him to shave a penny from every pound of copper purchased to stash away in cash for buying wine.  Every month or two, Kenny would make the run from Bilbao to Bordeaux in the company panel truck and buy up 20 or 30 cases of the best vintages.  Kenny showed me, with no little display of pride, the heavy-duty wooden box that he had designed that would store exactly 20 cases of wine.  When the Bilbao plant had a shipment of slag ready, Kenny would put between 5 and 10 wooden boxes of wine at the bottom of the barge, and then have 100 tons of slag dumped on top of it.  After 4 weeks on the Atlantic, and up the Mississippi, plant personnel in Illinois would remove the slag and deliver the wine carriers to John's house.  It was some of the slickest larceny I saw that year:  the company paid for the wine and shipping cost and the Fed didn't even get import duties on the vino. 

I've gotten through about a quarter of BAP 2006, and Junie and I are comparing notes.  More on that tomorrow.

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Junie has been here since Saturday and s'wonderful, s'marvelous (you have to hear João Gilberto sing that):  taking work breaks to do the Atlantic Puzzler, having breakfast at Panera's, watching Netflixes (or is it Netflices?) on TV trays, and of course all that snuggling.

Jeffrey, Malinda, Barbara, James, Erik and I continue to pound away at completing Volume VII of Many Mountain Moving, with Jeffrey doing the heavy lifting of InDesign editing, and Malinda doing serious forensic Googling to track down the contributors for whom we don't have sufficient contact information (my principal contribution is bringing wine to the staff meetings).  God know how Deborah gets 32 Poems out twice a year on what has to be the same kind of budget we work with (that is to say, peanuts).  Speaking of Wikipedia, it occurs to me that I should submit an entry for MMM, since I can find these other literary journals there now:  Ploughshares, Paris Review, North American Review, Poetry Magazine, and even online journals such as failbetter and 3AM Magazine.  MMM has been around for ten years now, and has produced 16 issues, which isn't chopped liver.  Later this month, we'll be opening our online submission website and another store site for back issues, subscriptions and books from MMM Press. 

I've been having more than my normal share of telephone conferences with clients lately.  This normally involves two to six members of the opposing team on one end of the phone and me (and maybe Dima, and very seldom Rimbaud & Emily) on the other.  When I was an academician, I used to understand viscerally the old adage that the meetings were vicious because so little was at stake.  With clients, most of them Silicon Valley startups populated with bright, fragile egos, it's even worse.  First, there's the TechSpeak:  "This project will turn into a tar baby if we don't consider the unlimited bandwidth involved, modulo the wire speed" (yes, irrespective of its un-PC nature, tar baby is used a lot to describe sticky projects that pull you into the vortex of unresolved problems).  Then, there's the endless Chip 'n Dale (no, no, after you, really, I insist) acts where the players expend most of their energy generating an ego-saving force field (which reminds me of the 1980's Cruz Smithian joke:  "Why do Japanese tourists avoid Gorky Park?  They're afraid of losing face").   Then, there's the sheer linearity of most of the players.  You're hesitant to make a reference to major league sports, but you just know a literary illusion will generate stares that would melt the Polycom conferencing transceiver (I once mentioned No Exit during a discussion of endless loops that caused everyone's head to spin a la The Exorcist).

Anyway, as you can tell, I don't really have anything to say.  Which makes this the perfect blog entry for a perfectly information-less day, meeting-wise.  I did receive both the hardcover and paperback versions of BAP 2006 today, however.  I've got some details to log into my database, some analysis to do, and then, watch out.

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Ads for The Atlantic are starting to look like those for Robb's Report and other upscale mags:  witness a guy who appears to be Roger Moore bowing to a young girl at a picnic in Palmetto Bluffs, "a Lowcountry treasure combining the undisturbed beauty of a pristine natural preserve with a thoughtfully distributed collection of properties."  Doesn't sound like the South Carolina I drove through on my way to college in 1970, where the main revenue was speed traps and breakfast in any town's local restaurant was $1.50, including home-grown tomatoes.  But, I digress.   Calendar notes:  welfare rolls are down 57% in the past 10 years (goodness, did Walmart hire all of them?).  Thomas Noe, the Ohio coin dealer and heavy GOP fundraiser, goes on trial for losing much of the $50 million that Republican appointees gave him to invest on behalf of the state's workman's compensation fund.  Professional golf will start testing for doping next month.  Skilling gets sentenced next month, but Lay's death saved the family $183 million in judgements (yeah, they can keep it all).  Jonathan Rauch views a U.S. president's success according to how long it takes to unwind his mistakes.  Nixon gets the prize, but by his analysis, Bush comes in next, followed by Jimmy Carter.  Antique Autocrats who have served as Dear Leader more than 35 years include Taufa'ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei, El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya.  Bongo?  America's educated elite have moved to the big cities in the past 30 years by astounding percentages.  Chuck Todd interviews Democratic Party movers and shakers and finds that many would like to just lose control of the House and Senate in the fall.  The reasoning goes:  even with a one or two member majority in either chamber, it would be difficult to make any sizable legislative changes.  Meanwhile, all the blame for everything (and there will be a lot of everything in the next 2 years) will remain a GOP problem just in time for the 2008 presidential elections.  For most of the 20th century, the typical American workweek grew shorter and shorter (remember how little George Jetson had to do?), but since 1970 the trend has reversed, and by 2001 30% of all American workers put in more than 50 hours a week.  A new study shows that what makes a red state red and a blue state blue is mostly predictable by how the wealthiest in the state vote, not the unwashed masses.  Another study shows that countries with students with the lowest self-esteem tend to score the highest in standardized tests (not surprisingly, the US has the most self-congratulating students).  I've already mentioned what a ride it will be when North Korea starts falling apart, and that the Chinese will probably make out the best.  Juries are increasingly handing out Guilty judgments to Muslim defendants charged with some flavor of terrorism charge, almost always based upon the argument of what they might have done.  Lots of other good stuff.  If you can't afford the five bucks, get thee to a library.

See you tomorrow, most likely.

Posted by jbahr at 06:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy's latest BAP skewering is Terence Winch's Sex Elegy. The way it starts off reminds me of another multi-mate poem.

Many Mountains Moving will be open to online submissions soon, thanks to some nice software from Devin Emke from One-Story and the folks at CLMP.  CLMP is licensing online submission software for $300 for small literary journals, which is a pretty good deal.  You'll need a server (or ISP) with PHP and MySQL, but virtually all hosting services can support that.  It took me about a half a day to put it up on one of our servers here (Windows Server 2003), and I imagine it's even easier if you have a Linux host.

It's a bad sign when you don't know whether you've blogged about an issue or not.  I'm going to take a chance and say "not", and tell you about the Sep/Oct APR.  Galway Kinnell (he certainly seems to get around recently) has 4 poems of pretty tame stuff.  His third poem, The Walnut, is about the prostate.  Old-guy "gutsy", wistful sex-talk certainly seems to be making the rounds lately.  Sarah Gorham with 3 poems.  I liked Your Retirement, Not Mine ("The bow-tied salesman bearing roses / wants our down payment.  We're an easy mark, / ... / ... while lace pajamas nictate / from a nylon catenary. ...").  Fredrica Wagman had a really long piece from His Secret Little Wife that is one long, long passage of phrases separated by ellipses and pretty much prose, methinks, but then if an author says it's a poem, then it's a poem, as far as I'm concerned.  Taha Muhammad Ali has 5 poems translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin (separately?  in concert?) which are short with shortish lines ("The past dozes beside me / as the ringing does / beneath its grandfather bell.").  John Yau has an interesting article about Jasper John's Preoccupation with ambiguity among a zillion other observations.  Johann Hjalmarsson (there are some strange accent marks I couldn't reproduce) is translated in 5 poems by Christopher Burawa, poems that are relatively chatty and mostly could have been written in Maine or Oregon.  Joan Murray contributes Rear View Mirror ("If you'd seen her there, trying to rise, you'd understand / why I didn't make a sound. ...")  Ross Gay has 2 poems, this from Bringing the Shovel Down: "Because I love you, and beneath the dying stars / have become the delicate pistons threading itself through your chest").  Anne Carson is showing off again with just oodles of classical knowledge in Hekabe, translated from the Greek (natch) and boasting a Cast of Characters, Chorus, and an explanatory introduction longer than most chapbooks.  I might just read it because Agamemnon shows up.  David Roderick with How I Learned Not to Speak ("They were hard and practical people, / and when they said / they were willing to serve me / I took what they had to give: / bowls of rain, / prayer-husks filled with meat").  Maxine Kumin with 2 poems, one (no kidding) on Mulching.  Ira Sadoff with (gulp) 14 poems that were mostly earthy (Incidental:  "It's no accident they find you in the bathroom puking.").  Stanley Plumly with 2 poems, John Yau again with 3, Terese Svoboda with 3 as well ("We mass, so many of us old, / with the old confusions of sex / and swarm, thrust and sting.").  Kathleen Ossip with 2 poems, Randall Potts with 2 also.  John Updike, who actually thinks he's a poet, and shows up in The Atlantic all the time, with the back cover ("In Arizona's drought, even cacti / die; the prickly pears are pancake-flat / with no more rain to plump them up, and blanch / to lavender instead of green.  Iraq / continues like a curtainless bad play.").  Somebody has to break the news to John that adding alliteration and assonance to your prose doesn't make it poetry.

What am I working on this week?  Glad you asked.  A least-squares multiple regression routine wrapped around by a 25-point touchscreen calibration application. 

More tomorrow, most likely.

Posted by jbahr at 06:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm really busy nowadays with projects, which is a good thing as Martha would say.  Business runs hot, warm, and cool throughout the year, with the expected direct effect upon my finances.  So, when projects are hopping, it's not the time to run all over town looking for BAP.  Thus, my order today at Amazon.  Amazingly, the paperback edition was only $10.88, which is a pretty healthy discount from the $16.00 cover this early in the BAP season.  Eventually, I'll get the hardcover, too, for my world-class BAP collection (pictures to follow, one day soon).  Jim continues to be funny, but I actually think that some of the poems he's panning have redeeming qualities.  There are some good lines in Hass's The Problem of Describing Color (If she tells fortunes with a deck of fallen leaves) and I like the close.  Simic's work was just fine if you like Simic's dark, sparse style.  Eamon Grennan's The Curve was an interesting, prosy work.  Wrigley's Religion wasn't to my taste, but most work seldom is.  I dunno, seems like a stretch to be hammering these poems out of all the potentially mushy walk-on-the-beach, long-lost-lover, mythological allusion laden work that must be in BAP.  And what's wrong with short poems (another JB annoyance)? I bet that out of the 40 or 50 print credits I have, only one or two span more than a page.  My motto is:  Get in, say what you have to say, and get out.  It's harder than it looks, and another reason I like Hass's poem.  Could be me, of course.

This month's Poetry features Anne Stevenson, D. A. Powell, Michael Heffernan, Paisley Rekdal, Natalie Shapero, Peter Kline, Galway Kinnell, Kevin McFadden, Christopher Middleton, Christine Garren, Linda Bierds, B.J. Ward, Jacob Polley, and Molly McQuade.  Most of these poets I've heard of, but as usual, the work I liked best tended to be from those whom I did not recognize.  The rest tended to be doing more of what Jimmy was encouraging, namely going on much too long to flesh out a single idea.  Though I didn't cotton much to Powell's "glaucous-winged gulls drafting" in meditations upon the meaning of the line "clams on the halfshell and rollerskates" in the song "good times" by chic (whew), I did like "who could have guessed love's a palpable thing:  a dark splotch / of kelp in the shoals".  Also, "the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself" in corydon & alexis, redux.  Rekdal's poem Post-Romantic was an OK first-person narrative, until I hit the word "limning", which is right up there with BC's cicadas for ruining my poetic experience.  I seriously dug Natalie Sheppard's Contact High:  "Bisect / an octave, and you're left with air, fat flounce. / They go /  ... / ... like money / he produces from his coat. / O, smoke ring home. O, how do you call an ounce / an O."  I generally like Galway Kinnell, but this month's offerings didn't do much for me ("Judith moves like a dancer / on sea-swells, in a cloud / of the dust and ashes of this ardent man").  Kevin McFadden was mostly whimsy, which you would think I would like, but was so-so on it.  I remember liking Christing Garren's first book, but these poems seem way, way too serious and architected with short lines for emphasis that doesn't seem deserved, The Donor:  "you see then — she gives life // just as your god did with his son — after death, give life // now the surgeons empty her // and take her eyes".  BJ Ward's Cuckoldom is equally whimsical to the work of McFadden and readable, as was Molly McQuade's The Octopus ("A senior ranking octopus / on the lam from the ocean / in a dull American aquarium / refuses to answer our summons").  Dan Chiasson does his Eight Takes and likes Josh Clover's The Totality for Kids (which I have to remember to put on my buy list), Linda Gregg's In the Middle Distance, Conor O'Callaghan's Fiction, is amused by John Bricuth's As Long As It's Big, and affected by Rodney Jones' Salutation Blues.  Jane Hirshfield ("Hirshfield ... has made a career of recommending thought-gimmicks to rid ourselves of consciousness") and Mary Karr ("There has never been a style more gilded with workshop aptness") don't get off as easily. 

See you tomorrow. 

Posted by jbahr at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I was going to cover some aspect of poetry, but I'm short of time.  I do suggest you wander over to Jimmy's place and read the usual hilarious treatment of BAP (thanks RHE for the URL).  My favorite part so far is Ashbery beating the drum and wondering why he's never been Poet Laureate. 

I received the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review with a sticker telling me that it's the last issue I'm privy to until I re-up.  Interesting articles included:  studios are beginning to insert subliminal messages like "Illegal Copy" into films which don't appear at theatres, but pop up in illicit copies.  DARPA (the people who brought you the Internet) have funded the invention of an ultrasonic tourniquet that detects a broken blood vessel (typically, from a battlefield injury) and seals it with ultrasound-based heat.  I've always been skeptical of the whole Ethanol-in-your-gasoline thing that has made ADM rich, as I've read that it takes more energy and generates more pollution to manufacture corn-based ethanol than what it saves in your tank.  It turns out that lots of scientists know this and recommend using prairie grass or soybeans instead.  Google has started a program to warn you when they give your a site in response that they know could infect your computer with malware.  Carbon sequestrian science is the field of study in which they believe that carbon dioxide could be stored underground in vast chambers (like abandoned mines), but it could have a large positive impact on lots of things we worry about (like global warming).  The Hundred Dollar Laptop is actually happening.  Founded by members of the MIT Media Lab and supported by many large electronics firms (e.g., AMD) the goal is to produce millions of these laptops that can connect to the Internet, include hand-powered crank battery regenerators, and be successfully targeted to 3d World consumers (imagine trading a goat for a computer).  The sequencing of the human genome was just the start.  You need to know a lot more about how genes are expressed and evolutionary signatures to sort out why flies, yeasts, pumpkins and us turn out so differently.  NASA has developed a whole new array of boom-based cameras to help Shuttle pilots to determine if their craft is damaged.  The rest of the issue is devoted to Young Innovators of science and technology.  They're mainly American and I love that their surnames range from Singh to Liao to Paninski to McGonigal to Argyris to Shendure to Voight to Maliakal Coe-Sullivan.

More on poetry tomorrow.  Really, I promise.

Posted by jbahr at 07:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It turns out that Packet-8 is every bit as slick as they advertise.  I purchased 3 handset stations after explaining to the Packet-8 sales guy what I wanted to accomplish.  Now I have three beautiful handsets on three desks, each plugged into my Ethernet network, and from there, to the Internet.  The handsets look just like standard multi-function office phones with a large LCD display and lots of useful one-touch buttons for retrieving voicemail, consulting the phone directory, redialing, adjusting volume and so on.  Like any good office phone, to call an extension, you just dial the extension number.  I went on to their website and logged into my account.  From there, I was able to set up each of the phones, establish auto-attendant, and configure voicemail.  The auto-attendant has all the usual office PBX features, like calling an extension, getting a company directory, or going straight to a person's voicemail.  OK, so I have a new phone system with professional features and reliable voicemail (it will even send me an email that I missed a call).  What's really amazing about the system is that Packet-8 doesn't know, or care, where an extension is physically.  I can unplug the handset, go upstairs with it and plug it into my WiFi receiver.  Junie can take the extension in her office here in Colorado, put it in her suitcase, and plug it in at home in Eau Claire.  I can ship a handset to Hong Kong or Russia or wherever and have employees halfway around the world that I can reach by just dialing an extension.  They, in turn, make phone calls with no long-distance charges with a phone number that originates here in Boulder County.  I can even take my handset to California when I'm there on a job, plug it in to the local Internet at an office or hotel room, and be instantly connected receiving phone calls exactly as if I were at my desk.  I can also use the web interface or the handset to forward calls to my cell-phone, when I'm out for a few hours.  For $5 a month, I can create a virtual phone number in Chicago that Der can call to reach me or anyone with an extension with no additional charges for long-distance.  All for about $40 per handset.  Amazing.

Vonage, which I also signed up for and tried, is just as amazing, if on a smaller scale.  I signed up, waited a couple of days, and got the box with a tiny VOIP interface box.  I plugged it into an Ethernet jack, plugged a normal phone into it, and got dial tone instantly.  The voice quality is excellent, and it supports all the usual stuff (Caller ID, call forwarding, 911, ...).  If you've been thinking about it for your home and you only need one or two lines, it's a great deal for about $30 a month AND they don't charge you the usual 30% of federal, state and local bullsh*t surcharges that you see on your current landline phone bill.

Of course, the instant I got a couple of Internet-based phone systems, Qwest managed to cut my broadband connection, first intermittently (no, Mr. Bahr, it must be your Cisco 678 DSL modem), and then for long painful durations.  After 4 days of telling me that I'm crazy, they now say that it will be up again in 4 hours, which is the Baby Bell equivalent of Real Soon Now.

Jeffrey Lee, Many Mountains Moving co-director, poetry editor, and managing editor for Issue 17,  has just about wrapped up the next issue, a beautiful ensemble of poetry and short fiction.  Malinda Miller and I are the Round-Up Staff, charged with finding all the people who have had their work accepted, and to whom we need to send galley proofs and requests for updated bios.   Malinda and I have been doing forensic web-searches, trying various combinations of names and "poetry", "poet", and other useful qualifiers.  In many cases, we've come up with work by the author in other journals and emailed the editors to get current information.  Still, we're missing a reliable phone number or email address for the following contributors:

Vito Aiuto
Thomas Robert Barnes
Justin Bzdek
Gerald M. Callahan
Josephine Chien
Ed Downey
Rosalyn Driscoll
Nancy Gannon
Eleanor Kedney
Gene Keller
Laurie Klein
Fredric Koeppel
Melissa Kwasny
Corinne Lee
Martin Napersteck
Clairr O’Connor
Heather Aimee O'Neill
Lois Rosen
Reena Roy
Neil Shepard
Annette Sloan
Maggie Smith
Mandy Smoker
Myrna Stone
Michael J. Vaughn
Rebecca Villanueva

OK, I know that seems like a long list, but we have way more than 100 contributors in this monster issue.  If you can help us with a contact email address, or know any of these individuals, please email me (or ask the authors to) a jbahr@set-software-services.com.  Thanks in advance.

The first Many Mountains Moving Poetry Salon of the season was a roaring success, mostly thanks to the efforts of Barbara Sorensen, the MMM Salon Coordinator, among other roles.  About 75 people showed up to bring potluck, drink wine, and hear Aaron Anstett, Tim Hernandez and John Latham read their work.  The venue is amazing:  the meeting room of St. John's Episcopalian Church in Boulder, a giant area with hundreds of folding chairs, dozens of folding tables, a great sound system (which we didn't use, but we will next time), and a huge kitchen that is used periodically to host a soup kitchen (dual ranges, hundreds of sets of cutlery and dishware, every imaginable gadget) that opens up, bar-like, on the salon so I could act as bartender and culinary handyman.  I spent most of the Open Mike session loading the dual dishwashers and scrubbing the crud off the ranges (apparently, the last gig was a pancake breakfast).  The next Salon is in a month or two, and I'll try to keep you posted, just in case you're in the area.

I got a new Atlantic with a fascinating article describing the end-game when North Korea eventually falls apart.  As usual, I felt finally like I was reading somebody who actually knew something about the situation, was somewhere between hopeful and realpolitik-al on the issues, and didn't sound like yet another mouth of the Ministry of Truth.  I also received a decent issue of Poetry, including Eight Takes by Dandy Dan Chiasson.  Dan has been all over the place in recent years, and must be Internet-savvy enough to self-google, as he found a review of his Eight Takes I did some time ago here and proceeded to kick my ass via email for mischaracterizations.  More power to him, we should all be held accountable for our statements (except Bill O'Reilly, who lives in the No Spin Zone, which Zone has been scientifically proven not to conform to the laws of physics or the whining of liberals).

More on that tomorrow.  I'm just happy to have Internet again.

Posted by jbahr at 06:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

While I was waiting to either find BAP in a local bookstore or give up and just Amazon it, I was staying busy doing techy research on VOIP PBX.  We all know that Vonage can hook you up with a phone that works through your broadband connection, but I was looking for a company that had a zillion servers in Kansas somewhere that would answer my phone, articulate the phone tree in the Queen's English, and connect to a VOIP phone in my office.  It turns out that Packet-8 does just that.  You order 2 or 3 VOIP phones that are connected via Ethernet.  Then when someone dials your number, they hear "Press 1 for Jeff" and it comes to my phone.  The whole thing has a web interface that lets me transfer my extension to the phone in my beachside condo in the Caymans.  Yeah, sure.

Other things done while waiting for BAP?  Received an invitation to get the NY Times daily.  Apparently, now-a-days, they transmit the entire paper to a printing press in your area and some poor schmuck gets up at 5 AM and gets it to your door in East Jesus, Wyoming.  Also, an application for yet another credit card with the AWP logo emblazoned on the front, and probably frequent flier miles every times you submit to a major litmag.   A solicitation to subscribe to The Sun, which I know nothing about except they run poetry, essays, interviews, fiction and photography.  They cite a number of noted people who gush about the pub, but I've never heard of any of them, so my guess is it was a waste of postage.  The Academy of American Poets thanked me profusely for renewing my subscriber level, which is well worth the bucks as I usually end up on their contributor page just under John Ashbery.  Then, there was the mystery check for $180 from ChevronTexaco.  Yes, it's apparently one word now.  I'm wracking my brain to figure out what I did to earn a modest sum from one of the top 5 oil companies in the world.  Said something nice about them in this blog?  Hardly possible.  My part of the settlement in a class action suit?  Maybe, but I usually throw those long documents from legal firms in the trash.  Hmm.  If I figure it out, I'll get back to you.

I did receive a nifty catalog of Viking River Cruises, whereby I could save $700 per cabin on any trip to Europe, Russia or China.  Also, a current PC Magazine titled "How To Hack Everything".  That reminds me that NPR was supposed to have a guy on yesterday talking about hacking plants.  I don't know if that means improvising your own Rocky Horror Show or what actually, but I was sad that I missed it.  I also received the HMC Electronics Catalog with such wonderments as a $2,000 "intelligent soldering station", whatever the hell that is. 

Best of the bunch was the Dean & Deluca catalog.  Ah, what decadence.  Fresh this month:   The Circle Cake (tm) which consists of a Miro-esque side frosting circling a NY cheesecake between two layers of dark chocolate, $120.  Sicilian almonds toasted "to perfection", dipped in dark chocolate and cannelitti, with a thin sugar shell, packed in a vase, $110.  Butter cookies with frosting on which is inscribed "Thank You", 18 cookies in a really nice tin, $58.50.  Dia de los Muertos cookies, a "traditional Sardinian treat", made of almonds, cinnamon and honey, $48.50 a box.  Skull Boy, Pumpkinhead, and Nosferatu Marzipan figures, set of 3 for $32.  Penguin Cookies marching from their metal box, "lovingly decorated", and only $55 for 10 ounces.  A whole lobe of foie gras de moulard, yanked out of the still throbbing carcass of a Canadian duck (poach or steam until buttery in a light broth), only $120 for a 1.5 pound slab.  One pound tin of D & D Karaburun Iranian caviar, $5600.  Smoked organic salmon, California quail, New Zealand rack of lamb, maple-cured Berkshire ham, Tunisian olive collection, red pepper and feta strudel, whitefish roe, elk tamales, English digestive pinch pots filled with black sea salt or anise seed, Imperial Torte Mignon Double, ... oh, you know, just what your grandma spread on the dining room table on T-Giving.

OK, hopefully, I won't have to stall another day.  Tomorrow, either a report on the new APR or some news about BAP.

Posted by jbahr at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was younger, I used to drive over to Wally Ryder's house and go through the new edition of Britannica with him.  It had a set of Macropedia that was organized in accord with a hierarchy for all human knowledge that was printed in the first volume.  I was pretty sure that by this age, I would know all there was to know about everything.  For years, I would go to bed with a volume of the Britannica, reading about some Burmese bird or the Three False Dimitrys.  Time went by, as it does, and eventually I realized that most of the knowledge I retained, even the work from my graduate degrees, was the recognizable surface of the original understanding.  I might be absolutely certain that I understood partial differential equations, but when I actually had to do the math with Ky, I would stop short and say "Hell, how did that work again?".  The same seems to be true of macroeconomics, 19th century history, and poets I've read more than five years ago.  That's why Billy Collins' Forgetfulness is so perfect for those of us in this state:

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

It is also why I read BC's introduction to this year's BAP with more forbearance than most of my blogroll would, Seth in particular.  I have come to the point where my worldview is a structure which, though flexible, requires significant evidence to make me rearrange things. One consequence of this is what Junie would call a certain degree of opinionated stance, a debating technique in which one throws out a certainty just to see what the esteemed opposition has to say that may modify my view.  One reason I read BC's introduction with more smiles than rancor is that he doesn't seem to be afraid, at this stage in his life, to say what seems to be pretty obvious, even if it rankles a few sensitive feathers.  How can you read his suggestion that the NEA fund poets to lay fallow for a year without cracking up?  What aspect of his statement that "much of what's published isn't worth reading" disagrees with your view of modern poetry?  My guess, having read a whole lot of poetry blogs in the last two years is:  not much.  The difference, of course, is what poetry should have been consigned to the dustbin and what should have dominated the litmags — but that's a whole different issue, and one in which, for example, CDY, Seth, TT, Clover, and Silliman (just to name a few) would disagree. 

Anyway, more on that in the coming days.  I drove over to Borders and it's not on the shelves yet.  Jimmy must have connections, or perhaps Lehman makes sure the New York market gets it first.  I have to update my databases and report back on the current statistics vis a vis aesthetic, gender, age, and establishment suckup factors.  Having read the list of final 75, it's pretty clear that this is a slightly more conservative issue, leaving room for Mary Oliver and Charles Simic.  Lest you forget, Mary Oliver is one of the best-selling poets in America.  So do you leave her out?  In other words, is BAP the Academy Awards or the Sundance Film Festival.  Beats me, I just do the numbers.

Posted by jbahr at 07:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

By some weird coinky-dinky, I mentioned the famous Black Dahlia case and it turns out they're making it into a movie.

I am occasionally struck now-a-days by the degree of outrageous partisan shit-slinging I see in mainstream conservative cartoons.

If, as the current administration says "The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq", and if our foes are "successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists", then Fred Kaplan asks reasonably "why [the President] hasn't reactivated the draft, printed war bonds, doubled the military budget, and strenuously rallied allies to the cause?".  Or for that matter, carpet-bombed Tehran like the Brits did Dresden?

I missed this obvious answer to Newt Gingrich's inane statement, which I quoted yesterday:  If all it takes is for Iran (or pick your favorite Islamofascist state) to be a threat is to have a nuke shipped from North Korea, why bother to bomb their sites . . . they'd just order another one when we were done.

The one thing that Rove and Company didn't think of is the game-theoretic results of their success in creating a monolithic beast of the Republican party.  There was a time when I, and lots of other independents and even slightly left-of-center types, would occasionally vote for a Republican candidate on the merits.  I wouldn't vote for Mother Theresa now if she were a Republican, and I don't think I'm alone.  There's too much chance that she will drink the Kool-Aid and vote with the rest of the GOP robots to sell off all the National Parks, invade Venezuela, or eliminate all sales taxes on Bentleys.  I was listening to Colorado gubernatorial candidates Bob Beauprez and Bill Ritter, and came away thinking that Republican Beauprez seemed to have a lot more on the ball.  Don't matter, though, I wouldn't vote for a Republican this year if they paid me.  Come to think of it, Rove may have that in his plans, too.

Reb says her "name is in lights" in the current APR.  I'm still looking.

If could be born again as only one writer, it would not be Hemingway, Proust, Dostoevsky, or Pynchon.  It would John le Carré.

Not having a blogroll, I forget to go google and look up people whom I love reading.  Case in point:  Kasey in his usual masterful piece on SoQ vs. post avant ("The oxymoronic collocation of post and avant tends to support the second of these options, though to my knowledge this aspect hasn't been developed at any great length") and his recent interview in which most of his responses were "I don't like this question".

I also visited Eduardo.  The absolutely most hilarious line is dubbing GC Waldrep as the new Virgil Suarez.

One of the countless things that Junie and I share is an admiration for Oni Buchanan, whom we heard read at the Chicago AWP between Timothy Liu and Mary Jo Bang.

I remember picking up BC's The Art of Drowning almost 10 years ago and thinking "this is deceptively good work".  Now, of course, Collins is the anti-Christ and co-editor of the next BAP.  Seth has a take and by some anachronistic magic, Jim has a preview.

OK, looks like my take on APR happens tomorrow.  You all have a GREAT extended weekend.

Posted by jbahr at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)