WhimsyLand

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.