Whimsy Speaks Again

It turns out that bat spit can save your life.  And not just any bat spit, vampire bat spit.  It sent the shares of drug developer Paion AG higher, and they don't even celebrate Halloween in Germany.

Rick Santorum, the conservative GOP Pennsylvania senator once described as "one of the finest minds of the 14th century", is lagging in the polls.  The same article says that Michael J. Fox is leading 3-to-1 in popularity over that blowhard "Oxycontin-Rush" Limbaugh.  Just as the head of the GAO explains the impending doom associated with current deficits, his boss is touting tax cuts.

A research crew will head to an ocean area off the North Carolina shore, hoping to continue salvage operations what is thought to be Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge.  So far, they have found cannons, a bell, gold dust and a "urethral syringe used to treat syphilis with mercury".  Ouch.

The 2007 calendar is now available from Cofanifunebri.  Each month features a coffin and a beautiful woman or two.  This is Miss July.  Thanks to the guy at J-Walk, who has a very interesting blog.

Another funny place I haven't been in years:  Jesus of the Week, featuring Jesus-related paraphernalia sent in by readers.  Recently this has included sacred cross lollipops, The Jesus Pan that will sear his image into grilled cheese sandwiches, and surfing Jesus.

Email exchange between Ann Coulter and Brian Gallagher just prior to her getting booted from her journalistic assignment.  One of her precious email paragraphs:  "Bad, vindictive humor with little substance to back it up is Ann Coulter. It's what you bought when you hired me. I've built a career out of talking directly out of my ass. I'm a demagogue. And I'm not doing real journalism. Not for you. Not for anyone."

Jorie Graham's full name was Jorie Pepper Graham-Galvin, but is presumably now Graham-Sacks.  She was either born in 1950 (Wikipedia and The Academy of American Poets) or 1951 (Encyclopedia Britannica), although her own bios tend toward 1951.  Dozens of sources vary on the year, though May 9th is the usual day of birth cited.

I watched the final table action at the 2006 World Series of Poker.  TV producer Jamie Gold, who ultimately won the $12 million prize, was nauseating.  Also, he couldn't be beaten, drawing almost impossible cards on every other hand.  Over 8,000 players were in the main event, paying $10,000 each to play.

Seth's birthday is tomorrow.  Be nice to him.

Posted by jbahr at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I realize that I never actually produced the punchline to yesterday's blog title, which was this claim by George "the man who would be President" Allen, that his opponent was guilty of discriminatory conduct and sexual innuendo.  I ended up reading MMM poetry submissions and lost track of time.

~

This month's Poetry arrived shortly after I had commented on the last month's.  Perhaps with all that money they have managed to lobby for a change to the Julian calendar, or perhaps I'm just a little behind the curve, as always.  The cover pronounces the featured work of Albert Goldbarth (who's star seems to be in the ascendant, along with Muldoon), the venerable Richard Wilbur, and the relatively obscure Dava Sobel, but then I'm obscure and what of it?  Poetry issues seem to have content that is gathered up in the arms of the editors among the relatively recent acceptances and shaped into a theme of some sort.  If I had to put a name to this month's collection, it would be "poetry that is either accessible or poses as such, tending toward Wyoming nostalgia without the gay cowboy factor".  AG leads off with a competent anecdotal piece and moves on to more comforting Britannica-eque 1400, an elegant list poem that enumerates rotting horseflesh, pulp of the cherry, and "the grease from an otter's anus", for most of a page until you receive the punchline that all of these were used as paint pigments before the miracle of acrylics.  Charlie Smith gives us Smarty Pants ("the little affairs I mean / in which some vagulous babe chucks a Chuck // under the balls") which still strikes me as accessibility on steroids.  Clive James continues with Natural Selection, which is a little like a paleontological class taught by man entirely sure that metaphor trumps carbon dating ("The little lobsters, in their mating fever, / Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff / An swept inland as scorpions ...").  William Wenthe's Poorwill is sedate and ornithological ("Goatsucker, nightjar: names given the family / of birds ...), and John Pursley III's piece reminds us that even Columbus was confused about what he had discovered (BTW, I liked his poem, irrespective of my carping), but his Belt Buckles and Little Britches is so nostalgic and pastoral that you would have thought it was penned on commission for the issue (though, I will admit very competent).  Mary Kinzie extends the metaphor, contributing a little spatial diversity to what is otherwise the same message.  Full stop, while Richard Wilbur translates Pierre Corneille from the French, in what seemed like a commercial for Desperate Housewives in the middle of a show on the Discovery Channel.  Lucas Howell gets us back on track with The Poker Players ("Those men with grimy fingers and fistfuls of change") and Primitive Road ("Say you love the fields, the black of midnight, / coyotes' yipped prayers, and ...").  Even Roger Mitchell's change of venue ("Fisherman's Ditty") strikes me as literate C&W.  I liked Linda Gregerson's Sweet, which could have easily spilled over into the issue's sluice-pond ("Your mother's wrong but sweet, the world // has never self-corrected, you Americans break my heart.").  Brian Swann's This Place seems almost like an argument for 19th-Century Natural Science ("... It could have been / a poppy head in a display case. ...") and Reginald Shepherd's My Mother Was No Kind of Snow brings up the rear of this Biology class with verse that is sometimes stale ("My mother was a murder of crows") and ultimately redeeming ("My mother always falling / was never snow, no kind / of bird, pigeon or crow").  The View from Here is an odd collection of perspectives from those peripherally associated with poetry.  Robert Kavesh, apparently a man in his eighties, echoes Gioia's insistence that "Poetry had a place in business".  Dava Sobel just plain pissed me off from the first paragraph: "The spheres of science and poetry probably intersect in all eleven dimensions, for poems, like discoveries, spring from insights of unusual acumen ...".  What a load of horseshit.  Do you know how this scientist is able to write poetry?  I follow the advice of Wemmy, which is to write drunk and edit sober (that may be overstating it, but not much).   Occasionally, you get a Russell or Feynman who can actually occupy worlds so distant from one another as Science and the Arts, and be articulate in both.  Ever notice how many scientists are competent poets?  Aside from the odd physician (CDY or Peter) it's a rarity.  Robert Aitken's Koan After Koan is an interesting take by a Zen student.  Nicholas Photinos relates the segues from musicianship to poetry, and who am I to say?  Matt Fitzgerald is "a preacher who has benefited from reading poems", and good for him ("Perhaps it says that death's hold over life limits our perspective").  Still, I felt like I was being hand-held through the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy of poetry.  I like D.H. Tracy and can't tell you why.  I've read some of his work, which I liked, if not loved.  I do like his contributions to Poetry, however.   In Bad Ideas, he discusses the limits of poetic license, among other things, and whether and how famous poets have completely warped history and gotten away with it.  It made me wonder why everybody doesn't just do the research like A.G. does before putting pen to paper.  The Letters to the Editor are mainly a gang-up on John Barr's recent piece in Poetry, American Poetry in the 20th Century.  Most of the letter-writers accurately characterize Barr's diatribe as warmed-over Gioia, and spend the next eight or ten pages proving it.  I particularly liked Robert Wrigley's assertion that "the only credential for a poet is the poems themselves ...", however much I may hold that opinion in some doubt, nowadays.  Barr responds relatively petulantly ("I'm sorry to have bored Robert Wrigley with the insipid and obvious, ...") and could stand to read a couple year's back issue of The Atlantic to find out how best to respond to your LTTE critics.

More tomorrow, most likely.

Posted by jbahr at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

You'll have to trust me that this wasn't Photoshopped.  It was another amazing Colorado sunset.

~~~

 

Posted by jbahr at 06:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Evans has a great article, Free (Market) Verse, over at Third Factory.  It weaves the recent history of the Poetry Foundation with anecdotes about Gioia and Kooser, and observations on the State of Poetry.

In a story that would be hard to make up, it appears that wild pigs were responsible for the recent outbreak of E. coli in spinach.  I like the wild pig defense.  I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't pop up again as the core reason for our problems in Iraq, and the culprits behind the corporate option scandal.

Stocks are on a roll and the Dow hit another high today.  Even Nasdaq is celebrating as their composite index hits its highest point in 5 years.  The folks at Nasdaq seem to have forgotten, however, that their composite was once over 5,500 — back when everyone was sinking their retirement money into Pets.com.

I've been thinking about that amazing statistic regarding housing prices and median income.  In many places on both coasts, the median home price is 12 to 15 times the median income.  That means that a 6% mortgage, together with PMI and property taxes, would consume the entire paycheck of the average homeowner (well, OK, the median homeowner).  How in the hell could that be?  It's not like the houses are owned only by the very rich — 70% of all American families own their home.  The answer is a) ARM loans with artificially low payments that are going to explode in the next couple of years, and b) home ownership isn't 70% in the highest-priced areas (more like 20% in some pricey locales where speculators account for most of the housing sales), and c) many Americans have traded in the gains in the last house to invest in their next house.  The remaining ugly truth is that, nowadays, it takes two incomes for most families to make it.  What effect this has on general family well-being I don't know, but it would be nice if Americans had the option for mom or dad to stay at home.  The irony in all of this is that the GOP, the people who specialize in corporate welfare and the elimination of estate taxes, are also the party of family values for God-fearing little guys.  You know, the ones who in large numbers would prefer their wives to home-school their kids and have dinner on the table at 5:30.

Since you asked, here's the latest poop on my sons:  Ky just got back from Las Vegas in what I hope was at least a break-even excursion (last time, he paid for the entire trip in poker winnings).  He's also co-host of an Internet radio show, Octale and Hordak vs The World.  Derek is in a killerbee Blues band, busses tables for spending money, and made the Dean's List.  He's totally Chicago now, along with Frank of Frank's Title Service.  I was chatting with Der today and he asked me how to pronounce gala, which I looked up online and then with OED.  You can pronounce gey-luh or gal-uh, but the British prefer gal-uh, and it's ultimately from Old French from a word meaning rejoicing.

Cuisine?  Cath asked me to bring greens and bread to dinner on Saturday with Ky.  It occurs to me that I used to remember my favorite jokes via short mnemonic devices on the punchline (Two Texans pissing off a bridge:  "And deep, too".).   Also, my favorite recipes such as Black Bean Cassoulet ("The French don't recognize black beans, for God's sake").   Cassoulet is the ultimate French peasant stew and cultural wars have been waged over its ingredients, which is typically duck parts, garlic sausage, and white beans.  Everything else is fought over:  tomatoes, pork, lamb, and various unmentionables.  Some have ventured that its provenance is from the 15th-century Hundred Years War and created in Castelnaudary.  Some say it was originally Arabic.  Definitive authors demand that haricot blanc dominate.  Cassoulet de Carcassonne features partridge.  Some health-conscious cooks report that Cassoulet is "good for the health and relatively light", though most recipes call for almost 2 pounds of bacon in a cassoulet for 8.  Also pork knuckles, pieces of preserved goose, up to 7 onions, and the inevitable bouquet garni.  All agree that it should be served bubbling in its clay or porcelain pot with a natural crust, unenhanced by bread crumbs.  Now, if I just had a lot of somebodies to make this for.  I haven't checked recently.  Maybe Tony R. is coming to town soon.

More tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Sign outside of Egg Harbor.

~~~

CNN's Business 2.0 rates Ft. Collins, CO as among the 10 best places to buy a home for appreciation.  Three of the other ten are in Florida (even while other Florida town are among the most overpriced).  San Luis Obispo, near where my sister lives, is also on the list with median housing prices expected to jump for their current level of $440,000 to $615,000 in the next 5 years.  At the same time, median incomes are currently $34,000 and expected to rise to $42,900.  So, who's going to drive up prices?  Retirees from the Bay Area and LA.   There was a time when a nice 3-bedroom house cost 2 to 3 times your yearly income.  Now, in many coastal cities, it's 12 to 15 times.  In another article, Matt Miller predicts the revolt of the "fairly rich" — those poor bastards who only make from $200K to a million bucks a year.  With these limited income, they find they can no longer buy their kids into college, purchase the best condos, or make a splash with a $20K donation.  There are thousands and thousands of doctors, lawyers, and not-quite-senior executives who are fed up and are going to do something about it, like voting for a return to estate taxes.  Well, that's the theory, anyway.

The Journal of the Academy of American Poets arrived, and guess who's one of the featured poets?  Right, Paul Muldoon, looking in one picture like all 4 Beatles merged into one head shot.  I swear that he's following me around.  Muldoon discusses prose poems in general and the Elizabeth Bishop's 12 O'Clock News in particular with considerable intelligence and wit (Bishop's opening lines are "at once buttonholing and blasé").  Michael Ryan discusses Stanley Kunitz' life and work, and his belief that "poetry is more than a craft, ... it is a vocation, a passionate enterprise ...".   James Longenbach introduces us to Barbara Jane Reyes' Laughlin Award-winning Poeta en San Francisco (which I thought was too replete with plainspoken, if mildly exotic, narrative for my tastes).  Albert Goldbarth (pictured sitting before his famous Underwood, as usual) presents The Poem as Prediction and a very readable article that notes some writers have a crystal ball inside their head (and presumably, their verse).  Fellow citizen of BlogWorld, Joseph Massey, has the good fortune (and presumably the talents) to deserve a nice article on his "small, tightly-constructed, haikuesque poems" by Rae Armantrout.  To wit:

Spider web
(wind-
ripped)

weighted with
a wet receipt.

which I admit to having a certain understated elegance.  Rodney Jones introduces Phebus Etienne.  Sherman Alexie introduces S. G. Frazier.  An article about the winner of the Landon Translation Award (yawn).  Peter Gizzi pens a tribute to Barbara Guest.  A gaggle of poems follows from Ten Bold Recent Books , including Mark Levine's The Wild, Sarah Manguso's Siste Viator, Sandra Gilbert's Belongings, Seamus Heaney's District and Circle,  John Balaban's Path, Crooked Path,  Ada Limón's lucky wreck, Carl Phillips Riding Westward, Tom Thompson's The Pitch, Robin Becker's Domain of Perfect Affection, and Approximately Paradise by the multi-talented writer, Floyd Skloot. As much as I like many of these poets, it is inane to call most of these books or the poems in them, bold.  Becker's sample seems to qualify ("Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk. / Now, it's jellyfish for the rest of the summer, / and the ozone layer full of holes), but Phillips is more contemplative, Balaban more retrospective, and Manguso intelligent.  I will now step down from my soap box.

The only man I've seen more than Muldoon in recent weeks is the ubiquitous Barack Obama.  In a recent Time, Joe Klein explains why he could be the next president (but not convincingly).  Other news of interest:  Tim McGraw explains why he's starring in Flicka (double yawn).  A list of American Traitors includes Benedict Arnold and Ezra Pound, among others.  Muhammad Yunus (they finally got a Nobel Peace Prize right) pioneered microloans to the very poor.  A joint research team from Johns Hopkins and al-Mustansiriya universities claims that 655,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the current war — a number 15 times the Administrations estimates (noted poller John Zogby backs the study).  In an article sure to infuriate RedMeats, Leslie Gelb asks Would Defeat in Iraq Be So Bad? The amazing and wonderful worldwide glut in good wine has Bordeaux winemakers fighting back with smaller yields and new technology (well, not the big boys, a bottle of any of the Premier Cru will set you back over $500 a bottle).  Panama plans on expanding The Canal to accommodate big ships that can only travel by way of the Suez Canal now.  The top ten TV show exports include Lost, two CSI's, The Simpsons, Desperate Housewives, My Name Is Earl, 24 and House.  Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion and everybody starts talking about the next Dot Com Boom.  David Kuo, former second-in-command of Bush's faith-based initiatives, explains why as a Christian he felt betrayed by the White House.  Review of documentary-style film, Death of a President, wherein Bush gets nailed by a Syrian man and Cheney takes over the Executive Branch with predictable results.

See you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tree-covered lane at Potawatomi State Park in Door County.

~~~

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is hammering local GOP Representative Marilyn Musgrave with what seems like daily mailings.  It looks like the Dems are finally taking the gloves off with attack ads that feature a rather jowly Ms. Musgrave a) voting for her own pay raise while denouncing a minimum-wage hike, b) advancing a pro-life bill that would outlaw abortions in cases of rape and incest ("The Marilyn Musgrave Plan:  Force Rape Victims to Have the Children of their Attackers"), c) citing Musgrave's preference for selling off public fishing and hunting lands to "speculators" and "special interests".   I can't wait for tomorrow's mail to see what's next.

I seldom buy anything from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, but I always like reading it.  The cover features a replica of the 1969 Zoltan Fortune Teller machine used in Big with Tom Hanks.  Other novel gifts that I got a kick out of include:  a voice-controlled universal remote for TV, VCR, DVD, cable; a sound-enhancing personal headset you can use in noisy restaurants to hear your meal-mate; the world's smallest indoor remote control helicopter; combination earmuff headphones; hi-tech golfball-finding glasses; laser-guided pool cue; portable "SteriPEN" purifier that you dip into a glass of water and flood it with UV; genuine bison driving moccasins; fold-away fedora with carrying tube; a hands-free book light that fits over your ear; wallet made from 100% stingray skin; tumbling vacuum meat marinator (you'd have to see it); four-minute wine bottle chiller; combination nightlight and room disinfectant; remote-controlled robotic shark; the CSI Young Investigator's Forensic/DNA Kit; "standard-issue" Space Shuttle slipper socks; Scandinavian moose-hide moccasins (they certainly seem to be into footwear); giant hand-blown wine glass that will hold an entire 750 ml. bottle's worth; hand-held instant star and constellation identifier; Himalayan expedition mitts; six-foot giant spinning penguin outdoor snow globe; voice-activated motorized R2-D2 replica;  and my favorite, the pump-action marshmallow shooter.

Poets & Writers came in and there's Paul Muldoon again.  I admit that I don't understand the whole Paul Muldoon thing.  I'd never heard of him prior to about 2002, and now he's won the Pulitzer, editing BAP and elbowing his way into P&W, APR and other literary mags. The bio on his website says he was a radio and TV producer from 1973 to 1986 and now he's a full prof at Princeton.  Wow.  I've seen formal and free verse work of his and it's certainly free-wheeling, but sometimes I feel like I'm not getting the joke.  In any event, he's probably a fun guy and a stand-up dude, and blogger Craig Teicher interviews him in a longish and interesting article.  A group of poets including Wanda Coleman, Leslie Scalapino, Anselm Berrigan, Quincy Troupe and Albert Flynn DeSilver (who was a classmate in MJB's Napa Writers class) are revamping Rilke's Letters to Poets by publishing written dialogues among them.  Retail competition, increased overhead and a dwindling reader base is closing more and more independent bookstores (or in the case of Denver's Tattered Cover, just getting them to move).  Literary MagNet covers Ploughshares, Calyx, Gargoyle, and American Short Fiction.  A short interview with Cornelius Eady on the success of Cave Canem press.  Stephen Morison introduces us to the poets of Kabul.  Michael Depp discusses Bernard Malamud (have you ever read "The Natural"?  great stuff).  Finishing First outlines the books of "debut poets" Vievee Francis, Anthony Hawley, Thomas Heise, Alex Lemon, Ada Limón, Maria Meléndez, Anna Moschovakis, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, and David Tucker.  Tucker won the Bakeless Prize at 59 and Everson won the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson Award (that I was a finalist in) at 80, so they are my heroes.  Of them, 4 have MFAs, 3 have MAs, 2 have PhD's and the rest are civilians.  P&W looks at the top 5 MFA programs as picked by U.S. News and World Report in 1997, which included (no surprise) The Iowa Writers' Workshop, Johns Hopkins (one of my many alma maters), University of Houston, Columbia University, and University of Virginia.  Lots of ads, awards, conferences, grants and deadlines, as usual.

Cuisine?  I'm having my third night of a giant pasta skillet with spaghettini, red peppers, garlic, green onions, artichokes, tomatoes, capers and broiled salmon bits.  Junie says I could probably diversify from my 5-out-of-7 night pasta routine.

More tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 06:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Junie inside the church in the woods.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah, talking about the recent Poetry.   I liked David Biespiel's Citizen David well enough.  Hey, there's Laura Kasischke again, this from I am the coward who did not pick up the phone:  "..//I am the ox which drew the cart full of urgent messages straight into the river, emerging none the wiser on the opposite side, ...".  Then, some translations from Latin by Richard Wilbur.  Lucia Perillo's Early Cascade mainly about a tomato, but quite a bit more I surmise ("The miser is accused by her red sums").  Susan Hutton with a couple, this from Atmospherics: "..//Not spider nor plum nor pebble possess any of the names we give them").  Landis Everson with what appears to be a trio of Valentine poems.  Thomas Sayers Ellis with a diverting Or, : "Or Oreo, or / worse.  Or ordinary. / Or your choice / of category ".  Small, tight verse by Jean Monahan.  Lots of Gottfried Benn, at last, all translations from the German by Michael Hofmann (why isn't Claudia doing this kind of thing?), this from Syntax:  "We all have the sky, and love, and the grave, / that's not at issue, / that's  been chewed over and done to death in illustrated lecture-series."  Michael Hofmann graciously explains the whole Benn Thing for us.  W. S. Piero contributes Semba!: A Notebook which was pretty diverting ("Losing your way in writing is good and bad.").  Danielle Chapman discusses The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, also well worth reading.  The Letters To The Editor are the usual bitching, moaning, and one-upmanship.

I've got at least 5 more publications to tell you about, including the latest Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, the Time with Barack Obama on the cover, the Journal of the Academy of American Poets, and Poets & Writers which has Paul Muldoon on the cover looking like an overdressed Irish hitman.

More tomorrow.
 

Posted by jbahr at 07:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Door County was pretty much everything it was cracked up to be.  Not that I knew what that was, other than the famous Fish Boils.  That's Sweet Junie in front of the the Sklaarkirke (or something equally Scandinavian) which is actually of recent vintage, stuck in the woods and open to all visitors.  I had no idea that Door County was a peninsula, something that an antique store owner mentioned should be made more evident in their travel literature.  Peninsular as it was, we drove along Green Bay visiting Fish Creek, Ephraim (famous for being a dry city), Sister Bay and Gills Rock.  We ferried over to Washington Island and back to tour the other side of the peninsula that overlooks Lake Michigan, taking in Baileys Harbor and Jacksonport.  We actually stayed on the Green Bay side in Egg Harbor, population 250.  The whole trip was splendid and I highly recommend it for Midwesterners (or anybody else, I suppose) looking for great views, good restaurants, and interesting antique stores.  Also, the only "oil shop" in the US, featuring dozens of kinds of olive oil (Junie bought some macadamia nut oil).  Even more so if you can wander around in the spring or fall when the rates are low and the traffic non-existent.

That latest issue of Poetry is still sitting on my desk.  Featured this month are Eavan Boland, Gottfried Benn in translation, and Robert Pinsky.  Pinsky is positively Muldoonish in Gulf Music:  "Mallah walla tella bella.  Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la, / Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bellw, wella-wah. // The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated / Galveston, Texas.  Some 8,000 people died."   A diverting piece and halfway through I'm beginning to wonder if this is Atakapa dialect or something similar interspersed throughout the piece.  Boland is pretty true to form, this from House of Shadows, Home of Simile:  "One afternoon of summer rain / my hand skimmed a shelf and I found / an old florin.  Ireland, 1950. // ... // And how in the cool shado of nowhere / a salmon leaps up to find a weir / it could not even know / was never there."  I liked Robert Vandermolen's Muscle :  "I had anticipated hiring a detective / But realized that I was better off without so many possessions — / Though I may miss the pieces of glass I found / In the ocean, and, of course, those Japanese fishing floats — / Yet I remain curious who he's seeing, that fat bitch / with a nose job, that college slut with the long rubbery nipples,"  but mainly liked it because you see so little of this kind of thing in Poetry. 

There's quite a bit more, but I'm out of time.  More, tomorrow.  Promise.

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

I will be seeing my sweet Junie this weekend.  We're heading over to Door County, home of the Famous Fish Boil.  The Boil is a soup made of whitefish chunks, onions and potatoes, typically served with cole slaw and rye bread "and topped off with Door County cherry pie", as the ad says.  I've never been in Packer's Country before, but I've heard it's beautiful in the fall, so we'll see.  I'm hoping that a sweater and windbreaker are all that are necessary for the microclimate.

The 17th issue of Many Mountains Moving has gone to the printers, thanks to the help of Malinda Miller, Barbara Sorensen, and Junie — and the Herculean efforts of Jeffrey Lee.  Jeffrey edited the InDesign version, organized the artwork, and managed the entire effort of producing a 290 page journal.

I had a really busy day with work and will have to report back to you on this month's Poetry when I get back.   It's packed in there with the latest Le Carré, 5 sets of underwear, a USB keyboard, and a collection of Wallace Stevens that Tricia's party motivated me to re-read.

I once semi-famously said "Poetry is the last meritocracy".  I think that was in 2002, when I was submitting to good journals with no bio and no connections, and increasingly getting accepted.  I admit to being a great deal more jaded now, not that I have many more connections than I did then.  The life of the academic poet, which is to say anyone who tries to make a living in this end of literary arts,  is so fraught with financial strain and assaults on the ego that it's no wonder most of them resort to what I do every day:  work the network, try to land positions, schmooze at every occasion.   When I do it for my software company, it's business and "no poem was harmed in the production of this commercial endeavor".  The answer, of course, is for all of us to go back to being amateurs.  Considering that there's something like 300 MFA programs in literature now, I suspect that's not going to happen.

Belated Happy Birthday to Tony.

You all have a nice weekend.

Posted by jbahr at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Horses.  Lots of horses.

~~~~~

That sweet young Tricia who has a giant brain, warped though it may be, continues to astound with her online party for Wallace Stevens.

I received another Cook's Illustrated.  Now, I don't know if I get it or I don't get it, since it's seemed so long since the last one.  I love the mag, but the editor is so New England schmaltzy I just want to throw up.  Every issue in the editorial he's going on about hunting ducks with his older boy, or gathering mushrooms with his daughter, or making pancakes so the little burg can buy a new fire truck, or taking his whole family to a good old fashioned picnic at the lake.  This issue, in a single editorial, he manages to evoke:  sitting at the round table at the Wayside Country Store before dawn and chatting with the townfolk; having coffee after church with a neighbor who always likes a wee drop of the Highlands in the cup; local newspaper announcements about square dances  and Easter Basket Raffles and school bottle drives; feeding the pigs, fetching the eggs, grooming the horses, picking the berries.  It's enough to make you prefer listening to some loud, rude Nyawker.

The good parts of CI follow.  New zero-transfat Crisco works as good as the bad, old kind.  Even though shallots are 3 times the cost of onions, their subtlety is necessary in mild sauces and vinaigrette.  Beans produce gassy side-effects in humans because only the bacteria at the end of our alimentary canal can break them down, but washing them before cooking removes up to 25% of the culprit (oligosaccharides).  Use a pizza cutter to cut up waffles into bite-sized pieces for kids.  To keep ginger fresh, cut it up into 1-inch pieces and freeze until you need it.  Don't pay extra for a mushroom brush, a soft toothbrush works just as well.  For perfect skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts, place a small portion of butter-plus-ground-pepper under the skin, rub some vegetable or olive oil on the skin and bake with the rib cage down in a roasting pan to ensure that heat circulates under the breast.  For perfect pan-seared shrimp, toss them in salt, pepper, and sugar in roughly equal parts before tossing in a medium-hot pan.  The best American-style potato salad requires using russets, white vinegar, celery, minced red onion, sweet pickle relish, mayo, powered mustard, celery seeds, parsley and hard-boiled eggs. For tender pork chops, brown over medium-high heat on both sides, then cover and reduce heat to low until the center registers 140 degrees.  Big, ugly supermarket green beans turn into wonderful fare when pan-roasted with a little oil, salt and pepper.  The best boxed brownie mix is Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Premium Brownie Mix.  For better peach cobbler, remove the dark red flesh that was in contact with the pit before slicing.  The best Dijon mustard is still from France (Roland Extra Strong Dijon Mustard), but Grey Poupon (made by Nabisco in the US) comes in a close second.  To kill bacteria, you must subject it to at least 160 degrees for 39 seconds, and some dishwashers never achieve that temperature.  The back of the issue has the usual veggie artwork, this time root vegetables (parsnip, beets, turnips, rutabagas, and burdock root).

So, My Bank calls today and says:  "We'd like to authorize a line of credit for your fine company".  I said:  "Aren't you the same bank who turned me down last year?".  Apparently, the bloom is off the home loan rose.  So, we go through the numbers and he offers some obscene level of credit, completely unsecured, at prime plus a half a percent.  OK, sure, I don't have to use it, but it's nice to know I could if my receivable hit the peaks they have in the past.  Then, he calls back and says we have a problem:  The State of Colorado says I'm delinquent.  Of what, he's not quite sure, but that's what the report says.  So, I browse over to the website for the Secretary of State for Colorado and, sure enough, Set Software Services is "delinquent".  There's a link to a place where I can become "In Good Standing", so I click and there's this nifty little shopping cart affair with a place for me to put a credit card charge for $50.  I do that and 30 seconds later, my report shows that I'm in "Good Standing".  This is such a great scam, I'm beginning to wonder if the Colorado Secretary of State is Nigerian.

I still have that Poetry to read.  More tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yeah, more horses from Lin and Roy's place.

~~~~~

Junie and I were discussing Darfur tonight, and she asked an interesting question:  "If we throw our support wholeheartedly to U.N. troop involvement, will it turn into another Iraq?"  This led to a discussion of famous 20th Century atrocities, including Mao and Stalin's starving of millions, and Clinton's decision to back the NATO involvement in the Kosovo Operation.  Meanwhile, four hundred thousand Africans have been killed and countless numbers raped or injured.  It's too late to blame colonialist policies and too early to point out the billions in Swiss bank accounts accrued by those who took over.  The African Union is a military joke.  So, what next, now that it's been almost a year since Bush declared the situation a genocide?  I don't know, except to think that it's increasingly apparent that there's a Human Suffering Scale that equates 100 black people to 10 Asians to 1 Caucasian, and even the U.N. Security Council seems to abide by the formula.

I'm still working my way through AQR.  There's lots of nonfiction (70 pages) and oceans of fiction (110 pages), and all the rest is Albert Goldbarth — 80 pages of work that doesn't seem as encyclopedic as most of his work, nor written with the same quirky charm, but I'm still going through it.

I was going to tell you about the latest Dean and Deluca, but it's just more of the same:  marzipan Halloween candies, rib eye steaks at $30 a pop, Iranian caviar in small tins that would cost you a week's salary.  There was an interesting collection of hams, including Smithfield's and imported prosciutto, which were reasonable by comparison. 

I'm still trying to figure out why Junie's Packet-8 VOIP phone is garbled at her house.  Her own charter.net VOIP phone works fine.  Packet-8 support provided some of the answers:  it turns out that most cable companies install a separate router in each household that reserves bandwidth for their own proprietary VOIP phone, while letting the competition's packets fend for themselves.  I suggested that Junie run the VOIP test at www.testmyvoip.com and she did.  Her results were "Forget the phone, try the Pony Express" with a score of 1.1.  Sigh, what you gonna do?

Yes, I got the latest Poetry, but it has sat on my desk while I was in Silicon Valley.  More on that tomorrow, hopefully.

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

My sister, Lin, at Avila Barn at Avila Beach.  Not long until Halloween, judging from all the stuff they've been selling at Safeway since September.

~~~~~

It seems that Senator George Allen, "the man who would be president", forgot to tell Congress about some stock options.  In another hilarious turn of events, most evangelicals blame Foley on his choices, not the Republican party, and remind us that the Dems are "the party that is tolerant" of homosexuality.  I have to agree with Ben Stein, though, that none of this is as important as the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Is everybody else getting mountains of email titled "Employer was just not hired" and "Owner has been suspended from work" and "Supervisor substitute" and the like?  They all promise to help you make "1.5K to 3.5K per day" and supply an 800 number (you have to wonder: K-what?  Bananas?  Mexican pesos?).  I called the 800 number for the hell of it and got a recording asking me to leave my name and phone number.  That's as far as I took the joke.

The Atlantic is of passing interest this month.  One article that my sons should read is titled A Matter of Degrees.  Its thesis is that a) it's increasingly true that higher education leads to significantly higher income, and b) there's really no good reason, it's mainly a matter of "educational requirement inflation".  Simply stated, perfectly competent non-college grads (like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) can't get past the door of the HR department nowadays.  In what struck me as a work of fantasy, Joshua Green states in Do Polls Still Work? that, yes, they do and the pollsters were ultimately correct in their diagnosis after "all the data was properly weighted and balanced".  Does that sound like the bewildering difference we saw between exit poll results and GOP gains in 2004?  Americans now believe strongly that we our support for Israel is "too strong" (62%), with 0% of the polled sample believing it was "not strong enough".  In other words, Hamas is on our list of international terrorist organizations, but the IRA isn't.  Also there are half a dozen Palestinian groups, most of which are zero threat to the U.S.  Then there's Carriers of Conflict:  hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees are flooding into Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, Syria and Lebanon with unknown future effect on the region's stability.  As a measure of New Orleans comeback, 85% of the hotels are now open, but then only 50% of the hospitals and 29% of the schools.  In the past 6 years, both Republican and Democratic voters have held CNN, NPR and the WSJ in declining trust.  Fox (Faux) News has gained slightly with Republicans and declined slightly with Democrats.  In a long and interesting article on Hillary Clinton (you'll just have to buy or borrow the issue), Joshua Green concludes that Ms. Clinton's success in the Senate (which includes attending prayer meetings and working with conservatives) may cost her the presidency. 

Gotta run.  More tomorrow.

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

It turns out that when I'm away, Emily and Rimbaud get bored.  Ky dropped by to have lunch and pet them every couple of days, but it wasn't enough to keep them from scavenging for toys.  When I got home, the Great Room (I love that designation) was littered with an old comb, a new Schick 3-blade razor, a pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol gelcaps, 5 wine corks, half-eaten Halloween candy, and one of those novelties that you blow on and a tube whizzes out.  I didn't know that I possessed even half of these, but The Kittens found them.  I should be thankful because, coming back from long trips in the past, Dear Departed Kitty would usually greet me lovingly, knowing full well that there was a dead baby rabbit under the dining room table. 

Oh.  About the chicken.  I spent the weekend with Lin and Roy and Mom and Dad and My Sweet Niece Dana Whom I Used To Rock In My Arms To Sleep, and Her Husband at The Ranch which is just outside of Arroyo Grande.  AG has this small preserve in which they keep a small apartment complex for stray cats and a multi-story condo for exotic cocks.  No hens, no chicks, just cocks.  The one above is particularly sassy, though they ranged in size and plumage from the exotic to the bizarre.  So, about the ranch.  It's got horses and oodles of horse paraphernalia.  Chinese Tang Horse Statues.  Horse Benches.  Alabaster Horse Statues.  Here's a typical random shot of almost any room:

In case you're wondering, I did actually do some work on this trip.  I drove up from AG and slaved over a 25-point calibration algorithm while Dima did the heavy lifting on our new product bring-up.  I also spent my promised night helping Dave dispose of a brace of bottles from his fine wine cellar.  For the record, Dima and I ate at a good Vietnamese restaurant and spent another evening discussing engineering challenges while eating sushi and drinking Asahi Black Draft.  Oh, also a nice lunch with a client in Menlo Park at one of those fancy restaurants that feature (and, as Dave Barry likes to say, I'm not making this up) Macaroni and Cheese as the luncheon special at $14 (OK, it's hand made macaroni and 4 kinds of cheese, yada, yada).  Most of the rest of the tables were drinking microbrews or artsy Sangiovese, and luxuriating on Comfort Food.  Really.  Meat loaf and mashed potatoes for $15 with a little Bach in the background.  And don't get me started on the newest thing in Haute Cuisine, Sous Vide cookery, pitting top-end New York chefs against Alice Waters on the merits of Cryovac-entombed lamb shanks boiled slowly in hot water (also a feature in this month's Atlantic, but that's for the next blog entry).

Anyway, I'm back and there's an AQR on the table with an astounding number of poems by that other AG, Albert Goldbarth.  On first read, it doesn't look like his best work, but maybe he's turned a corner and I'm still in the backdraft.  I only read 10 pages of the Claudia-recommended The Possibility of an Island,  having decided to re-read Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor after lo these many years, so there's that to enjoy this week.  More tomorrow, OK?

~~~~~~~~~~

MovableType has pretty good comment-spam control, but the latest thing is to leave a single URL that has most of the information on how you can buy generic Cialis or leather thongs.  Apparently, the Nigerian Scam has also made it to blog comments.  This from yesterday:

My Dear,

I am Mrs.Veronica Toya Johnson. From Ivory Coast, I am a widow being that I lost my husband a couplle of some years ago.

My husband was a serving director of the Cocoa exporting board until his death, He was assassinated on january 2002 by the rebels following the political uprisng before his death, he had a foreign account here in CA'te d'Ivore up to the tune of $9.5 million dollars which he told the bank that it was for the importation of Cocoa processing machine.

I want you to do me a favour to receive this funds to a safe account in your country or any safer place as the beneficiary, so that I will come over to your country with my only son Kevin by name.

I have planes to do investment in your country, like real Estate and Industrial production, this is my reason for writing to you.

Please if you are willing to assist me and my only son, indicate your interest in replying soonest, I will ofer you 20% of the total money.

Thanks and best regards.
Madam Veronica Toya johnson. call 0022508424265

Even though this was addressed to me, feel free to give Veronica a call.  I'm personally just rolling in dough and can't imagine what I would do with another $1.9 million.

Posted by jbahr at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)