WhimsyLand

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.