WhimsyLand

Yesterday morning found us awakening at the Fisherman's Wharf Holiday Inn Express, then breakfasting with Peet's coffee at the Boudin mini-bakery, restaurant and gift shop on the pier.  The City was generally quiet, save those who have to work for a living — women in business suits, men carrying briefcases, city employees (some in Santa caps) policing the parking lot.  We decided to drive around aimlessly and then head across the Bay Bridge, which was pretty much the same activity as getting on the bridge requires no small amount of backtracking and wrong turns.  For the next half-hour, we toured neighborhoods of wonderful new and old domiciles, and I kept wondering if we were near CDY's house (of which I think he displayed a photo earlier this year).  We headed into Berkeley (a mandatory stop for the authors of the Travel Guide for Lefties) and promptly got lost among the sari shops and Cambodian cafes.  I actually had to get back on I-80 and head north so that I could turn around and hit University Avenue again.  At the end of that long street we found Cal and meandered around the various buildings, many of them dedicated to Lawrence (as in Lawrence Livermore Labs), though I confess to ignorance about the gentleman.  Having circumnavigated Berkeley twice, I still failed to find Chez Panisse, but I did find the Berkeley Bowl, which is best described as Whole Foods on steroids wearing Birkinstocks.  It's a grocery store housed in what used to be a bowling alley and has the most amazing produce section I've ever seen.  They had 5 kinds of eggplant (including Japanese and Filipino), a dozen varieties of mushroom, exotic Asian lettuces, five or six kinds of banana (babies, red, plantains), and equally diverse selections of just about everything.  Also a killer bakery aisle, fresh soup and salad takeout aisle, organic everything, sushi bar, to-die-for fish market, natural grain-fed beef, free-range poultry and, well, you get the idea.  I had wanted to do a drive-by on Alice Water's famous Chez Panisse, just to show Junie where I once had dinner with only 18 hours to make a reservation (in a joint which is usually booked up a month in advance).  That was 5-6 years ago, when an online poet buddy, Coreybelle, got me a rez on short notice with only my pleading email as motivation.  But, I digress.  Berkeley doesn't seem to have changed much (nor had Santa Cruz, come to think of it), which is not what you can say about the increasingly upscale Boulder.  Junie and I drove back down I-80 and ended up at a client's shop in Sunnyvale, where after a short meeting, we headed over to the Winchester Mystery House.  The Mystery House is a mansion reportedly under near constant construction for decades by the heir to the Winchester fortune, which lady was convinced that all the victims of Winchester rifle mayhem were out to get her, spiritually speaking.  The biggest mystery about The House was finding it, which we did after the usual ping-ponging between freeways.  Then, back to Casa Paulsen for a dinner with the fam-fam at Maurizio's, our collective favorite Italian restaurant in Morgan Hill.  When I last saw Junie, it was at SJC waving to me as I got ready to board a Frontier flight, and she slightly later a NWA hop back to chilly Eau Claire.

I see that 17 boxes of the new MMM issue has arrived in the Many Mountains Moving Storage Facility, so it's time to get contributor copies out.  Also, a new Poetry is in the gigantic pile of mail, including a poem by Mary Ruefle, whom I always like to read.

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There's a large inflatable Santa in front of a lot of Xmas trees just outside of Salinas.  I've now seen it 5 times.  The first time was driving down on Thursday from San Jose to join my extended family for T-Day at Starry Nights, my sister's ranch outside of Arroyo Grande.  Using the intra-family network, I discovered from Cath, who had heard from Derek who had heard from Mom who had heard from Linda that her ranch's well had suddenly gone dry.  I picked up 10 gallons of drinking water, which helped in the fixing of everything that needed to be washed, boiled or liquefied (like coffee).  Friday included visiting the Monarch butterflies that end up at Pismo Beach after a long flight from the Sierra Nevadas (Monarchs east of the Rockies fly to Mexico).  Saturday morning, I drove up to SJ again to pick up Junie and turned around again for the 200-mile drive back to the ranch. Sunday, Junie and I installed Der and his friend Max (both visiting from Chicago) in the back seat for a drive up Big Sur.  Now, I know what Elaine felt like as she moaned and rolled her eyes during the showing of The English Patient.  I had always envisioned Big Sur as a piece of 101 that wandered through towering redwoods. That is about 5% of the drive.  The rest is THREE HOURS of unrelenting (and on this day, gray and foreboding) coastline, punctuated by the occasional guano-covered offshore rock.  I was so tired of looking at chaparral and coastline that by the time we got to Salinas, I was happy to drive, for a 3d time down 101. 

Junie and I were discussing the commercial prospects of a travel guide for lefties.  You know, the Liberal's Guide to Travel, or something including fun but socially relevant jaunts to Madison, Santa Cruz, Boulder, Yellow Springs and other liberal Meccas.  We decided to postpone that venture in favor of the Bah Humbug Travel Guide.  Big Sur would get 4 Bahs on a 5-point scale. 

After a wonderful meal of Silver Palate Crabcakes at Casa Paulsen, Junie and I got to bed early for our drive this morning to The City.  The day's activities included the same things we always do:  espresso at Ghirardelli Square, a long walk through Chinatown, lunch in North Beach, a cable car ride, and lots of hoofing between.  I'd never visited City Lights, but we managed to find Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore, where I found and bought a nice broadside by Dean Young.  Only The Cannery deserved entry into the Bah Humbug Guide.  The otherwise cool renovated Dole canning factory looked deserted on a Tuesday afternoon and none of the interesting shops were open. 

Tomorrow, it's back to San Jose for a quick client meeting and an obligatory visit to Fry's mega-tech store.  More from me tomorrow.

~~~

My favorite comment of the month is from "rat's ass": "You have the poetic acumen of a sloth." I'm thinking that I got off pretty easy.

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Oh, I know.  Where has Whimsy been?  Mainly buried in work, but also with my sweet Junie for a week.  No poetry litmags arrived, nor anything poetry-related.  I did some MMM-related work with Malinda and Barb, details to follow soonish.

I'm off tomorrow for T-Giving with my extended family at my sister's ranch.  Two of my nieces are pregnant, so there's a baby shower in the offing, along with berry pies from Avila Barn.  I'm thinking to make a killer paella for one of the off days, as fresh seafood is so readily available in SLO.  Derek, recently lead guitar of The Down And Dirty Blues Band, will fly in from Chicago and Junie flies in on Saturday.  Even given the size of my sister's ranch and multiple guest houses, I may be sleeping with the horses.

 Poet Frank, famously of Frank's Title Service, has already Crackberried in from Amsterdam and is having a wonderful time deciding on the menu items at local "bars".  Ally and John probably have something planned in Walsenburg.  Die Cloud is probably BBQ'ing German sausage and mixing Campari drinks.  Hannah is probably having a pre-TDay blowout in the Reference Section.  Jon is probably eating bear paw.  Tricia may be pan frying fish that The Professor caught on lines while mugging for the camera.  You all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

I'll check in again from the road.  I'd tell you how I'm going to do that, but it's a Secret.

~~~

Apparently, I am Professor Dumbledore and Captain Kirk.

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How sweet it is.  The Dems gained 28 seats in the House, giving them a 32-vote majority.  They're not veto-proof, of course, and it seems likely that Bush might start using them after 6 years of forgetting veto power existed.  There's also the fact that many of the Democrats elected are relatively conservative.  Full control of the legislative branch hangs on the final results in Virginia and Montana.  If the Dems get only one of them, Cheney becomes the tie-breaker (assuming that he's not out duck-hunting with Scalia).  In Virginia, Webb leads Allen by a tiny margin — about 7,000 votes of the 2.3 million cast.  The race in Montana is even closer, with Democrat Tester leading by 750 votes.  Of course, only about 400,000 votes were cast, which is fewer people than live in Omaha.  Remind me again why they get two senators?  (this is the part where the States' Righters burn a cross in my front yard).

Getting those last two senators would let us all breathe a sigh of relief about judicial appointees.  Justice Stevens is 86.  Ginsburg and Kennedy are 70 or more. 

It was weird watching the TV for results, and relatively fruitless.  This morning, I surfed the channels trying to get some overall results and mainly learned about the weather, the driving conditions, and Colorado election foul-ups.  I had to switch to The BBC to actually get some decent coverage.  I had forgotten how articulate the BBC newspeople were.

The stock market has been on a tear.  It has expected a big Democratic win and a Republican in the White House.  The market loves gridlock.

~~~

Yusef Komunyakaa has graciously accepted our request that he judge the next MMM book contest.  He's also on the cover of a damned decent APR, looking exactly as I envision Easy Rawlins, one of my favorite fictional detectives.  This from The Autobiography of My Alter Ego:  "... // But one day Roberta / brought a puppy with her / & she said, She's yours / if you give he a name, & I whispered into her ear / Bullet.  My tongue / was locked against the world."  Cynthia Cruz does not look happy.  This from Praying:  "Woke on the highway. / Thin in my dead brother's clothes. / I was gone but still dreaming. // A desert city strobing in the distance like sex."  Merle Brown has an nice essay on Poetic Listening ("A poet will attend to an upsurge of feeling, a deep impulsion, ...to the swarm of words that impinge upon him ...".  Mark Doty with Theory of the Sublime, and an explanation of its provenance (don't you hate when they do that?).  There's Laura Kasischke again.  Sarah Maclay has Two Poems, this from The Vehicle:  "In that room of caramel-hued regret, "the music room", where they sit on vintage office chairs, apart, ...".  David Trinidad offers up a nice bit of scholarship describing Sexton and Plath's Friendship and Mutual Influence.  Stanley Moss with Five Poems, this from El Sol:  "If the sun is money, as you say, then the trees cash in, the ocean has deep pockets."  Anne Carson, the ever-interesting classical scholar, introduces Susanna Neid's translation of Inger Christensen's det (or it in Danish), and along the way keeps me fascinated with the details of PROLOGOS, LOGOS, and EPILOGOS as exemplified by Hesiod, a poet who has been dead about 2,800 years.  Three Poems by Kazim Ali.  Robin Becker on the Summer and Sustainability in the Georgics of Virgil.    Four Poems by my recent favorite, Dean Young, including the absolutely great Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool:  "Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends.  You want middles, read novels.  / You want happy endings, read cookbooks.  Not closure, word filched / from selp-help fuzzing the argument".  Rosanna Warren with Odyssey.  Ira Sadoff discusses Frank O'Hara's Intimate Fictions.  Ten Poems by Paul Nougé, translated from the French by William Kulik ("White everywhere demands revenge / for the maid's weary eyes / and the salegirl's pretty ones/ ...").  Ellen Bryant Voigt with Messenger, and Pinksy on the back cover (The Material:  "The moon-stirred volume of ocean sighed / Coconut tanning-oil and frozen custard. // ...")

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Even with all their dirty tricks, it looks like the Republicans are going to get a drubbing.  We'll know tonight.  I voted this morning at the elementary school behind my house.  When I walked in, there was a yellow line of tape that led back to the voting area in the library.  Bevies of little kids blocked the way in three places, but I eventually got to the library, where they checked my ID, handed me a ballot, and told me to get in line.  While shuffling toward the booths, I was able to pull books from the shelves and read them, including one on witchcraft and one on The Centennial State (that's Colorado, so named because it was admitted as a state 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence).  The nutcases in Colorado Springs (home to over 100 conservative Christian organizations) managed to get an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment on the ballot.  I voted no on that of course, but all the rest of the amendments as well, figuring what's the point of a state constitution if you're going to go changing it all the time.  The referenda were mainly about taxes, but there was one for civil unions.  The last sheet of the ballot was for local elections.  As I live in Boulder County, virtually all the people running for office were Democrats, and usually the only person on the ballot for a given office.

Looks like Britney got K-Fed up.

Jeffrey, Malinda and I read poems from the upcoming MMM Volume 7, Number 1 on Dona Stein's Poetry Show, which Dona does weekly on KRFC in Fort Collins.  It was a lot of fun and Dona was gracious and professional.  Our 17th issue has a lot of great poets as contributors including Geri Lynn Baumblatt, Michelle Bitting, Marcus Cafagña, Anne-Marie Cusac, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Stuart Greenhouse, Claudia Grinnell, Patrick Lawler, David Lunde, Frank Matagrano, Clairr O’ Connor, Veronica Patterson, Neil Shepard, Alice Templeton, G.C. Waldrep, Rynn Williams, Kathryn Winograd, and Jake Adam York.

Some nice work in this issue of APR.  Yusef Komunyakaa's wry smile graces the cover and an excerpt from his "The Autobiography of My Alter Ego" starts off the issue.  More on that tomorrow.  I have to watch the returns.

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