WhimsyLand

I just opened the dryer and found Emily sleeping among the underwear.  It's a front-loader and I tend to leave the door open too often, I suspect.  She was probably getting some rest from dealing with Rimbaud, who outweighs her by 8 pounds and can be brutish.  I may have to send them to couples' therapy.

Among the CNN headlines:  "Ford body tours Washington".

I am trying to understand The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark, a Christmas present from my son Derek.  It is composed of six sections of prose poems, which I read first by jumping around from here to there, and then more methodically.  Many of the pieces leave an impression, and much of the phrasing is elegant or startling or both.  I got to the point where I wanted to get something from the poems, at least as much understanding as I took from the poem Sabrina dedicated to her grandfather.  First, I went to the back cover, but there was only the same head feints and critical blather that we have come to expect from back covers.  This from the judge, Jane Miller:  "They offer a look at a time we must face, or else face its consequences. It happens that, in The Babies, we aren't sure if we are looking at past, present, or future. Sabrina Orah Mark ultimately posits what is surely meant as praise for poetry: timelessness."  And this from Claudia Rankine:  " Rarely do we encounter poems that are so precisely framed, though on their surface seemingly whimsical and erratic. These poems are gorgeous, intelligent, and disturbing. They are owned by the imagination that created them and the history that created her."  OK, no help there.  Then, I read Ray McDaniel's review at Constant Critic, which seemed relatively confident in the process of demystification (with the excellent suggestion to read the poems as if one were the object of whispering).  There's a section of Ms. Mark's The Proposal cited in the review:

Vintage darkling, metropolis? I asked. But you said no
without sugar, you said arms. I said please. I was bent
at the knee and scripting. You said fix it. Sky
turning from broomstick to bone, you said angel, I said yes,
quiet as a hill going up, I said yes. A hunger. Or to get to
The bottom
of it, I said plate of oranges with pepper on top, you said
nothing. I said rustle, with a bad case of Doll’s Eye, I said—

This is quite typical of the level of surreality at play in The Babies.  McDaniel reads a lot into this passage, suggesting that "darkling" stands in subconsciously for "darling", which contributes to "a specific grammar of intimacy".  This is a perfectly acceptable result of Reader Response, and I applaud McDaniel's creativity.  I think I need more cues to sort this out.  I don't know why I can't approach this kind of writing as I would Pollock or Kandinsky.  Anyway, I'm not complaining . . . I'd rather read Ms. Mark's work than 50 retrospective banalities in the next mainstream prize-winning book.

You all have a GREAT New Year.

 

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Now that Christmas is over, I can go back to buying modest numbers of poetry books.  From about November on, I'm prohibited by my loved ones whom I don't wish to disappoint by buying books that they've already bought for my Christmas or birthday present (yes, I'm a Capricorn).  Now that the leash is off, I'm ordering Rebecca's Navigate.  I'm expecting it to be something like MJB's Louise in Love, but it doesn't really matter as I like Rebecca's poetry and I'm sure it will be killerbee.  Hey, I see that Radish King is finally out and only a Paypal click away.

I like to read intelligent stock market appraisals, including those of Jim Jubak and the Motley Fools.  I particularly like the way Jubak weaves a story to convince himself that a given company's shares will rise.  It seems not at all dissimilar from recommending poetry books, for some reason.  Maybe I should end all my recommendations with Full disclosure: I will add a copy of Radish King to my personal poetry portfolio three days after this column is posted.

I just bought another yearly subscription to the Microsoft Software Developer Network.  For about $2,500 you get something like $50,000 in software (not that a small firm could use all of it).  In addition to providing access to the MSDN articles and archives, you get a large collection of DVDs with virtually every Microsoft product.  This includes all current and past operating systems (XP, Server 2007, Vista), the extended Office suite (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Visio, et cetera), development tools (Visual Studio.NET, 2003, and 2007), useful applications ( Publisher 2007, OneNote, Office Accounting) and dozens of other programs that I didn't even know existed.  I'm particularly confused by the range and number of Microsoft server products.  I'm familiar with Exchange Server and Commerce Server, but what do you do with Forms Server, SharePoint Server, BizTalk Server?  And what in God's name is Groove Server?  I suppose I could install them on one of our boxes and read up on them, but I suspect they are targeted at large organizations with the IT staff to keep them running. 

I didn't realize Tricia had extended her now-famous Wallace Stevens birthday party to include other famous poets.  Tricia is one of the funniest women on earth, with the possible exception of Paula Poundstone on one of her good days.  She's also one hell of a poet.  Tricia, I mean.  I think Paula specializes in gothic novels.

I've become accustomed to Rimbaud stealing things (reading glasses, glue stick, pencils), but he actually eats the breath mints.

Now, here's something macabre:  Every year around late November, flies start to accumulate in my master bedroom around the large window that faces the Rockies.  They are nowhere else in the house.  Not anywhere, really.  By mid-December, there are dozens of them if I don't vacuum them up (which I never seem to do enough).  They just sit there on the ceiling and around the windows until they die and fall onto the carpet.  Now, being a bachelor sans resident sons, I'm not the most meticulous of housekeepers — but, I do take out the trash and clean the litter box and mop the kitchen floor and Pine-Sol the bathrooms occasionally.  There is something very Anne Rice going on here.  Flies (or as Twain called them in Letters From The Earth, God's Favorite Bird) have a typical lifespan of 30 days, although they can live for months in warm climates.  Their normal reproduction months are from April to September and they live on waste matter.  They can't become flies without first being maggots, and I've never seen a maggot in my house.  Ever.  This is Colorado, where There Are No Bugs.  I mean no bugs, really.  Not in the flour.  Not in the 3-year old box of Cheerios.  Not scurrying around when you turn on the kitchen light.  So where do these spawn of the devil come from?  How do they live to become the proven carriers of Typhoid, tuberculosis, amoebic dysentery, bubonic plague, gangrene, and listeria that they are.  They are despicable creatures and Ich hasse fliegen.  But they still show up every late November like clockwork.  10 points if you can figure out how they get into the bedroom.  20 points if you can figure out what they are eating in their larval stage.  30 points if you can figure out how to get rid of them before they lounge around my bedroom gazing at Long's Peak.

Sigh.  I'm out of disk space on my C: drive again.  Sheesh, you'd think 40GB would be enough, considering I have another 350GB disk in the box for most everything.  However, there's 8GB in Documents and Settings, 7GB in my Windows directory, and .  It's time to uninstall and re-install applications on the big drive, I suppose.  Someone should write a utility to move installed programs elsewhere, while keeping any user-agreement restrictions in place.  I would just wipe the drive and re-install everything again, including XP, except I have installed dozens of programs over the years and finding the original CDs would be a major pain in the ass (you would have to take a look at the office shelves to get an idea why).  Hmm, I could de-install Office 2003 and install MS Office Ultimate 2007.  Then, I would get OneNote (which I haven't played with) and Groove (about which I am clueless). 

One nice thing about cleaning up my system and doing lots of installations is that I have a perfect excuse to blogwalk.  I have missed so many months of so many good people that it was easy to stay engrossed for hours.  Entertaining stops along the way included:  Jordan's review of Daisy Fried's My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again.  Reading some poems Kate Greenstreet has at here site.  Robert's defense of his demystifying of Adorno.  Gabe and Rosanna read in an uptight town.  The world's most difficult general-knowledge quiz.  Laurel clues me in on Jordan and Ali's marriage (BTW, Junie and I met on an Internet poetry site).  Little-known things about Kasey, which led me to Poets in Need.  Tony reports that The New Sincerity is the subject of two graduate term papers.

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Denver apparently got 16 inches of snow, but we only got 3-4 inches.  Longmont is about 500 feet lower than Denver and Boulder, both of which are mile-high.  Let's hope it keeps up at this modest pace, which the snowplows can handle, at least around here.  Travelers at DIA are getting inconvenienced again, but not as much as the guy who thought he was flying to Australia, only to end up on his way to Montana.

From BBC's 100 Things You Probably Didn't Know:  Experts say that 200 million people have stopped posting to their blogs.  The lion costume for the Wizard of Oz was made from real lions.  The pope has been known to wear red Prada shoes.  Sex workers in Roman times charged the equivalent of 8 glasses of red wine.  Barbie's full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.  Cows have regional accents.  Nelson Mandella stole pigs as a child.  The Himalayas cover one-tenth of the earth's surface.

I just finished Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain.  Junie gave it to me and, though not as good as CM, it was a fine read.  The book takes place in the early 1800's, and one noticeable aspect of the book is that everyone drinks all the time.  This shouldn't come as a surprise to me, as I once read in a Scientific American article that the 1830's was (by far) the most drunken decade in American history.  As I recall, it was largely a result of farmers finding that the only way they could profitably store grain and corn was in the form of licker. 

I'm back to doing my treadmill walking in the morning and there's a whole new lineup of cable shows available in the 5-6 AM time slot.  The biggest difference seems to be the diet plan shows.  It seems like a year ago every other channel was promoting some kind of magic pill.  Now, it's eating plans whereby, for $10 a day, a company will send you "breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert!"  Judging from the ads, millions of pounds and thousands of inches have been shed by eating lasagna, milkshakes, and chocolate cake.  They actually look pretty good, but I wonder if the servings have been photographed through a magnifying lens and they're really doll-sized.  There are still a couple of exercise regimens, but my favorite is Yoga Booty Ballet.  I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up.  One woman after another looks at you with a straight face and exclaims "I'm back in a size 4, and all due to Yoga Booty Ballet!"  I like to start at Channel 101 and just click up to the 200's, stopping for a few minutes if I see something interesting.  Recently that has meant: old episodes of Star Trek, before Shatner had that ghoulish pumpkin face; Xena: Warrior Princess, whose androgeny fails to excite; BBC World News (unless I'm not in the mood to be depressed); Who's Number 1? with that great rap intro; hiphop and rock videos; the ever-hilarious Fairly Odd GodParents; Fresh Prince with Will before he got so buff; Kenneth Copeland Ministries (why does that man always look so angry?); Xiaolin Showdown and all those Japanese animated characters with exaggerated movements.  I can't bear Fox Friends or Imus in the Morning, but the rest of the mix is pretty good.  I don't know how people just go to a gym and get on a spinner.  I'd be bored to tears without my morning Wiggles.

I loaded Vista on one of our PCs yesterday.  First, I downloaded the Vista Upgrade Advisor, which pokes around your machine and tells you if you have enough stuff (RAM, CPU horsepower, disk space) to run Vista, and whether your video card is capable of running Aero (Vista's fancy 3-D desktop experience).  Most systems purchased in the last 2 years should run Vista as all you need is a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of memory and a modest video card.  To appreciate the full Vista user interface, you'll need 1 GB of RAM, a bit more beefed-up video card and 40GB of disk.  The system I loaded had a 3-year old ATI 9500 video adapter, 1 GB of RAM and an Opteron 140, and it runs the full Vista Business just fine.  Vista has been market-targeted into four versions:  Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate.  The latter three support Aero.  Home Premium and Ultimate tack on media management software and Xbox connectivity.  I like the way Aero works, but it's not clear that Vista is any faster than XP Pro, which I run on all my systems that aren't servers.  I'm certainly not loading it on my main development machine until I've messed with it a lot more.

Most of the 20th anniversary Poets & Writers focuses on writers this month, with the following poetic exceptions:  Literary MagNet mentions Rattapallax, "the bimonthly literary magazine published in NYC by Ram Devineni", and Poetry Kanto, published in Japan, but including work by Jennifer Michael Hecht, Gregory Orr, and Sarah Arvio.  John Freeman intersperses biographical anecdotes about poets with the work of Frederick Seidel.  20 Years includes the thoughts of editors, publishing execs, governmental directors and litbiz higher-ups on Then and Now.  Joan Houlihan, an interesting choice, laments that while two decades ago poetry was a "furtive, cornered, back-of-the-room, secret-doodling, window-gazing" kinda thang, now it's a biosphere where poets chase book contests to get published to re-enter the hive that is the current MFA-laden poetry microcosm.  Don Lee, editor of Ploughshares, allows as how all journals have become more professional with the advent of technology, but grants are dwindling and retail sales are "way off".David Fenza of the AWP mentions in passing that the number of creative writing programs now stands at 320 in the US (imagine!) and is generally happy that dozens of poets have sold more than ten thousand copies of a poetry book (which is the sales of the next Harry Potter in the first 14 milliseconds).  David Hamilton of the Iowa Review is stunned by the sheer number of submissions — 526 envelopes of poetry in the first 6 weeks of their reading period alone.  Tree Swenson, currently executive director of the Academy of American Poets, notes that their site gets a million hits a month (though I suspect that a large number of them are looking for poems to inscribe on their anniversary card to their spouse).  In other news, Bob Hicok is judging AWP's Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.  Hmm, I might actually take a shot at that.

More tomorrow.

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So far, the research has turned up no evidence that snickerdoodles are harming sea creatures.

The Weather Underground says:  1-4 inches today, 6-12 inches tonight, 2-4 inches on Friday, "snow may be heavy" on Friday night, "snow may be heavy" on Saturday,  and more snow on Saturday night.  Sunday looks good though :)  Yeah, you bet I already went out and stocked up on wine.  I may be partying by myself on NYE.

I've started Pynchon's After The Day.  It appears (after a quick 10 pages) that he's back in rare form with impossible character names, unlikely (and even anachronistic) scenarios, and a plot range that encompasses most of the world just prior to WWI.  More as I read . . .

Poetry and Poets & Writers showed up today.  I've only thumbed through Poetry, starting with Peter Campion's Eight Takes.  Campion is articulate and persuasive, but I haven't read any of the reviewed books, so I'm at a disadvantage.  One of them, A.E. Stalling's Hapax, doesn't measure up to her prior work (at least for M. Campion), which is a pity as I have always admired Ms. Stalling's work.  Regarding the NeoFormalists, Campion admits that she "is too good to be lumped with these muggles".  Other tidbits:

Selected Poems, James Fenton:  "Few poets have begun so powerfully and then fallen off so suddenly".

Man and Camel, Mark Strand:  "To read through Strand from his first book to the present is to see a single course pursued with exquisite precision".

Green Squall, Jay Hopler: "In the end, though, I'm grateful for Hopler's raggedness."

Selected Poems, Louis Zukofsky:  There's the ninth section of his epic "A", ... [and] scores of doctoral candidates who could write a thesis chapter on the intertexuality.  To me, it sounds like copy-work".

Messenger, Ellen Bryan Voight:  "If a young poet wanted a model for dynamic verse movement, she could do a lot worse than to memorize these twelve lines [from the title poem]".

Strong Is Your Hold, Galway Kinnell:  "I once heard a famous British poet pronounce that most American poets merely make home movies".

Interrogation Palace, David Wojahn:  "Wojahn has a fiction writer's talent for building panoramas".

More tomorrow.

 

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There's always a Christmas present you know instantly that you will not be able to live without.

I received the lovely Whimsy Daybook 2007, a collaboration between Maryrose Larkin (holidays) and Nita Hill (paintings).  Each month begins with some lovely artwork by Ms. Hill, followed by daybook entries for all the most important whimsical holidays, including:


Miracle Making Wednesday
Punctuation Holding Cell
Amazing Cleaning Amy Invented
PEONY+MEMORY+PILLOW BOOK
Flash Mob Hunted Out of Existence
Ask Me About My Glitter Bone
Feline Career Day
Feast of St. Rage
Buddha Bean Distribution Day
Kick Your Husband If He's Mean
Sun Enters the Sign of the Chevy Suburban
Scare a Crow Day
Error History Day
Let's All Visit Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle
I Live In A House Made of Fish Ladders
Nobody's Mother Day

For the nominal price of the daybook, you also get Ms. Larkin's chapbook, Inverse:  "The name of this intersection is frost broken up // heavy spar reign heavy phrase ravishment /    strands careening // let us unfurl instead: weather /     see also river // see also   self and the less restricted sense". 

~~~

There's been the usual loquacious tussle going on over at QED, this time a minor altercation regarding Muhammad Yunus, microcredit and the degree to which he deserved the Nobel Prize.  As usual, the libertarians face off against the libs and socialists.  It's always entertaining and often illuminating.  HP, the resident libertarian and Randist, contends that only real capitalism can save the poor and that the debt created by microloans is not much better than the burdens of debt anywhere.  That got me to thinking about the truly ludicrous state of student loans.  Try to buy a car or a house without good credit and what happens?  Try to finance either of them for more than they're worth and what happens?  And yet, any young person with an optimistic point of view can take out student loans approaching 6 figures with no credit whatsoever except, perhaps, the co-signing of their parent — for whom there are no strict credit-checking procedures either.  Thousands of schools qualify for student loans.  You can rack up $80K getting an MFA or even more getting a PhD in Art History.  You can indenture yourself for just as much at 4-year "art schools" where you will be lucky to make $30K a year when you graduate, assuming you can get a job.  These are loans that can cost between $400 and $800 a month for up to 20 years, all of it after tax dollars.  I really find the situation quite incredible.  I know that it would be politically dicey to start ranking job prospects, but if you were a bank wouldn't you rate the prospects of med school grad a bit higher than that of an undergrad with a major in philosophy?  The reason it all works is that, through a variety of government-sponsored loan guarantees, there's no risk to the banks. 

~~~

I'm hoping to get some sort of poetry literature in the mail shortly.  It's certainly been long enough.  However, the Weather Underground says that we may get from 6 to 12 inches more of snow tomorrow and Friday.  I don't know what's happened to my sunny state of infrequent snow.  Maybe we annoyed one god or another.

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I trust that even the naughtiest of you received something nice yesterday, even if you're of a non-Christmas persuasion.  I was with my children and sweet Junie, 800 miles away, with hers.  I got no less than 3 copies of Pynchon's latest book, but then I'm hard to buy for.

We actually received USPS packages on Sunday, and on Christmas.  Some 1,500 Denver area mailmen volunteered to keep delivering mail that had been held up by the blizzard.  Many thanks to the guys in gray.

Something has gone horribly wrong with Amazon's "people who bought" engine.  Based upon having purchased Reb and Molly's Bedside Guide, Amazon suggested I buy the works of William F. DeVault, "The Romantic Poet of the Internet", who has written "over 13,000 poems and eloquences", most of them centered on the page ("the words run past like dust / crushed stone powder to match failed ardor").  Actually, Amazon was suggesting William's latest work, Ronin in the Temple of Aphrodite, whose blurb runs:  "The astonishing manifesto of romanticism at the verge of disillusionment! Raw, intense, emotional and literate as only one of the fathers of the Digital Renaissance can conjour.[sic]  61 works that capture the struggle of passion and faith in the soul of the poet. "  William is also the "inventor of the triskadelian canto", and has a blog liberally adorned by black stems and red roses.

Coincidentally, Cath and Der and I watched the film production of Phantom of the Opera while waiting for Kyle to arrive with his sweetie.  Christine was a little young (Emmy Rossum) and the Phantom's voice a little thin (Gerard Butler), but the visuals were outstanding and the supporting cast excellent.  Rossum certainly had that "deer in the headlights" look down pat.  Minny Driver almost steals the whole movie in her role of Carlotta, and Patrick Wilson plays a muscular Raoul whom I liked much better than the original London casting.  Webber has guided the script to demystify some of the Phantom's magical tricks and fleshed out the backstory.  The movie was almost good enough to forgive Webber for Cats.

Not much mail today.  I think the backlogged local post office is doling out my mail and litmags slowly.  See you tomorrow.

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Dima's son went back to Russia and works for us occasionally from there.  Here's a pic of his children, who are impossibly beautiful.  As are most children, come to think of it.

You all have as wonderful a holiday season as humanly possible.  And with us humans, that is as much as we can imagine.

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With all this snow and manly shoveling, I decided I deserved to make myself a nice beef stew.  I probably eat meat less than 3 times a month now, but since my last kid left, it's just easier to take a couple of extra-large scallops out of the freezer, microwave them for a minute, and sauté them in with scallions, red peppers, capers, olives, and whatever else is interesting in the fridge.  Like most cooks, I have dozens of stew recipes, not that I use recipes actually, which I consider more as guidelines.  When Dima ran me over to Safeway this morning, I picked up a 3-pound hunk of beef chuck.  You definitely want a flavorful inexpensive cut for stew, so just look for something under $3 a pound, preferably on sale. After sautéing a large chopped white onion and nearly whole garlic until they were translucent, I set these aside and threw half-inch cubes of the beef into the pot to brown.  I cut away most of the fat and sinew, but left about 20% of the cubes with a little of each.  After the initial sear, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of flour on them, grind liberally from the pepper mill, and dust them with a little paprika if you have any Hungarian blood.  Toss them when they brown, like dwarves onto a Rohan bridge.  It's best as they say, to do the browning in batches, but when I'm impatient I just turn the heat up and turn the whole mess of beef pieces periodically.  When the beef was just starting to crisp, I tossed the onions and garlic back on top, added a can of tomato paste, and dowsed the whole thing with a half-bottle of Greg Norman's excellent Australian cabernet sauvignon.  At that point, I poked around in my spice cupboard, which has hundreds of bottles in complete disarray, and came up with thyme, sage leaf, oregano, and a couple of bay leaves.  I considered cumin, which I love, but decided against it.  I then added two cups of water, and waited for time to soften the meat and small bits of tendon.  Now you have a hour or two to wait, depending upon the degree of bite you want in the meat.  I will be adding red pepper pieces, carrot disks cut on the diagonal, celery half-moons, and perhaps a small  loosely-diced russet potato (haven't decided yet).  The good news is that Dima and his wife gave me a set of these wonderful Riedel goblets that have no stem, are featherweight,  and hold in the hand like a silky ostrich egg.  Just perfect to pour some of the remaining Norman Cab into, and sip away reading poetry while the whole concoction slowly becomes stew.  The fabulous thing about this dish is that, with changes in the plan midstream, it could have become chile (delete red wine, add chile powder and cumin) or any one of a half-dozen bubbling wonderments.

I'm in the TechBiz, so of course one of our clients announced their new gizmo would be arriving from the ASIC foundry about now, and were we available to work just after Christmas (by which he meant, the 26th).  Dima celebrates Christmas according to some variation of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Junie's not in town, so I said yes.  That gives me until Tuesday to buy the remaining stocking stuffers for my sons and spend some time on projects that pay by the hour, which might just cover the expense of buying all those pigs, sheep and llamas on behalf of my loved ones.  As my son Derek picked up the All-Wheel-Drive Subaru 24 hours before the blizzard hit, I'm going to have to enlist him for taxi service, but he's a good boy and, besides, he's likely to be one of the principal beneficiaries of my weekend shopping.  Both boys have these gigantic Christmas stockings that I found at Target years ago, which need to get filled with interesting items that I haven't sprung on them in prior years.  It's a complete sell-out to put gift cards in, so I will have to get creative.  At least as creative as Easter, when I hide plastic eggs around the house with a bill of some denomination and a cryptic clue to where the next egg may be. 

It was sunny this morning and I thought the vaunted Colorado sun (we are a mile farther up in the atmosphere than you are, by the way) would banish all this snow to runoff and water table replenishment.  It was not to be, as the clouds rolled in and temperatures dropped.  Good thing I made stew. 

See you tomorrow.

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Before.

After.

Well, typical Colorado.  We got just hammered.  Thirty inches in Boulder and about two-thirds of that here, with drifts running 3 to 5 feet.  It started yesterday morning and was spent by this morning.  By 2 PM this afternoon, we had blue skies and a sunny 35 degrees.  I know Buffalo (just to pick a northern, LangPo-friendly town) gets blasted with Lake Effect snow all the time, but this was pretty special for us.  All day, people drove down my street in high-rise SUVs and pickups, but they were the only ones out and God Knows where they were going.  One rumor had it that the closest Safeway was open, but only because half the staff couldn't get out of the parking lot last night.  It would have been nice to have some fresh bread, but none of the passing Suburbans and F150s offered to take me, so I went outside and shoveled alongside my neighbors.  It was the first neighborhood bonding experience I've had since the Homeowner's Meeting of 2001, which was the last one I attended.  The really good news is that while chatting about our children and birthplaces, I mentioned that I was out of wine, and my neighbor Pat ran over to his house and came out with a choice of Chardonnay, Shiraz or both.  I took the Chardonnay and threw it in the snow to chill while I shoveled.  I actually got a good swath all the way out to the street so Dima can navigate his SUV over here tomorrow and get some work done (although I did tell him he could take some days off if he wanted). 

Here's an interesting one, if you follow the machinations of The Evil Empire.  Microsoft has done a deal with Novell to actually resell SuSE Linux and paid down on a whole lot of support contract fees.  The press release says that the companies will "co-develop software to improve virtualization, Samba, server management, and web services in mixed environments".  The Linux community, who are basically raving ideologues (not that I often disagree with them), are incensed that a major Linux company is dealing with The Dark Lords.  Having been around the Tech Biz for a while, I can tell you what happened.  They looked at each other and said what they always say:  "Hey, we're not saying we're not whores, we're just talking price here".

Since there's no mail, there's no litmags and no Time and no Atlantic and no nothing.  Since I got on my no blogroll kick, I can never remember where anybody is, so I get lazy and don't check.  Except sometimes, like today, when I Google "Jane Dark" or "Suburban Ecstasies" or something about Angie or Jordan that might get me there.  Here's a great quote from Joshua in his review of The Queen:   "At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction."  I saw a positive and assuredly deserved review by David Shapiro of Jordan Davis's poetry in the online Boston Review.  I also haven't visited Rebecca since the last time I was waxing nostalgically on the wonderment of Rebeccas In General.  She's the only poet whom I know personally (and I mean that, of course, in that distant, never-quite-met, leave comments on each other's blog, wish you were visiting her city to have lunch with, chatted a lot in one forum or another way) that just seems to write more and more X all the time.  X stands for something for which "better" is a substandard adjective.  It's more like engagingly, interestingly, strangely, exotically, evocatively, compellingly.  Well, you know.  Who can put words to these things, even poets?  But, I digress.  Rebecca also points us to the Whimsy Daybook of imaginary holiday, one of which I will be ordering forthwith.  It occurs to me that you don't really need a blogroll, you just need Ron's blog URL imprinted on the inside of your eyelids.  He's got a the blogroll of all blogrolls, and everybody is just a click away.  Duh.  Ron notes (if you haven't already read this, and you probably have because you are all more conscientious than I) that Dolly Parton has received a National Medal for the Arts but John Ashbery hasn't but Maya Angelou has.  Omigod, there's Kasey's blog.  I'm missing so much being a misfit.  I love his description of Jimmy Durante as "incomprehensibly grotesque".  Oh, look, a link to Mairead Byrne: "I clapped until little drops of blood / jumped out of my finger".  See why I don't do this more often?  I love these people.  I would be consumed by them.  I would not get anything else done, nor contribute to the Great Engine of American Progress, nor pay the mortgage.

Jilly asks if Turing is the Turing of Bletchley Park.  Yes, he was a genius, the father of computer science, largely responsible for breaking the Enigma Code in WWII, and a homosexual.  After a short illustrious career, he was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" and required to submit to hormone therapy.  He committed suicide a couple of years later at 41.

And now, a blizzard poem:

There’s a girl in the park outside my window bending her head back
to swallow the snow that’s rushing from somewhere. I will not go out
and push it around with a shovel the way that Celan plied his mother’s tongue,
the tongue of her loved ones, and that of her murderers. Soon, the roof will moan
with unaccustomed weight, the aspen will sag under pleasant treachery. There will be
no doorbell -- my neighbors are fatalists. This the cure for desiccation, the parch
the surveyor divided with transit and sightline. I can hear the clapping
of erasers, the deconstruction of chalked apologies. And a train making its way
through the town with boxcars of turkeys, an a cappella of wheels
on wet metal. The girl is up to her knees in snow, except now
it’s a sapling wrapped in plastic. We prayed for this in a punchline.
We’re so thirsty in deceit.

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I appreciate that the last thing I said last week was "More tomorrow", but that was before I spent the next three days either sleeping or throwing up with the flu.

You may heard about the little blizzard we're having.  I opened my front door to check the mail and a four-foot drift was piled against it.  It looked weird sitting there like a standing wave.  The blizzard warning is in effect until mid-day Thursday.  Sheesh.  And not a bottle of wine in the house. 

Denver International Airport is, of course, closed down for flights at least until tomorrow evening and many people will be sleeping there on cots tonight.  The official DIA website says "don't come here", and then nicely notes that security wait times are less than 5 minutes.  At the time of Denver's last big blizzard, I was on the last flight out before they shut down.  Then our 75-ton aircraft slid off the runway.  We exited out the rear drop-down stairs and trudged over to a bus that took us back to the airport.  For the next 3 days and two nights, almost a thousand of us sat in the bars, ate from fast-food restaurants, and slept on the carpets.  The most popular activity was riding the underground train.  People were actually talking to each other for a change, and one old guy was passing around a flask.  People of limited means relied on the airport authority's food coupons, which were redeemable at Burger King if you didn't mind waiting 2 hours in a line with hundreds of people in it.  I mainly lived on snack food from the news stand and beer.  It was nice having an ironclad excuse to do nothing but drink beer and read for a couple of days.

I was working on my Amazon Christmas wish list and noticed that:  people who bought Jordan and Sarah's Free Radicals also bought Dumanis and Marvin's Legitimate Dangers; people who bought Sarah's Siste Viator also bought Gabe's A Defense of Poetry and Sabrina's The Babies; people who bought The Babies also bought Alice Notley's Disobedience; people who bought Notley's Disobedience also bought Hejinian's My Life, and Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons;   people who buy Hacker's books then go out and buy more of them.

In the Spam Arms Race, the newest thing in comment spam is to drop in a section of text ("Madonna says she may adopt another child from abroad following her proposed ...") and a URL to an add for Viagra or mortgage loans.  Movable Type had some decent built-in spam control in their latest version, but it looks like I'll have to apply a Turing Test to comments in the future (I accumulated 350 spam comments during my absence).  A "Turing Test" is short-hand for those squiggly character strings you are asked to type in again to post, and is taken from Turing's famous test for deciding if an intelligent agent was artificial or human. 

I discovered yesterday that an in-law of mine is making large sums of money ghost writing novels for a famous mystery/thriller author.  You've seen him on the front table of any Borders, with what seems to be a new book every 3 or 4 months.  They are always competent, middle-brow fare of the sort that people buy to read on airplanes, and are generally on the NY Times Bestseller list when they come out.  I've heard that authors like Dan Brown and Tom Clancy have armies of researchers and a handful of ghost-writers that handle everything from chapters to entire books.  Books like these have sales of 50,000 or more per week, totaling hundreds of thousands of sales in the course of their life.  If the author gets, say, $4 per book, then every book produced puts another million bucks or more in his/her pocket.  And, these books don't appear at a Pynchonesque rate —  Michael Chrichton has written almost 30 books and Stephen King at least a dozen more than that.  It's hard to believe, but probably true, that all the poetry books sold in the 20th century don't total up to the sales of The DaVinci Code.

The Time "Man of the Year" is you.  That's right, all the people who participate (mainly on the web) to provide content and interaction (think You-Tube).  Like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States Time has decided (at least temporarily) to throw Carlyle's Great Man Theory of History in the dustbin.  I've met a fair number of Great Men over the years, including three who became billionaires.  The only thing that differed among them was the relative degree of their rapacity and sociopathy. 

Well, I found a bottle of 25-year old creme de menthe.  I bought it when I held a party for my students when I lived in California, and it probably cost 1.99.  Isn't too bad in ginger ale, actually.

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I went to bed last night and couldn't find anything I liked in the poetry section of Colorado Review.  Then, I woke up this morning and gave it a shot again and liked quite a lot.  Does that ever happen to you?  CR is no Fence, but it does have a reputation of being more often outré than accessible.  I've always thought that Jorie Graham and Donald Revell were an interesting pair one might be honored to have as poetry editors, considering the differences in their work.  I'm sure they end up looking at a small percentage of what comes in as submissions, but eventually the Readers must acquire a sense of their preferences.  There's a subgenre of poetry in this CR (and other CR's as well, and for that matter, in a number of progressive litmags) that I might describe as overt disjunction.  When it's not working, it sounds like all that surreal-speak of the 60's when bands named themselves Strawberry Alarm Clock.  When it is working, it has you expecting a certain noun after a certain adjective, only to find a completely new object of description, one with the evocative powers of the best metaphor.  There is a point for me when poetry stretches my sense of expression, when the gestalt lies just beyond my ability to articulate, but within an expanded sense of kenning.  Given enough stretching, however, and the whole collection of verse seems to collapse with self-consciousness.  Elena Karina Byrne's Language Fable/ —civilization depending on it resided on the cusp for me:  "    Because water, fire.  Because food. // Because our "yes" was in Provençal, because our hunger-worth ate / in a Feast of Lanterns, light caught in the mouth, human. // Babel:  traders and navigators. // Slang-bearing to verb a name, scruple, oh uneasiness origin, / God confounded, and does."  I will admit in advance that you can't take these small snippets I'm giving you and make any kind of coherent argument.  James Cummins' Buying a Dog for Margaret was quite a bit more mainstream:  "...// My daughter asks for a dog.  / It seems such a humble request / in the great scheme of things, / a desire expressed each day by thousands, / maybe millions of children, / and turned down by millions of fathers / who have other things to love."  Many of the poems in this issue are either narrative or at least have a sense of temporal, descriptive or thematic flow (and many do not).  Malcolm Alexander's Failure appealed to the minimalist in at least one of the Editors:  "But instead I write / around the idea, // skirting it like a child / does a campfire, // reaching in with a stick / or a thrust of breath, // the coals brightening / for a moment ...".  I had to stop short because 3 more lines and I would have transcribed it in its entirety and probably violating the Fair Use principal.  Zach Barocas's Spiderbird Hunting is similarly linear, but the arc is descriptive:  "The eggs are unhidden / & crack to reveal / mute & wingless chicks who will // hop & swing their lives / tethered to limbs with hair-like / feathers sometimes several / feet in length,".    I liked the way that Chris Dombrowski's Rex's Georgic:  Hunting Morels in Last Year's Burn earned its strangeness by juxtaposing colloquial plainspeak with musical passage:  "Some folks'll rub soot on their face for luck.  Paint warrior-lines and such but it ain't about luck 't all.  Matter of fact you know Chick Alexander?  Judge.  Lost his son Abe when their baseball rolled under the porch.  Right in front of you.  Next to your foot. // Swallowtails, cabbage-whites, the dark scat of denning wolves. / Little azures that love the dung."  Nathan Parker takes us out to the edge again with The Land in a Bell:  "Because sent to us / by green-stomached lambs, we suspect Her // of inner darkness. / We invite her Husband: // in a lane of shining blueberries a bluebird-bitten / bluebird limps to the beat of bell rust,"  It gets even more interesting (though no more alliterative).  There was an odd innocence to Lacy Schutz's poems, considering their level of indirection, this from If You Should Care for Me:  "The 'gan him soft to shrive.  She asked him, What / black ladder must we climb? How sere my grass? / How ravaged my valley? //           You and I, / we seek perfection, mix of brew of horse / manure, of menstrual blood and soil dug from / a dead love's grave." 

More tomorrow. 

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It all started when I ran out of disk space.  My 80GB drive was full and there was actually nothing that I could move to one of my servers.  Most of it is development software and build trees that I need frequently.  So, I went out and bought a 320GB drive and installed it.  My BIOS, as it turns out, wasn't happy with something that large, so I gave the drive to Dima for his development machine (thus expanding the ever-greater Russian Empire, which is what I call his megadesk, 40" monitor and multiple machines).  Then, I went out and bought a 160GB drive and installed that, which worked, but it occurred to me that I might as well upgrade my 2.2GHz processor.  I ordered a new 3.4GHz, 800 MHz FSB P4 and when it arrived, I found I had neglected to order the correct socket type.  So, then I had to go buy a new motherboard, but they don't have Socket-775 motherboards with more than one IDE channel anymore, so I had to buy another 160GB SATA drive to replace the 160GB PATA drive.  CompUSA also had no motherboards with anything but PCI-Express interface for the video adapter, so I had to buy a new video adapter.  I might have found a suitable motherboard on the Internet, but this is my development machine, and being down for any amount of time means lost revenue.  When I got home, I tried to transfer the 2GB of memory from my old machine, but the new motherboard required DDR2 memory, so I drove over to Best Buy and got some.  OK, I'm into this upgrade $800 now, but I need it to make a living, so I decided to grin and bear it.  The rebuild went fine until I tried to log on.  Windows complained that so much had changed with my system that they need to re-activate my Windows XP license.  So, I waited on hold with Microsoft support (which, from the accent of the help-desker, was somewhere in Bangalore) and got re-activated.  Then, I opened Outlook, and it wanted reactivation too.  More time on the phone with Microsoft.  Then, Visio.  Same deal.  Then, FrontPage.  Again.  I had a lot of stuff on the 160GB drive from yesterday, but only one IDE channel, so I had to copy 80GB across our internal network to get all my stuff back.  So, that was pretty much my day, except having lunch with my son Kyle at Red Robin.  I hope you all did something more productive, like writing a poem or taking pictures of flowers.

The Fall/Winter edition of Colorado Review arrived yesterday, and it's another example of CR's excellent literature and professional layout.  Kudos to Stephanie G'Schwind, the editor.  I have only read a couple of short stories, so I'll be back tomorrow to comment on the poetry.

My son just called me as he was walking over to the Chase Auditorium to see a taping of NPR's news-comedy show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.  It's pretty much just across the street from Columbia College in Chicago, where he goes to school. 

Harper's just showed up today, too.  More on that tomorrow, too. 

It was in the 50's today and will be in the 60's tomorrow, in case you've been avoiding moving to Colorado because it's cold.  On the other hand, it could be 20 next week, and it's hit 20 below 3 times since I moved here in 1989.  So, maybe you're wise to stay in Boca Raton or wherever you are. 

More tomorrow. 

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Junie says I have a vacuum cleaner fetish.  That could be true.  As soon as I've had one for a while, I start getting buyer's remorse and figure nothing's going to get that cat hair up except a $1200 Miele or $600 Dyson.  I've actually read extensively on the Web regarding vacuum cleaners.  Reviews.  Recommendations.  User comments.  There is no consensus.  Some people don't like to deal with bags.  Some don't think they're getting enough animal hair up.  Even many of the Dyson owners kvetch about them being only so-so on carpet or difficult to use on sofas.  I want a vacuum cleaner that sucks everything that isn't carpet out of the carpet.  That cleans coffee and wine stains.  That doesn't grumble over the occasional screw left over from a computer rebuild.  Maybe Junie's right.

This year, I decided to give my family a donation in their name to Heifer International.  Between my two sisters, brother, parents, two nephews and a niece, we've managed to rack up a llama, a pig, a sheep, a goat and a water buffalo.  That leaves bees, geese, ducks, heifers and trees for next year. 

That's my grand-niece, Gracie.  My sister became a grandmother a second time yesterday, thanks to the newly arrived Ms. Daly DeNike.  How Gracie is related to my sons is a mystery.  Second-cousin?  First cousin, twice removed?  I only know of these terms because they come up all the time in English murder mysteries.  That doesn't mean I know what they mean.

I read some more of jubilat.  I really liked the strange Memory by Kaethe Schwehn:  "I am not going to church.  I am wearing my church clothes and carrying a flour sack filled with four dead rabbits.  . . . My father rolls a sappy cottonwood bud between his fingers and puts his fingers to my nose.  Smell that he says."  I also liked Coffin Bone by Gabriella Klein: "    I was the loom / inside a horse, the engine / that drives thrashing /     on great slabs of neck and anger at god // is not god.  The Appaloosa is refusing to cross thresholds,".   I'll have to re-read some more.  Maybe this stuff is growing on me.

I'm getting Time again.  Actually, I don't know why I stopped getting it, but I'm getting it again.  Here's the poop:  Dakota Fanning is 13 and has made 16 movies.   A woman was blacklisted by American Airlines after lighting a match on a plane to hide her flatulence, "setting off alarms and causing the plane to make an emergency landing".  Princess Di's driver, on night of her death, had a blood alcohol level 3 times the legal limit (and he was in France, so God knows what the limit is).  Israeli businessman Avi Shaked has offered to pay the Israeli Premiere $100 million to sit down with the Palestinian Premiere.  Turning over security to the Iraqis will mean empowering the largely corrupt police force and not much better military.  John McCain, the overwhelming front-runner for the GOP presidential candidate, has to run hard to the right to get nominated, then hard to the middle to get elected.  NASA wants to go back to the moon, build a manned base, and use it as a jumping off spot for Mars.  There are 12,440 Starbucks and they're going for 40,000.  Those of you with small children probably know that there's a new Yellow Wiggle.  George Clooney's 300-pound pet pig of 18 years died peacefully last month. 

See you tomorrow.
 

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I've been watching Lord of the Rings on TNT this week.  I thought this evening looked a bit like Mount Doom.

My son is guitarist for the Down and Dirty Blues Band (he's the good-looking rascal in the brown suit and buzz-cut).    They play all over Chicago, and their schedule should be on the site soon.

The new Many Mountains Moving is out, thanks to the phenomenal amount of work that Jeffrey Lee put in.  We've got a new website for subscriptions, books from MMM Press, back issues and donations here.  Now, if we can only get coffee cups and mousepads made, but that may have to wait for AWP, where you can find us at the Book Fair. 

We have also opened up our online submissions, thanks to the distributed system provided by the CLMP (and modified by yours truly).  We're asking for $2 for each submission to fund the review process, but (for now) you can still submit via paper and snailmail.

What else is new?  Well, I got my name on my first patent today.  I could tell you what it's about, but then I would have to read my collected works to you while you were tied to a chair.  My friend Dave, chief BBQ specialist at Casa Paulsen, has more than half a dozen of them.  Dave is one of the patent holders of the "laptop clamshell", something that he help invent at Grid, the first real portable computer company.  What's a "laptop clamshell"?  It's what every laptop on earth does now, it opens up and there's the keyboard beneath you and the screen staring at you.  Sure, it seems obvious now ...

More tomorrow, promise.  I've been devilishly busy.

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I didn't notice until today that Pynchon has another book out.  I never did finish Mason & Dixon, but maybe I'll give this a go.

I was just reading Joshua's piece on the relationship between mobile technology and property values.  Fascinating, as always.

Speaking of property values:  No one has explained to me why there is so much new housing.  After all, houses aren't like cars . . . they last the better part of a century in most cases (Junie's house was built in 1936).  Even in this construction slowdown, the forecasts are for another 1.5 million homes to be built.  This includes both apartments, townhouses, and houses.  The population of the US is roughly 295 million and the average household size is 2.6 persons.  That means there's about 115 million households (with roughly one-third renting and two-thirds owning).  The population grows by about 2.3 million people per year, or about about 900,000 households.  So we must be building 600,000 more homes a year than there are new people to live in them.  Presumably, that's because 600,000 existing homes per year either disappear (think Katrina) or become undesirable for some reason.  I wonder where they go?

There's a certain poetry in my work, at times:  "The Ethernet controller handles a nibble of dribbling bits if the receive frame terminates as non-octet aligned ..."

The prose section of Poetry consists of monographs, reviews and letters to the editor (at least).  Clive James rambles nicely in Listening for the Flavor, mentioning along the way Frost, of whom he says:  " I ... find his easy-seeming, usually iambic, conversational forward flow is a deception, a way of not just bringing the show-stopping moments to your attention but of moving them past your attention ...", which I thought was astute.  Hooray for Christina Pugh who says "Where is the humor in the geography of contemporary American poetry?"  She notes that Halliday, Ashbery and (Dean) Young often make her laugh out loud, and why not?  God forbid that we all conform to the poetic model of teen angst that non-readers of poetry are quite certain we poets all still wallow in (somebody can rewrite that so that it doesn't end on a preposition).  Brian Phillips does Eight Takes.  Since receiving a nastygram from Dan Chiasson last year, I'll limit my treatment to direct quotes.

Paul Muldoon:  "Horse Latitudes is simply a splendid book, full of deep wit, intelligent form, and Muldoon's usual crafty uncertainties".
Charles Wright:  "At this point, let's face it, a new book by Charles Wright ... isn't going to sneak up on anyone".
Nathaniel Mackey: "It isn't possible ... to say much about the elaborate unfolding project of ... Splay Anthem ... // .. both deal with the same recurrent themes of music, death, rebirth, history, culture and travel". 
Mark Levine:  "Enola Gay was one of the best collections by a young poet ... in the past decade ... // ...Now, Levine has published his third collection of poems, and . . has managed his most surprising trick yet:  he has written a boring book".
Major Jackson:  "What I like about ... Jackson's book in general (Hoops) is the confidence with which it merges inner-city black American milieu with a high-art aesthetic tradition ...".
Jennifer Michael Hecht (Funny):  "But, it isn't funny, Professor".
Djuna Barnes: "Djuna Barnes is one of those small, sharp points of vividness ..."

Dandy Dan Chiasson comes in for a drubbing in the Letters to the Editor for his "mocking dismissal" of all of Hirshfield's work.  Conservative critic Adam Kirsch is told he misses a major point about how Ginsberg's views are informed by Buddhism.  Our own CDY has returned "no less than six times" to read D. A. Powell's poetry from the September issue. 

More tomorrow on jubilat. 

Posted by jbahr at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Miró has been out drawing in the Colorado sky again.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  Poetry, 32 Poems and jubilat.  The rest of the verse in Poetry was servicable.  I didn't cotton much to Dana Levin's Refuge Field, but it's probably my aversion to serious, breathless verse, not that it wasn't competent ("a diamond tent, how the adepts / pupate / among bones — // saying I who fear dying, I who fear / being dead — ").  Geoffrey Hill's In Memoriam: Gillian Rose was chatty and interesting ("There is a kind of sanity that hates weddings / but bears an intelligence of grief / in its own kind. ..").  Mary Ruefle, reported buddy of Tate and Young, cracked me up with The Bunny Gives Us a Lesson in Eternity ("We are a sad people, without hats. / The history of our nation is tragically benign. / We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard.").  I'll discuss the prose section of Poetry tomorrow.

I just noticed that in the back of 32 Poems, I'm listed as on the R&D Board, along with Jeannine Gailey and David Vincenti.  Wow, cool, seems like I should get on the ball and do something technical soonish.   CDY is on the Board of Directors which makes a lot of sense.  John Poch is still the Editor, but I actually thought he was on sabbatical in France or something.  In any event, there is a lot of good work, a fair amount of quasi-formal work (including that of my Alsop-mate Teresa Coe).  Also blogmate Steven Schroeder with From the Margins ("My eyes are blue butter- / flies on a shimmering / windshield, voice the buzz / of a bug in my ear. ...").  Lydia Davis offers up two prose poems which sit in juxtaposition in my mind to those by Sarah Manguso in jubilat for some reason, this from Men:  "There are also men in this world.  Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women — endless hills and plains of unresisting women.  We make little jokes and comfort each other ...".

jubilat is unrelenting too-too.  It seems to have collected in Volume 12 All The Right People, including (gasp) John Ashbery.  Most of the poetry is of the non-temporal variety where actions take place and things pop up and it's all tied together with metaphor or musicality, or in some cases neither.  Typical, perhaps, is Monica Fambrough's I Love Them As I'm Defying Them :  "I am the new colt. / I took the creamery road to the palace. / I took the chill-knob to be polished. / It was a lonely way/ ... / I am in it now alone. / I am precious like rosacea. / I stand for youth on my new knees / and I carried this flag the whole way. // I am several. / I am not harmless. I am small horses."   There's a lot of that going on, which is probably why they've rejected me a dozen times in the last 5 years.  Kazim Ali & Claudia Rankine & Kirsten Kaschock & Karen Volkman & Caroline Knox & Danielle Pafunda & you just have to wonder what their Xmas card list looks like.  Speaking of Caroline Knox, she contributes Salad, which describes some pretty inventive pre-prandial art forms as recipes.  Alessandra Lynch offers up the interesting One Day I Was Watching the Birds ("The spit-polish grackles and the blackbirds with their bright razors / tucked in each wing, and the purple finch / disoriented, absent minded / ...")  Somewhere in the middle is a fascinating collection of the amateurish sketches of Stevie Smith.  I know that a lot of my readers have a fondness and respect for Sarah Manguso, but I can't figure out what she's doing with the 3 short prose poems that start on page 86.  They seem like reverse-chic versions of poetic work, Girl Scout diary entries, but maybe that's what she's going for.  This from 5: "Realizing  I couldn't stay in the choir unless I recovered from my crush on the countertenor, I decided to cure myself.  I would focus on what most ignited my desire, and by flooding my consciousness, render the countertenor powerless over me. ..."  Most of the poems strike me as conversations I've encountered after strolling from the bar to a small group who are in the middle of some intense discussion about something of which I am totally ignorant.  Which might be exactly right, come to think of it.

Dear rat's ass:  I know I'm an amateur.  I'm OK with being a civilian in a world of MFAs.  I was balancing my checkbook today while listening to the completely unredeemable Phantom of the Opera CD with the London cast, tears rolling down my face while Sarah sang to Michael.  I know I should have been listening to Kind of Blue and writing.  Preferably with a beret on, one of which I actually have, although I admit to acquiring it in Bilbao where everybody wears one when they're not bombing something.

Oh, well.  More tomorrow, I suppose.  I should take a shot of the homage to MJB that consists of a framed set of 3 broadsides and the first page of Louise in Love that she illustrated for me.

 

Posted by jbahr at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had thought that it had been just a couple of days since the last blog entry, but it's been longer.  That's what happens coming back from holiday ... by the time you're caught up, you're behind on something else. 

I noted some comments from friends, including Joshua Clover whom, truth be told, I'm slightly in awe of.  I would have loved to meet up with all the Bay Area poetic denizens, but I'm notoriously spur-of-the-moment.  Also, I always place Joshua mentally in either NYC or Paris for some reason.

That's the Dean Young broadside, BTW. 

I really like this month's Poetry.  That will probably get me kicked out of some club that I was unaware I was a member of, but what're you gonna do?   Joel Brower's A Report to an Academy was charming ("and that she's awake now, sweet with sleep sweat, / patting her belly's taut carapace and yes / hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister") and so was Claudia Emerson's honest and unadorned Great Depression Story ("... A lone / house broke the sharp horizon, the train dreaming // beneath him, so he climbed down, walked out, / the grass parting at his knees. ...").  More tomorrow on that, but by the by, there's also a nice section of pen-and-ink drawings of various poetic luminaries (Ashbery, Auden, Crane, ...).

The most recent 32 Poems got tossed over the transom, and I'm glad it did.  32 Poems asks for short poems that get in, do what they're supposed to do, and get out.  That's my style, too, which is why I like the work they select.  As a special treat, this month there is work by my buddies Frank (of Frank's Title Service) Matagrano and Kelli Agodon.  Nobody splits an infinitive like Frank, and Allowing the Body to Finally Speak proves my point ("I am partial to the idea / of making love as a means / of stalling death, of allowing / the body to finally speak").   Kelli does a nice job with anagrams in You Ask Why I Write About Death and Poetry ("There's entirety in eternity / and in the pearly gates — the pages relate.")  Lots of other good stuff.  Also, the recent jubilat.  I'm running out of time, as usual, but will be back tomorrow.  Promise, OK?

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