WhimsyLand

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.