WhimsyLand

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.