WhimsyLand

I had my facts wrong when I last estimated the amount of storage it would take to hold all the text of all the books in the Library of Congress.  The LC's current holdings include 130 million "items" of which 29 million are books.  They estimate this represents about 20 terabytes of storage.  I received an email today from NewEgg offering a 500 GB (or half a terabyte) drive for $120.  So for under $5K, I could host just about every book written in the past 100 years.  One of these drives could hold approximately 115,000 copies of the Bible (KJV).  During my life in computing I've bought disk drives from 5MB up to my last purchase of a 500,000 MB drive.  They all cost about $150-250.  They were all about the same size.

Here's a synopsis of the past 10 day's mail:

Poets & Writers:  The U of New Orleans is offering a 4-week workshop session in Madrid which grants graduate credits (that would be fun);  the ever-interesting Jonathan Lethem will give away the film adaptation rights to the author of the best letter describing the movie to be made;  Literary MagNet highlights New Ohio Review, Atlanta Review, and HoboEye; Joe Woodward writes about Nathaneal West, of whom I know nothing; blah, blah, blah, more about fiction; The Practical Writer asks the question that I've been asking for a couple of years, "Is the PhD the new MFA?"; Amy Rosenberg writes about poet Eliza Griswold (I liked most of the excerpts, but how can you actually put "wreaking havoc" in a poem?); blah, blah, blah, more about fiction; Rattle is giving away $5,000 for one poem; Lots of deadlines, contests, grants and awards.

APR:   The cover has a picture of Sherwood Anderson sitting on a deck chair among trees, smoking a cigarette and dressed for all the world like any Bohemian of the last century.  Interesting article on Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I never read the translations, but you probably already know that.  Clayton Eshleman (with whom I once had lunch at the New Orleans AWP, come to think of it) gives us the text that he read in introducing 6 poets (Gary Snyder, Michael Palmer, Will Alexander, Christine Hume, Jeff Clark, and Andrew Joron) during a university reading series ... my goodness, who keeps their notes that long?  Poetry by Doreen Gildroy, Mark Irwin, Sherwood Anderson, Raquel Chalfi, Samuel Exler, David Lehman, Kate Northrop, John Rippey, Gabriel Fried John Felstiner, Michael McClure, and Peter Jay Shipley.  Also Merwin doing his usual imitation of Merwin.  I liked Kim Addonizio's Matter ("..// Some men say your name like a verbal tic.").  Also Peter Jay Shipley's Unbelieve ("../My mouth was a black hole and I wish / I would have thought to take a picture / ..").  There's Rattle again with their $5,000.  I would like a lot of the poetry in this issue if it were set to bluegrass music and Alison Krauss were singing it.

Ploughshares:  This issue is edited by Edward Hirsch and, halfway through, it became apparent that we differ in aesthetic matters.  Among the dozens of poets contributing are Stuart Dybek, Garrett Hongo (OK, he was interesting), Philip Levine, Cate Marvin, Jacqueline Osherow, Vijay Seshadri, Susan Stewart and David Wagoner, to name a few.  Most of the poetry involved observation, lament or remembrance – sprinkled with poetic devices guaranteed not to tax your powers of imagination.  Did  I like anything?  Sure.  Gary Finke, The Dead Girls ("The girl who martyred her dolls, sending them / To heaven to wait for her arrival / .."); Bob Hicok, Modern Prototype ("We melt the old thing into the new thing. / Tongs, a ladle the size of a man's head. / .."); Corey Marks, Semper Augustus ("The plain white petal between her finger and thumb / belled into a sail pregnant with nothing it could bear / ..."); John Rybicki, Three Lanterns ("There's our son at the end of my hook / riding over the Detroit River // where Tecumseh's still rowing / towards his oblivion."); Jason Shinder, Hospital ("While the machine sucks the black suds // from my mother's blood and then sends it back / stinking clean into the pistol-tube nailed down / ..."); Charles Harper Webb, He Won't Go to Sleep Without Me ("I like to say.  I must like to; I say it all the time, ..."); 

ZYZZYVA:  I'm actually going to read this on the trip with Junie.  I love the layout, however, and the ads from local Bay Area firms.

Poetry:  This one also gets read on the plane.  Bob Hicok leads off with two poems, then Susan Stewart, Anne Stevenson, Dora Malech, Ben Simons, Tom Sleigh, P.K. Page, Maurice Manning, Geoffrey Brock, Lucia Perillo, William Logan, Adam A. Wilcox, Alicia Ostriker, and Conor O'Callaghan.

~~~

I'll chat at you from on the road.  Junie and I are driving down to Madison (home to The Onion, among other things) and I'll have plenty of time to read poetry to her, when I'm not whispering sweet nothings.

Posted by jbahr at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Prince Humperdinck: [sincerely] Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work, but I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped.

Count Rugen: Get some rest. If you haven't got your health, then you haven't got anything.

~~~

Well, I've been swamped.  And so many good sources to tell you about:  the current issue of Ploughshares, the quite excellent ZYZZYVA, the last issue of AQR, the APR that came in the mail today, the May/June Poets & Writers, Harper's, Time.  I'm off to visit Sweet Junie on Friday and should actually have more time to blog. 

One brief note:  the adorable and brilliant Tricia turns 25 tomorrow.  Such a baby, and as she says:  "I have such a tiny toe in the grave".

More tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm having car trouble.  That's not much of a problem, as I drive about 3,000 miles a year, and most of that is back and forth to DIA.  Still, a guy has to have a car and both the old Lexus and the bashed-up Subaru are limping.  I bought the Subaru from my parents after they were done using it to make ski trips (they moved up to one of those monster SUVs with onboard microwave ovens and 7-speaker surround sound).  Then, Derek drove it in high school and managed to put a pretty good dent in the passenger door.  Then Kyle borrowed it and his significant other pretty much tore off the front bumper exiting a gas station.  The Lexus is 17 years old and any repair to it costs the equivalent of Estonia's GDP.  Luckily, it's been up to snuff for a year of so, even with its 220,000 miles, which by the way, is probably only 70% of its engine life.  It's silent on the road, does zero to 60 in 7 seconds, and has a top end of about 130 miles per hour.  The speedometer goes to 160, but I can only confirm 130 because I don't live in Germany, so there aren't that many chances to find out where she tops out.  About 3 months ago, the Lexus started getting flat tires.  I had a new tire put on, but one day in February I looked in the garage and three tires had gone flat.  I started thinking about changing out the rims ($200-300 apiece) and decided it was cheaper to just use my compressor to pump them back up, which actually I never got around to since I have the Subaru.  Until today, when the Subaru started kicking up steam under the hood about a mile from the house.  I drove slowly back home with my heater on high and poked around under the hood and found that there was a tear in the hose from the radiator to the engine block.  Now, I had two cars that didn't work, so I pumped all the tires on the Lexus and gave it a 30-minute charge on the battery and drove over to Advanced Auto Parts to get a new hose, which was too long but with a hacksaw and some adjustments on the clamps will work just fine.  I could get a new car, I suppose, but I like the little Subaru and love the old Lexus, and why should I sign up for three or four hundred dollars a month for something actually reliable?

When I first found out the Subaru was running hot I was on my way to the local Longmont used book store. I thought I might find more books by Jonathan Lethem, who writes weird detective novels like Motherless Brooklyn and just won a MacArthur "genius" award.  Yes, I know it's not a genius award, but that's what everybody says, and it's always in caps.  Anyway, they didn't have any of his books, so I settled for old Spenser mysteries (as the protagonist says, it's spelled just like Edmund Spenser, Renaissance poet and author of Faerie Queene).  That's no surprise either as Robert Parker received his PhD in English Lit from BU on the strength of his dissertation which compared the work of Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.   Hawk may be a cold dude, and Spenser may be a literate thug, but what the latter does a lot in Spenser novels is throw together good meals, usually while Susan is in the tub dolling herself up in some pre-coital ritual.  The recipe in Looking for Rachel Wallace sounds pretty good, if a little sketchy:

Spenser's Broccoli and Pistachio Pasta

Boil 4 quarts of water in a large blue pot and a cup of water in a smaller saucepan fitted with a steamer rack.  Put a pound of frozen broccoli into the steamer rack, and set the timer for nine minutes.  While that's going, put "two garlic cloves, a handful of parsley and a handful of basil and some kosher salt and some oil and a handful of shelled pistachios" in the Cuisinart that Susan gave you for Christmas, or any kind of food processor if you're not Spenser.  Process until smooth.  Put one pound of pasta (your choice, but I prefer spaghettini) in the boiling blue pot and take it out when it is still a little too firm to the bite (it will soften in the next couple of minutes).  Toss the broccoli (now just perfect) and the oil-and-pistachio sauce with the pasta and serve.  Eat in front of the fireplace with Syrian bread and Soave Bolla and make intimate small talk.

Posted by jbahr at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sure they mean well, but this ad from the National Fatherhood Initiative reminded me of the report today that Bush's faith-based insistence that our nation's schools teach abstinence-only sex education was a bust.  The ad was attached to the comical but tragic analysis by Glenn Greenwald on the ongoing criminal duplicity of this Administration when it comes to "lost" emails, videos and correspondence.

~~~

As you may know, I'm a director of Many Mountains Moving, a literary journal of some note.  We're in the middle of our submission period for our annual Poetry Book Contest and entrants are coming in slower than last year.  Frankly, I'm amazed.  Our judge is Yusef Komunyakaa.  We adhere to strict guidelines in terms of fair treatment, anonymous reads, and serious consideration of all manuscripts.  We have a track record of publishing some really terrific books in the past four contests – books of widely varying themes and aesthetics.  The entry fee includes discounts on subscriptions, current MMM Press Books, and back issues.  What's not to like?  If you're tired of sending $25 to The Same Old Contests and reading about your non-acceptance in the trade press, give us a try.  Who knows, you may be the next Patrick Lawler or Anne-Marie Cusac.

~~~

I miss Junie.

~~~

Derek, Kyle and Cath have organized a reason for me to engage in another boondoggle, this time the Moving Of Derek's Stuff.  It takes place in early May, when Kyle and I will descend on Chicago to cart Derek's paraphernalia from his dorm room to "Max's place".  Max is Derek's best buddy and, as far as I can tell, lives in an apartment roughly the size of a Yugo's back seat.   I will be flying in, renting the Internal Combustion-Powered Conveyance Vehicle (probably a Ford Taurus, judging from the Hertz site), getting a room at a local hotel (I don't think the Palmer House is in my budget, though it is close), and probably taking everybody out for a terrific dinner at that fish house downstairs looking out over the Bank One Building's fountain or Italian Village or someplace else capable of putting a large uptick in my AMEX bill.  Der will then be officially done with school for the year, and he and Max will leave almost immediately for Europe.  They have their backpacks and travel guides.  They've purchased their EuroRail passes.  They've plotted out their itinerary starting with Paris, sidetracking to Provence, wandering through Italy, slugging over the Alps to Munich, thumbing on the AutoBahn to Berlin, and ending up in Amsterdam.  They probably don't have enough money, but they do have a google list of European youth hostels and a backup credit card from Cath and me, should we need to ransom them from the gypsies.

~~~

I was reading Rebecca's blog after a long absence, and I'm quite sure that I could never be that honest and engaging.  Nor could I ever find a photo of 3 tigers in a swimming pool.

~~~

I've been thinking a lot about poetry lately.  And, of course, talking to Junie about it.  Mainly, I wonder if I'm done.  I don't write it anymore, and it's not because I can't.  As an experiment, I stopped bitching to my friendlies and critiqued a few pieces today.  In the four years that I spent on various poetry boards, I probably critiqued a couple of thousand poems, maybe twice that.  Doing it again today, I found that I was required to pinpoint the specifics of my objections, rather than summarize as I have been wont to do lately.  Truth be told, 90% of what I read bores me to tears.  That is consistent with Sturgeon's Law, of course.  Unlike many of my blogmates, I am a civilian.  I don't have the disadvantage of running workshops and providing blurbs and generally having to maintain an open-mindedness consistent with keeping my career unimpeded by enemies created by my comments.  I think I sit somewhere between the great unwashed masses of conventional poets and the rarefied artisans of All Things Post LangPo.  My favorite poems include those by Sharon Olds, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Jorie Graham, Mary Jo Bang, Billy Collins, Lyn Hejinian, Lucie Brock-Broido, and John Ashbery.  The poems I like tend to have one or more of these characteristics:  subtlety, concision, clever breaks, compelling overstory, good titles, in media res, strong imagery, lack of summarizing closes, enough mystery to make you wonder, enough cues to clue you in.  Other facets, no doubt.  What I don't want to read is a poem that sounds like a poem, I guess.  I don't care at all about poetics, which started an exchange one time with Joshua.  Why would I care about that?  I once characterized this attitude as an indifference to strategy (as opposed to tactics), but I mis-spoke:  I mean that I don't care about extra-poetic agendas.  Like most poets, or perhaps as I expect most poets to be, the poetry I like the best is what I wrote last year and forgot about long enough to read it again and smile.  So, perhaps, it is all about self-indulgence.  I'm still trying to figure it out.

Posted by jbahr at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm pretty sure that Anthem Blue Cross is the most screwed-up large company on the planet.  This is a multi-billion dollar company that handles health insurance in a dozen states.  Here's their track record with me so far:  Last year they changed the PO box where they want their payment.  I kept auto-sending payments from my bank every month to the "wrong box", so they cancelled me without informing me for 3 months.  When I asked the bank why the hell I didn't see the auto-checks returned, the bank said that they had not been returned, just not cashed.  Sigh.  Anthem straightened it out finally, re-instated me and took a payment on the phone for the past 3 months. Then, Anthem put me on an auto-payment plan so, even if they changed their stupid drop box address, I'd be covered – they would just suck out of my bank whatever they wanted. Meanwhile, I had had a physical whose claims they rejected, so I called today to straighten it out.    The first thing I found out was that I was dropped again.  I said, "What?  Why?  How?"   The Anthem lady said that three checks had bounced, so was being de-instated.  I said, "what check numbers", and she read me these long-ass numbers.  I said, "OK, you just tried to cash the three checks that you received 5 months ago at the wrong address and then told me to stop payment on".  Oh, she said.  Then I asked, "If I have auto-payment, how come my payments are in arrears?"  She said, "if we ever receive a physical check from someone, we automatically drop them from the auto-payment program".  At this point I was speechless.  She gave me the number to get my claims covered, and also the IT Support number, because the Anthem website gives me this weird error after I log in – which is why I didn't know I was covered in the first place.  I called the customer service number and asked them to pay for the bills for my yearly physical.  That's when she told me that my plan doesn't cover ANY preventative care.  That was news to me, but I was pretty shell-shocked by then.  I called the tech support number and explained that I was getting this weird error message after logging in.  The lady said, "Oh, you must be using Internet Explorer 7", which isn't compatible with our system."  I said, "You're not compatible with the standard Microsoft browser that every Windows XP user has received as a standard auto-upgrade?  That ships standard on Vista?  That has over 120 million users?"  No, she said, "It's got problems and they're always changing things, and besides, we have to be careful about security".  I said, "It works on my bank's website and the website for all my credit cards . . . do you think you need to be more secure than them?"  She said, "Well, we have Federal regulations to consider too".  "Aren't you guys a multi-billion dollar corporation?"  She didn't answer.   "Does Netscape work?", I asked.  "Most of the time", she said.  Now, I was truly speechless. 

In the final analysis, I'm not focusing on the price we pay for health care intermediate, like Anthem.  The thing to notice here is the world-class incompetence.  Do you think that any firm in Silicon Valley could survive this kind of rampant stupidity?  Even the Big Three (although Chrysler is now the part of Daimler that is soon to be dumped)?  How can you be this dysfunctional and still run a business?  I suspect the answer is politics.  I once had a conversation with my brother about a conference he attended in Disney World when he was a drug rep for Big Pharma.  Two thousand reps from his firm descended on Orlando and stayed in the nicest hotels and attended dinners and held meetings.  They cheered together at Epcot as Disney executed a wonderful fireworks display on their behalf.  After the meetings, they all went home, at a cost of millions of dollars.  I asked what was the occasion, and my brother told me with a straight face that they had all gathered at the Magic Kingdom to discuss cost control.  I kid you not.  Big Pharma is a gigantic fund source for any political campaign on their radar.  This includes Democrats and Republicans.  It's the reason that Viagra, that costs about 40 cents to make, costs $10 to $15.  They say that this is because of "research costs", but it's not research that would pass muster in any legitimate scientific venue.  It's paying researchers to write paper on their behalf, and sending doctors on cruises to "educate" them (though, admittedly a lot less of that is possible now), and God Knows What else passes for research.  Viagra is so easy to make that you can get it from Asia by the barrelful at 10% of its current cost.  But, I digress.

One of the reasons I don't have group coverage is that (a) my company isn't big enough, and (b) in its infinite wisdom, the Colorado legislature has mandated that any company group coverage has to cover EVERYTHING  – maternity, psychological counseling, chiropractors, you name it.  For that reason, the only group plans available run about $10,000 a year per person, and you have no opportunity to pay less for less coverage.    Probably 20% of the people reading this blog have no health coverage at all.  The health coverage we have is ridiculously expensive and often doesn't cover some basic care (my policy doesn't cover colonoscopies or annual physicals, how smart is that?)   I've spent something like $75,000 in the last 10 years on health insurance.  The total for all doctor and drug bills in that time probably don't amount to 10% of that. So where is all that money going?  Countless emergency room visits by the indigent that Reagan threw out onto the streets?  Six-figure last-minute intervention for those who used to just die quietly at home and hospices?  I don't know.  I know enough physicians to know that they're not getting rich, but health care costs have been running 2 to 3 times the rate of inflation for a decade.With luck, someone will get elected and fix this fucked-up system.

~~~

Received a new 32 Poems today.  Here's some work I liked:

Seth Abramson, The Mines:  Once more the black throat keeps / the better part of its gravid business / ...

Eric Higgins, Monologue:  After a long day at the chapel, the pastor relaxes with a joint as a sitcom starts in the background:  When you're in the womb, there's very little ideology / piped in, then you're born, slapped on the ass, / called a Boy, a Girl, a Give me a minute here, / ...

Leslie Jenike, Three Go Confessional:  Hide the diamonds and cocaine; a monster with my face / is deep inside her bullheaded dream, dragging pleasure / behind her by its hair. ...

Kelly Madigan Erlandson, Rarely Have We Seen a Person Fail:  I have not come to sobriety without reason. / The rim of the glass itself insisted.  I was collared by bottles / ...

Hannah Craig, Mushroom Hunting:  o homely hunt / o barb and rail / o here-a-grail / and flock of naked sheep, / and snakeheads with grandmother skin / and russula, cello-deep.


See you tomorrow, most likely.

Posted by jbahr at 05:21 PM | Permalink

For some reason, the power for my entire part of the town went down on Thursday.  What I didn't know was that one of my uninterruptible power supplies had tired batteries, so the servers went down, too.  This wreaked havoc with some of my websites, and it's taken me until today to:  replace the batteries in the UPS's, restore backups, buy another couple of terabytes of storage for current server redundant storage, reconstruct my domain server, get PHP and ASP and Perlscripts working again.  Whimsy Central now has close to 10 terabytes of storage for our various whimsical operations.  That's something like the text content of the Library of Congress times ten.  While I was at it, I also upgraded my fax machine (which is like the care and feeding of a dinosaur) to a fancy laser-based model, and replaced a few monitors with new flatscreen LCDs. 

Der called from Chicago and is taking a poetry workshop course at Columbia next semester, which should be interesting.  Claudia wrote to tell me that she's collaborated on an interesting new poetry work.  Frank has a new job where he will kick more ass and take more names than his last job.  Jan is working on her Paradox Book.  I'm making whole wheat spaghetti for dinner, with a home-made sauce including sautéed onions, garlic, and red peppers, canned diced tomatoes, artichoke hearts, capers, What'sThisHere Sauce, and red wine.  I received a new AQR today.  More about that tomorrow.

~~~

Well, that was two days ago, and I still had another 48 hours of heartache to get through.  I had to replace and test the 16 sealed lead-acid batteries in each of the two 3000 VA UPSs, and one still isn't sure it's happy.  It was nice to have Ms. Emily around to bat at the plastic wrappers I peeled off of each battery unit, though.  Because I had to build a new domain server, all 20-odd machines here at Whimsy Central had to re-register, which caused them to lose all their settings (Outlook, desktop, you name it). PHP was not cooperating (PHP on Windows Server is a pain in the ass, in case you've ever tried to get it to find the php.ini and recognize all the extensions) and I still had 3 websites down, including one I host for a buddy of mine.  A lot of the directories needed to have their Windows security settings changed.  One of the UPS's still thinks it wants to be in bypass mode, but the new domain server seems to be doing OK.  The weirdest thing is that my VOIP phones all went kaflooey.  I ran an Ethernet sniffer on them and they're clearly trying to get an ARP response from Level-3, but it isn't happening.  I called Packet8, my VOIP PBX supplier, on Friday but it was late and I had to spend way too much time explaining that, yes, I know what DHCP is, and yes, our server is assigning IP addresses to the handsets, but no, I'm not getting dial-tone.  Now that I have sniffer results, I'll be able to brow-beat somebody in support to pay attention and figure out why I'm phoneless, except for my cell, which keeps running out of juice. 

Is everybody getting spam from Janis Goodwin, Jonah Martinez, Lessie Grimes, Deanne Childress, Claudine Floyd, Verna Cote and other interesting names with a subject line of "Read me!"?

I'm doing first reads again.  It is simply amazing how many people have graduate degrees in Creative Writing and still can't write poetry anyone wants to read. Or, perhaps what I don't want to read.   I'm sure you've heard this before.  Somewhere in my heart of hearts I understand that getting a B.A., M.A., and in some cases a PhD in poetry doesn't guarantee that you know how to write.  But, I am still amazed at the sheer persistence of these kind souls.  I was a professor for almost 8 years.  I understand how you grade someone in IT or computer science or even accounting.  How does grading happen in the arts?  If someone can parse Chaucer and write a term paper on Foucault, is that enough?  That seem quite reasonable for an English major, but isn't CW about actually producing something of merit?  Isn't a degree in Fine Arts about actually being able to do the deed, the same criteria one would use for a sculptor or a water-colorist?

Sheesh.  More tomorrow, really.

Posted by jbahr at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What a day it's been!  I hadn't checked yesterday, and my mailbox was so stuffed that the contents had actually spilled onto the sidewalk.  I opened envelope after envelope of acceptances including Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, jubilat, Fence, and The Atlantic Review.  Howard Junker sent me a letter soliciting work for ZYZZYVA , even though I don't live on the West Coast.  Brenda Hillman wrote to ask me to teach for a week at the Squaw Valley Writers Community.  Another letter informed me that Ruth Lilly's will included a bequeathal of $500,000, to me and the other nine finalists of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson Award.  In the next envelope was a note from Jorie Graham, with the news that she and other other MacArthur judges had deemed me a "genius" in poetry, and that's another half-million.  Looks like my worries about the shortfall in my 401(k) is a thing of the past.  I immediately called Northwest Airlines and had Junie's flight upgraded to first class, and picked her up in my new Porsche Cayenne.  Junie walked out from airport security looking like a million bucks, even more gorgeous than usual, prompting the airport police to give us an escort to the borders of DIA.  When we got home, there was a message from the IRS apologizing for the little misunderstanding of last week, and informing me that after doing a serious check on my last 7 years of returns, I had overpaid taxes by almost $35,000.  Derek called to say that Bono had called and asked him to fill for The Edge for a couple of shows, as he was feeling poorly.  Kyle dropped by means of hot air balloon, a new hobby made affordable by his recent promotion to VP of Internet Development at Dish Networks.  Rimbaud came home, saw Emily, and immediately scratched out a short piece of free verse in the litter box.  So now it's 6 PM and I can't imagine anything else exciting happening.  Junie and I will make dinner and watch the sun set.  Tomorrow, things will probably settle down.  You only get one day a year like this.

Posted by jbahr at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)