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.

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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.