WhimsyLand

The Academy of American Poets has a slick web area which permits you to locate poets, journals/presses, academic programs and poetry resources by state.  There is lots of interesting information – for example, I didn't know that Lee Ann grew up in Wyoming or that Cole Swensen is a native Coloradan (well, I think she is, she's listed on the page, even though she teaches at the U of Iowa).  There are a few odd poet-state linkages.  For example, Henri Cole is listed under Wisconsin, even though he was born in Japan, and currently lives in Boston.  California is chock-a-block with Names:  Addonizio, Bidart, Ferlinghetti, Hass, Hejinian, Hillman, B.P. Kelly, Olds, Rich, and many more (although they forgot CDY).  New York does pretty well, also (Ashbery, Brock-Broido, Collins, Glück Auden, Ammons, Eady, Equi, Hadas, Howe, Merwin, Wilbur, . . . and let's not forget Whitman).  Of course, New Jersey claims Walt, too.  I mentioned to the nice AAP lady via email that MMM has been a Colorado literary journal for more than a decade and I'm hoping we get listed.  I also mentioned that there weren't enough poems about Colorado, and I'd be happy to supply some.  I'm not usually that shameless, in fact I'm pretty non-promotional when it comes to poetry.

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I'm trying to get my mind around this statistic:  the size of the average new home in Boulder County is now 6,300 square feet.  That must mean that the average house is selling for $600K to a million dollars or more.  Where are these people coming from?  My house is an absurdly large 3,000+ and has 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, a large living room, great room, and built-out basement.  In any event, the Boulder County commissioners want to limit new homes to 2,600 square feet in unincorporated areas and 4,000 on "the plains".  Now that I'm getting the paper, I've just started to notice the amazing rise in Boulder home prices recently.  The classified section is filled with page after page of houses that run a million bucks or more.  Keep in mind that this isn't California – there are dozens of towns in Greater Denver with affordable housing and when you get away from the Front Range, prices start to drop to levels that Midwesterners are familiar with.  There are a reasonable number of high-paying jobs in Denver, but it's hard to imagine the same is true for Boulder.  There is a smattering of high-tech and a few big players, like Pfizer, but the majority of these "good jobs" are still paying wages below 6 figures.  So how do you afford an $8,000 mortgage?  Maybe these are all trust fund babies or Californians trading in their West Coast equity, but I doubt it.  Anyway, I don't get it.  But then, I don't understand how New Yorkers survive their real estate and rent market. 

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I was going to tell you about Colorado Review, but I can't find it.  Like I said earlier, I have a big house and things get lost in it.  Take, for example, toilet paper.  I bought a 12-roll package and couldn't find 2 or 3 of the rolls that I lugged up to the upstairs bathroom.  Today, however, I found that Ms. Emily had hauled them down to the den and made them her own personal shredding posts.  I don't know how exactly, as her mouth couldn't possibly open wide enough to grab these "double-the-tissues" rolls.  Maybe she pushed them along with her nose.  Anyway, I will find the CR and report.  There was one poem by Kevin Prufer that I liked for a start.

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I used the be the only one in my extended family with a digital camera.  I would take shots with my bigass Sony and email them to everyone and their email servers wouldn't accept them, or they couldn't open them, or they got shuffled off to a spam folder.  Then I tried Flickr, which was only partially successful.  Eventually, I just threw them up on my web server and gave everybody a URL.  Most of the time, nobody could figure that out either.  That was then.  Now, everybody with a genetic link seems to have discovered digital camera and I get attachment-laden emails all the time:  my niece Julie's party upon arriving back from Hawaii to join a commune (for which they threw a party when she left), and it's a long story; my other niece Laura's graduation party; landscaping shots from my nephew Matt; countless shots of grandnieces by way of my sister's progeny.  I'm tickled to get them, but it makes me wonder if there's a new onslaught of family pictures zooming across the Internet with increasing frequency, vying with spam for bandwidth. 

Note:  I'm surprised that the gerund for vie is vying.  There's probably other words like that that follow some arcane rule of English, but I can't think of one at the moment.  All I know is that MS Outlook flagged it and dictionary.com agrees with them.  The origin of the root, if you're interested, is the medieval French envier which means "to raise the stakes at cards", which mutated from the Latin invitare, which means to entertain.

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I'm currently playing my 10th or 12th or I can't remember game of Zelda.  Junie's son, who waited in line for a Wii and got Zelda: The Twilight Princess in the bargain, was kind enough to ship it to me.  I first played Zelda I in Belgium on the first Nintendo.  You could barely make out what was what given the horrendous low-res pixelation of all the characters.  Kyle and Derek would sit on the couch and watch, and when I needed Really Seriously Responsive Motor Skills, I would pass the controller to Ky, like anytime a Boss needed to get killed.  The last 3 or 4 versions have graphics which rival big-screen animation.  I find myself overthinking a lot and spend hours trying to figure out how to boomerang the spider-bomb into the mouth of the overgrown carnivorous houseplant in some dungeon.  The only thing that saves me are the Zelda Walkthroughs that abound on the Internet.  Time was when I would pay 50 cents a minute to get the next hint.

OK, tomorrow, I'll track down the CR and tell you about the June Poetry, to boot.

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Richard emailed to say:  lie, lying.  OK, how many more can you think of?