Whimsy Speaks Again

Two interesting facts:  1) Wonkette gets something like half a million visits a week.  2) Jimmy's Kreepy Kats was featured last week.

I went to Cath's house to see her (and my) old friend Jodie, who lives in LA, and Ky and Eileen.  Jodie (and for that matter, Cath) is a terrific cook.  The first course was potato-leek soup pretty much cut of the same cloth as this one, but without the red peppers.  I oven-roasted two RedBird chickens stuffed with garlic, fresh Italian parsley bunches, tarragon and thyme.  Appetizers included Red Pepper Hummus and a new variety (Caribbean Hummus) that had two garlic cloves, one can of black beans, one-half can of garbanzos, two Big T of tahini, a big squirt of lime juice from one of those lime-shaped bottle in the produce department, a big bunch of nicely washed and de-stemmed cilantro, and a couple of splashes of Tabasco.  Safeway artisan Como bread, a salad made from mixed greens and spinach with lemon dressing, and Jodie made dessert:  homemade chocolate sauce poured over bananas and high-end, high-fat vanilla ice cream.  The wine for the night was the delicious and reasonable Red Bicyclette chardonnay.  OK, does this sound like a Spenser mystery or what?  All we need is Hawk to arrive in black leather carrying a bottle of Dom Perignon.

Cook's Illustrated showed up on schedule.  The back cover is replete with Holiday Breads, whatever they are (I wouldn't know, I don't bake worth a damn).  They, however, included St. Lucia Buns, Stollen, Pulla, Potica, Babka, Challah, and Panettone, to name a few.  Kimball must be running out of root vegetables to feature is all I can figure.  Notes from the Readers included:  a question about "high-quality white bread", which apparently means in CI-speak something like Pepperidge Farm Hearty White;  Are the less expensive Reggianito or Grana Padano as good as Parmigiano-Reggiano?  No;  Can you freeze holiday pies?  Deep-dish apple and pecan, yes.  Pumpkin?  No;  What is rose water?  It's made from the condensed steam of boiling rose petals and used in Indian and Middle Eastern desserts. Quick Tips includes:   Keep pizza dough from shrinking by spreading it over a floured, overturned mixing bowl;  clean microplane graters with a toothbrush under running water;  dried vanilla beans?  microwave them in cream or half-and-half;  if you need blanched almonds and can't find them, take whole almonds and pour boiling water over them.  After a couple of minutes, run them under cold water, slip off the skins and toast them in a dry pan or 350 degree oven until the color you want them.  I actually was going to make the recipe from Modernizing French-Style Pot Roast for Cath, Jodie and the kids.  Even though they cut the recipe down from two days to four hours, I relented.  Sounds pretty good, though.  You can buy chuck-eye roast and then all you need is a bottle of good wine (I'd suggest Guigal Côtes-du-Rhône, about $10 if you look around), which is reduced before adding to the pot.  The meat is brined with an hour's worth of kosher salt rub, and then cooked in a dutch oven.  Along the way you add frozen pearl onions, fresh parsley, 4 ounces of bacon, garlic and onion, carrots and mushrooms.  One interesting ingredient is a Big T of powdered gelatin, which replaces the traditional pork trotters and lardons (this is derived from a 17th century recipe).  The results of Improving Mashed Potatoes and Root Vegetables would be perfect with pot roast.  They suggest doing everything possible to reduce the starch which turns most mashed veggies to glue, including cutting the potatoes into thin slices and running under cold water.  Mashed Potatoes and Root Vegetables with Paprika and Thyme sounded particularly good.  The potatoes are Yukon Gold if you can get them.  The root vegetables are carrots, parsnips and celery.  Saute the root vegetables, add the cooked well-rinsed potatoes and gently mash, then folding in a quarter-cup of half-and-half, third-cup of chicken stock, chopped parsley, and paprika that you have toasted for a few minutes in a dry hot pan.  There seem to be quite a number of other holiday-oriented recipes, which seems odd for this early in the season:  Holiday Ham 101 (Cook's Spiral Sliced Hickory Smoked Bone-In Ham is there clear favorite), and Easy Roast Turkey Breast (brine, of course).  I wasn't that interested in Beef and Vegetable Stir-Fries.  Ditto, Stocking a Baking Pantry, The Best Drop Biscuits, and Foolproof Pie Dough, since I don't bake worth a damn and probably never will.  Seeking Pear Salad Perfection was pretty good, including pan-roasted and caramelized pears , some shallots, balsamic vinegar, green leaf lettuce, watercress, Parmesan, and pecans (how could that not be good?).  The turkey analysis ended up suggesting that you pay just $1.99 for Rubashkins' Aaron's Best or Butterball if you can find it, instead of the gourmet turkeys at $8 a pound and up. 

See you tomorrow.

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I was chatting with a buddy of mine in a noted MFA program the other day.  We were discussing the pursuit of first-book publishers, the inevitable schmooz factor, a couple of young poets in particular, and the merits of their work.  I picked up one of these poets' books and was reacquainted with the chatty work, replete with low-grade surrealism, purposely faulty remembrance, and strategically placed cameos – plus a back cover covered with killer blurbs by major poets.  It occurred to me that I've read a lot of this kind of thing lately and that I'm getting tired of writing long notes in the margin.  I've begun a new taxonomy that lets me express my opinion in efficient abbreviated form:  GPP (Glib Pseudo Profundity), DE (Diary Entry), PR (Pointless Recollection), WARC (Whimsical Anecdote with Redemptive Close), ASC (Allusions Surrounded by Clutter).  I'll probably be adding to the list.

Speaking of disparate schools of aesthetic expression, I wish I could find the poetry categorization done by (I think) Charles Harper Webb.  I think it was in either APR or the journal of the AWP, but it was hilarious and brilliant.  Hah, God Bless Google, I found it using "whimsy poetry charles harper webb" and I was wrong, it was a list of properties of a poem:  flash and flair, mystery, seriousness, figurative language, moral uplift.  That kind of thing.  You would have to aggregate these into groupings to get a taxonomy that included "elliptical verse", "high modern narrative", and the ilk, I suppose.  As far as I remember, Charles doesn't get down to the level of detail that would describe my strategy in having images slam into each other to create a new dialectic.  Nor does he have a category for the obsessive attention to extended metaphor detail in Spin. 

Like that word you never knew but heard last week and now hear it three times every day, I'm seeing Ange Mlinko (of the beautiful name) everywhere.  She reviews an octet of books in this month's Poetry.  She also is a contributing blogger on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet.  The latter is an interesting forum for disparate notions about poetry and includes Stephen Burt, Christian Bök, Rigoberto González, and A.E. Stallings (my favorite formalist).  I've already spotted blogmates Henry and Simon in the comment section. 

Unlike last time, I wasn't a finalist in the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson Award.  Granted there were 1,600 entrants, but we were all old guys without published books, so I think I should have done better.

For lack of anything better to do than the long list of things I should have done months ago, I've been reading about Irreducible Complexity, the latest nugget of junk science adopted by the Intelligent Design folks (and other right-wingers and Creationists).  The only reason anybody is even discussing this notion is that it was resuscitated by a (presumably devout) biochemist who is actually a real scientist and should know better (Michael Behe).  The argument goes that there are some things (like a mousetrap, the eye, and E. coli's flagellum) that are composed of parts that, in and of themselves, aren't useful.  Thus, evolution couldn't have crept up on the invention of the flagellum (for example), as no intermediate stage of development was useful from an evolutionary standpoint.  The problem with the Irreducible Complexity argument is that it is fundamentally flawed in the general case, and factually incorrect in the specifics.  More on that here.

I've also been pondering what it means that supermassive blackholes have a mass of 2 billion suns.  If the earth had that kind of mass, you would weigh about 6 x 10¹⁴  times what you do now, or say about 80 quadrillion pounds.  If my math is right, that's the weight of 40 million Twin Towers.  Of course, if the Earth had that kind of mass the event horizon would be way out at the edge of the solar system, so you couldn't actually stand on it (assuming you could do so before it collapsed into a black hole, and you'd have to be quick).  Anyway, that got me to thinking:  why isn't the universe all black holes, dark energy and dark matter now?  All those black holes (and there's one in almost every galaxy, and maybe even some bachelor singularities out there) had 13+ billion years to gobble up everything we see when we look up at night, and plenty of gravitational attraction to do it with. And what's really depressing is that it's a one-way trip – black holes don't get tired of being black holes and give it all back at the happy conclusion of the movie (well, Hawking says they do leak out a little, but it take a really long time for that to happen).  I did some spreadsheeting and it became apparent pretty quickly that even with unthinkable gravitational attraction, the mutual gravitational effect of a supermassive black hole on a star as little as one light-year away is pretty minimal.  Considering that the Milky Way (for example) is a 100,000 light-years across, I suppose it will take some time to accelerate all those stars inward toward their doom.  As you may have suspected, this is all a veiled attempt to get Simon to leave corrections in the comment box.

Junie and I have been talking about the courage of the Burmese monks all this week.  Yesterday, she asked to no one in particular:  "Goodness, the number of monk protesters grows every day.  I wonder how many there are?"  It turns out that Slate knows the answer, which is something short of half a million.  Being a monk in Burma (no, I won't call it by the M name) appears to be a male right of passage, or perhaps akin to joining the Peace Corps, or doing your stint in the Israeli army.

Kelli decides to quit writing.  It takes a lot of courage to quit writing.  I never stopped writing poetry for example, I just stopped writing poetry.  Oh, and started this damnable blog.  I stopped doing my PhD dissertation once.  It was perhaps the most liberating moment of my life.  The ungodly weight was off my shoulders and I could get on with my life.  Of course, my parents, siblings, and close friends eventually convinced me that I was crazy, and I positioned my nose in the vicinity of the grindstone shortly thereafter. 

I don't suppose they read this blog, so it's probably OK to mention that I have a chapbook in a competition for which I've been told I'm a finalist.  I'm tickled by that, as it's basically the whimsical story of Junie and me over the past near-decade.  Boy, does this sucker have narrative arc.  I'd buy 50 copies of it just to give away, but I can't tell them that, as it would be unseemly.

I suppose tomorrow I'll get off my duff and give you the rundown on the new Poetry and Notre Dame Review.  MJB happens to be in both of them, so it's a pleasure. 

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Well, I was going to be back yesterday, but Qwest had other plans and my DSL line is down.  I'm hoping it will be back tomorrow.

~~~

Jimmy is at it again, making me laugh at the expense of BAP poems.  He's already annotated some of the same eye-rolling contributions that I had critiqued in the margin of the paperback.  So, what makes me think that this is the best BAP in a decade (which somehow reminds me of "the youngest seeker in a century")?  I'll tell you later.  First, let's do the numbers:

BAP Overview

Every year, David Lehman collaborates with a guest editor to produce what is arguably the best-known anthology in poetry (by which I mean, you don't find Norton in airport bookstores).  This year's guest editor is the mercurial Heather McHugh, the 20th editor of the series.  To give you some perspective, here's the stats on prior BAP issues:

The designation "Number of Poems" isn't 75 for all years, because some poets apparently refused to give their ages (almost all women, I might add). 

Ms. McHugh is about the age of most BAP editors (with noticable exceptions of Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley).  The average and median ages of the poets included is in the low 50's, which is also increasingly typical. 

The Journals

There's a somewhat larger-than-normal clustering of journal contributions, and the journals from which the most poems were chosen aren't usually this high on the list.  APR was the original publishing journal of 5 of the poems (which is a bit above their historical average), but Barrow Street, Sentence, POOL and Beloit Poetry Journal had 4 contributions each – a far greater number than they've ever had.  AQR and Crazyhorse each had three poems in this issue (and a total of 2 in the prior 19 years).

Equally atypical is the number of journals that usually rank high in contributions, but ranked low in 2007.  This includes New Yorker (who have had 7 contributions 5 times, but only 1 this year), Poetry (also only 1), Threepenny Review (who have missed being included in the last 3 BAPs), and Boston Review (also batting zero for the last 2 years).

The top "contributing" journals are shown below.  Antioch Review, Atlanta Review, BOMB, Bookforum, Conduit, Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Field, Five Points, Gulf Coast, Hanging Loose, Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, New Criterion, New England Review, New Letters, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Poetry, Raritan, Rattle, Sacramento News & Review, Southwest Review, Subtropics, Tarpaulin Sky, the tiny, Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Vocabula Review each contributed one poem to the total.

Among the relative newcomers, POOL, Sentence and American Poet have made the largest gains in their BAP count. 

The Poets

There are, of course, 75 poems in BAP 2007 as there always are.  What's odd about this BAP is that McHugh has chosen to include two poems by each of three poets: Linh Dinh, Susan Paar, and Robert Pinsky.  The poets in BAP 2007 that have been featured in prior BAPs include:

Of the "Old BAP Standbys", this year we're missing John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Tate, John Koethe, Amy Gerstler, and David Wagoner.  Ashbery, however, still leads the field with 14 appearances, followed by Hall, Simic, Pinsky, Tate, Collins and Wilbur.

Poets in BAP for the first time included Kazim Ali, Jeannette Allee, Nicky Beer, Christian Bok, Louis Bourgeois, Geoffrey Brock, Matthew Byrne, Macgregor Card, Julie Carr, Michael Collier, Mike Dockins, Sharon Dolin, Landis Everson, Thomas Fink, Helen Forman, Daniel Johnson, Richard Kenney, Milton Kessler, Brad Leithauser, Ben Lerner, Joanie Mackowski, Amit Majmudar, Sabrina Orah Mark, Campbell McGrath, Leslie Miller, Ed Ochester, Meghan O'Rourke, Gregory Orr, Chad Parmenter, Susan Parr, Peter Pereira, David Rivard, Marya Rosenberg, Natasha Saje, David Shumate, Carmine Starnino, Brian Turner, Cody Walker, Kary Wayson, Joe Wenderoth, George Witte, Theodore Worozbyt, and Harriet Zinnes.

Metrics

Exactly one-third of the poets in BAP 2007 are women, which is about what has been for a few years.  The age distribution is also fairly typical, with the largest number of BAP contributors in their early 50's:

BAP Facts

Poets who were in the first BAP (1988) and BAP 2007:  Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, Richard Wilbur, Robert Creeley, Robert Hass, and Rae Armantrout.

Journals that contributed to the first BAP and BAP 2007:  New Yorker, Poetry, APR, New American Writing, and Verse.

BAP journal with the longest name: Princeton University Library Chronicle.

BAP contributor with the largest number of appearances who has not been a guest editor:  Richard Wilbur (10 appearances).

BAP journal with the shortest name: No.

BAP journals with a number in their name:  88, 26, 32 Poems, 3d Bed.

Youngest and Oldest BAP contributor at the time:  Deborah Stein (19) and Carl Rakosi (101).

BAP journals with the most humorous names:  Van Gogh's Ear, Stud Duck, Sal Mimeo, Pressed Wafer, Iodine Poetry Review, Heavy Daughter Blues, Figdust, Croonenbergh's Fly, No Roses Review, O.blek.

The distribution of contributing journals has changed over the years (in 1990, the largest contributor was in fact poet's books, not journals at all).  In the early years, the journals with significant contributions included Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, New American Writing, Grand Street, Sulfur, and Boulevard.  The journals with the most BAP selections since 2000 include:

The Work

OK, so why do I think this is the best BAP in a decade?  Mainly because I like the whimsical nature of much of the work.  I've always considered McHugh a somewhat quirky poet (and I mean that in a good way), and the selections seem to reflect her aesthetic.  Even the old-timers, from whom we've come to expect long, muted poems seem to have representative works that are shorter and stranger.  The poems by Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Elaine Equi, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell, Robert Pinsky, Richard Wilbur, and even Albert Goldbarth (!) run about a page, sometimes less.  Even with the poems that I didn't care for, no one sounded like a parody of themselves.  Here are a few among the ones I especially liked::

Jeannette Allée, Crimble of Staines:  "You're back in motherbickered / England dumb with brick / & viper typists."

Mary Jo Bang (natch), The Opening:  "Feels warm. There may have been an arson. / Mistakenly Released Suspect Still Missing"

Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary:  "Moon, refrigerate the weeping child / and guard his frozen brook."

Matthea Harvey, From "The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future" Series:  "From the gable of the window, we shot / at what was left:  gargoyles and garden gnomes."

Daniel Johnson, Do Unto Others:  "How many rocks would I stack / on my brother's chest?  A rock / for his beauty, a rock for his trust,"

Joanie Mackowski, When I was a dinosaur:  I was a stegosaurus, a.k.a. "armed roof lizard", with seventeen / headstones growing from my spine. ..."

Amit Majmudar, By Accident:  "Your friend may want to start running. / I gave his scent to the hounds by accident."

Carmine Starnino, Money:  "Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes / like still-cooling splatters of silver.  Stater and shekel, / mina and obol.  Persia's bullion had a lion and bull."

Kary Wayson, Flu Song in Spanish:  "God of the bees, god of gold keys, god of all in- / famous noses, I folded our total"

There is also fine work by our blogmates Peter Pereira, Danielle Pafunda, and Sabrina Orah Mark.

What's Online

The complete list of contributors to the last 20 years of BAP is available here.  The rankings of journals by year are available here.

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Rumors of my demise are exaggerated.  I have actually been working pretty much 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and only noticed that my blog had gone dark when my son mentioned it.  It's been that long, I thought.  Needless to say, the mail and news has been piling up like garbage bags during a New York strike.  First, the silly ones:  Dean & Deluca showed up with their usual goodies, quickly followed by a catalog from Mackenzie Limited, an apparent competitor.  Mackenzie seems to have pretty much everything D&D does (no wine, though).  The Tsar's Cut of smoked salmon runs $60 a pound, and there are a dozen other salmon offerings from around the world to be had, all about the same price range.  Caviar samplers, natch, and a variety of mini and full-sized comfort food offerings, such as escargot en brioche, crab artichoke dip, olives in puffed pastry, mini crab Wellingtons, Mediterranean purses (phyllo dough stuffed with Med goodies), 72-layer biscuits, Lobster Newburg, sweet potato casserole, and even mac and cheese.  How much?  Well, the mac and cheese runs $35 for two servings, so you can figure what the rest are running. 

Next up is The Bounty Hunter, which is a ridiculous premise:  this guy goes around Napa and finds great wine and puts out a nice catalog about his finds, as if you couldn't find this wine anywhere on the Internet.  If I had the money, my pick would be the Gaja (pronounced gie-ya) '99 Conteisa at $225 a bottle, but unless you're paying, I'll pass.

I'm also stacked up with issues of Time, one of which has the rather ambitious General Petraeus who recently mentioned privately to aides that he wouldn't be running for president until 2012.  One issue showcases The Case for National Service, which would be fine for me, since I'm too old for that nonsense anyway.  Taking the prize for stupidest Time cover in recent memory is the issue with The Running Mates on a faux commemorative dish, including of course the smiling face of Prez Bill.  The most entertaining article is 10 Questions for Fitty Cents, who answers them with his usual hubris.

APR's issue is at least partially dedicated to elegy.  Bob Hicok has some subdued and excellent poems about his experience at Virginia Tech.  Robert Hass is on the cover (and inside as well with some poems).  I have only seen him once, at the Napa Valley writing thing I was at, at the side of his wife Brenda Hillman.  They also have a lot to do with the Squaw Valley workshop, as I recall, and I recently saw that they're organizing a workshop in Africa during the winter (ours, not theirs). 

I received a new copy of ZYZZYVA from Howard, and love reading all the Bay Area ads and news.  The writing is quite good, as one would expect, but there's a sassy sense to ZYZZYVA that makes you want to turn pages. 

Harper's has a terrific article on Disaster Capitalism that spells out why much of Corporate America is rooting for more Katrinas, 9/11's and war in general.  In short, there's big money in tragedy now that the government is outsourcing every imaginable job at rates 3 to 10 times higher than it would cost if we just hired (or re-hired) Federal employees.  The best of the Harper's Index:  US immigration to Canada is up 46% in the past 3 years;  GW Bush now matches the record disapproval ratings of Truman and Nixon;  chance that a Global 2500 CEO was forced out in 1995 and this year:  1 in 8, 1 in 3;  number of cattle that Fidelity Investments keep on their Fort Worth campus to avoid $328,000 in taxes through agricultural exemption:  25;  number of poetry book sales per week it takes to be on Poetry Foundations best-seller list:  50;  number of escort services and MacDonald's in DC:  26 and 25, respectively;  percentage increase in the amount of food you will eat if you accompany 1 other, 4 other or 7 other persons to dinner:  +35%, +75%, +96%.

Of course, the new BAP is out and I'm slowing plugging the names and numbers into my Massive Best American Poetry Database.  I'll be back this week with the stats, but a word about the work:  I think it's my favorite BAP of the past decade, maybe two.  First off, MJB is in there, always a good sign (BTW, she's in a Notre Dame Review that came in but more about that later), and Heather McHugh has put together a great collection of poems in which even the Old Guard seems to be brief and quirky.

More tomorrow.

No, really.

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I spent all day working on a Linux driver for touchscreen monitors.  I know, that is impossibly sexy and now you want my number or at least my instant messaging details.

~~~

I've been receiving The Camera, the newspaper representing the People's Republic of Boulder, for a couple of months now.  A nice young lady called up some time ago and asked me if I wanted to receive it regularly, and I thought what the heck, I need something to read on morning breaks.  She asked my permission to bill my AMEX $1.67 a month, which I thought had to be a joke.  That's about one half of a skinny, no-foam, extra-hot latte, and I end up with enough newsprint to paper the bottom of the birdcage, if I had a bird, which I don't.  You don't expect a lot from The Camera except liberal editorial, decent comics, and interesting local news.  For example, Pete Sheinbaum's yellow Lab was attacked by a mountain lion on Friday, which the latter called off after Pete waved his arms at the 150-pound cat and yelled a lot.  This actually happens a lot to people who live in the foothills, and every 5 years a human gets attacked and sometimes killed.  I guess the theory is they were here first, which goes down pretty smoothly with Boulderites, who tend to have sympathies with the indigenous.  In other news, Maxine Mager, the young lady who runs Creative Acres, is trying to raise money to keep the banks from foreclosing on her animal sanctuary.  Said sanctuary is 40 miles northeast of Denver and is home to 300-odd "cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, peacocks, turkeys, gees, ferrets, hedge hogs, guinea pigs and one iguana".  Everyone loves Maxine, even Washington Mutual, who is the Simon Legree in this story, and another local bank is soliciting customers for donations.  The Business News informs us that local Level 3 CEO James Q. Crowe's tumor is benign.  I remember when the Level 3 folks moved into town to open their headquarters in Broomfield.  This was during the dot-com boom and they were all zillionaires and wanted megahouses built on the prairie right now thank you.  Now, of course, there are LOTS of megahouses on the prairie starting at $2 million but you get 7,000 square feet of living space, a master bedroom suite bigger than most Manhattan apartments, Italian marble throughout the gourmet kitchen and hardwood floors made of some exotic tropical wood that will soon be extinct.  How do I know this?  Because I had dinner with my old buddy Jerry, a long-suffering upscale real estate agent who lists these properties all the time.  Another article discusses the slow decline in land mine casualties and the efforts taken to find them.  This includes a novel Danish plant, the Thale cress, which turns red when it grows near mines, and Columbian researchers who have trained rats to freeze when they encounter them (the rats aren't heavy enough to set them off).  Kate Becker has an entire article devoted to "Uranus" and how it's the best-ever viewing season (I can't believe that somebody didn't mention this in Abraham Lincoln), avoiding every puerile insinuation imaginable and ending on "New moons for Uranus?  Why, the jokes practically write themselves". 

~~~

I somehow missed out knowing that Jim is famous.  I was cruising Wonkette and came across an ad for Gawker that looked weirdly familiar.

~~

I haven't received a Williams-Sonoma catalog in some years, but one showed up today.  It was inevitable, given that I get Cook's Illustrated and everyone shops around their mailing lists.  I've always liked the somewhat pricey merchandise in WM, but I have to admit the big draw is their outstanding recipes.  This issue revolves around Liguria, the rocky coastal Italian provinces that border France.  WM has some killerbee recipes including Pesto with Trofiette, here's the deal:  Boil a half-pound of Yellow Yukon potatoes cut into circles until tender and set aside.   Now put two bunches of basil, 1/4 cup of pine nuts, two garlic cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a mortar and pestle it up (I would just use a food procesor).  Add 1/4 cup of Parmigiano-Reggianno (any good cheese of this ilk will do) and keep grinding.  Put in a bowl and swirl in 1/4 cup of olive oil.  You now have your pesto.  Cook trofiette pasta (which is basically impossible to find, so use bowties or small penne) and during the last 3 minutes of cooking add 1/2 pound of  haricots verts (which are those ridiculously skinny beautiful green beans that I only find at Whole Foods, and I suspect that decent Reglar Merican green beans will do in a pinch).  Grab a large bowl and toss everything together, adding 1/4 cup of the pasta cooking water.  They also have an enticing recipe for Veal and Artichoke Involtini, but I keep thinking about the tortured eyes of all those penned lamblings.  Nice recipe for Frito Misto which I first experienced in Venice.  Basically, you take a pound of halibut and a pound of "baby calamari" (which is cook-talk for squid taken before they really got to experience life) and cube the halibut and make rings out of the helpless squid and dip them in buttermilk and flour them and dip them into hot oil for a couple of minutes.  WM has yet another excellent recipe for Frittata with Zuchinni and Goat Cheese, but I'm already too hungry from all this and I'm off to cook something.  The frittata is similar to the Spanish omelet they serve in bars for tapas, but more elaborate (fresh oregano and Italian parsley, goat cheese for God's sake, and arugula for trimmings) as you might expect of an Italian.

More tomorrow.  I need to go watch Starship Troopers again.

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