WhimsyLand

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. 

Posted by jbahr at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

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