WhimsyLand

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.