WhimsyLand

I've decided to post in pieces today, following the last post with whatever strikes my fancy.

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I have decided to start up a literary journal, The Futility Review.  It will displace The Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker on my difficulty rankings with the only score of 10.  This is because it will be perfectly difficult:  we will reject everyone.  I will start by placing ads in Poets & Writers and APR, and a listing in Poet's Market.  We will be looking for "your best work" and even if you send it, it will be rejected.  Our solicitation strategy will be to send gracious letters of encouragement to fresh up-and-coming talent, and then tell them that what they have sent us wasn't up to the standards of their first book.  From there we will move to established poets, rejecting them out of hand when their solicited work arrives.  We will shoot down Hicok, Armantrout, Swensen, Pinsky.  This will continue until we have rejected Glück, Graham, Walcott, and Heaney.  We will take out even larger ads announcing our poetry prize and first book award.  There will be no entry fee.  The poetry prize winners will receive $5,000 and a featured place in our first issue.  The book award winners will receive $25,000 and a stipend to travel to Colorado to read at The Tattered Cover.  Like Auden's famed Yale Youngers, no one will win, not even Ashbery.  We will hold non-readings by non-contributors in salons all over the country serving excellent appetizers and the best wine, and negotiate swap ads with the finest magazines.  Decades will go by and we will never print an issue.  We will be the most famous literary journal in history.

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I know a lot of poets and blogmates live in the Chicago area.  If you get a chance, check out the Down and Dirty Blues Band.  My son is a guitarist in the band, and they are really good.  Check out their MySpace page here and listen to some of their music.  You'll also find a list of their upcoming venues.

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And in local news:  Robert McCorkle of nearby Coal Creek Canyon has asked a judge to remove the protective order that prevented his wife from visiting him.  The order was applied shortly after she shot him with a 357 Magnum.  Apparently, she was trying to shoot him in the leg, but got him in the stomach.  Robert says that they want to work on their relationship, and that "there's no threat of April gunning me down" again.

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I can't really think of a technology less exciting than developing BIOSes.  We do a lot of that ourselves for embedded systems, of course, but the big boys are Phoenix and AMI/Award.  The BIOS is that bit of firmware that spits out the first unintelligible lines on your screen just before you see the Windows logo (assuming that you don't have a Mac, and they have a BIOS, too).  Anyway, it turns out that Phoenix hosts their own conference, and I got an invitation as part of their developer network.  Now, you might wonder who could possibly get excited about a BIOS, or why you would want to attend such a mini-convention.  Well, one reason might be that various CTO's of major CPU and PC firms will be speaking (nah).  Also, it's held at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay (over the mountain from Silicon Valley) and includes golfing, receptions, and dinners (yeah!).  For only $7,500 you can attend and show off your Phoenix-powered product at a pre-assigned "demo station" that includes electricity, (1) stool, and (1) wastebasket.  For $8-10,000 you can sponsor a cocktail reception, breakfast or lunch.  For $30,000 you enter the Gold Sponsor Level and can sponsor the Phoenix Golf Classic Tournament.  For only $50,000 you can buy yourself into becoming a keynote speaker, going on and on about your Phoenix-powered product while everyone eats a dinner that some poor other guy paid for.  Other promotional possibilities are funding promotional golf shirts to go around ($20,000) or a conference bag ($10,000).  All in all, they're expecting a couple of hundred people to show up.  I think AWP should start running things this way (but, of course, cheaper).  For $175, you can host cheese and crackers in specially set-aside hotel rooms.  $1,500 lets you pick the topic for your AWP panel discussion.  $775 and you get do an official reading.  $8,500 and the keynote speakership is yours.  We just need to get a little more capitalism into the PoBiz.  Take that, Jonathan!