WhimsyLand

The newly svelte and good-looking Jonathan has posted (A) a skeletal recipe for caldo gallego (hooray for culinary poets!) and (B) a writing exercise.  Here's my take:

In egg-shaped endlessness,
Snow, egregious salt,
He lost his elegy.

The color white. He walks
Over a  carpet made
elk bones.

Without eyes or thumbs
He suffers to see with elbows
But the aspen quiver

In the egg-white endlessness
How erratic a wound
His entropy left.

Snow, still-born salt, eyeless
In the egg shell endlessness

~~~

Ron says Rockies gonna lose.  Oh, yeah?  You don't frighten us, East Coast pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!  I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper!

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I find the whole outing of Dumbledore to be completely ridiculous.  In almost a decade of reading HP, reviews of HP, fan fiction of HP and general chitchat about HP, I've never heard anyone once suggest that they thought the headmaster was gay.  So why is gay now?  Because Jo says he is?  If she wanted Dumbledore to be gay, why didn't she just come out and say so somewhere in the last 4,000 pages of HP?  What better venue than an English public school?

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Joseph thinks that James Wright's A Blessing is pretty awful and I have to agree.  Of course, I don't care for Franz, either.  Or early work by C. D. Wright.  For that matter, I've never thought much of the Wright Brothers.

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My parents live in Ranch Bernardo, one of the San Diego County areas that is threatened by fire.  As it turns out, my parents had already evacuated for a month vacation in Hawaii.  When I spoke with them they said that, worst comes to worst, they'll take the insurance money and move to Kauai. 

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"Cruise lines are hiring older men to foxtrot with their lady patrons".  Hmm, I may have found my post-retirement job.

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I was browsing through Amazon and noted that Tennis Court Oath had only two reader reviews.  The last two Mary Oliver books had dozens.  Some of the fiction best sellers had hundreds.  Imagine!  More Amazon reader reviews than the total print run of some poetry books.

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From Poets & Writers:  Andrew Furman discusses killing off your protagonist.  The new site slushpilereader.com cuts out the middleman and lets subscribers read the first 50 pages of submitted manuscripts;  the most popular are published by Slush Pile Reader Press.  Virginia Quarterly Review will publish a poetry books series composed of books solicited from poets who contribute to VQR.  Literary MagNet discusses the "x factor", the percentage of submissions that are dreadful.  Travis Nichols does a nice job reviewing the life and work of John Ashbery, noting that his self-referential injections remind him of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The cover article is on Affa Michael Weaver, whom Major Jackson has bemoaned suffers from "near anonymity".  Interesting article on physicist-turned-novelist Alan Lightman (whom, I admit, I've never heard of).  The Poetry of Beginning showcases a dozen poets with first books, including Nathaniel Bellows, Roger Bonair-Agard, Albert Flynn DeSilver, Aracelis Girmay,  Alena Hairston, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph Legaspi, Eireann Lorsung, Chris Martin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Elizabeth Reddin, and Steve Willard.  I remember Albert Flynn DeSilver, as my constant moaning about his verse in Mary Jo Bang's workshop is what forced her to threaten to have me sit in the corner.  The Great MFA Debate includes Joshua Henkin In Defense of MFA Programs (which seems vaguely Perry Masonish), Rachelle Spenser's Growing Diversity in Graduate School, and Kelly Ferguson's Confessions of a Teaching Assistant.  Ferguson isn't particularly harsh and Henkin currently teaches in Sarah Lawrence's CW program, so the effect seems rather skewed toward a positive spin.  There are a few more fiction-oriented articles, blah, blah, blah.  Matt Marinovich writes (rather humorously) about his search for blurbs.  Pages and pages of awards, grants, contests, and winners as usual.