WhimsyLand

You know, all saucers of bite-sized food are not tapas.  A slice of Polish sausage, even if it has been drizzled with Balsamic vinegar, is not tapas.  A mini-slice of pizza, even if its topping is fresh basil and mozzarella, is not tapas.  So when Cook's Illustrated posts an article called Multinational Tapas Menu, they're only two-thirds right.  I mean, come on, peanut dipping sauce?  Tapas includes marinated octopus chunks and omelet wedges and mixed olives and chickpea-sausage stew and garlic potatoes and Spanish ham and giant white asparagus and grilled shrimp and bleached anchovies in vinegar and toasted almonds and I'll even give you calamari, OK?  But, it does not include sushi or anything with liverwurst in it or smoked salmon, and stuffed grape leaves aren't "Greek tapas".  And it especially does not include chicken wings, ever, anywhere, not matter how they are prepared.  That's what The Med had on the menu as Pollo Con Limon y Ajillo as tapas.  They were delicious, but that's not the point.

~~~

Junie and I walked off our early dinner at The Med by traversing the new 29th Street Mall, which replaced the old conventional indoor mall that used to sit in the heart of East Boulder until they shut it down and then tore it down over a long sad couple of years.  The new mall is an outdoor mall, which seems a bit odd in a weather-iffy place like Boulder.  It has an Apple Store and a Panera's and a Coldwater Canyon and lots of lower-mid-range restaurants (think Rumbi's Island Grill) and plenty of stores like Anthropologie where you can buy Fisherman Dungarees for $188 if you could fit into them, and I assure you unless you have just arrived back from the Bataan Death March, you won't.  Also a multi-story Border's where I bought a huge paperback edition of Lord of the Rings (having noted with some surprise that I didn't own one) and a sale-table book called The Book of Classic Insults.  The latter was filled with good stuff.  The Writers and Books section has:

"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."  − Charles Darwin

"Jonathan Swift was a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind, ..." − William Thackeray

"Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel organ is to music" − William Thackeray

"Shelley should not be read, but inhaled through a gas pipe" − Lionel Trilling

"This awful Whitman.  This post-mortem poet . . . with the private soul leaking out of him all the time." − Lionel Trilling

"[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." − Virginia Wolff

"[Henry James was] one of the nicest old ladies I ever met." − William Faulkner

"Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water."  − Alexander Woollcott

"[Dylan Thomas was] an outstandingly unpleasant man, one who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets."  − Kingsley Amis

"[George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralizing on the conditions in the handkerchief industry."  − Cyril Connolly

"[Hemingway had] a literary style of wearing false hair on the chest"  −  Max Eastman

"[Gertrude Stein] was a past master in making nothing happen very slowly"  −  Clifton Fadiman

"[Auden was] an engaging, bookish, American talent, too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving"   −  Philip Larken

"That's not writing, that's typing"   − Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

"It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in this dreadful little volume"   − John Hollander on Howl

"[Alexander Solzhenitsyn] is a bad novelist and a fool"   −  Gore Vidal

"[Writers are ] schmucks with Underwoods"   −  Jack Warner

"[Rod McKuen's] poetry is not even trash"   −  Karl Shapiro

"A sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine."   − Agatha Christie on Agatha Christie

~~~

I was reading someone from my Bloglines and they had a blogroll filled with people, some of whom I visited.  They were very funny.  They also linked to other people who were very funny.  It occurs to me that poets aren't very funny.  Well, Tricia is hilarious and Rebecca can leave me in stitches and Reb makes me laugh and CDY and his commenters are often quite humorous.  Robert Archambeau makes me smile at times.  OK, that's about it, I think (sorry if I left out someone humorous).  Ron is humorous about 5% of the time, but Josh Corey and Jonathan are dry as toast.  TT isn't funny and Reginald is definitely not funny.  Sometimes Joshua C is funny and also Kasey.  Tony is not very funny and Gabe used to make me laugh but not any more.  Simon can be witty, but that's not the same as funny.  I like my friend Seth, but he's not funny either.  We need to get Daisy Fried and Ron Padgett and Kay Ryan to start blogging.  They would be funny, I suspect.

~~~

I bought The Hat 7 and you should, too.  Not because it's funny, though it is in places.  There are lots of good poets in the issue, including people who would be on my blogroll if I had a blogroll.  Where Fence seems mostly gratuitously weird, The Hat seems invitingly strange, for example in Christopher DeWees's untitled poem:  "I was a barker for the dolphin show, / a huck I believed in enough / to hitch my throat national, / boxcars re-glassed as aquariums/ ...".  So where is The Hat funny in places?  Oman Day's My Nephew and His Baby:  "To watch my nephew Griffin / hold his baby Maisie / is to be awed / by the loving bond of father and dauther, / ..." // There's my letter.  Do you think / It will help him get joint custody?  There doesn't seem to be any kind of Over-Arching Aesthetic to The Hat (which is perhaps what you could say about Jordan's notable poem list, come to think of it).   There are some deliciously silly poems and some enticingly confused poems and even some lovely poems.  You don't see a lot of lovely poems anymore, except in journals that are filled with them, and then they tend to be lovely about the wrong things.  So who's in the issue?  Lots of people, but the ones I recognized immediately included Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Aaron Belz, Anne Boyer, Adam Clay, Wayne Koestenbaum, Reb Livingston, Jonathan Mayhew, Catherine Meng, Andrew Mister, Gina Myers, Kathleen Ossip, Ken Rumble, Zachary Schomburg, Peter Jay Shippy, Chris Vitiello, G.C. Waldrep, and Dara Wier. There are other fine poets in the issue, I just haven't made their virtual acquaintance.