WhimsyLand

Well, hell, you have to blog at some point.   Might as well be now. 

Christmas was pretty terrific, including my sons and Cath and Cath's guy and Ky's gal.  We were missing Junie but you can't have everything.  The trade was respectable and equitable among our inner circle.  Gifts from outside our little circle tended to reduce the get-to-give ratio substantially, however.  Not to name names, but one of the siblings to whom I directed a Balinese drum sent me a ball cap and coffee mug.  Verizon was running a phone special if you re-upped for 2 years, which I was going to do anyway.  Junie and I got new phones that were the equivalent of sensible shoes, if you ever read any English murder mysteries.  The boys got these ridiculously cool Samsung Jukes with cameras and MP3 players and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to receive instructions from the owner telepathically.  The Jukes are slim and elegant and fold open like a high-tech jackknife.  If you own one of these, you have to grow a small ponytail and answer "Talk to me" like some famous director.  Cath got me an immersion blender, which I badly wanted.  Of course, so did Junie, but I knew what Cath was up to from the Sons' Intelligence Network so I ungifted and regifted the first immersion blender back to Junie and it was all good again.  I got Cath a selection of Spanish culinary things from www.latienda.com, which actually has absolutely everything I've ever eaten in Spain except perhaps fresh seafood.  The pièce de résistance of the Spanish collection was a quarter leg of Jamon Serrano, which is the wondrous cured pork product that I have as the first course any time I'm in Spain.  For 50 years, the Other White Meat lobby managed to keep it out of the country, and for that matter, prosciutto too.  Not that that kept John, the president of the US foundry, from importing it when we had copper processing operations in Bilbao (see a former post on how he smuggled Bordeaux in under 100 tons of slag).  John would just order one of the returning Americans to purchase an entire leg of ham from El Corte Ingles and pack it in a suitcase surrounded by green coffee beans.  I guess he figured if you can smuggle dope in that way, why not ham?  It worked, actually, and for good measure John would tell them to put a couple of dozen Cuban cigars in the suitcase right next to the ham.  As far as I know nobody went to jail until the EPA indicted the top 15 people at the Illinois plant that John owned, but that was for creating a 10 mile-wide plume of heavy metals beneath the plant illegally over the course of 15 years.  John of course got off without even an slap on the wrist, as he had bribed all the proper Illinois judges and contributed heavily to both sides of the state reps and senators.

But, I digress.  Christmas was, as I said, pretty wonderful and a break from the insane work that has occupied my time of late.  The good part is the work on Many Mountains Moving.  Malinda is the managing editor of Number 18 and doing a bang-up job.  My support role at this point is proofing the copy coming back from the person who pours Word docs into InDesign.  I also write the scripts that manage the email traffic to our contributors, so that they get galley proofs and their responses (contact information, desired correction, that kind of thing) get back to Malinda and her crew (Jeannine, if you're listening in, you're next up for galleys).  The somewhat-less-than-good part has been all the work I've been doing on SlowDown.  This is the algorithm that stretches out audio books.  I have been close for 8 weeks now and the bad news is that I promised to do this in 2 man-weeks, which is all I'll get paid for.  I actually don't consider it a project now, I think of it as a hobby.  I know way more than I ever wanted to know about PSOLA, WSOLA, attack, pitch detection and the like.  I've read the technical papers of everyone who's anyone, actually spending $100 in fees to obtain back presentations and US patent filings.  I'm close, but then, I've been close for a month.  This is really getting irritating.

On another front, I've almost completed the second of two poetry book reviews for A Major Literary Journal.  The first review was terrible and wonderful and very difficult to write, mainly due to the unusually somber subject of the work.  The second review is going a lot more easily because I like the work and I like the poet.  My biggest problem is that (of course) I've read all the blurbs and the few reviews that are extant.  Every one of them shoehorn the book into some Grand Theme and deduce what must be the narrative arc.  Hello!  What if there is no narrative arc, I'm thinking.  What if it's just a great collection of poetry, like the old days when we didn't have to write 60 poems keeping in mind that the only way they would get published was if someone could find the Grand Unifying Theme in all those poems about came to mind in the fertile imagination of the poet over the course of a year or two?   I'm probably sensitive about this because the lack of a narrative arc is the usual complaint about my manuscript, which is after all, just a collection of poems I wrote over a number of year about whatever struck my fancy.  And I'm a guy who gets bored easily and changes the topic frequently and likes to experiment and so you can imagine the challenge in making up a manuscript from poems published in a wide variety of litmags on a wide range of topics.

Oh, heck, it's not that important.  Next Wednesday, Der and I will be driving to Linda and Roy's ranchette for this big post-Christmas Christmas where my siblings and my parents and the Little Brown Babies will be in attendance.  My dad called last night to say he wanted to pay for a "big SUV with all-wheel-drive and lots of metal around you to protect my progeny" or something so who am I to complain?  I rented it today.  We'll be seeing Der's roommate Max in Las Vegas and maybe staying overnight with his parent and maybe not.  Max is a nature buff and suggested that while we are in Las Vegas (which is the most outrageous place on the planet and should be in the top 5 on everyone's list of places to visit before they die) we should see the desert or go rock climbing.  Omigod.  You have to be kidding me.  There are frigging rocks and deserts damned near everywhere, but there is only one Las Vegas and Der is going to see the shrunk down Paris and New York and Venice and the Luxor and the lights and the size of the gambling area at the Hilton and all the unbelievable wonderment of Sin City.  Then, we travel to SLO by mostly Blue Roads (if you ever read that book by William Least Heat Moon, which I thought was the strangest combination of Native American and physicist monikers I'd ever encountered), and land at Casa Rawlings.  On the way back, Der is going to spend a day and a night in San Francisco while I visit client in The Valley.  I've suggested the usual:  Chinatown, City Lights, North Beach, oh you know. 

I hope you all had pleasant holidays and continue to do so.  I'm having dinner with Dima and Tanya tomorrow night, which is always a pleasant surprise from a culinary standpoint.

Be good.