Whimsy Speaks Again

Thanks to Matthew and Jilly for the IT support (answers to your questions in yesterday's comment box).

Also thanks to Hannah for pointing out I'm on Verse Daily today.  That's the first I heard about it.  I know it's not good form to explain a poem, and this one defies explanation anyway.  I was sitting on my deck when I noticed this giant swarm of bees that had wrapped themselves around one branch of a tree in the back yard.  I was listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station.  The last media-driven poem was when I was reading Lucie Brock-Broido in APR while some dumb Steven Segal movie was on the tube.  It resulted in this.

I didn't Google myself, but I did look for me in Technorati.  One of the first entries was:  "There was a dinner. It was a stately dinner. Powerful people dined, news folks wined, ... . I like Stewart’s quip in the video clip. “Say, Jeffrey Dahmer shows up to your Bahr-mitzvah and it turns out he is a really good dancer."

I'm sending more keyplug/dongle things to Alejandro tomorrow.  He's the European distributor of our ancient product that permits ancient software to run on Windows and Linux, and it's a product protected by Rainbow Sentinel USB keyplugs, as we call them.  I actually got a call from a customer's customer this morning, which isn't all that unusual.   Joe bought an accounting system for his fire extinguisher supply and service company in (gasp) 1982.  The application was written in our commercial BASIC language, so when it came time to convert his server to Server 200X and his workstations to Vista, he googled enough to find our website.  Weeks have gone by and I've Remote Desktop'ed into his system to rearrange things and get him going.  There's not a lot of money involved, actually I don't think there's any money involved, but Joe's company is in New Orleans, so there's the sentimental factor, and what the heck, if Sweet Junie and I ever get down there again, we can all go out to dinner at NOLA, where Emeril never actually shows up but the backup chefs yell "Bam!" from the kitchen from time to time.  But I digress.  I've been noticing the astronomical increase in the price of fine Spanish wine.  There are now dozens of vintages that retail over $100, when in the past only Vega Sicilia (which even Robert Parker admits is among the top dozen wines in the world) achieved those kind of numbers.  Alejandro is the conservator of my Spanish wine warehouse, which probably totals 20 cases or so at this point.  Seven or eight years ago or so, I made my usual yearly pilgrimage to Spain and bought a whole lot of wine, thinking I'd ship it to the US.  I had, however, lost my connections in Kuehne  und Nagel, and couldn't find anyone who wanted to shrink-wrap 30 cases and throw it into a container for surface transport to Houston or wherever, and then by truck to me.  So, Alejandro ended up with the stash, and I have been pleading with him for years to just drink the stuff since only the good stuff (Viña Ardanza, for example) was going to age well.  But Alejandro is stubborn, determined and generally has all the qualities of your best friend, irrespective of the culture, so he keeps saving it "until Junie and I come to visit".  Like we're going to drink 100 bottles of wine while we're there, I keep thinking, but what the heck.  I could, of course, just FedEx the wine here, but that would cost more than the wine cost originally.  There's probably no choice left but to find some time to get over to Malaga again and eat 12 kinds of mind-boggling seafood hot off the grill in that restaurant on the beach where we sit at picnic tables and flag down waiters for the next course as they cruise by with half a dozen plates of the next temptables.  And about which I jotted down a small poem on the disposable paper table cloth where they mark up how many plates you ordered, and how many carafes of local wine, and which I tore off and stuck in my pocket and here it is:

Malaga is a long
slow smile, even
the bats
in low palms, even fish
on white plates struck
dumb in rictus:
laughing flame
bends squid into parentheses.

Alejandro arches one wry
brow, and I
lean to kiss a child
who has run
from the yawning grin
of the sea in July.

See you tomorrow, most likely.

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(Still Life With Red Peppers and Miss Emily)

Well, I did make the Hearty Tuscan Bean Stew after all.  CI's recipe starts off by noting the area's residents' fame as mangiafagioli (bean eaters), but the test chef (Charles Kelsey) allowed as how he wasn't going to soak his beans in rainwater or put them in a used wine bottle to soften by a dying fire.  He did try a number of soaking methods, finding them roughly equivalent.  The biggest difference, which ended up with soft beans with creamy interiors was slow-cooking in a 250-degree oven.  The recipe calls for dried cannellini beans, pancetta, onion, celery, carrots, garlic, canned tomatoes, bay leaf and kale (or collard greens if you're into Soul Food).  I decided not to search around (or drive down to Boulder's Whole Foods) for the pancetta and just substituted 4 strips of bacon instead.  These I cut up and sautéed with a chopped large onion, 8 garlic cloves, celery sliced in perfect little quarter-moons, and carrots.  The carrots were the bagged little ones that Junie left me and worked fine.  The celery was the last few stalks of what I had in the vegetable crisper.  The bacon was the last of what was in the freezer (and has been for months).  Since I was trying to make this a really easy recipe with whatever I had around, I used the diced tomatoes that I usually have a dozen cans of anyway.  I intended using the same low-sodium low-fat chicken stock that I have lots of (in those handy cardboardish two-pint cartons).  I broke down and made a wine-and-kale run, though, picking up a nice Tuscan red that was on sale, and running into Safeway to grab a bunch of kale.  The CI recipe has you use about half and half water and stock, but I just used stock (hey, it's low-cal, low-fat and low-sodium, why use water?).  At this point, I had very little invested in time or materials.  After the sautéing was done (in a few tablespoons of olive oil), I threw in a pint of chicken stock and brought it to a boil.  While that was happening, I washed and chopped up the kale.  Jeez Louise, that was a lot of kale, even though I know it cooks down.  When the broth was boiling I started adding kale, filling up the pot, letting the kale reduce in size, and then doing it again.  Even at that, I only used two-thirds of a bunch and bagged the rest.  When the kale was ready, I did something diabolical.  I poured in two big cans of Great Northern beans, waited 5 minutes and started ladling it out for my dinner.  Because I didn't cook the beans, they were very nice and didn't require soaking overnight, much less rainwater.  The whole recipe took 15 minutes or so, and was delicious.  Tonight, I will take the rest of it and doctor it up with sautéed red peppers and some Tabasco.  Safeway is having a sale on red peppers ($1.79 a pound in the dead of winter!) and I'm a sucker for red peppers.

Here's a Microsoft IT problem someone can help me with.  Lord knows that googling my brains out on it hasn't been much use.  I have a rather large office in my home, in fact it's the entire basement except for that big wine rack over by the hot water heater.  Between Junie's office, my office, and the downstairs lab, I have something like 20 systems, mostly Windows XP, but a couple of Vista machines and 4 Windows Server 2003 machines for websites, domain server, FTP server, VPN server, mail server and so on.  I love Remote Desktop and use it all the time, bouncing around from machine to machine from my desk, or from East Jesus, Wyoming if I happen to be in a motel there with a fast Internet connection.  Two of the systems, one XP and one Server 2003 both lock out Remote Desktop from time to time.  I found that what happens is that, even though it's an "automatic start" service, Remote Desktop Help Session Manager stops at some point, and I'm locked out.  All I have to do is run over to the machine and start it again, but invariably, within the next couple of days, it stops again.  Any ideas?

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Many Mountains Moving has a table at the AWP Book Fair and copies of our newest issue will be for sale (or for just paging through if the price of NYC hotels has left you bereft of funds).  Authors of MMM Press books will be on hand for signings at various times during the show (see our website for details).  Editors Jeffrey Lee, Thad Rutkowski and Malinda Miller will be on hand, as well as Patrick Lawler, editor of the volume's EcoPoetry section and past MMM Book Contest winner.  Editor Barbara Sorensen will be stopping in for one day, and attending Diane Glancy's panel on indigenous poets (Diane has a killerbee mixed-genre piece in this issue).  Wine and cake will served at the book signings.  Drop by and say hello!

Boy, those people from Wisconsin just don't get a break.  It was in the low 40's in Eau Claire yesterday and the sun finally came out and the weeks' old snow started melting.  Today the expected low is -12 with -30 degrees wind chill factor and Junie says they've already closed the schools for the day. 
 

(Later that day).

So things were going pretty well today.  We landed a huge engagement that will keep us busy until next summer, on top of a ton of work we already have.  The guys and I were making excellent progress on a number of fronts when we lost power to all the systems on the east side of the office.  Dima and I moseyed over to the 50 amp breaker box that is dedicated to the downstairs office and noticed that one breaker was reset.  Pushing it back on just resulted in sparks, not a good sign.  We methodically unplugged all of the computers, monitors, switches, UPSs, and assorted power-consuming paraphernalia and plugged them in one at a time until we found the culprit − a power cord to a USB hub that was pretty chewed up.  Then we noticed that a couple of Ethernet drop cables were chewed down to bare wires, too.  We've caught Miss Emily doing a little recreational gnawing but didn't realize it was this bad.  It looks like Em will be barred from the office now.  I'd hate to find her fried, smoking and hairless like that cat in Christmas Vacation.

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I did what I should have done earlier and just Googled Ms. Conquest.  It turns out she is Professor of the Aquatic & Fishery Sciences and Associate Director at University of Washington.  She graduated from Pomona with a B.A. in Math (Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude), went to Stanford for her Masters, and got her PhD from U of WA 3 short years later.  Quite a lady, I'd say.  I can still remember the first day I met her.  I was in line in the Pomona cafeteria and you had to give your meal ticket number to her as you passed.  Each of the students in front of me said, "Hi, Love" and "Good morning, Love".  Given how lovely she was, I wasn't surprised that so many of us were enamored of her, but it was a bit overwhelming.

The Black Bean Cassoulet was thick and goopy and delicious.  Pirates actually got a little better as it went on, and Orlando got the girl, though (if I understood the script correctly), he has to serve a 10-year stint as the heartless captain of the Flying Dutchman.  Johnny sailed off to find the Fountain of Youth, which certainly smells like a sequel to me.


Congratulations to my friend Jill, who was project manager for the rather incredible MacBook Air.  It weighs 3 pounds and is about a half-inch thick.  Not bad for a device with a full-sized keyboard and 80GB hard drive.  It also boasts "multi-touch" technology like the iPhone.

I've spent the last two weeks de-spoiling Ms. Emily.  When I was on my trip to CA, Dima bought her some toys, fed her some special cat food that he feeds his cat, and even upgraded the litter box scooper to this giant thing the size of a backhoe.  One concession I've made in the cat care area is to play Follow The Red Dot 3-4 times a day with her.  The laser pointer was Sweet Junie's Christmas present to Emily and she loves it (Emily, that is, though I think Junie gets a kick out of it, too).  Ms. Em goes kinda nuts as I run the dot all over the living room, down the stairs to the office, back up and over to my other office, up the stairs and back again.  We do this until Em starts panting.  I didn't know that cats could pant.

I received another Cook's Illustrated today and the back cover is resplendent with Indian herbs and spices, including Cassia Bark (commonly sold today as cinnamon), mint, turmeric, fenugreek, nutmeg, cardamom, star anise, and bay leaves.  In fact (excluding the saffron), a lot of what goes into my home-made curry powder.  I was surprised to see saffron in the list, as I always associate it with Mediterranean climate.  Spain, where azafran is king, has had saffron on the menu since the 8th century, when the Moors brought it from Syria to cultivate in hospitable Spanish soil, and before long the monks were out there harvesting the Crocus sativus for their three stigma.  Spain is still by far the largest exporter and saffron remains the most expensive spice by weight in the world, generally costing about $200 an ounce retail, which makes it about a quarter the price of gold at today's prices.  OK, I won't do my usual diatribe about Christopher Kimball's editorial notes.  This month CI has decided to cater to those of us who want Crisp-Skinned Roast Chicken (as opposed the French potted chicken of last month), which includes cutting channels for fat, loosening the skin, poking holes, rubbing and chilling out, and roasting at high heat.  They also evaluate the Best Chickens in the World, and if you have the budget, recommend the D'Artagnan Heritage Blue Foot at twenty-one bucks for a 4 pound bird.  Perfecting Oven-Roasted Salmon is OK, but I still contend that the The World's Best Salmon recipe trumps it.  There's a really long and interesting (if you're into spuds) article on Rethinking Mashed Potatoes, which recommends a ricer which I already have and use, thank you.  Hearty Tuscan Bean Stew is a nice alternative to BBC, featuring cannellini beans instead of the French variety (or black beans), pancetta for the sausage, some carrots, and bunches of kale or collard greens, which seems appealing.  I may try this one and report back.  Chicken Saltimbocca Done Right seems like an oxymoron, since it's usually associate with veal, but Wikipedia assures me that chicken or pork are appropriate substitutes. Then, there's the latter pages of CI, where they insert filler like how to make the perfect Fluffy Yellow Layer Cake and How to Make Meringue Cookies, like anybody cared.  Their Consumer Reports-like section has an entry called Is Super-Premium Orange Juice Worth the Super-Premium Price, and they conclude only Natalie's Orchid Island Juice gives fresh-squeezed a run for their money, and isn't that much more than Tropicana Pure Premium (which was the runner-up), if you can find it.

That's all for today.  I think Lost may be on.  See you tomorrow, most likely.

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Last month, Junie and I were watching Paris, Je T'Aime when it dawned on me that this was a collection of short stories.  It's a good flick, with vignettes by Natalie Portman, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe and one really weird segment with Elijah Woods.  Anyway, I succumbed to ennui yesterday and rented the third installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, and it seems like the same deal:  a series of unconnected short stories that are individually adequate but which have little in the way of connecting tissue.  I'm only one hour in and Johnny has watched rock crabs haul his ship across the desert, Keira's dad has drifted by on a boat-of-the-dead, the Singapore pirate king has been invaded by the Brits, and Orlando thinks he's unloved.  I suppose I'll try to finish it tonight, though Junie warns me that it never really gets any more coherent.

The Black Bean Cassoulet turned out mahvelous, dahling.  The only small hitch in my giddyup was when I was sautéing the onions and garlic in a cup of olive oil and it dawned on me that I've never used a cup of olive oil for anything before.  I read the recipe whose link I posted yesterday and (duh) read that it serves 16.  Had I continued, I would have ended up with a gallon and a half of BBC, which is even more than I care to eat in a week.  I had only soaked a pound of beans, so I cut the recipe in half and let the beans, hamhock and spices boil down a bit more than the recipe calls for.  Since I'm not going to throw 3 pounds of sausage into the mix, it will be about 4 servings.  For the record, I used twice the amount of garlic and cumin than was called for and about 50% more red peppers.  I actually think you could leave out the hambone and substitute mushrooms for the sausage, and the whole thing would be properly vegetarian.

I haven't talked technology much in recent weeks, and after all, it is on my tag line.  We have a number of interesting projects in the works, most of which I can't say much about.  One project is a competitive analysis of a novel product that will involve in-depth analysis of their software.  Another is a conversion of a 32-bit Windows driver module to 64-bit, including dealing with all the new instruction sets (SSE/SSE2/SSE3) that handle multimedia and other high-performance math applications.  Another is a portation of a complex Windows driver to Linux.  Another involves X and kernel drivers for SPARC-based Solaris, which turns out to be way harder to do than X86 work.  Slowdown is done now, but the client still has to test it on dozens of audio sources to make sure that it works on different content sets and media formats.  We've got a big project coming up doing system software for a novel back-end engine − something like the Search Appliances that Google leases to organizations to handle their website search needs, but more cutting-edge.  I've got this other company that I started 25 years ago that still has a couple of hundred customers and one European distributor.  Funny enough, it's a commercial BASIC compiler product that runs software that was usually written decades ago (on Windows, Linux and what have you).  For the last decade, I have expected the product and the company to die, but our customers (who are generally all in their 50's and 60's now) just keep on updating their applications and selling them, requiring that we keep the product up to date (like making sure it runs on Vista) and servicing the odd request for a new feature.  That's a lot of work for my small company, which is composed of three people (one of whom is in Russia now), four if you count Junie pitching in from time to time, and the occasional contractor.  It's a great way to make a living, of course, because I don't have to wear a tie and there's something new to pique my curiosity every month.  On the other hand, there's nothing like the security I had when I was a prof in California with a boring paycheck, a boring health plan, a boring 401(k) and the prospects of a boring retirement income.

I've always had high regard for people who kept their name in the face of taunts and other adversity.  I've known sisters named Rene (Rainy) Day and Stormy Day.  I had a kid named Herman Lipcrumb in one class once.  The gorgeous gal at Pomona College who part-timed at the cafeteria was Loveday Conquest (no, really, Loveday Loyce Conquest, and she was a descendant of a noble Hawaiian family, I was told).  I myself had to endure taunts in junior high by people who insisted in calling me Gay Bar.  Even Ange mentioned in a comment that she was pestered in her youth by kids who referred to her as Mlinko the Pinko.  So it was with some degree of admiration that I opened the APR to read the poems of Caroline Crumpacker.  Her literary credits include jubilat and No and she's an editor for Fence, so we have to assume that she's no slouch at the poetry game.  The poems ("Lawn Party" and "The Uses of Distortion") are diverting pieces and all the more as they're in APR, which tends toward the safe and domestic.  This from "Lawn Party":  An awkward assemblage of external: // Without     context    yet    embarrassingly external. // The suburban     landscape / a nakedness of        where we are and why //  I         work     here       are both humiliating."  Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand the rules of modern spacing.  Ms. Crumpacker (and she's not alone by a long shot) creates white space within lines, blankness of varying lengths which I could not faithfully reproduce here.  Like short lines, I suppose it should create some silence, some breathing room, a slowing down to emphasize the phrasing.  I still don't get it, but that's my problem I suppose.   Since I read poems about the same way I do anything else, I find myself blasting through a poem, irrespective of its spatial qualities.  As RJ would say, I should probably just read it aloud and slow myself down, which I do occasionally, but perhaps not often enough.  Dick Allen has a couple of interesting poems in the issue, as well, this from "Rowing a Boat Across China":  " It's not an easy task.  The oarlocks rust, / the crows seem too overhead. / Once, as we neared a village under a steep cliff, / oxen blocked our way for many hours, / lily pads grew enormous and almost engulfed us / but our craft proved worthy.  We placed below the gunwales / the Analects, a dog-eared copy of the Tao / and a foot-high Buddha statue,"  This is an example of why I've never been published in APR.  I probably would have just gotten on with it and started with the gunwales.  Also, my name is much more complicated than Dick's.  On the other hand, Mr. Allen is cursed with a name that has nothing like the memorability of Yusef Komunyakaa or Mary Jo Bang (!) or Kazim Ali or even Alice Oswald.  He's won countless awards and yet every time I see his name, I almost just think he must be a game show host.  Of course, he has seven books to his name and I have none, so I may be all wrong about this.

OK, I have to finish watching the interminable Pirates and eventually eat a big bowl of cassoulet with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of fresh parsley.  See you tomorrow.

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I was looking for the first Silver Palate cookbook, where I'm pretty sure the Black Bean Cassoulet first showed up.  I just know I had a copy of it with pages falling out and the spine in tatters, but I couldn't find it.  That was a really good excuse to run over to Borders and try to find it, and meanwhile stop by Brewing Market for The World's Best Latte.  I did due diligence first, however, and found the recipe all over the web, such as here and here. More's the pity, as I could have used a latte to get me through the afternoon, which was a wonderful Colorado winter respite, in the 50's and sunny.  I don't remember the original using red peppers, I thought that was my improvement, but maybe I'm mis-remembering.  What a concoction!  Imagine:  black beans, ham hocks, two kinds of sausage, dry sherry, brown sugar, fresh lemon juice, and all that wonderful other stuff I mentioned yesterday.  I've just got to make this tomorrow.  I bought some dried black beans, so I suppose I'll do them from scratch, though I've never personally noticed any difference using canned beans.

I finally got around to unpacking My Giant Suitcase which is a gargantuan blue monster that I bought because I was traveling a lot and got tired of checking two bags.  Of course, not 15 minutes after I bought it the airlines imposed a 50 pound limit on bags with a stiff penalty for going over.  This thing probably weighs in at 12 pounds empty, so that doesn't leave a lot of slack if I try to stuff my laptop and 10 paperbacks in it amongst a week's worth of clothes to wear.  For the trip to CA with Der it was pretty handy, though, and I had tossed the (then) recent Poetry issue, an APR and a Poets & Writers.  Between driving, the Family Gathering, a night at Casa Paulsen, and being near-comatose for the last part of the trip, I never got around to reading any of them.  You're going to get a really quick take on them, as I have to go soak some beans.  Poetry starts off with 4 poems by Stephen Edgar, of whom I've never heard but that's nothing new.  D. A. Powell has a couple of interesting poems.  Kay Ryan weighs in with three of her usual long skinny poems that seem more like aphorisms.  I liked Carol Frost's two works:  "Man of War" and "Argonaut's Vow".  Also, Rachel Webster's "La Porte".  There's a large Comment section, which is increasingly my favorite part.  Our Own Dear Ange Mlinko reviews Gulf Music by Pinsky and California Sorrow by Kinzie.  I haven't read them, but I will tonight, and I know, I should read everything before mentioning them at all, but who has the time for goodness sake?

The Poets & Writers has the attractive and surely talented Susan Choi on the cover, who apparently has written an article within called History in the Making.  Blogmate Reginald Shepherd, whom I actually seem to see everywhere nowadays, has an article on Poetry as a Way Out, which I did read and found poignant in its description of his life and how literature saved the day for him.  APR has Jane Miller on the cover and the ridiculously ubiquitous Clayton Eshleman inside with 20 Questions for Robert Kelly and Terrance Hayes with a new Mohawk or maybe it's an old Mohawk since I haven't seen him since seeing him read at the Chicago AWP. 

OK, that's my really pitiful report on journals and litmags that I will hopefully read tonight and tomorrow, unless I decide to read The Opal Deception, a kidlit novel starring Artemis Fowl, criminal boy genius and his giant guardian Butler and Holly of the LEPrecon and a cast of characters from the fairy world that resides just below ours underground. 

See you tomorrow, most likely.

Posted by jbahr at 06:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Surprise, surprise
Couldn't find it in your eyes
But I'm sure it's written all over my face.

    -- Norah Jones, "Sunrise"

Well, whaddyaknow, I'm actually back the next day.  Every time Sweet Junie leaves I root around in the icebox for comfort food.  Well, not exactly an icebox, I suppose, but that's what my mom called the fridge until at least 1975.  I had made some Onion Soup with Saffron and Sherry for us this week and there was a couple of cupfuls left in the big Calphalon pot on the bottom shelf.  I added black beans, frozen collard greens, one cut-up chorizo, some cumin, and a pint of low-fat chicken stock and my guess is that will be my dinner when everything blends nicely together.  It got me to thinking that I hadn't made Black Bean Cassoulet in a while, which is one of my favorite recipes.  Which got me to thinking that I don't even have the recipe in Whimsy's Cookbook.  Hmm.  How did that happen?  Anyway, cassoulet is one of those wondrous recipes from the south of France that tourists have once and then go home and pine over for years.  It's traditionally a slow-cooked bean casserole with tomato paste and some kind of meat (mutton, duck, pork sausage, goose) and in France the beans are haricot blanc, for which you can quite easily substitute Great Northern white beans or whatever kind of beans you like, but I like black beans myself.  I have to dig it up out of my old posts on other sites or emails because I don't have what you would call a thoroughly organized recipe file, more like a bookshelf of cookbooks with sticky notes in them and the odd page of scribblings stuck among them.  The recipe I have in mind has lots of garlic and red pepper and plenty of cumin and is something that could gird your loins against the harshest winter.  I just have to find the sucker.

I promised Steve Schroeder that I would mention the launch of his new poetry journal, Anti-.  I admit to immediately thinking "anti-Christ"?  "antimatter"?  but that's my problem.  You should run over to his website and visit for a spell because Tim Lockridge, Rose Kelleher, Brent Goodman, Tony Robinson, Louise Mathias and D. Antwan Stewart are there among other and I think the last two are in our current MMM Volume VIII come to think of it.

This month's poetry is more comment than poetry, BTW.  I'll get to that tomorrow.  OK, I really do always say that but my guess is I'll actually be back tomorrow.  Gotta go now, cassoulet calls.

Posted by jbahr at 06:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, my sweet JunieBird has flown back to Wisconsin.  We checked The Weather Underground before she left and at that time it was 15 below zero (wind chill -30), but it's supposed to warm up to a balmy 10 degrees by the time she gets there and gets on the shuttle.  I've been bitching about the unusual cold spells we've been enduring (both their length and temperature), but I suppose I can count my blessings that my state doesn't border Canada.

I'm pretty seriously backed up on my litmag reading.  There's at least one APR and a couple of journals that sit on my To Read pile.   Also a new copy of Poetry that came yesterday, which includes work by Louise Glück and (gasp) Jorie Graham.  I think I've read a couple of times about Louise's decision to put the umlaut back in her name.  People tell me that she pronounced her name something like "glick", which isn't of course anything like what it would sound like in German.  I know, because I used to make a habit of asking attractive German girls at Hanover Messe to help me with umlaut'ed vowels.  Invariably, they would put their fingers on my cheeks and tell me to purse my lips.  Then, they would show my how it was done, drawing out the sound, pursing their own lips, and generally looking kissable.  But, I digress.  Ms. Graham can't be bothered to conform to Poetry Format Standards, of course, so her poem is the only one I've ever seen in Poetry that is sideways on the page, like those spreadsheets in the middle of Word documents that cause your printer to switch to landscape mode.  It even folds out to be its own eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper.  I'm surprised it doesn't possess scratch-and-sniff properties.  It's called "Full Fathom" and it sort of goes on and on, as Jorie is wont to do since about around The End of Beauty, and starts out as an extension of the title:  "& sea swell, hiss of incomprehensible flat:  distance : blue long-fingered ocean and its /     nothing else: nothing in the above visible  except /    water:  water and // ..."  Oh, you know that kind of stuff.  Hardly the power and understated elegance of "To a Friend Going Blind", but my friend Claudia assures me that there is much to appreciate in Later Jorie, so what do I know?  Ms. Glück's contributions are the usual reminiscences that one approaches like an episode of Twilight Zone, narratives that start out perfectly normal but with that eerie background music that makes you just know that something's going to happen and it isn't going to be good for someone, but it's OK because it's really deep and shouldn't be confused with the other expansive narrative that dominates today's journals, to wit:  "On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry, / the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girl's clothes / and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since /      last summer    / and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones / leaping off the high rocks − bodies crowding the water."  When I read this kind of thing, it occurs to me that most poets lead lives that generate the fewest number of interesting moments, as opposed to hit men, for example, or professional wrestlers.  Or the carneys that guess your weight or the UPS driver.  Or world-class downhill skiers or really successful sushi chefs.  Or certainly those fiction writers who claim on the back of their book to have been lumberjacks and short-order cooks and bull-riders and oil-fire putter-outers.  Or drill sergeants or bond traders or even the people who walk the dogs of 5th Avenue clients. And yet who writes poignant vignettes in 42 lines about their first love that first summer?  Well, poets of course.  And why?  Well, for the same reason that some pharmaceutical company increased the price of my sole prescription medicine 23% last month.  Because they can.

There's more to Poetry and I really really promise to tell you about it tomorrow, but I always say that.
 

Posted by jbahr at 07:07 PM | Permalink

I don't know.  I guess I just didn't expect Court Green to be pink.  Without really thinking too hard about it, I assumed that the last 5 issues would have come in sea green, olive, khaki, verdant green, and blue-green or something.  It's a nice journal, though.  Court Green 5 has a section "Dossier:  Sylvia Plath" in which a boatload of talented poets have written poems inspired by SP.  Here's the first part of "Departure" by Mary Jo Bang:

God's nose-end,
White nothing tower,
White-bearded, socketed face.

Fixed prison.  World of grub-
White birds' litter,
Frost, love, snowflake, fat,

I mention MJB because she precedes me immediately in the bio section.  I'm always lucky like that.  The last Academy of American Poets donor list had me right after Ashbery.  A recent journal had me directly following Seth Abramson.  It's kind of spooky, really.  But, I digress.  In the main poetry section, there are lots of fine poets represented whose names I recognize:  Noelle Kocot, Ron Koertge, Mark Yakich, Aaron Anstett, Jordan Davis, Denise Duhamel, Steve Schroeder, Stephanie Strickland, Adam Clay, Noah Eli Gordon and Alice Notley.  Lots more too, of course.  I liked "Nail Guns in the Morning", a strange poem by Susan Briante.  It starts out "Nail guns in the morning from the street behind my house, / Outside: tin roof, cement tabletops, "vast maw of modernity" (Sontag), the UPS man, / someone has painted all my windows shut" and ends with "Stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war".  Also, Kristin Abraham's "Fits, Starts, Etc.", which begins "(It wasn't as simple as  / "wife kills husband with hatchet.")".  Also, Brent Goodman's "My First Queer Poem":  "Of course I shake all my martinis Sapphire, / appreciate art, MFA'd, these shoes international, / chocolate chaise zen-modern, whip smart attire".  Also, Tom Christopher's "Study of Thomas with Powdered Wig and Quill":  "I have said this before:  Every moment is a babe of two humours -- one brightly vile and slightly sandy, the other a honeyed liquor, a flourish, an airy hissing like an angry goose".  Actually, there is a lot of strange and wonderful work in this journal.  You should probably sell your mother's pearls to the local pawnshop and buy a subscription.

I received an issue of Cook's Illustrated, which I love, which leads off with editor Christopher Kimball's folksy reminiscences, which I hate.  I mean, it's 2008 and the guy is maybe 50.  Maybe.  He talks about his childhood in Vermont as if he shared Thanksgivings with the local Native Americans.  He's always remembering having to walk to the well to get water and how he slaughtered that pig for Christmas, and what the smell of a small-guage shotgun was like after nailing that pheasant for Mom's special birthday.  All the cooking in his youth was done in a wood-fired stove.  Sheesh.  the rest of CI is pretty good, of course, since Kimball is no dummy and runs a pretty tight ship, culinary-wise.  The article on Improving Cheap Roast Beef is interesting.  Basically, you do what Adelle Davis used to say and cook a good cut (they recommend Eye-Round Roast) at 130 degrees for a long time after salting and wrapping and refrigerating for 18 hours.  The key is to put the roast in a 225 oven, then turn the oven off.  I guess you turn it on again if you have to, but they are requiring that you look periodically at the meat thermometer to make that call.  French Chicken in a Pot looks really good, too.  You take a good chicken and dry roast it in a Dutch oven with root vegetables after browning.  It cooks at 250 for 80 to 110 minutes.  No crispy skin, but wonderful flavor.  Ultracrunchy Baked Pork Chops is a matter of coating them first with a batter of flour, mustard, and egg whites, then coating with toasted bread crumbs.  The secret to the Best French Onion Soup is to deglaze the dark brown crust on the bottom of the pot at least three times.  Good recipe for Spanish-style Garlic Shrimp.  Really interesting article on No-Knead Bread, which you can make in 18 hours with very little kneading and a Dutch oven.  Roasted Broccoli, yum.  The Truth About Dark Chocolate:  Callebaut, Ghirardelli, Dagoba, Michel Clizel, and Valrhona come out on top.  The back of this issue has Exotic Mushrooms:  Beech, Fairy Ring, Nameko, Wood Ear, Bear's Head, Blue Oyser, Pippini, and Abalone.

See you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I think I entered a state of grace this morning.  It was as if someone was playing that big country music record in the sky backwards.  I think I'm finally over this flu, which is a plus.  Sweet Junie is coming to visit on Saturday.  Then, I got another couple of poems accepted by The Journal, which is a publication I like.  Of course, I don't remember sending them anything, but that's what I said about Blackbird.  I shipped the first version of The SlowDown Algorithm to the client this morning, after spending 10-12 weeks laboring on what was quoted as a two-week problem.  Later in the day, the editor of That Noted Journal accepted my second review.  At this point, I was pretty much walking on air.  To top it all off, Der and I got a father-son haircut from The Fabulous Natasha and then went over to Brewing Market for their killer latte and a bagel.  The father-son haircut means, of course, that the son gets any haircut he wants and the father pays for it, but that's OK.  The Fabulous Natasha is our new interim hair person, as Whitney is "on sabbatical" (we were told), not that I'm sure what that means in the hair biz.  As usual, I printed out the copy of my picture from my personal site, the one where I'm wearing the New Sincerity T-shirt, and took it with me.  "Just like that", I told her, and so she proceeded to chop off a small mountain of peppery hair, some black, mostly gray (or grey, if you're English). 

The reviews were very difficult to write, much more so than I would have imagined.  I used to knock off a poem in a night, take a day to stew over it, post it on the poetry board, take some criticism, make some corrections and send it off.  Both reviews have taken 3-4 weeks to write each.  Of course, that wasn't a full-time endeavor, but I found I needed a lot of incubation time to find what exactly I wanted to say about each of the books.  It didn't help that I love the work of both poets involved and hold them in high personal esteem, as well.  That kinda puts the pressure on.  You want to be fair, and you want to be eloquent, and you want to be entertaining, but you also want to be true to the work.  I decided that I owed it to everyone (the sponsoring journal, the poet under the lens, and myself) to read all existing reviews of the books for which I was responsible.  I wasn't worried unduly about subconsciously cribbing from their riffs, but I did think hard about whether I agreed with them on metamatters.  Such as narrative arc or gestalt or whatever it is reviewers (and particularly blurbers) feel compelled to bestow on volumes of poetry, even if they are perfectly dandy collections of work without any particular agenda.  Anyway, somewhere along the way, I ended up reading Simon and Jordan's reviews and was struck with the thought:  how do they make this seem so easy, and why can't I be as scintillating?  Oh, well, I suppose reviewing is like anything else.  You take your best shot and get better at it as you practice your craft.

The new Many Mountains Moving journal arrived in proof form yesterday, and I drove over to hand it off to Malinda Miller, our journal editor.  Malinda runs a group at CU and is responsible for their monster website among other things, managing a lot of full-time employees and contractors in the process, so she was just terrific in her role as Journal UberMeister.  It looks terrific, and we should have copies available at our table at the AWP Book Fair.  Look for Jeff Lee, Malinda, Patrick Lawler (who sponsored the EcoPoetry section), and Erik Nilsen at various times during The Big Show. 

Oh, and I had a wonderful birthday party last night.  Cath and the kids had to wait until Der and I got back from CA, but it was worth the wait.  Cath cooked up a tapas party with Spanish tortilla, jamon Serrano, nuts and olives, a kind of Spanish snack with tomatos and pine nuts on toast, Manchego (cheese) cubes, big pieces of roasted red pepper and lots of other good stuff, all lubricated with a nice Ribera del Duero.  Dessert was a dark chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.  Der and Ky put 58 candles on the thing, some spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY, some twisted and sinister, some apparently in the shape of farm animals.  They burned and sputtered and lagooned all over the chocolate icing as I mustered the remaining breath to extinguish them in one wish-fulfilling blow.  I did though, and I think that means that World Peace is right around the corner.

Talk to you tomorrow.  I know, I always say that.

Posted by jbahr at 06:01 PM | Permalink

Well, I'm home in one piece, mainly due to Derek's excellent driving.    I've been semi-comatose the last two days, sleeping most of the time that Der was driving and then sleeping 10-12 hours every night.  I got a nasty bug somewhere on this trip, but I have no obvious suspects, so I'll just deal with it.  I need to get Der, The Official Trip Photographer to upload a few pics for me to share.  Those of you who are Bay Area denizens will recognize most of the shots, including a disproportionate number of shots of the Haight-Ashbury district, where Der and Max seemed to have spent a lot of time (including one impromptu Yoga lesson).  I really have to set aside more time to spend in The City.  I always seem to end up on Fisherman's Wharf or Union Square, when I really want to see the giant jungle gym in Golden Gate Park.

Dima did a brilliant job of holding down the fort while I was gone, though he too was struggling with a bout of something nasty.  Speaking with him on the phone was like communicating with the near-dead, but I kept seeing a steady stream of emails to clients indicating his progress in keeping up with things.   I did manage to call Junie every day, but not with my usual regularity.

I received a copy of The Ravens Chronicles Whimsy Issue for which I (quite naturally) had a poem accepted.  At some point in this trip I also had two poems accepted by Blackbird.  I can't remember submitting them, but that's nothing new.  I think that, shortly after my demise, hopefully some time in the distant future, my heirs will still be receiving journal acceptances.

I took a short gander at my email Inbox and got depressed.  I have to send out my last review to That Noted Publication that I finished a week ago but have been unable to get transmitted.  Then, I've got a whole lot of catching up to do.

More tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 08:01 PM | Permalink

Posted by jbahr at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)