WhimsyLand

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.