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March 30, 2008

A Bash and a Canary

Many thanks to the contributors to Many Mountains Moving Volume VIII who read at the MMM Bash last night.  The tables were laden, the audience was lubricated, and the readings were brilliant.  Barbara Sorensen, assisted by issue editor Malinda Miller, performed their usual magic and spiffed up the reading parlor to a high literary gloss.  MMM volumes were on sale, with a sign that said "We have issues!".  A Druid priest blessed the event outside from the sidewalk (we were, after all, provided wonderful space by incomprehensibly generous St. John's Episcopal Church).  Small children proceeded each reader with a flurry of thrown rose petals.  Each contributor took his or her turn delighting the members of the audience, one waxing on about his extraterrestrial abduction, another reciting a poem about the virtues of his 14 prior wives.  Diane Glancy, noted literary figure and featured speaker, kept us all spell-bound with her reading of The Similitude of Oxen, a mixed-genre piece so compelling that every single MMM editor voted YES! on the first pass.  The readings continued.  We wept, we laughed, we text-messaged old friends.  As the evening came to a close, guests were pitted against one another in oratorical arm-wrestling contests to see who would take home the last of the Mother of All Meatloaf, the last tempting pieces of Malaga Street Vendor Shrimp, the remainders of the Carribean Black-Bean-and-Cilantro hummus.  Ah, what a night.  Photos here.

If you're like me, and I know I am (apologies to Kevvy), I still don't understand the relationship between The Canary − the wonderful and arresting journal of poetry edited by Edwards, Twemlow and TR − and The Canarium.  Little matter, though. Two renowned critics and poets, Jordan Davis and Dan Beachy-Quick, have provided some top-drawer review in the Slow Readings section of the site, Jordan on Michael Morse's "Void and Compensation (Assisted Living)" and Dan on Philips Jenks' "Untitled".  Check them out.

Junie is in Florida with her siblings, mother, nieces and traveling paraphernalia.  She called to tell me that somewhere it's 85 and humid and that place is Orlando.  It's quite a shock for Midwestern snowbirds, I would imagine. 

I just read the last few weeks of Robert Archambeau's blog, which is entertaining, instructive and occasionally brilliant, in measures.  I may be overreacting because I haven't gone blog-hopping in a month or more.  What would I think about Radish King, Rhubarb is Susan or Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes?  I'd better take it slow.

Hah!  If you're old enough, you remember those Irish Spring commercials where the Irish guy took this wicked looking knife and sliced into a bar of the soap to reveal its masculine green stripes.  The Irish guy then intoned "What a manly smell" and the the Irish gal in the background chimed in "and I like it, too!".  Well, I had one hell of a manly smell this afternoon.  I received two fresh and new-smelling headlamp assemblies from a dealer in California and installed them on the Subaru-with-failing-eyesight.  It took me 45 minutes with a metric wrench, a tiny screwdriver to pop out the connectors, and a bottle of Fat Tire wobbling on the battery for encouragement.  God, what a feeling.  Fixing your own car is like wrestling a water buffalo to the ground.  Well, maybe not that macho, but I did feel like I deserved to eat red meat for dinner instead of my usual vegan pasta arrangement.  Next up:  a new bumper!

See you tomorrow.  And I mean that in the poetic sense, where tomorrow is a day in the future when all we can remember is yesterday.

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March 28, 2008

This Page Left Intentionally Blank

I've been so bad.  On the other hand, I haven't gone a day in a month without working for at least a few hours, so I have a feeble excuse.   Dima finished the Solaris port of the touchscreen driver, a project that was starting to take on the aspects of the Bataan Death March until we started to think outside the box.  I continue to work with Ilya on the Project That Must Not Be Named, and perfecting firmware for future versions of the Amazing Playaway.  A client of my mostly dormant CET Software products has required a lot of help in using our mostly untested MySQL Interface.  And then there's the Windows-to-Linux port of a complex USB driver and subsystem that Dima is ramrodding and for which I am providing the occasional mid-course correction.  Junie, as you might have guessed, has been a thousand miles away since Las Vegas, so I have plenty of time to work during the day and feel sorry for myself at night.  Well, feel sorry for myself and call Junie and cook dinner and drink wine and watch old movies, which isn't so bad actually. 

Speaking of cooking, I've been culinary all afternoon, preparing for the Many Mountains Moving Volume VIII Bash tomorrow.  If you're anywhere near Boulder tomorrow, drop by, by all means.  Contributors (including Diane Glancy, Aaron Anstett, Jeff Franklin, Juan Morales, Ginger Knowlton, Debra Bokur, Rita Kiefer, John Latham, Devin Murphy and others) will be reading their work, and we will host the usual open mic afterwards.  For the occasion, I'm bringing a case of this terrific Terrai wine I recently discovered, available in Grenache, Tempranillo, and a delicious white.  Oh, and some Izzies and Fat Tire and colas.  I'm also bringing a 5-pound Mother of All Meatloaf and two big World's Best Salmon platters.  Oh, also three varieties of hummus, including Caribbean Lime Black Bean Hummus and Red Pepper-Kalamata Olive Hummus.  Also, Roasted Red Potatoes to go with the MOAML.  Also, 3 pounds of big shrimp cooked quickly in their shells on a bed of kosher salt, just like you get them on the streets of Malaga.  I might get ambitious and think of a few things more before I get there.  Barbara Sorenson, the capable Head Poobah of all MMM Salons and Reading Events, will be cracking the whip.  Anyway, it's always a lot of fun, so I hope you can show up.  Bob Hicok and G.C. already said the 2,000 mile drive was probably a little problematic for even a great party.  Tricia Lockwood and Rebecca probably found the drive a little daunting, too.

Speaking of G.C., I can now report that my two reviews in the Colorado Review were for G.C. Waldrep's Disclamor and Mary Jo Bang's Elegy.  I received my contributor's copies today and the reviews looks so great that I can only imagine that Stephanie cleaned them up in her usual amazingly competent fashion.  Ms. G’Schwind is the editor of CR and produces an amazing journal, with a wonderfully balanced set of work in a beautiful package.  Since originally writing the review for Elegy, it has become the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  I'm hoping to spread this good reviewing karma around and suspect that G.C.'s terrific Disclamor will also earn the distinction that it deserves.

While I've been cooking, I've been listening to RLJ's terrific Pop-Pop.  I recently bought these Athena WS-100 speakers that made my old speakers seem old and muddy.  It was something of a trial, actually.  I was cruising by CompUSA, which was going Out Of Business on a national scale, to pick up a couple of LCD monitors.  There was this stack of speaker boxes discounted from $599 to $419.  I googled them and found that they had rave reviews, so I bought a box (which included a pair of speaker columns).  When I got home, I found that one of the speaker columns had a fuzzy speaker in the stack, so I drove back only to find that All Sales Were Final.  I phoned Athena and they said basically, tough luck, go back to CompUSA.  The manager there said all inventory was owned by a liquidator and go back to Athena.  This went on for a week until I finally just wrote a letter to Athena explaining my situation.  I got this nice phone call from the Customer Relations guy at Klipsch (who apparently owns Athena), who told me just talk to Yvonne again (I had, multiple times) and they'd sent new speakers.  I eventually settled for a Return Authorization and sent them off for a replacement, but not before buying another pair from CompUSA, who now had them discounted to $349.  So, I'm figuring that Derek will get the other set, since Ky probably has speakers and whatever given the fancy new job and raise he got.  At this point, the Lexus has been parked for a month with a flat tire, one of many it gets in the winter for no apparent reason.  I'm driving the Subaru that my dad sold me and I gave to Der for high school that has a)  146,000 miles on it   b) a bashed in right rear door due to an ice-slide by either Der or Kyle's gal Eileen, can't remember which, c) really dangerously dimmed headlights due to some sort of headlight glaucoma, and d) a bashed in bumper due to either Der or Kyle's gal Eileen, can't remember which, but I made matters worse by ripping off the entire thing leaving a party at Barb and Tony's and put the whole bumper assembly in the back area and drove home.  So, lately when I've picked up Junie at the airport it's been in a Subaru with no bumper, bad headlights, and terrible gas mileage owing to the complete lack of aerodynamics at this point.  So Der and I had this great idea!  I get it all fixed up and load it up with More Derek Stuff when he visits in April for the BB King concert and we drive back to Chicago, except this time it's not freezing and snowing like hell and we live to get there.  I think we can throw the new speakers in the back, and my old subwoofer and my old Sony amp, and all of Der's stuff that Cath was keeping in her basement, but now has a new big house with her guy Terry and would just as soon that the drum set we drove to Albuquerque to pick up from my nephew doesn't actually make it onto her moving van, and hey, I understand.  I think this will be in mid-April, so I have to get on the stick and see if I can arrange a lunch with Simon or Robert in Lake Forest or Arielle Greenberg or somebody.   Or stop in Iowa and see Seth.  So many possibilities.

Have you heard of LinkedIn?  It's a social networking site for professionals.  You can post your resume, add people to your "professional list of friends", and generally schmooz and make contacts.  I must have the weirdest set of friends in my circle.  They include Silicon Valley types, fellow poker players from the past, and poets, to name a few. You can find me here.

OK, gotta go back to the kitchen.  I need to Cuisinart the excellent potato chips with the fresh dill in preparation for scattering all over the mustard covered salmon.

I'll try not to stay away so long.

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March 15, 2008

Be Nice to Call Center Workers

The reading at Cannon Mine Coffee was great fun.  Cate Wiley and Mackenzie Carignan were hard acts to follow, though.  Cate read her pie-eating contest poem, which immediately brought to mind that great scene from Michael where they're all eating pie and Andie McDowell sings her pie song.  Mackenzie is a freshly-minted PhD from Chicago whose blogroll has dozens of people I know (some very well), which I found surprising.  I read exclusively from my Junie and Barker poems, which are poetic vignettes, I suppose.  I started the series at Junie's suggestion about 5 years ago, modeled roughly after MJB's Louise in Love.  I'm going to break down and get them printed up in chapbook form one day, since only 4 of them have been published and the rest don't lend themselves to journals. 

Work is slowing down a bit, a mixed blessing.  I am one-part paranoid about running out of engagements and one-part desirous of luxuriating on weekends again instead of debugging 8051 code and FFT algorithms.  It's definitely pretty ugly out there.  Commodity prices have skyrocketed (not just oil, also wheat, corn, soybeans, copper, . . . ) and gasoline prices won't hit their peak ($4 a gallon?) until the summer.  Meanwhile, record numbers of people are losing their jobs.  The housing/mortage crisis is fueling a lot of the economic woes, but 8 years of Bush's mismanagement and record-setting deficit spending send the dollar to all-time lows, while the national and personal debt levels reach new highs. 

Der got his Easter basket and was happy.  He and his roommate Max (and lots of classmates apparently) divided the candy, which ranged from a Swiss chocolate rabbit to Snickers miniatures to those pink chicks made out of something like marshmallow.  I also threw in some money, cleverly hidden in a plastic Easter egg, to help fund Max and Der's summer adventure where they will put 10,000 miles on Max's parent's SUV in an attempt to visit every state in the union.  Also included were a "nose and glasses" disguise kit, a cap gun that takes those plastic circle caps.  The biggest single item was this giant box of Jelly Bellies that I found on sale at Ross Dress for Less.  Ky and Der kid me about Ross Dress for Less, telling me that it's OK to just call it "Ross" and that enunciating the full "Ross Dress for Less" is a little like saying "MacDonalds, Billions and Billions Served", so now I say RDFL but sounds too much like R.O.U.S. (rodents of unusual size), so I don't know what to call it really.  Ky, if you're reading, I owe you either a basket or a nice lunch with Eileen.

I received another zany and wonderful Abraham Lincoln (#2), the litmag child of Kasey and Anne.  It's hard to believe it's only $5, which is, variously, the price of 1.5 gallons of gas, the typical chapbook, or a fast food meal, take your pick.  The range of depth, depravity, hilarity, and profundity is too much for my increasingly small brain.  It's easier just to give you some examples:

Rod Smith, "We are Duende for Pigs":  "... loose the auto-confirm Boston intellectual pitbull's torte clamp device, & comely".

Rita Dahl, "Human Ape":  "What would I, a human ape and biological robot, know about life?"

Benjamin Friedlander, "Law and Order SVU":  "... Christian content is like poetry: / it often begins in torment, then like damp grass / eh, delusional."

Brandon Brown, "From Wondrous Things That I Have Seen":  "Dumped beer onto the lap of the gender performance."

Tim Yu, "Asian American Poem #5": "I am cooking your favorite meal again. / It contains shoyu, rice wine, scallions, / fish eggs and sukiyaki, and smells like dog."

Mel Nichols, "You Should Be Nice to Call Center Workers":  ". . . my underpants absolutely reek of curry".

Also in the mix are Cathy Eisenhower, Tao Lin, Kevin Killian, Lanny Quarles, Mitch Highfill, Joe Massey & Jess Myines, Patrick Durgin, Linh Dinh, Christina Strong, Rachel Zolf and Nada Gordon.  It's a great collection.  Go order it and start smiling and nodding and making that funny look with your eyebrows up and your mouth in a strange kind of happy moue.

I still have a good Atlantic and a great Harper's to tell you about.  See you tomorrow.

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March 09, 2008

Black Bra, Black Hole

I'm going to give Poetry and The Atlantic a rest for a day, as I received a new Notre Dame Review on Friday.  It's a nice, fat 225 pages featuring (among others) Kelli Russell Agodon, Nin Andrews, Mary Jo Bang, James Doyle, Beth Ann Fennelly, Debora Greger, Chris Ransick, Anis Shivani, Charles SImic, and Buzz Spector.  The issue intersperses nonfiction and articles (which the NDR labels biography, memoir, essay and review) among large swaths of poetry, which I quite like.  The volume starts out nicely with Herbert Leibowitz relating WCW's last years.  The remaining articles are all well-written and read-worthy, including Joseph Buttigieg's essay on the brilliant and much-maligned Edward Said.  MJB's poem, "No Exit", is from her recent book, Elegy.  Simic does a good imitation of Simic.   Poems I liked included Carmen Firan's "Last Impression", Jason Tandon's strange and engaging "Flight" ("No one was going around killing anybody. / The town was always in the sun. / I packed nothing"), Kelli's smile-inducing "What the Universe Makes of Lingerie" ("It's impossible to see a black bra / directly as no light can escape from it;"), James Doyle's eerie pair ("The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water": The priests nailed down the island. / Their cassocks were solid / with salt, gills from the reef, residue").  I was also taken by Anne Heidi's disjunctive, but weirdly coherent poems, this from "Greenwax":  "Every time a jungle ruby / I've found it the mother / says in the butcher's book.").  Lea Graham has a series of "crush" poems, this from "Crush #90":  "Something of a mystery.  Heels' click / & echo, before step's hitch, musing:  this crowd's / vine black off to their brandies or supper,".

My buddy Malinda Miller is reading on Dona's poetry program in Fort Collins.  You can listen in at 6 PM MDT, here.

Well, we received boxes and boxes of the new Many Mountains Moving Volume VIII (which is also something like issue number 17).  I spent most of yesterday morning getting 100 copies mailed out to contributors, libraries and friends of MMM.  That amounts to rotating through a large stack of Tyvek envelopes, methodically applying a) our standard Media Mail label, b) our logo and return address, c) one $2.00, one 10-cent stamp, one 3-cent stamp, c) the labels that I've generated using Word's mail merge and our database.  The Tyvek envelopes are a little more expensive than standard ones, but they're indestructible and I don't have to worry about a journal arriving all beaten up.  My mailman Mike is my hero because he never complains when I drive around the neighborhood, track him down, and load the back of his little mail-carrier vehicle with boxes of mailers.

I don't like daylight saving time, as I am an early bird.  Recent studies show it's completely useless.  In fact, energy consumption is slightly greater, as the effect of greater air conditioner use offsets reductions in early morning light and other energy uses.  It's OK though, I'll get over it, I always do.  They're not going to change back to normalcy.  DST is an institution, like the color of Good 'n Plenties.

I made a delicious stew yesterday.  Safeway had a sale on Christopher Ranch shallots, big and pink and fresh.  I sliced up five of those big suckers and sautéed them with diced red pepper and garlic.  Then, added a big standard-sized box of button mushrooms slices (separately sautéed) , a big can of diced tomatoes, a half (small) can of tomato paste, Italian herbs (dried parsley, oregano, thyme, rosemary), and a half-cup of red wine (actually the delicious Greg Normal Merlot-Cabernet).  It bubbled for an hour, reduced a bit, and was heaven topped with a little Lite sour cream.  I might add a few splashes of Tabasco and a double-dose of Worchester sauce next time.  I tried using a minimal amount of olive oil for the sauté step as possible, just to see how little I could get away with, and the answer is about a tablespoon or 100 calories, if you do the batch slowly.  Not too bad for a whole pot of stew.

Rebecca's artwork on Flickr is amazing.

I can never get over Joshua's reviews of C&W alongside his erudition and compelling prose on matters more urbane. 

I just read on CDY's blog that MJB's Elegy won the National Book Critics' Award in Poetry.  I recently wrote a review of Elegy for Colorado Review and it was one of the most difficult literary endeavors I've ever tried.

See you tomorrow.

 

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March 08, 2008

Nude Mice and Oral Sadism

"The British book-trade magazine, the Bookseller, has for more than 20 years run a competition to find the oddest book title of the year. This year's awards have just been announced."  The winner was the rather dull Weeds in a Changing World.  Past finalists have included Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, How to Avoid Huge Ships, Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, Attractive and Affectionate Grave Design, and Beyond Leaf Raking.

The Amazing Obama Money Machine continues to set records.  As of the end of January, his campaign had raised $138 million.  In February alone, they raised $55 million, and reached the goal of one million individual donors.  To put this in perspective, if McCain and Obama agree to abide by Federal Public Funding limits, they could only spend $85 million each.

Warren Buffet was briefly the richest man in the world, until Microsoft stock rose again and Bill Gates retook the lead he has had for over a decade with $60 billion plus in assets.  That doesn't count the donations he's made to the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation, to which he's given tens of billions.  Buffet, by the way, will be divesting himself of his fortune by donating $1.5 billion a year to the Gates, an amount that exceeds the total endowment of most of the world's charitable organizations.

I like the new Poetry (he pauses to hear the cat calls).  I like A.E. Stallings, Terrance Hayes, Heather McHugh, Campbell McGrath and Ange Mlinko and they're only a few of the contributors.  There are some terrific Q&A sections discussing the poems, not something you see every day.  A.E. has a very nice (partially rhymed) sonnet in her pair of offerings.  Christian Bök and our own Joshua Clover are quoted on their views of formal verse (which seemed rather right-on).  The eloquent Ms. Stallings responds:  "I suppose writing a sonnet is perforce a response, rebuke and defiance of such views".  Commenting on her geographically dispersed poem "The Violinist at the Window, 1918", which is printed sideways on a fold-out like the last time, Jorie Graham says "In these poems I am working with lines that acquire momentum as they move down the page, yet need to carry that momentum across shifting distances of breath and attention."  Frankly, I still don't understand the value of radically indented lines, but then they never slow me down as they are supposed to.  More about Poetry tomorrow.  My friend Richard reminds me that Ms. Graham will be in Denver on April 10th at the Denver Public Library receiving the Evil Companions Literary Award and tickets start at $65.  I think that when the Pope was in town, it was cheaper to get good seats.

When my boys were small, I would buy dozens of those plastic Easter eggs and create an Easter Egg Hunt.  I would give them a clue to where the first egg was.  Each successive egg held a few dollars (to be shared between them) and a clue to the next egg.  Over the years, it got harder and harder to come up with places (and clues), but it was great fun.  Now, Kyle lives in Denver and Derek in Chicago so a tradition has been held in abeyance.  I will send a nice Easter basket (well, actually a FedEx box) to Der and think of something I can do with Ky.  I once wrote a poem with a line in it referring to the complicated calculation that computes the date of Easter, which is the first Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon, or the first full moon upon or following the vernal equinox.  To make matters more interesting, it's not an actual full moon, but an ecclesiastical full moon, which is obtained from tables generated centuries ago. 

I received a new Atlantic (naturally, it's dated April 2008).  It must be the Pop Culture issue because the cover article is "The Britney Show:  Days and Nights with the New Papparazi".  More on that tomorrow.  I thought of finding one of my more soporific poems and submitting it to them, but it was easier to send it to The New Yorker, who only accepts submissions by email (and receive something like 50,000 of them yearly).

Work has been rather crushing, but one large client temporarily dropped out of the picture, due to problems between their venture capitalists.  So, the gang at Set Software Services have fewer plates to keep spinning at the expense of possibly losing a good client with a longish-term project.  It's a little nerve-rattling only having a planning horizon of 4-6 weeks (the typical length of a project), but I feel blessed to have work at all.  Over 60,000 souls lost their jobs last month, the biggest slash in five years, so I'm happy to be able to pay my bills. 

More tomorrow. 

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