WhimsyLand

"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.