Whimsy Speaks Again

Well, actually I have a dozen people to trifle with as I'm wandering over to Cath's to have dinner with her Terry and various sons and friends of the younger persuasion.  My responsibility is dessert, and it occurred to me that I haven't made a good trifle in years.  I think the last time was when Sweet Junie and I lugged one down to Ally and John's, and I think bell-bottoms were still in style.   But first, some news about my tiling.  Dima showed up on Saturday and was a backboarding maniac, measuring every cut 7 times, laying down the thinset in perfect rows of quarter-inch whiteness.  Truth be told, Dima was originally a mechanical engineer, so he adopts this superior affect quite naturally around me.  Me, who was variously a physics, economics, computer science and business major.  On the other hand, I did work a few summers in construction, usually the really dirty jobs like grinding a window out of solid concrete with a rotary saw, a carborundum disk, and nothing remotely resembling safety goggles.  But, I digress.  Dima was pretty much the field boss on this gig.  My responsibility was to keep us in good coffee, and screw in a couple of dozen self-tapping screws when the Hardieboard was nicely seated in the thinset.  You have to remember that I was drilling through what was basically concrete, so I was sore-wristed by the end of the day.  On the other hand, I did get to buy some cool new tools, which makes any self-respecting guy feel better.  I spent the next day filling up the spaces between the boards with thinset and laying down fiberglass tape and trying my best to figure out what "feathering the joint" meant.  I never did figure that out, but I did note that the whole point is to have a really, really flat underfloor, so the next morning I fired up my little rotary sander and wiggled my way across the small mounds that represented my taping job.  The kitchen floor is now ready for tile.  Well, actually it's ready for using my new chalk line and other paraphernalia to figure out the dead center of the kitchen so I can lay tile in the recommended way with all the tile fractions of equal sizes on the baseboards, which still seems really inefficient, but supposedly if you don't do that your inner ear gets thrown out of whack as soon as you enter the room.

And speaking of trifle.  I used to make trifle a lot.  Of course, I used to make a lot of things a lot, and then the fad passsed and then I didn't.  The difference is that trifle has its own bowl and I have one and it reminds me from time to time to do one again.  The problem with that is that it would take me a week to eat it and it would one of those "a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips" kind of things.  There are, as you can imagine, a zillion recipes for trifle, but that's mainly because these days anything goes and if you are gluten-intolerant it's perfectly OK to leave the sponge cake out of the trifle.  The original recipe was mainly custard, raspberries, liqueur, trifle cake, whipped cream and some confiture.  I've adapted the recipe somewhat.  My shopping list today had on it:  pound cake, apricot jam, fresh raspberries, fresh blueberries, fresh blackberries, heavy cream for whipping, a dozen eggs to make the heavy custard, a lemon for a little zest, no sherry because I already have it, and I know I'm forgetting something. What you really want is God's Own Twinkies without the filling for the sponge cake and I noticed that an English site actually sold "trifle spongecakes", but I'm hardly going to get those in time, so I opted for pound cake, which I will slice into columns and line the outside of the trifle with them so they serve as visual pillars of sensual support when viewed from the outside of the trifle bowl.  Then, you pour in some red berries, and then some vanilla wafers for body, and them some apricot jam perhaps, and then some blueberries or blackberries, haven't decided which yet, and then a layer of heavy custard, and then more wafers and perhaps some more custard and then berries and then a lovely layer of hand-whipped cream and keep doing this as the strata build and the riot of color takes shape as viewed from the outside of said trifle bowl.  I'm thinking I'll put some blueberries and toasted almost slices on top, and WAIT, I just forgot that you just can't forget to add mandarin oranges somewhere along the way.  
As you can tell, I like making trifle.  I'm a little bit sure that one reason my poem "Anabasis" got accepted by Iowa Review and Poetry Daily was because there was a trifle bowl in it.  I'll tell you how it turns out, but in reality, I've never had a bad trifle.

 

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I hate my kitchen floor.  It's composed of these faux hardwood strips that yearn to be real oak or something, but which buckled and bulged the first time my dishwasher overflowed ten years ago.  If I were married, or domestically inclined, I would have had it replaced a long time ago.  I spend a reasonable amount of my free time in the kitchen and who wants to look at these posers?  Now that work has slowed down a bit, I got a bug up my nether parts, and while having my nightly call with Sweet Junie, decided to start ripping up the old slats.  This was sufficiently noisy and I was sufficiently distracted that Junie noticed.  "What on earth are you doing?", she asked or something to that effect.  "Ripping up this stupid floor while we're talking", I said.  That was last week.  I spent the next night ripping up the rest of it, and the next three nights pulling the thousand staples out of the subfloor which had anchored the strips.  It took me a while to evolve to the correct tool, which was this snipper kind of thing with a rounded face that would grip the staple and then let me rotate it out of the subfloor.  OK, so now I had a bare subfloor.  Immediately I ran to Home Depot and bought a book on "Flooring - 1-2-3", and decided on tile.  After consuming that volume, I watched a half-dozen videos on the Internet and read another half-dozen descriptions of "How To Lay Tile".  All of them advised putting down "backerboard", such as Durock (which I swear is the city the Duke in Shrek reigned over) and Hardieboard.  I read extensively about that.  The problem, apparently, is that tile isn't really cool with the idea of stress.  So you need whatever's under it to be really, really flat.  There is even an index of this, the name of which I forget, but it's like Moh's Scale, advising you about the degree of level-ness of your floor and whether you really should be contemplating natural stone.  I drove over to Lowe's which is closer nowadays, and the Nice Young Man told me to get half-inch Hardieboard and "acrylic-enhanced thinset" to attach it to the subfloor, assuming that my subfloor's supporting members were no more than 20 inches apart and somewhere in there was another metric for the strength and virility of my joists.  I used to be able to look at my joists but that was before I had my basement built out, so I had to guess.  I thought I probably had 3/4 inch subfloors made of composite.  The Hardie site said all I needed was 1/4 inch Hardieboard and that 1/2 Hardieboard actually provided no additional stiffness as their 90% Portland Cement and 10% Something Else composition has compressive strength but not sheer strength, or something like that.  But, I had already ordered the 1/2 inch boards, and here they were in my garage.  I had incurred multiple bruises and a day of fatigue ripping out the damnable wood strips and it was now time to Move The Appliances.  The fridge actually worked its way pretty nicely over a spot behind the couch in the den.  I had, of course, undone the hose that connects to the ice machine, but I don't drink Campari anymore so what do I need with ice?  Likewise the range, which was really light and almost walked itself to the living room.  Dima went upstairs for coffee and saw all of this and decided, as he had tiled his bathroom, that I really needed help on Saturday and he's coming.  I've conquered my fear by buying lots of tools:  power drills and chalk lines and floats and serrated trowels.  Meanwhile, I have to figure out what to eat that only requires a microwave.  I settled on Salad Nicoise, as I have an old can of anchovies somewhere.  I had to make some hard-boiled eggs, but I found that if I dropped two of them in 3 cups of water in a Tupperware affair, they come out OK.  I won't be eating pasta for a couple of weeks unless I figure out how to boil enough water in a microwave to suspend the pasta in small portions at a time, or maybe I should just try suspending bowtie pasta in water in the first place and see how the microwave zaps the whole thing.  And, of course, there's the actual tiling.  I've written a poem called "Tessellation", so as you can imagine, I'm sort of an expert at this kind of thing.  I just have to decide between ceramic and porcelain and colors and such.  It's a decision I would much prefer to have Sweet Junie in on.  Well, I have to go.  My eggs-in-Tupperware are threatening to explode in the microwave.

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The cover of Poets &Writers is adorned with a picture of Valzhyna Mort (leaning on an accordion?) staring back at you with blue eyes, turquoise earrings, and an elfin grin.  If I handed the magazine to my mother, I'm sure she would say "cute as a button".  And yes, I called my mother today and even sent her a bunch of tulips last week.  Ms. Mort is a poet from Belarus, which coincidentally is also where Dima's parents are from.  Copper Canyon Press has published Ms. Mort's Factory of Tears, which includes the originals in Belarusian along with translations by Franz Wright (now there's an interesting combination).   I like looking at the Belarusian originals of the poems, which look like what I get when I accidentally pound out an email on Dima's machine (for which he occasionally turns on the Cyrillic option).  Wright's translation of "Cry Me a River" starts off:  "her body trapped in a voice / as if it were a cage / and roses thrown on the stage / like pieces of red meat".  Page One notes that Mark Yakich's The Importance of Peeling Potatoes, his second poetry book, has been published by Penguin.  It's not an all-Slavic issue, however.  Other items:  Small Press Points asks whether "poetry-only" presses are a dying breed, pointing out that BOA lost its standing as an IPOP (independent poetry-publishing publication) by releasing a story collection, as did Four Way Books, Wave Books.  Anhinga Press will be publishing a book of essays and Copper Canyon Press has published (Poetry editor) Christian Wiman's prose work.  Literary MagNet mentions Ninth Letter, Oxford American and Literary Review.  Rebecca Wolff's Fence enterprise is ten years old, and I laughed at her response to the question about the "booby issue".  Stephen Morison writes about the Chinese literary scene (very interesting).  There are a number of articles on fiction, fictioneers, and agents − which I don't tend to read.  I actually find the whole agent thing kind of comical.  It's not that poets don't have agents, of course.  Visit the Steven Barclay Agency and you can sign up for speaking gigs with Billy Collins, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Jane Hirshfield, W. S. Merwin, Naomi Shibab Nye, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, or Adrienne Rich.  SBA doesn't represent their poetry, of course.  They still have to lick stamps and send in their submissions and submit their manuscripts for consideration without benefit of agent, right?  I'm only kidding, of course.  The combined solicitation letters from litmags to these folks would probably fill a boxcar.  On the other hand, a mediocre Tom Wolfe book may only sell half a million copies in its first year, which is probably the total sales of all books over their lifetimes of all the poets just named.  I really liked Katrina Vandenberg's article on how to arrange the poems in your manuscript.  I just don't believe it.  More on that later.  Her advice is an 11-step program, which takes its inspiration from popular sources (Elvis Costello, Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Tom Waits).  My problem with this whole arrangement-of-poems-in-your-manuscript thing is that I don't know how to do it (OK, at least I'm being honest about my failings) and that I don't read any poetry book anything like front-to-back.  I also don't read magazines that way.  Or technical manuals.  I admit that I do read murder mysteries that way, but it's an exception.  But, I digress.  Amy Rosenberg discusses Melissa Delbridge's debut collection of personal essays about the South in Family Bible (OK, it's fiction but it was interesting).  Everything else was ads and the usual.  You have a nice Sunday.

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I got an email from a client today, worried about some new aggressiveness in enforcing the GNU Public License. The short story is that the GPL is the cornerstone of the open source movement, and particularly championed by the father of "free software", Richard Stallman.  As you can tell from the picture, this guy is not your basic Republican capitalist.  Stallman asks people to envision a world in which there is only "free software" and to assiduously avoid the term "intellectual property".  He's an intelligent and interesting man, but he has very strong opinions about "free software".  You know, the kind of software you don't get from the Evil Empire in Redmond. 

The problem with free software is the same problem with free anything.  If a commodity is truly free, who but hobbyists would spend time and money creating it?  "Wait!", you say, what about Linux and all that open source and free software?  Well, that's where the peas start moving under the shells.  Yes, there is a lot of open source software and Linux is widely available and you can download sources and build it any time you want.  But, you may have noticed there isn't actually a lot of Linux applications, in fact the ratio of Windows apps to Linux apps has to be 100-to-1 or more.  Still, somebody is writing all this great free software, so who are they?

I hate to burst your bubble, but my experience over the last decade is that the open source developers fall into three categories:  1) hardware companies that are "pushing iron" as we used to say and pay programmers to contribute to open source projects like Linux to move more hardware out the door and provide the corporation with a service revenue.  A good example is IBM.  2)  Researchers, government employees, university staff and faculty, and others who already make a good living and can contribute without worrying about their next paycheck, and 3) thousands of employees who use their company's time to write code for the open source community, often unbeknownst to the company who pays them.  I've had two programmers like that in the past 10 years.  One of them was a frequent Linux contributor, and even gave a paper in Germany on his enhancements.  Every time I would come into his office, he would do a screen switch to what I wanted him to be working on (and, of course paying him for) from some Linux project he found interesting. 

If Stallman had his way, all software would be free.  Any application linked to standard Linux (or GNU libraries) would be "viral" and immediately require that the author take his hard-won code and deliver it in source form to anyone who wanted his program.  What's wrong with this?  Well, in the first place, why should the development of software be any different than any other construction job?  In the "free software" world, if I spend two years writing a novel application, I should just offer up the entire thing for anybody who wants it free of charge.  I can bill them for the services of pre-building it and support, but I have to give away the source code.  The standard notion is that this "prebuilding" fee should be relatively nominal, like the cost of the CD's plus labor.  It's as if someone said that Lexus had to ship their cars at the price of the steel in them.

But, "wait!", you say.  What about Google and Yahoo and all those remaining successful dot-com companies.  They're doing so well that their employees get free bikes and climbing walls in the lunch break room, which is also coincidentally free, and all kinds of amazing benefits.  Well, that's the catch.  Google and Sales.com and other major firms deliver a product on the web, so they don't "distribute" it in the 1980's sense, so they are free to use any public source contributions without the viral effect that makes them provide their product for free.  How screwed up is that?

I hear a lot of this kind of nonsense, of course, not only in software, but in music and video.  Sweet Junie and I each have some kids who firmly believe that all their downloads should be free.  I don't know how we are going to suddenly reverse Adam Smith's observations that when there's no money in something, it stops getting produced.  This is certainly the case with software.  Microsoft and Oracle employ something like 100,000 well-paid engineers who then go out and spend money in the local economy.  If Microsoft Office or Oracle were free, I have a feeling there would be a lot fewer of them.  In fact, there neither product would exist.  Here's a perfect example:  I have a tiny company that over the last 25 years has sold something like 50,000 licenses for our commercial BASIC product.  Each of the customers is a vertical application developer, someone who writes programs to run a 4-user pharmacy in Spain for example.  Each license sold to the dealer/developer results in a revenue of probably $500 to them (and about one-tenth of that to us).  So, our customers have had revenues of about $25 million in the past 25 years, which let them hire staff and run businesses.  Most of them are just one or two developers with a specialty, like church management software.  But, had the fact that our compiler links to Linux libraries made EVERYTHING they spent their lives writing and maintaining public property, there would be a thousand people out of work.  

So think of it this way:  if we had "free software", all those software manufacturing jobs would disappear and there would only be software service jobs.   Yeah, we know how well that's worked out for millions of Americans in the past 8 years.

There's a joke that's a favorite of mine.  An emperor asks his wise men to condense all the wisdom of the world.  The wise men come back with one book, and the emperor says it's too verbose.  The wise men come back with a small monograph and the emperor says it's too much.  The wise men reduce the wisdom to a single page, and it's still too much for the emperor.  Finally, the wise men come back with a single sheet on which is written "There's no such thing as a free lunch". 

Right.

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It occurs to me that one reason I like reading Dean Young is that his poems seem quite like my dreams.  All except that one about the big erection.  I've never had a big erection in a dream.

One of the science magazines that Sweet Junie got for me was Skeptic.  It's an odd magazine with excellent production values.  All kinds of notable people seem to have written in it and generated accolades for it, much like the blurbs we see on the back of every poetry book, even those that get sent to me for review that are simply dreadful.  Skeptic, as I was saying, has excellent production values:  3-D cartoons of Isaac Asimov on the cover, color pics of the cosmos.  Still, there's a strange amateurishness to it, as if the editors want to try just a little too hard to believe that the world is, after all, a rational place and all that spoon-bending just needs to be debunked and right now.  There's a section called the Junior Skeptic, which is sort of like a Boy Scout manual for addressing every young lad and ladette's questions about wishful thinking.  I did like a couple of articles, though, including the detailed coverage of the New Creation Museum that you can read about here.   Our roving skeptical reporter asks question after question disingenuously about the day-to-day operations of the ark:  "How many sheep would a dinosaur need to eat?" and "What exactly do you mean by two of every kind?"  It turns out that Creationist scholars admit that there are WAY too many species to have fit on the ark, no matter how you quibble about the length of a cubit.  Thus, we suppose that the best Noah could have done was to place two of every genus on the ark, not including aquatic animals and various creatures that could have lived on floating islands of vegetation.  The answer to the question of feeding the carnivores (how do you even approach a lion with the day's meal?) is that before the Fall, all animals were herbivores and many of them conveniently did a long stint on a veggie diet until the flood subsided. 

ZYZZYVA's cover shows a US soldier in desert camo arguing with a harpie or something.  There are a zillion ads at the front, which I love, having grown tired of the usual MFA program pleas.  One, for example, is sponsored by Firefly Restaurant that has the motto "Food you eat.", which embodies the sort of brevity and in media res that I like in any kind of literature, including advertisements.   For the record, the poets this issue are Amaranth Borsk, Kate Evans, Michael McClure, Verónica Reyes, Matt Schumacher, and Bucky Sinister, and I think someone may be pulling our leg on that last one.  I thought all of these were decent poems, but I tend to like the fiction better than the poetry in ZYZZYVA.  My loss, no doubt.

The American Poet also showed up this week, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.  Most of the articles are titled "XXX on YYY", which sounds a little inbred to me.  "James Tate on Charles Simic", "Marie Ponsot on Alice Notley", "August Kleinzahler on Sally Van Doren".  It all sound a bit self-congratulatory, but actually the article are interesting and well-written.  I particularly liked the article on Alice Notley, whom I admire for living in Paris and other reasons.  The RE:PRINT section has "Poems from Ten Exciting Books", and includes MJB, Robert Hass, Joanna Kink, Cate Marvin, Carsten Neilsen, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Prageeta Sharma, G. C. Waldrep, and Charles Wright.    Amazing.  I've only reviewed two books in my entire life, and they both made it into American Poet (and certainly, I had nothing to do with that).  Pretty good poetry by Ron Padgett, Heather McHugh, Karen Volkman, and William Shakespeare.

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