WhimsyLand

I'm thinking that I don't actually grok the whole Facebook thing.  I mean, Harold Bloom is now my friend.  I'm pleased and gratified that Lara Glenum is my friend (with all its gothic undertones), but Harold Bloom seems like an entirely different category.  By that standard, I think I should be Helen Vendler's friend and Marjorie Perloff's friend and William Logan's friend and perhaps even Randall Jarrell's friend?  I am also Richard Siken's friend and Gabe Gudding's friend and Kazim Ali's friend and Mark Doty's friend and Suzanne Frischkorn's friend, which I'm quite pleased about.  And I'm friends with people who have 50 friends in common and I haven't the foggiest idea who they are.  Is that OK?  Should I google them and read about their exploits?

I had written this long paragraph before my new Nike Air-Something tennies (usually called trainers in English murder mysteries and Harry Potter books) hit something on the UPS under my desk and rebooted my system.  Yes, most of the Office products were doing backups every couple of minutes, but apparently not Front Page, where I type in my blog entries mainly because there's a spelling corrector built in.  The paragraph was about how much I like Jim Jubak, and his recent article on Asian inflation.  About Vietnam, he says:

Those interest rate increases have crushed the nascent Vietnamese stock market. The VN, an index of 151 companies on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, was down more than 60% for 2008 as of June 11. And the government is predicting economic growth will slow to 7% for 2009 from last year's 8.5%.

The Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange?  I mean, do the affluent belong to the Karl Marx Yacht Club?

I spent all morning working with our 25-year old product that we retrofitted a MySQL interface to.  One of our clients is one of the largest organic foods distributors in the U.S., and they are having problems that cause dozens of IT workers and data entry personnel to pull their hair out.  Basically, it seems that updates we do are incurring huge time lags, up to 3 hours before they post.  It's pretty inexplicable, actually, since our software does really simple MySQL queries via their C API.  I VPN'd in to their system last week and Remote Desktop'd over to their Terminal Server and was able to reproduce the problem, but not fix it.  Today, I spent all day working locally and was able to reproduce the problem, as well.  It turns out that I need to reconnect to MySQL from time to time to flush transactions.  I don't know why this is necessary, it certainly isn't required on other database products.   It feels good to win one every once in a while, though, and I shipped the new version off and started cutting up carpet again.

An interesting project came over the transom this afternoon.  It's one of those ugly projects where the product is a commercial product in a sensitive industry (think aerospace or the military) with dozens of compliance requirements and a large handful of specifications to which it must conform.  Of course, these are the kind of projects that are farmed out by giant megabusinesses, which is the case here, and the expectation is that the cost (think, $4,500 toilet seat) is 10X what it would be in the commercial market for the same basic device.  We would be subcontractors to subcontractors to subcontractors to subcontractors to the general contractor, so whatever we charge you can bet it the eventual bill for our labor will be a multiple of that.  Also, the general contractor is based in Paris and wants all kinds of manufacturing test software.  Sweet Junie and I have a Paris Fund that has a healthy, but inadequate, balance right now, but I would love to think that I could combine business with pleasure and be paid to work a few days and spend a few nights with my love on the Champs Elysées.  OK, I've already been there a few times, but Sweet Junie hasn't and once you get over the fact that a coffee is 5 Euros, you're home free with a nice view of the Arc de Triomphe and a little biscuit on your plate.  Actually, my favorite place in France is probably Nantes, right on the Loire.  But, Paris has a lot to keep one busy for a week, assuming you're not staying in the Amarante Beau Manoir and have spent all our money on tips.  When I left to live in a small town in Germany, I listened to tapes for a month.  It was amazing.  When I was done, I knew the 200 most common sentences in German, and I used them 80% of the time I was in Ochtendung.  The rest of the time, I just waved my arms, and made shapes with my hands.  I gave those same tapes to Dave and Kevvy to listen to on their long drive from my place to Hannover Messe.  After a half-dozen hours of lessons, they arrived in an Irish pub on Saint Patrick's Day, and the only thing they could say was "I am not an English woman" (Ich bin keine Englanderin, as near as I remember).  So, I figure a dozen hours of tape will get me way past the cultural problems of the Griswalds.  Besides, Sweet Junie majored in French a long time ago, so she can correct my transgressions, and all the locals will be so happy that we are trying so hard to disassociate ourselves from the American hubris of the last decade.  That's the plan, anyway.

 

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Well, I received three emails today from people wanting to take advantage of the GREAT MMM back issue offer (see below).  Why not you, too? 

Now, look at that beautiful kitchen tile!  Well, you can't see much of it, because the kitchen has become my living room for a week or so.  I have to pull up the carpeting in the den/TV room, so the grandfather clock in the foyer had to go to the living room, and the Scandinavian shelves had to go to the foyer, and the den sofa and TV and what not had to go into the kitchen.  It will be kinda fun to watch a DVD there tonight, though, only steps from the range where I can refill my bowl with pasta, and the fridge, where I can top up my Chardonnay.  It feels a little like a dorm room, actually.

I spent the ENTIRE BLOODY DAY completely reloading my main system.  Why, you ask?  I don't know why, exactly, but it was the result of a Vista update.  For once (and I'm never doing this again), I permitted Vista to install a few of recommended, but optional, updates.  That was the beginning of 12 hours of hell.  First, it said it had to shutdown and install the updates.  OK, no problem, it always does that.  I've always figured that Billy Gates personally earns a nickel every time we reboot somehow, not sure how.  Then, around the middle of the 3d update, Vista said that it couldn't complete this one, and it would have to revert the update.  I wasn't too worried yet.  Then, it rebooted and attempted the reversion and completely tanked with the Blue Screen of Death.  That started 4 hours of trying everything I know to recover. First, I started the system with the "last good configuration".  It continued the Update of Doom cycle.  Second, I started in Safe Mode.  Same thing.  Then, I loaded the original Vista DVD and selected Repair, and Vista told me that I had no recovery points.  Of course, I did, I checked a couple of days ago, I had dozens.  So apparently, the update destroyed them.  Since Vista doesn't have an XP type of repair, where it just puts everything back to where it was upon installation, I was screwed.  I fired up my MSDN subscription and chatted online with some useless Microsoft idiot who told me that the BSOD meant I had a hardware problem.  I said "No, it means that you somehow updated a driver that is incompatible with my system, since I haven't changed one thing since the original installation".  He then ignored me and gave me a URL to a MS techie who would "work with me" on the BSOD.  I said, "I know how to read the BSOD details, and your guy isn't going to help.  I just need to know how to recover when Vista has wiped out my restore points".  Then, he terminated the chat session.  So, I spent the next 6 hours loading Vista again, loading Office Ultimate 2007 again, loading Visual Studio 6.0, 2003.NET, and 2005 again.  And the Cute PDF printer and my RoboForm password rememberererer.  And Acrobat Reader.  And God Knows how many dozen other things, and I will bet you anything that I've forgotten at least another half-dozen that I'm going to remember in the next week when I'm actually trying to get real paying work done. 

OK, so much for venting.  Time to go at the carpet again with my wicked carpet knife and roll up the pieces and tape them and watch Ms. Emily crawl in the new ones.  And then make dinner and probably watch something educational and sophisticated in my kitchen, like maybe one of the four Lethal Weapons on my DVD shelf.

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Do you know what Sherman Alexie, Alicia Ostriker, Agha Shahid Ali, Forrest Gander, Tony Hoagland, Mark Irwin, W. S. Merwin, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell, Pattiann Rogers, David St. John, C. D. Wright, Michael Collins, David Hernandez, Jeffrey Levine, Richard Siken, Eliot Khalil Wilson, Deborah Batterman, Mary Crow, Jack Collom, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kim Addonizio, Amiri Baraka, Jeffrey Franklin, Ray Gonzalez, Patrick Lawler, Aliki Barnstone, Virgil Suarez, G.C. Waldrep, Jane Hirshfield, Renato Rosaldo, Robert Bly, Diane Glancy, and Reginald Gibbons have in common?

They are all published in one or more of the dozen Many Mountains Moving issues that I will send you if you send me $4.00 in postage.  Yes, that’s right $4.00.  If you must PayPal me, that’s OK, too.  Use jbahr at set-software-services.com.  Otherwise mail your postage to

Many Mountains Moving
c/o Reducing the MMM Footprint in My Garage
549 Rider Ridge Drive
Longmont, CO  80501

You will be very happy with what you receive.  It will come Media Mail, so you will have to sit on your hands for 4-5 days, but then the box will come with a dozen fresh, beautiful issues from our back issue warehouse.

~~~

From Harper's Findings:

• The gonorrhea bacterium is the strongest organism in existence.
• Texas doctors cured priapic mice of their genetically engineered constant erections.
• Human-robot communications work better if the robot fills its pauses with spoken tics instead of silence.
• As much of one-quarter of the Earth's beaches is now made of plastic.
• Goldfish were found to have reasonably good memories.

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Tiling Diary: I finished the third coat of glazed sealant on the tile and it's nice and shiny now.  That's Ms. Emily heading out to sneer at the robins.  If you look carefully, you can also see my main floor office, where I have a zillion poetry books and journals.  If I were Ron, of course, I'd need an entire house full of book shelves.  Apparently, the Silliman poetry library is in excess of 5,000 volumes.

Want some proof that gas prices are affecting collateral economics?  Sweet Junie and I are flying in early July to see my parents (I should remember to stitch my name on the back of one of the Persian rugs, while I'm at it).  Dad is recovering from the installation of a new hip, so he's only walking 3 miles a day now, instead of his previous 7 mile jog.  Mom and Dad got new bikes, so I got him a snazzy pair of red biking gloves for Father's Day, the kind with no fingers that make you look like an Extreme Fighter.  I need to see clients in the Bay Area and, of course, stay a night at Casa Paulsen (yes, Dave, we'll bring some wine) and maybe have a nice night out at Maurizio's.  Dave and Chris and I have been to Maurizio's many, many times, a period that I think spans three different restaurants that he owned.  But, I digress.  I logged into the Hertz web site to book a one-way car from San Diego (near where my parents are) to SFO (where Sweet Junie and I are departing), and found that they wanted $550 which didn't count taxes or the gasoline, which at $4.00 a gallon would run another hundred bucks probably.  That was more than the round-trip airfare for both of us.  Amtrak came to the rescue with a deal where we take the train, business class, whatever that means (and I hope it means a dining car like the fabulous one I had dinner with Kurt in when we took the Swiss train from Zurich to the Italian border, but I kinda doubt it) to Grover Beach and spend a day with my sister Linda and my longest-standing BIL Roy, at their ranch and then leave the next day on an Amtrak Thruway bus, and the whole thing is $144 for both of us, which sounds like a deal to me.  Then, I have to rent a car in San Jose, drive over to Casa Paulsen, wine/dine/talk/sleep, and spend the next day in a couple of meetings while Sweet Junie roams around Silicon Valley.  I checked Travelocity for one-day rentals, picking up in San Jose and dropping off at SFO.  It was hilarious.  Budget, for example, will rent me an intermediate $104 a day, but their minivan is only $78 and an SUV is $85.  Thrifty is even more in tune with gas prices.  Their intermediate is $89, but I can get a "standard SUV" for $59 a day.  It's amazing to see economics kick in this rapidly.

I received my Atlantic yesterday.  The lead article is "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?".  I can hardly get through a blog entry anymore without googling something, or at least checking dictionary.com.  It may have something to do with "typing while drinking" on my part, but apparently the crutch is endemic.  The article says that authors get so used to short reads and short writes that it's hard for novelists and reports to keep the attention span necessary to finish longish pieces.

I'm working with a company now on the software to use dual-touch "gestures", such as what you saw in Minority Report or what one does on an Apple iPhone to rearrange and rotate and squish a collection of photographs.  It's pretty interesting, but if I told you more, I'd have to staple your tongue permanently to a bamboo cutting board.

See you later this week, most likely.


 

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Tiling Diary:  Last night, I applied the gray sanded grout to the slate in the foy-yay.  This entailed scrubbing the tiles repeatedly with a copper pad that looks like a Brillo pad, but that's, well, copper.  I also used a cold chisel to knock out small parts of the thin set that had dribbled over into areas where it was Not Wanted.  Applying the grout was actually the easy part.  I would ladle along the lines and then go at it with my rubber float, trying to get as little grout on the tiles as possible.  This went on for an hour or two (and tomorrow I will seal it with a glazed sealer).  Then, I had a glass of wine to let it set up a bit and watched one of those movies I bought at Blockbuster, 3 for $20, can't remember which one.  It wasn't There Will Be Blood, because I watched that for two nights and finally gave up out of ennui.  I mean, Daniel just shows up and they give him an Oscar?  But, I digress.  The bitchy part was cleaning up the grout.  This is not your ordinary smooth ceramic tile, this is slate with a zillion imperfections, each of which seems to attract grout like the proverbial magnet.  Three passes and 12 big buckets of clean water later, plus the ever-present copper pad, it looked pretty good.  I found that Lowe's had a couple of stacks of remaining slate (I thought I was still waiting for New Delhi to get off the dime), and was able to cut the rest of the odd shapes on my wet saw and use some pre-mixed thin set, which costs more but what the hell I only need a little, and finish the tile laydown.  I've finished the kitchen tile sealing and tomorrow morning I can finish the foyer grouting, then wait 48 hours and seal the sucker.  I am now ready to tile the entire house, including the redwood deck and possibly the ceiling.  Sweet Junie advises that I wait until her next trip out to advise on the wisdom of all this.

I got a new issue of The Journal, the publication of Ohio State.  Lots of good work.  Here's some that caught my eye:

Laura Kasischke, "Please":  "Anyone here who has ever stolen a ring from the finger of a corpse, raise your hand. // All who have lusted burningly in your heart for a bird, please stand."

Nicky Beer, "Clock-Radio Ambush":  "I should have known:  the air was just a thin / membrane holding back the voices".

Hadara Bar-Navad, "Let Me Hold the Kaleidoscope":  "Everything unbuttons and we / forget about war, / its itchy apparatus."

S. Whitney Holmes, As In The Device, Not The Dance":  "Because robots cannot bleed / the action continues as usual. // The cogs fit together, the claw / opens, grabs, lifts, deposits, / repeats.//      and and and //  It is nothing like a hand. / It is nothing like a hand."

Molly Bendall, "Flame Vendor":  "Cast doubt why don't you / on your blouse and sad attire. /     I might too−"

Anna Leahy does a bang-up job reviewing books by Kate Greenstreet, Nancy Kuhl, and Sandra Lim.  In her preface, she discourses on first book contests brilliantly and quotes from Beth Ann Fennelly's excellent article in the AWP Writer's Chronicle from some years back:  "First books that can be grasped quickly by those doing the preliminary judging − . . . are more likely to be passed on to the final judge.  They are also books that can be reviewed in 250 words or less, summed up neatly for jacket copy, and advertised to a specific audience . . .".  Oh, hell.  Now, I know why I never win those things.  I'm really tempted to put in the cover letter to Anabasis, my current first book offering:  "IT'S A LOVE STORY ABOUT THE POWER OF REDEMPTION".  But, I haven't got that kind of hubris.  Yet.  Give me a few years.

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A rare Persian rug sold at Christie's for $4.45 million, which comes to about $730 per square inch.  When my family was leaving Iran, mom and dad sold all of their furniture and bought rugs.  They are still in my parent's home, and quite beautiful.  I've never thought about how valuable they might be, but they cost thousands of dollars in 1960, so probably quite so. 

I didn't know that Reb had red hair.  Did Reb always have red hair?  It's quite attractive red hair, and she has the perfect right to have it.  I'm just wondering if I've been unobservant.  For example, for the first three years I knew Sweet Junie, I couldn't remember her eye color.  That kinda thing.

An Ohio high school passed out graduation diplomas which had the word education misspelled.

Gabe Gudding reports on Facebook that Harper's wants to run "part of an essay-poem" in their Readings section.  I'm assuming that it's an excerpt from Rhode Island Notebook, but I don't really know. 

Dumb flies live longer.

I've been adding friends to my list on Facebook.  It helps that FB recommends individuals, most of whom I don't think I know, and then I find we have 54 friends in common.  I have not been very active on FB, nor anywhere as clever as my friends.   They tend to report their doings in strange and wonderful ways:  "Daniel Nester thinks he can dance. So?" and "Amy Newman forgives the caramel deer who ate the red geraniums." and "Tony Tost was wondering if he was infantilizing Simon with a cutsie pajama outfit, then remembered that Simon is an infant." 

Rebecca has had me thinking all day about the poetic possibilities of "high filberts".

"In some regions, the supply coming to the market from home builders is now smaller than the supply coming from foreclosures." - Deutsche Bank senior economist Torsten Slok.

Trish finally got to go to Disneyworld.

Tiling Diary:  This morning, I applied the sealer to the kitchen tile and grout.  The sealer, manufactured by DuPont, cost $90 for a quart or so.  You could buy a nice Bordeaux for that.  Meanwhile, I'm still (slowly) laying slate in the entryway (or if you wish foyer, which I would pronounce foy-yay, but that's me).  The slate is quite lovely in strange and unpredictable ways.  I cut the odd pieces with a wet saw which spews up slate-dusted water and makes me absolutely filthy and feel very manly.  I have been combining my tessellation and culinary skills to good effect.  I find that a kitchen ladle is much more effective in doling out thin set, for example.  For those odd places where using a serrated trowel is tricky, I just apply the cement directly to the back of the tile with a rubber spatula.  When a tile is mis-set, I use a pancake flipper to lift it.  I have found no use for the turkey baster, but it's still early days.

Cath and Ky and Luke and Julie and Joanna and Clifton and Rosario joined Derek for a 21st birthday party at The Med.  We ate all kinds of tapas and Der had a martini.  They didn't tell us if it was shaken or stirred.  Luke is my nephew and was visiting his friends Clifton and Rosario in Boulder by excellent chance, so were able to join us in the consumption of bocarones and almendras tostadas and pinchos morunos and almejas con salsa verde y jamon and aceitunas mixtas.   We were all sorry that Sweet Junie couldn't make it, as she loves the baba ghanouj and hummus bil tahini.

Special Offer!  The management of Many Mountains Moving has decided that we don't really need thousands of back issues.  So, you can obtain a dozen back issues for the cost of postage.  Just send me $5 in postage and I'll send you the volumes via Media Mail.  If you'd like a whole box (which is between 32 and 45 volumes) of any issue, send me $14 in postage and I'll make sure it gets to you.  If you'd like to know who has been published in these volumes, there is a selected list of contributors at SPD.  The poets and writers who are featured in these volumes include Kim Addonizio, Hayden Carruth, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Mark Irwin, Dorianne Laux, Charles Simic among the many hundreds of authors.  Email me at jbahr at set-software-services.com for details.
 

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Derek arrived on Saturday at an hour he called "early in the morning" and the rest of us call 10 AM.  By that time, I had installed the backerboard in a part of the entryway.  Der did an outstanding job scoring and breaking odd pieces of the backerboard to fit the weirdly-shaped entryway while I spread the mud.  At some point we switched as I figured the wrist exercise would be good for his already superb guitar playing, and besides I was tired.  We finished the backerboard installation, Der headed off for a Boulder encounter and I started looking for a wine bottle.  This morning I began laying the slate 12x12's in the entryway.  The first step was mixing the thinset, for which I need a paddle that affixes to one my power drills.  I found the same Nice Young Man who had sold me everything else and asked him how to score the slate.  He said, "you don't, you need a wet saw".  Two hundred dollars later, I had a wet saw with a nifty angle guide and a laser line drawing gizmo.  I asked the Nice Young Man if the next palette of slate was on its way, as I didn't think I had enough.  He checked and found out that it was currently in New Delhi, so I may have a bit of wait on my hands.  Der made it into work even earlier and we commenced with laying down the slate.  It's strange stuff, colored variously between black and gold rust, and ranging in thickness from 1/4" to 3/8ths so we threw out the book on using the level and decided the entryway would be an adventure.  When we had 60% of the entryway done, we suspended that operation and attacked the kitchen.  These were conventional ceramic tiles, each a perfect twin of the next.  For this job, we used the little rubber crucifixes for spacing and mudded large swaths at a time.  Odd pieces were easily created with a tile cutter, though a couple of times I had to wander out to the garage and make a cut with the wet saw.  We got 80% of the kitchen done when the big Belgian grandfather clock bonged 5 PM, and I decided that a glass of wine sounded better than mixing another batch of mud.  And dinner?  Grilled flank steak and microwaved red potatoes.  Who needs a range, anyway?

Cook's Illustrated must be recycling their back covers because this month is Asian Fruit again (pomegranate, Coconut, lychees, kumquats, et cetera).  I was once told that the word pomegranate is derived from the French for "apple of Granada", though I haven't actually checked.  But I digress.  Editor Kimball never seems to tire telling us stories of his childhood, all poignant and reproduced in sepia tint.  The rest of the issue is, as usual, excellent.  Quick Tips advises that a half eggshell will act as a magnet to attract stray shell bits in a bowl of egg innards.  Another tip addresses the plaguing problem of having your hands smell like anchovies after mincing, something that I admit I never worried about.  Recipes include Enchiladas Verdes using tomatillos and broiled chiles, Great Grilled Bone-In Chicken Breasts (requiring that your grill have a hot side and a less-hot side), Reviving the Original Drive-In Burger (buy boneless short ribs and sirloin steak tips, use the food processor to create the ground beef, make your own hamburger buns, use classic burger sauce), Rescuing Summer Vegetable Gratin (don't squeeze the seeds from the tomatoes as they contain two-thirds of the tomato flavor, use caramelized onions, zucchini, squash, and garlic-thyme olive oil), Better Grilled Sausages with Onions (render the sausages on a bed of onions, then grill them), Perfecting Caponata (salt the eggplant, dice and dry out in microwave on coffee filters, make sure to use pine nuts), Improving Pasta with Olives, Garlic, and Herbs (Kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil), Fool-Proof Peach Shortcake (I don't care, I don't bake), Best Blueberry Pie (use tapioca for stiffener, mash half the berries).

The latest Poetry is pretty star-studded.  Contributors include Peter Cole, A.E. Stallings, Charles Bernstein, W. S. Di Piero, D. A. Powell, Tom Sleigh, Geoffrey Brock, Charles Simic, Ange Mlinko, Nance Van Winkel, Rae Armantrout and many others.  This issue has a moderate amount of formal verse (spearheaded by A.E).  Here's a collage of the poetry: "Birdsong, face it, some male machine / The lumber's astringency.  Fuck guacamole. / We also had a queen, / whetted by the moon. / An inch from the curse and pearled / Violet ocean only nothing / The rich men, they know about suffering / Do me my elegy now, or I'll scrawl the thing / engloving the scene.  Why is it the slipper the bitch clutches? / like a wily Anne Bonny / What's a person to us? / this no-way-to-resist seeing / Staring up into the tank's belly lit / The inlet will come first.  It always does."  The letters to the editor are full of court and spark as usual.  This from Marilyn Chin responding to a letter from Joseph Bednarik:  "Perhaps Joseph Bednarik is not conscious that noodling around the margins is an appalling and problematic expression, fraught with demeaning sexist, racist, imperialist overtones, and born out of the hateful stuff that Ho Xuan Huong so pointedly and whole-heartedly fought against in her poetry and in her life." 

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