Whimsy Speaks Again

I'm sure you've heard by now how much the moneyed class hates the idea of Barack and his Communist budget.  Even those on the left are saying it:

"Though, alas, the super rich will have to pay slightly more in taxes. Yeah, that's a shame. So they're gathering in their secret war rooms in the Orange County underground and on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, grinding the tips of their Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins into razor-sharp spears and fashioning their Bentley key fobs into makeshift nunchucks in preparation for a supremely ridiculous rebellion led by a cast of far-right characters more freakish than the acid trip monsters from Yo Gabba Gabba."

The problem with this trope is it isn't true.  Take a look at the NPR Electoral Explorer.  Click on median income and you'll see the breakdown of Obama vs. McCain.  As you move the slider bar across from $16,000 to $98,000 the percentages don't change much.  In fact, how they change is:  the higher the median income in a county, the more it voted for Obama.  When you get beyond $90,000 median income, you're in the 55% to 59% range.  And those are median incomes, which means a whole lot of households made more than $250,000 a year – exactly the income of the families that will be "punished" by the current budget proposal.  The spookily predictive Nate Silver shows that households making more than $200,000 tended Democratic.

So, the take-away from all of this is:

1.  Obama stated countless times during his election run exactly what he was going to do, who was going to pay for it, what the tax consequences were, and for whom.

2.  Those with exactly the income levels he targeted for higher taxes voted for him more often than for McCain.

3.  After detailing his policies and budget, his approval number shot up, even among Independents and Republicans.

The only conclusion I can come to is that those with high incomes were perfectly happy with the stated sacrifice they were going to make.  This is completely at odds with the current Republican story line, and the mad ravings of Santelli.

~~~~

I'm swapped out tessellation for economics.  If I'm going to talk about it, I might as well add it to the list.  Besides, tiling is so 2008.

~~~

I just did a word count on all blog posts since I started.  It sits at 996,573 words.  Isn't that at least a novel?  OK, Seth does that many words in a week, but I'm not a former attorney.

~~~

Extremely cool human candles over at Emily's.

~~~

For some reason, everybody's talking about David Orr's "greatness" article in the NYT.  Sandra links to Amy's response. 

~~~

I got around to reading Jason Guriel's collection of negative reviews in this month's Poetry.  I think they were wholly negative (in the Logan sense) only in the case of his review of Jane Mead's latest.  For John Poch, for example, he included two sonnets that he really, really liked and then allowed as how the rest of the book didn't measure up.  Those of us with a couple dozens of published poems under our belt (or more) can attest to the fact that getting a critic to love two or three poems in an entire book is pretty good, actually.   And the quality of the two Poch poems that Jason included were almost enough to make me want to buy the book.  

In any event, I am a vociferous supporter of balance, even negative, reviews.  I want to throw up, thank you, when I read the dozens of non-critical reviews and hundreds of vapid blurb relating to modern poetry books.  At least Logan is reliably hilarious.  To wit:

"Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human spirit is indomitable, that the animal spirit is indomitable, that she loves birds very much, that she loves flowers very much, that even her dog loves flowers very much."

"Claudia Emerson’s well-behaved, slightly prissy poems deserve more attention than they’re likely to receive. They thrive in an oddly narrow register between regret and paralysis, as if the duties we owe the past were enough to kill us."

"When you open a Sharon Olds book, you know what to expect: lurid vignettes followed by privacies most people wouldn’t whisper to their doctor. The body count will be high."

"Back in 1986, Ted Kooser wrote a poem for Valentine’s Day, printed it up on a postcard, and sent it to women he knew. He did this the next year, and the next, adding a name or two, each year shipping the cards over to Valentine, Nebraska, for the postmark. After two decades of this sweet, facetious nonsense, he decided to call it quits—by then the mailing list had grown to 2,600 names and the postage exceeded the annual budget of Omaha. Valentines collects these poems, pieced out with black-and-white drawings of farmhouses, prairie landscapes, and an alarming number of dead trees."

"Campbell McGrath loves the world’s bewildering variety (you might mistake his poems—gaudily colored, artificially flavored—for a candy shop), and like most gods he can’t bear to leave a single thing out. "

Anyway.  People love to kick Logan around, and Franz would like to do it literally.  A typical response is Steven's, citing Logan's predictability, limited vision, and self-centeredness.  However, in a small blog-oriented world filled with people like Kent Johnson and discussing flarf, I find that getting upset about Logan's guilty-smile-inducing shenanigans a bit much.  I mean, you may not agree with the level of his calumny, but he usually comes out and says what most of us have been secretly thinking, right?  It's like somebody finally calling Jorie on all those infuriating underscores.

~~~

Speaking of whom, Steven has two pretty funny lists.  One is 13 Facts About Bob Hicok and the other is 13 Facts About William Logan.  The Hicok list includes:

1. Bob Hicok doesn't submit to literary journals. Literary journals submit to Bob Hicok.

4. After a Bob Hicok reading, all the audience members are pregnant, including the men.

The Logan list includes:

10. William Logan and Franz Wright once formed a wrestling tag team called the Ultimate Warrior-Poets until Logan turned on Wright and bashed him over the head with a steel chair.

12. If you poke at William Logan with a stick, he puffs up to three times his normal size and shoots poison spines.

Of course, in the comment section, is the obligatory response by Franz Wright.  I think someone should start a web page with links to all of Franz's comments around the Internet.  Sort of like a Where's Waldo.

~~~

I like this 13 Facts About thing.  It combines the Wallace Stevens poem with those lists about Chuck Norris ("Chuck Norris can sneeze with his eyes open. ").  We definitely need more 13 Facts lists.  Send me some!!  Try Jorie Graham or Virgil Suárez or Sharon Mesmer or whomever you wish.  Come to think of it, 13 Facts About C. Dale Young would be a hoot.  I'll start:

1.  When CDY walks up to the baccarat table, he straightens the tuxedo lapels over his holstered Beretta and says to the table:  "Dale.  C. Dale."

~~~

Almost every night, I cut up two fresh shrimp for Miss Emily.  And almost every night, she takes a bite and then hops back up on the sink to see if I'm having them, too.  If I am, she waits until she can steal one.  They taste better that way.



When she's finished with shrimp, she sleeps on poetry.

~~

Last night, I passed up turkey burgers and buffalo burgers and RedBird chicken burgers and vegetarian BocaBurgers and tried some Quorn "chicken-like" filets.  They are made of mycoprotein, which is grown in a vat and is the same genus as nail fungus (fusarium).  To tell the truth, by the time I had the "chicken-like" filet fried up and put on a cheddar cheese bun with mayo, lettuce, onions and tomatoes, it probably didn't matter what it tasted like.  Hard to tell if I'll get through the box of them.

~~~

Julie and the Flying Hamper of Doom:  "What followed was a blur of hamper, cats, Julie, socks, bedspread, ceiling fixture, cat hair, eyeglasses, books, and Puffs plus lotion with menthol-y Vicks goodness. The hamper shot across the room. The cats set high jump records. I smacked myself in the head. A sock somehow dangled from the ceiling light."

~~~

Rob Bartlett, Imus and Hemingway on the Six Word Novel. 




 

Posted by jbahr at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Republicans have been chanting their "lower taxes" mantra for months, even after seeing significant tax breaks in the budget.  In reality, letting the top marginal rate ease back up to where it was in 2002 still puts it way below marginal rates for the last 50 years.  Top marginal rates in 1986, for example, were 50%.  Top marginal rates during the 70's were 70% (50% for earned income, higher for dividends and interest income).  It's not exactly apples-to-apples, however, because you had to make a lot more money to get to the top marginal rate.  For example, in 1963, the top marginal rate was 90% (!).  But, you had to make $400,000 to get into that bracket, and $400K was a lot of money in 1963.  It wasn't much different in the U.K., which is why the Rolling Stones moved to France.  Also, why the Beatles wrote "Mister Tax Man".

~~~

In Denver news, the Rocky Mountain News is shutting down after 150 years as a major newspaper.  The head chef at Jax, a Boulder fish restaurant, took top honors in Top Chef.  Boulder home rentals are scarce and prices are going up.  Apparently, between the CU students and prospective homeowners who can't get mortgages, demand is exceeding supply.

~~~

A fascinating article in Wired this month:  "A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all.


 

The gist of the story is this:  There exist "messy" bonds, or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), such as those formed from pools of mortgages (or credit card debt).  The borrowers can pay down the debt, pay it off early, miss payments, and so on.  One way to make quality investments of these bonds has been to "slice and dice" them.  This takes place by creating something like a tier of cascading in-boxes (see the The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis for details).  The first payments each month to come in go to the investors who own the first tranche, then if there are any more payments, to the second tranche, and so on.  The risk involved in these loans is heavily dependent on the "default correlation".  All investors in these instruments knew that some percentage of underlying mortgages would fail, but with enough of them, the risk would be limited.  That is, if there were a predictable default correlation, and everybody didn't default at the same time.  David Li wrote a paper that proposed a formula that would avoid having to look at the historical default statistics.  Instead, his formula just looked at the pricing of the credit default swaps.  These are like insurance policies that pay if a bond like these defaults.  It was assumed that the price of CDS's would track the underlying risk of the instruments they were insuring.  As a result, the number of CDO's exploded, as did the CDSs.  The value of credit default swaps grew from under a trillion to $62 trillion in six year, prompting Warren Buffet to call them "financial weapons of mass destruction". 

He was apparently right.  Li's formula was oversimplified by the financial types, and other economists were ignored (one was Paul Wilmott who wrote "the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable.").  But, Wall Street was making boatloads of  money, and nobody cared.  Until now, that is.

~~~

A Linux command that will make you a sandwich

~~~

From yesterday's press conference (hat-tip to Nate):

Gibbs: Well, that's true, but not on their income. I mean, I think it's interesting as people listen to those complaining about some aspects of the budget, I think it's just interesting to note. I think the President was pretty clear on Tuesday. We are talking about people who earn in excess of a quarter of a million dollars a year.

Reid: And a huge percentage of those people are small business owners.

Gibbs: Some of them are, sure. Some of them are big business owners. Some of them are home run hitters in Major League Baseball. Some of them run kickoffs back for a living. Some of them are the President of the United States.

~~~

How Radio Wrecks the Right:  "In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year."

Here's your chance to read The American Conservative.  I bet that doesn't happen very often.

~~~

Wow.  This from Gallup via Andrew Sullivan.

OK, he moved up smartly among Democrats and independents, but approval by Republicans are also up 50%.

Posted by jbahr at 08:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Emily on the "I Remember" meme:  "I remember walking in downtown DC with her later that week and giving a dollar to a panhandler sitting on the pavement (to impress her). It did, and she kissed me, and the panhandler leapt to his feet and yelled "Freaks! Freaks!" after us until we ducked down into a subway station."

~~~

From Karen via Deborah:  "And yet a long time ago I came to my own crossroads about my entertainment choices. I came to the spot where I learned, the way all hard lessons are learned, how far I could go by entertaining my own good looks and cleverness. How long I could last on my acerbic wit and abrasive tongue. How far I could fly on style and chemical highlights. One thing I learned is that too much chemistry can lead to the day your hair falls out! And so while I find entertainment entertaining, I do not find that it goes the distance on a daily basis. I don't know about your daily basis, but my daily basis often requires a stronger salve.

Faith is what goes the distance. Not a certain kind of faith, mind you. But faith in action. Faith in trial and error. Faith that cannot always be trivialized or repudiated. Faith that is sometimes difficult and demanding and entirely unreasonable."

If Junie has taught me anything (and there have been many things), it is this.

~~~

Seth discusses Jason Guriel's review of a Jane Mead book in "an upcoming Poetry".  OK, how did you get an "upcoming issue", Seth?  (smiley emoticon)

~~~



Here's a fascinating graph of median housing prices in America's major cities.  It's difficult to parse, but if you follow the colored lines with the big upswings, you'll find Metro DC, San Diego, Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix making up to 250% gains in 10 years.  That this was not only unsustainable, but bubble-ish should have been clear to everyone, but apparently wasn't.  As someone said recently, the housing crisis is really a crisis in only 6 or 8 metropolitan areas in the country – those with the most ridiculous gains.  BTW, the lines showing modest gains, and much less downturn are Cleveland, Dallas and Denver.

By odd coincidence, I just noticed that Andrew is discussing the same thing.

~~~

OK, I know that Gitmo, the economic meltdown, getting rid of our torture policy, purging the Executive Branch of industry toadies, and all the rest is important.  However.  When are the Obama's gonna get their dog?

Actually, I would have pegged Barry for a cat guy.
 

~~~

Joe the Plumber:  "I believe he's taking America down the wrong path," Wurzelbacher told POLITICO. 'So far every step he's taken I pretty much disagree with.' Wurzelbacher has been pondering a run for Congress and said, "If I became a congressman I would literally bang people's heads together and probably get in a lot of trouble."

Let's see.  His name isn't Joe and he isn't a plumber.  Besides lying, he's a complete nincompoop.  I mean, with the stock market meltdown and a major presidential speech, was this such a slow news day that we had to hear from Samuel J. Wurzelbacher?  This is why I only click over to Politico once a month.

~~~

I suppose that I'm not supposed to like Chris Matthews of Hardball fame, but I do.  He talks a mile a minute, he talks over his guests, he refuses to let the discussion become slow and thoughtful.  Still, he seems so genuinely interested in just pummeling ahead, throwing out ideas, correcting himself, saying pretty much the first thing that comes to mind.  It's the cable version of first thought, best thought. 

~~~

Kelli is giving up Lent for Lent.

~~~

Josh with a fascinating contrast of Molina and David Orr's NYT greatness essay:  "And this gets to another thing I love about Molina: she's a comedian, and there's humor, wit, and goofiness behind and beside the sublimity, which I probably would not have apprehended without seeing her live. She doesn't melodramatize herself and her music, but the music isn't "small"—it contains multitudes. That's what I'd like my poetry to be like: something supple and with real reach, and power without taking itself too seriously—without playing the game of self-canonization."

~~~

Listen to Joni while Jilly's off the clock.  Listen for Jaco Pastorius.

~~~

Roy Blount Jr (yes, you've heard him on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me) demands that Kindles stop reading books to you.

~~~

Lockheed-Martin's famous Skunk Works is responsible for the U2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117, the F-35 and the F-22 (discussed yesterday).  Creating the completely amazing SR-71 would have sealed their place in history ("A defensive feature of the aircraft was its high speed and operating altitude, whereby, if a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate.")  Their latest bizarre project is a half-plane/half-dirigible.

~~~

Bobby Jindal's Intrade price after his disastrous Republican rebuttal.  (hat-tip to Nate).

~~~

Conservative Rod Dreber on Bill Maher:  "I think he's absolutely right: our silly gods have cost the world too greatly. The God of Hedonism and Sexual Indulgence, whose devoted high priest Bill Maher is, has given us a world of broken marriages, shattered families, the destruction of the traditional family, miserable deaths from AIDS, epidemic teen pregnancy, fatherless children and the social (even criminal) dysfunction that accompanies such, and a younger generation unmoored from sexual sanity".

Why does this remind me of Ghostbusters?
 

This entry from a past contest always cracks me up:

 

Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Prufrock

We real depressed. We
get dressed. We
don't talk. We
just walk. We
don’t giggle. We
pin and wriggle. We
measure spoons. We
drown soon.

Posted by jbahr at 05:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sandra comments on the abysmally low sales of Elizabeth Alexander's chapbook of the inaugural poem.  The last time I flew to be with Sweet Junie, there were stacks of the small volume front and center in each of the many bookstores in both DIA and the Minneapolis airport.  I admit to wondering at the time, "who would possibly buy these?".  Particularly, when the text was available so readily elsewhere.  I admit to purchasing a ridiculous number of Obama memorabilia items (T-shirts, the special Time issue, et cetera), but I really had no desire (and after all, I am a poet), to add the small, brown mini-book to the pile.  Apparently, I wasn't alone. 

~~~

I follow my Bloglines every day, and other than the stalwart CDY, Eileen is the only poet who seems to have a new post every single bloody day.  It make me feel guilty.

~~~

A very moving poem by Julie.  My heart goes out to you, dear.

~~~

Stephen announces a book he's co-authored and says:  "If you’re not sure whence the title  . . ."  Yes!  One of my many pet peeves is hearing someone say "from whence".  Whence means "from where", so "from whence" means "from from where".  Even Hugo Weaving said it in LOTR: "[The Ring] must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came."  I can't remember if that was in the original text.  I suppose I should go look it up.

~~~

Thomas reflects on Sharon Mesmer:  "There are moments of real referentiality. We all know what "Al Gore" and "no fucking Merlot" stand for. In fact, it is with the connection of the speaker's sense of her own "famous and gorgeous" body (and soul) to the connoisseur's famous vitriol and the environmentalist's famous spam ("I am also really sick of getting emails from Al Gore./Fuck you, Al Gore, you fucking loser") that a rapport with the reader also becomes possible. There is nothing ironic, mocking, satirical, or sarcastic about the tenderness we next come to feel for this "ballerina with a clown face encased in a big beautiful teardrop". We are now willing not to hate her just because she is beautiful."

I read a little of Annoying Diabetic Bitch every day, because it is in the office bathroom.  I think Sharon would approve.  I remember "I Am Beautiful", and personally I find it brings a smile to my lips, but I also find it difficult to take seriously.  I don't mean seriously seriously.  I mean that I find it hard to find anything profound or moving or eloquent in it.  It's probably my loss.

~~~

Robert appears to be on a tear.  Now, his new essay in Pleiades.

~~~

Art → Life → Art → Life . . .

~~~

Seth is on the cover of Poetry I just noticed.

~~~

Obama is such a gifted orator that I wonder if we will, one day, become inured to the power of his speech.  But not yet.  Last night, he was masterful.  I pity poor Jindal the duty of following him in what seemed like a high school debate appearance. 

On a related note, Nate instructs Bobby why volcano monitoring is, like, a pretty good idea.  And this from his live-blogging:  "If it sounds like Jindal is targeting his speech to a room full of fourth graders, that's because he is. They might be the next people to actually vote for Republicans again."

And this from one of Andrew's readers:  "Sitting here watching the speech I have been thinking that something is wrong. My first thought was that he is talking too fast. Then it dawned on me: he knows what he is talking about and expecting me to keep up. After eight years of being talked to like a child (or an idiot), my president is speaking to me like I am an intelligent adult. This is going to take some getting used to."

~~~

A gigantic cell phone market in Shenzhen:  "Near that area are dozens of booths selling batteries for these phones … and the best part about these battery booths is that there is a girl sitting in each with raw lithium ion batteries and a pile of Nokia stickers, and she is literally building the fake batteries right before your eyes. She even has the holographic Nokia authenticity stamp; the finished batteries look exactly like the real thing. "

~~~

A sign of the (deleveraging) times:  "It used to be that credit-card companies lured customers with cash rewards. Now American Express Co. is paying to get rid of them. The card issuer is offering selected customers a $300 AmEx prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts."

~~~

I had coffee with a rep from a large recruiting and contracting firm yesterday.  The firm serves both the conventional electronics industry (e.g., what most people do in Silicon Valley) and the defense industry.  I made the observation that, while many of my friends in the over-50 range started their careers in aerospace, there seems to be almost no cross-over now:  people in aerospace stay in aerospace and vice-versa, even when they are mechanical, electrical or software engineers whom you would think would have skills suited for employment at Oracle, Apple or Intel.  One of the reasons may be that (metaphorically) aerospace engineers' hearts just beat slower.  I've talked to Ball Aerospace employees (there's a plant here in Boulder County) who mention working on a requirements document for years.  I write proposals all the time, usually in concert with a California firm who specializes in contract product engineering.  I usually have a day or two to produce a budget, project plan, list of goals and summary of risks for an endeavor that may have a million dollar price tag.  Now, I understand why you want to take some time designing a $300 million aircraft, but there's a fetishness about planning that seems almost to be its own end in aerospace.  Anyway.  I was reading an article in The Atlantic that advocated the building of the (very expensive) F-22.  The argument was that our jet jockeys are increasingly vulnerable to the pilots and aircraft of other nations who have crept up on us technologically.  Even without a lot of analysis (such as that provided by Fallows and his readers), I would argue that a nation that spend more on defense than the total of all other nations on earth doesn't need more toys.  We have demonstrated in two recent wars (three, if you count Kosovo) that we can kick the crap out of anyone in conventional warfare (asymmetrical warfare?  not so much).  And the article ignores the fact that the Army has lots of aircraft and the Navy has LOTS of aircraft, and the cheap A-10 Warthog was one of the most effective weapons in recent conflicts.  So, you have to ask yourself:  "why so many expensive weapons systems".  At the same time, ask yourself:  "why so many divisions of Boeing and Lockheed in so many states with so many representatives who receive so many political contributions?"  I am reminded of a debate in which a congressman was pimping for his state to continue to build $2 billion nuclear subs so as not to lose 3,500 jobs in his district.  To which another congressman said it would just be cheaper to send each of them a check for $100K each year.

~~~

Three comments by My Dear Readers on Franz's post:

"Jeffery, thanks for posting the message from Franz Wright. He is very eloquent, & I would say "yeah!" to almost all of it. But I think he should show a little charity & grace to us nobodies, who don't have streams of poetry running in the family veins, like he does."

"Franz Wright is one of my favorite poets. I do indeed turn to him to be moved, and in times of crisis. I wish him only the best with whatever life-path has seemed to him the just and necessary one."

"Is it possible to become more self-absorbed than Franz Wright? I mean, and still function in society? I ask not in judgment, but in wonder. "

Posted by jbahr at 07:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More Boulder news:  A young entrepreneur has started the business of providing hookahs a la pizza delivery.  Foreclosures were down almost 20% last quarter in Boulder County, most of the decline in the Longmont area (where most of them are in the first place).  The Olympic curling trials are being held this week at the Broomfield Event Center.  A man wanted for desertion from the U.S. Army was arrested in Boulder and, upon inspection, was found to be wearing a woman's thong and had three pairs of women's underpants in his shirt pocket.  Complaints about noise from Boulder Airport have plunged 45% this year.

~~~

Kelli:  "My worry is I allow my rational brain too much power over my emotional brain (the brain I trust most) and it ruins things. My rational brain is the guy who comes late to the party and starts tearing down decorations. My rational brain throws away the party favors because he views them as clutter. My rational brain begins sweeping up the confetti even before my emotional brain as tossed it. My rational brain needs to be holding a martini, honestly, if it wants to play with the poets and their poems."   

Yes! Exactly.

~~~

Interview with Alison Stine at Deborah's place:  "Actually, I don’t listen to music when I’m writing. I can’t; I start just copying the lyrics."  Ain't it the truth.  I can't do almost anything with music on.  I might be able to work a cross-word puzzle with instrumental music on, that's it.  I wonder if it's a personality trait.  I'm one of those people who can tell you what everybody is saying at every adjacent table in a restaurant.

~~~

Franz Wright has left a long comment in one of my posts, so I guess I have arrived.  Here it is in its entirety:

"This obsessive interest in me is gratifying, I suppose--except all the "chatter' about me tends to issue from envious, mean-spirited under the radar low level losers--which would also describe Logan himself. The attention he's received has been solely based on his so-called criticism--not even Logan would review a book by Logan. Not successful enough. I published 5 full length collections with university presses and he never said a word. Then Knopf took one of my books and the New Yorker started to publish my work with some regularity, and he was all over me. The critics who endure--you probably don't really care that much about poetry, or read a lot of it, it is probably not right at the center of your life, you have probably not devoted your life and in many ways sacrificed your life for it, so you may not have noticed this but the critics who endure tend to write mainly about what they love--when they write a negative review it is done with respect and an absence of sarcasm and personal viciousness. Logan's prose is the equivalent of right-wing talk radio dialogue, or tabloid journalism, obsessed with celebrity, but truly pissing itself with delight when it gets a chance to mock or tear someone down.Cheap shot irony and sarcasm and a weird glee in causing pain (from a safe anonymous distance) are the hallmarks of the generation of people who came of age in the 80s--too much David Letterman as children, maybe. And the poetry, well, it would never risk sincerity or reverence and tends to employ a style that very successfully masks a lack of talent or anything interesting to say--My God how boring all that obscurity for obscurity's sake crap is. And it has built-in obsolescence stamped all over it. No one will ever be deeply moved by it, nobody will ever seek it out when they are alone and need words to articulate their wordless thoughts and feelings. There just isn't anything there. It's audience is other people who write it, primarily for the purpose of getting a job in the one the ubiquitous MFA programs that perpetuate that shit. Poetry is seen as an occupation. Or you have the formalists, like Logan himself I suppose, with their fairly sophisticated doggerel or at best their inoffensive and immediately forgettable work. Why poetry, is what I often wonder. I just don't get it, all the thousands and thousands of people with degrees in writing poetry, jobs teaching poetry, chattering about poetry--but there is still the same small number of serious poets, people profoundly engaged every day of their lives in it, as there were in pre-poetry business decades. It may be a little more difficult to make them out sometimes for the dense fog of instantly forgettable prose with line breaks and deliberate obfuscation. I'll never understand it. Why not ruin some other art. Perhaps because music and art, say, would mean first making a serious formal study of the means by which they are created--with poetry, you don't have to do that. You don't have to study much of anything, you can just claim this instant artistic identity. Anyway, keep chattering away. By next fall, I will have published 5 major collection is just under a decade. I have agonized over and rejoiced in poetry every day of my life for forty years, since I was fifteen years old. I have seen several waves of fashionable crap passing as poetry come and disappear again. And heard all the commentary from the chattering nobodies who know everything. It will never end. The difference for me,personally, is I just don't care anymore. Franz Wright"

I suppose that I agree with a number of Franz's points (but I won't tell you which ones, sorry).  One position with which I disagree, perhaps, is the idea of poetry as a profession.  Personally, I find that poets with diverse backgrounds and educations (take, for example, Hicok, Seth or G.C.) tend to write poetry that is informed by fascinating aspects of the world that seldom find their way into MFA programs.  But, that's me. Everyone has the right to their opinion, including Mr. Wright.

~~~

I saw a clip of Obama man-handling the Republicans at yesterday's press conference.  He was not only awesome, he was hilarious:  "By the way, I've already talked to Gates about a thorough review of the helicopter situation (twirls his finger, like a roto-blade), and the helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me.  Of course, I've never had a helicopter before".

~~~

Wilkinson:  "The fact that a government is small doesn’t rule out the possibility of egregious restrictions on non-economic liberties or of incredibly burdensome economic regulation. Suppose it takes two years to fill out all the paperwork, get all the licenses, etc. to start a small business, but once you do that, your profits aren’t taxed all. Suppose many forms of exchange are simply prohibited. You might have small government, low taxes, and very little economic freedom. Of course, a small government can ban abortion, prostitution, drugs, a free press, etc. just as well as a big one. Such a government may need to spend a lot of its modest budget on police and prisons instead of on genuine public goods. The size of the budget as as percentage of output doesn’t tell you anything about the composition of spending. This is a really important point. The United States spends a lot on prisons, the military, drug law enforcement, border patrol, etc. A lot of this is the opposite of rights-respecting, and a lot of it is downright wasteful."

In all their moaning about the size of the bailout, Republicans seem to forget that, between the defense/security budget and various (off balance-sheet) wars, we have spent as much as TARP every year for a decade.

~~~

Nate:  Upper income voters tend to vote Republican until their income exceeds $200,000.  I wonder what the hell that means.

Posted by jbahr at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't follow leaders - watch your parking meters.

~~~

26 Alphabets.

~~~

"You get older, you just want to simplify".

~~~

I'm trying out Robert Archambeau's Key Lime Curry Chicken recipe tonight (well, last night, by the time you read this). Like all good recipes, it's approximate.  Do you use a whole chicken, a whole chicken cut up in nice pieces, skinned breasts?  Well, you decide.  It certainly has a boatload of onion and garlic in it.  I used two BIG onions and two ENTIRE garlic bulbs in the Cuisinart'ed glop that included enough fresh ginger to make a case of ginger ale.  Sautéed in peanut oil, as Robert suggested.  I still had plenty.  Of course, it had an expiration date of 12/01/2001, but I'm using it for cooking oil, for pity's sake.  What nasties could survive a couple of hundred degrees of pain in the pan?  My sons are, as I speak, rolling their eyes, remembering when I would bring up Cheerios from the basement with use-by's that predated their birth.  I had a hell of a time figuring out what to do about the absence of key limes in the immediate shopping area.  Various web sites just recommended using regular limes, perhaps adding a little sugar, which I will do.  Robert suggested finding key lime juice, but no luck on that front either.  But, more on that when I write it up proper-like. 

A propos of nothing, I note that Robert's fresh visage on his web page is not as stunned as his picture on Facebook.  The baby, mayhaps?  My sympathies, Robert, I remember those days.

~~~

Johannes is Flarf's Biggest Fan, in which Jonathan, Kasey and a former Whitman winner figure.

~~

Robert (yes, the same Robert) talks about Margins and Centers and has a diagram that reminds me of my relativistic musings of yesterday:  His thoughts about how Ashbery is simultaneously outside and inside are intriguing, and parallel what I've thought for a long time.  When I was in my first year of poetry, writing on a poetry board, giving critiques, chatting up the natives, it seems that all of us knew the famous poets of the distant past and the nominally famous poets of the recent past.  But, we had no idea who was who in the present, Ashbery included.  It seems, however, that when anybody reads Ashbery for the first time, they have almost the same reaction to his elegance, absurdism, savoir faire, intelligence, and wit.  It's some kind of universal reaction. 

~~~

It's not often that you see a profitable small press.

~~~

Stephen mentions Lana Turner (a literary journal), which includes "a stellar, scary, essay on Jonathan Richman and the global financial collapse by Joshua Clover", which would be enough probably for me to buy a copy.  Burt also telegraphs his intention to write an essay on prose poems, citing "Waldrep, Brian Johnson, Stonecipher, Allison Benis White".

~~~

Emily cracks me up with this one.

~~~

Joseph is twanging the plumbline:  "Henry has explicitly named Flarf as one thing he’s reacting against; my own frustration with current practice stems from the cultural configuration that sponsors an all-or-nothing divide between the so called “School of Quietude” and the so called “Post Avant.” I’m already on record as preferring something like Seth Abramson’s ecology as a starting point. "

~~~

Deborah lists the 20 poetry books that inspired her.  I'm not sure I could come up with 20.  I would have to start with Ted Hughes' Crow, and then the collected works of Emily Dickinson, both of which I read decades before I actually wrote poetry.  Then, as I was actually writing the stuff and knew basically squat about modern verse, I would run into a book that would really amaze me, poets that would change the way I thought or wrote.  Those would include:  Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field (which led me to read her earlier books, from which the poems were excised).  Mary Jo Bang, Louise in Love, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of the Swans, Apology for Want.  John Ashbery, Houseboat Days (that's the first one I read, probably almost any of his books would have moved me).  Lucie Brock-Broido, Trouble in Mind.  Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning.  Louise Glück, The Wild Iris.  Yusef Komunyakaa, Thieves of Paradise.  Bob Hicok, Animal Soul.  G. C. Waldrep, Goldbeater's Skin.  Ben Doyle, Radio, Radio.  Dean Young, Skid. Albert Goldbarth, Combinations of the Universe.  Olena K. Davis, And Her Soul Out of Nothing. 

OK, that's a dozen and a half or so, and pretty well split between men and women.  There are a lot of poets I'd like to put on the list, but I have been inspired by individual poems (from journals, mainly) much more often than by books.  A good example is Gabe's outrageously excellent How I Caught My Cold.

~~~

From Nate's place:  "Winning a Best Actor or Best Actress award extends one's life expectancy by four years."  I had to laugh when I saw this:

It's exactly what Junie and I were asking last night.

~~~

From BoingBoing today:  nuclear duct-tape, "I Survived the Bush Administration" T-shirts, official "SCRABBLE Word of the Day" is D-I-L-D-O (seven points).

~~~

It's now the morning, and I can report that Robert's Key Lime Curry Chicken was delicious.  I ended up buying a whole RedBird chicken and cutting up breasts and thigh-legs, browning in peanut oil and setting aside.  Into the aforementioned glop, I added store-bought curry powder (didn't have time to make my own), two Big T of tomato paste, fresh lime juice from one lime, two additional limes cut into lime-coins, a half Little T of sugar, and a Big T of cumin powder.  All this got reduced a bit in the left-over peanut oil from browning the chicken (yes, I spatula'd up the little brown bits).  When it was bubbling, I threw in the chicken and cooked it covered over medium heat for about 20 minutes.  A huge salad and a glass (or two, come to think of it) of Clos du Bois Chardonnay, and I was ready for the Oscars.

~~~

Is January O'Neil a great name, or what?

~~~

SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: I'll take it. I'm more than happy to take his money or any other governor in his country that doesn't want to take this money, I take it, because we in California can need it.

~~~

Krugman on zombie banks: "How would nationalization take place? All the administration has to do is take its own planned “stress test” for major banks seriously, and not hide the results when a bank fails the test, making a takeover necessary. Yes, the whole thing would have a Claude Rains feel to it, as a government that has been propping up banks for months declares itself shocked, shocked at the miserable state of their balance sheets. But that’s O.K."

On a related note, CitiGroup stock was up 23% in early trading.

~~~

Senator Maddow.  Now, there's a thought.

~~~

"But it amazes me, absolutely amazes me, the number of Apple owners who lack the clarity or self-awareness to realize that purchasing a commodity from a enormous, soulless corporation that is also owned by several million other people doesn’t make you a unique and beautiful snowflake."  (hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan)

Posted by jbahr at 06:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chatting with Der yesterday about his class at Columbia, something like The Fate and Origins of the Universe.  As Columbia is an arts school, I can imagine that there are a lot of young musicians, dancers and thespians who are not all that interested in physics, and Der said he's nearly the only one who ever asks questions.  The prof was mentioning a hypothetical case of a stellar explosion four light years away, and Der asked if the light would "feel" like it took less than four years to reach earth, since time would slow down for it.  This led us to talk about the Twin Paradox, and I stumbled through as much as I could remember about why only one twin would end up younger, and wished Der's brother Ky were around to help me out.  In my own dated and feeble remembrance of college physics, it always seems that the cause of all the weirdness in relativistic physics is the fault of the fixed speed of light.  Everything else in physics has the sense of unboundedness (e.g., the universe has no boundaries, there is nothing so small that it can't be smaller, there is no largest number, etc.)  But, as the T-shirt says, "186,000 miles per hour.  It's not just a good idea, it's the law".  If you're sitting on the top of a speeding train (OK, pretend that you're Bruce Willis) and throw an orange in the direction the train is traveling, the orange will achieve a velocity (relative to the observer at the train station) equaling that of the train plus the speed the orange achieves as a result of your throwing it.  However, if instead of throwing the orange, you turn on a flashlight, does the light leave the flashlight at the speed of light, plus the speed of the train?  No, it doesn't.  If you accelerate to a speed close to the speed of light, an observer on earth would note that the ruler on your spaceship desk is getting shorter and shorter, and the grandfather clock in your spaceship dining room is tick-tocking slower and slower.  The fixed speed of light makes everything else work asymptotically, like living in a room of fixed size, but of seemingly infinite dimensions because you are only able to get half the distance closer to a wall with each step.

And then, there's quantum mechanics, which makes relativity seem like common sense.

~~~

Sandra on AWP.  Danielle on AWP things.  Anne on AWP.

~~~

Poems for Obama's first 100 days, organized by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker (hat-tip to Johannes).  BTW, Arielle teaches at Columbia College.

~~~

January O'Neil with photos from the 2009 Trashfinders Ball. 

~~~

Gary, "WC Fields + WCW" :  "Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake. Forgive me."

~~~

And you thought NYC apartments were expensive.  Read this by Danny Choo on Japanese Apartments:  "First up there exists something called "gratuity fee" or Reikin. . . . Then there is key money known as Shikikin. Key money can be up to 3 times the monthly rent and is used as a deposit which the landlord uses to clean up the place when you leave. . . . Apart from the gratuity fee and key money, one has to not only pay the landlord an average of 2 months rent upfront, one also has to pay the estate agent up to a months rent for introducing the place too."

~~~

Andrew Sullivan links to two interesting articles on e-books.  Among the advantages:  1) You can change the font size and type on the fly, no more reading glasses.  2)  Illustrations can be mobile or even interactive, like in Harry Potter's world.

~~~

I was listening to C-SPAN this morning and heard a congressman talking (for the zillionth time) about how many large banks were essentially insolvent because of the reduced value of the homes that serve as collateral for mortgages.  While this is true in current practice, we seem to have skipped a step.  Any prof in Finance 101 will tell you that a debt instrument is exactly worth the discounted stream of payments associated with it.  In the case of mortgages, this is represented by the (seemingly endless) collection of monthly payments.  The debt instrument is only affected by the value of collateral (e.g., the home value) to the extent that this stream may be disrupted or lessened.  Suppose we lived in a sort of Samurai world where everyone's commitments were a sort of blood oath.  The value of your house would have nothing to do with your obligation to pay the mortgage.  You would sell your furniture if you had to to make them.  Or take up prostitution or sell your children into slavery.  Now, I'm not suggesting we act this way, but it makes the point that is almost always overlooked.  Many people with homes that are "under water" have no desire to walk away.  They bought a house for a lot of good reasons (schools, neighborhood, aesthetics, pride of ownership, income tax deduction, . . . ) and if their home is a little under water, so what?  This is why it's important to legislate any way we can to help people make the payments that they want to make, but can't quite, perhaps. 

~~~

For the first time in a long time, the number of applicants to CU's Boulder campus has declined.  Out of state applicants are down by 19%.  I wonder if the $24,000 out of state tuition figures in.

~~~

Boulder has announced the first three projects that will be done with Recovery Bill money.  One of them is a traffic light, to be constructed for $500,000.  Must be a hell of a traffic light.


 

Posted by jbahr at 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Sweet Junie notes that Ulysses is on the list, and that I marked it as read.  That is certainly not true, as I've never made it all the way through.  Junie also suggests that we add a column for "No, but saw the movie".

~~~

A fascinating post on why you need to vaccinate kids:  "Here’s a nasty. Diphtheria is highly contagious and potentially life-threatening. Signs and symptoms include the lining of the throat turning into a thick, gray, moist membrane that can block breathing, requiring either intubation or a tracheostomy. The bacteria also creates a toxin that that circulates in the blood stream and can damage the heart and kidneys, and cause nerve damage leading to paralysis. Before the diphtheria immunization became common, the United States had some 200,000 cases and 15,000 deaths per year from the disease, 80% of them children. Post-immunization: 41 total reported cases in the US from 1980 to 1995."

~~~

Barack is now bigger than Jesus.

~~~

Absolutely great video characterization of the credit crisis (The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo, hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan).

~~~

Krugman on why the recession will eventually end:  "Or consider the plunge in auto sales. Again, that’s bad news for the near term. But at current sales rates, as the finance blog Calculated Risk points out, it would take about 27 years to replace the existing stock of vehicles. Most cars will be junked long before that, either because they’ve worn out or because they’ve become obsolete, so we’re building up a pent-up demand for cars."

Of course, the key word is eventually.  I mean, eventually, you're dead.

~~~

Over 90% of all weekday talk radio is conservative:  "Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management."

Well, duh.  Have you ever spun the AM dial in the morning?

~~~

Right on, C. Dale.  I like Chicago as much as the next guy, but 3 AWP's in 8 years?  As CDY points out, AWP only seems like a big deal.  Three or four thousand people is what large pharmaceutical companies host internally at big sales conventions.  With the economy in a slump, why not Las Vegas or New Orleans again?

~~~

Julie is eloquent and heartbreaking.  When you're done reading the post, read this, my favorite modern sonnet.

~~~

Kim reads and plays harmonica at Bistro 33.

~~~

Seth on AWP.   Steve on AWP.  Deborah on AWP.  Reb on AWP.

~~~

Posted by jbahr at 06:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jubak thinks that Geithner and his Fed team are doing a pretty good job, irrespective of all the nay-sayers.

~~~

Ah, yes, the stock market.  We are actually using the WayBack Machine here, as stock indexes fall to level not seen since the late 90's.  The S&P 500 is about where it was at the end of 1996.  The Dow 30 is where it was in 1997.  Bank of America stock is trading this morning at 10% of what it was in September – and BofA is a pretty sound bank, as banks go, and almost certainly among those "too big to fail".  What does it all mean?  If I knew, I'd be trading stocks instead of writing code.

~~~

Peter, by way of CDY, points us to a BBC list of 100 books and asks which we've either read or intend to.  It's not this list, which was composed of "best-loved novels" and separates out (for example) individual Harry Potter books.  This person says the list was constructed in 2003, but gives no actual link to the BBC list that I can find.  The list was apparently constructed by the BBC listener votes.

The meme part of the list is where you indicate which you've read, and which you intend to.

So, I guess that puts me at 47 read and only one that I really think I'll get around to.  I'd like to read more of the Russian greats, and of course, finish Ulysses, which I've started countless times (and which isn't on the list).  When I think of it, I imagine that at least 10 of the books on the list, I read in high school (probably under duress). 

~~~

Andrew Leonard makes some good points about foreclosures:  "The Michelle Malkin prescription: "suck it up" and let the weak bleed to death on a pile of their own foreclosure notices was rejected by voters in 2008. Just because someone is a "loser" doesn't mean that we shouldn't feel an obligation or responsibility to help them out. We are better than that."

One thing that he points out is that millions of people bought houses in the past years with decent down payments and for good reasons ("rent money is spent money", the tax break, relocation because of job, wanting a good place to raise children, . . . ).  Many of these people faced a housing market in which everything was overpriced. 

~~~

"We're running out of rich people in this country".  Ah, Michelle, you never fail to amuse.

~~~
Interesting stuff from BoingBoing:

I was chatting with Sweet Junie last night about moving to MS Word 2007 (which she might have to do for business reasons).  It was a painful switch from Word 2003 (and prior Words) because they rearranged everything so that, for weeks, it took me 60-90 seconds to figure out where a function was.  I definitely prefer the older version, and apparently I'm not alone:  "Microsoft Word is the overbearing dick dad of software. Yeah, it sucks, but what are you going to do, it's your dad. Live in his house; follow his rules."

A cave-house with 15,000 square feet and 14 waterfalls on the property.  Only $300K.

"Capsule-sized doses of schadenfreude to help you feel better about your life any time you need it", for example:  "Today, I saw a elderly man fall in a crosswalk, so I jumped off my bike to help. As I helped him across, the light turned green. At that point I noticed my phone had fallen out of my pocket in the street and was run over by several cars. I then watched across a 6 lane street as someone stole my bike."

Obama sushi.

~~~

Interesting run-down on the nation's top 12 banks, from "Zombie" to "Hidden Gem".  I currently own a lot (for me, anyway) of US Bank, which is currently paying an unheard of 15% dividend.

~~~

How's the recession affecting sales of various goods?  Jewelry and watch sales, down 7.2%, casino revenue down 8.5%, off-premise alcohol down 9.3%.  One of the few consumer expenses that is up is movies.

~~~

You know times are tough when rare wine prices tumble:  "Last September at Hart Davis Hart, a case of Château Lafite Rothschild 1982 brought in a record $54,970. In November, a dozen bottles of Lafite '82 sold for $22,705. "

~~~
 

Posted by jbahr at 08:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So far, only two entries to the contest, so you COULD BE THE BIG WINNER!

Posted by jbahr at 05:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On my last full day with Sweet Junie, I will de-chandelier a living room and install an extra doorbell.  Yeah, I'm thinkin' about my doorbell
When ya gonna ring it, when ya gonna ring it?

~~~

Among the many events in The Big Cheese, "Your 'where to go and what to do' magazine of the Baraboo area, is the return of Ken Waldman, Alaska's Fiddling Poet.  He's actually been published in BPR and Quarterly West, so he must be some kind of real poet.  Other entertainment includes Spanish Brass, a somewhat bizarre (but most likely competent) group of five Spaniards who bring us works by Corea, Bach, Mancini and Ellington.   "Gilligan's Island - The Musical" is playing at the Al Ringling Theatre.  There's the St. Joseph Family Fish Fry and the Antique Snowmobile Review and Ground Hog Hunt Ride.  We missed Poetry Night at the Village Booksmith, the Mostly Mondays Poetry Society at the Spring Green General Store, and the Castle Rock Bass Masters Annual Ice Fisheree.

~~~

I have been carrying around the Fall/Winter issue of Colorado Review and finally got to reading it last night.  Here's some excerpts from some of the work I liked:

 Christine Hume, Leash:  "Tongue heard tell of your enterprise. / Tore loose from turning skies. / Convolutions got it bound. / Migrating heart of a hound."

Carmen Gimenez Smith, Civilizing Mission:  "She poured me into a cincture made from dollar bills.  I barely moved.  I was filthy and priceless.  A box of fruit they called me."

Matt Terhune, Shell Bin:  "It wallows here like a sack of stars hemming / light in ash and metal.  This is where / the body's hurricane sets down.  Here, / the hollow leg of war distills into gin."

There's also a wildly inventive poem by Khaled Mattawa, Power Point II, which mixes verse with boxed comments and arrays (e.g., Grief Matrix, Consolation Matrix, Reverence Matrix).

~~~

As I drive around shopping for home project items for the home that Junie and I own in Eau Claire, I listen to NPR, as I do in Colorado.  At least, I think it's NPR, because they say they are.  Sure, they have Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but the rest of the time seems to be devoted to local productions:  Nature/wildlife shows, gardening shows, A Chapter A Day (where they read to you from novels).  I can't imagine what show I caught the end of this morning, but they were talking about "bitch nipple pheromones".
 

Posted by jbahr at 12:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In Wisconsin, I've noticed that they do things with a certain lack of self-consciousness (I noticed that in Germans, too, when I lived outside Andernach).  Junie and I are staying at The Cedarberry Inn, in Sauk Prairie, where Junie grew up.  There are no cedarberries to be found anywhere.  Also no half-in-half, and no orange juice, but I do spot donut holes.  It's 6 o'clock and change, and Junie and I will take her mom out to breakfast later.  Yesterday, the three of us went to a dinner club production of a comedy, it you allow dinner to begin at 2:30 PM.  Outside the club entrance (folding doors into an small club setting with a stage) were a couple of dozen regulars at a bar that looked, I suppose, like the outline of a Viking ship from a birds-eye view.  Each patron had his or her own ashtray and what looked like a remarkable variety of drinks.  I must not get out to bars enough, because I had never seen anything like the posters hanging everywhere.  One said "Drop the F-Bomb" and showed a hand dropping a shot glass filled with Irish whiskey into a mug of beer (the whiskey was Finster or Finiger or something).  Then there were three or four Ice Hole schnapps ads:  one with two ice fishermen sitting by a hole for their mint schnapps, and simpler ones for their chocolate and butterscotch schnapps.  Hustling behind a bar filled with the motley combination of gray hair, camo jackets, mukluks, and 3-day beards was a remarkably attractive bar-tender with a beautiful figure, long  black hair and the calm visage of a Madonna.  Go figure.

We always eat breakfast with Mom at the The Proud Eagle Cafe or the Soaring Eagles Restaurant or something like that, a block from the Wisconsin River where tourists apparently bus in to see the Bald Eagles in February, though God knows what either of them are doing there in the zero degree wind chill.  I will eat my usual 9 eggs and a ham slice the size of a flywheel.  This is to make up for the fact that all I normally eat for breakfast is Blue Monster and a banana at home.  From there we will head to the famous Ho-Chunk Casino, a couple of miles from The Dells, about which I once wrote in a poem:

They will stop at the Ho-Chunk Casino for their famous daily
of pike and potatoes. Barker says he'd like a taste of predation.
Junie counts cards, elbows sheltering a column of green. She wonders
if a dozen reasons are enough, puts her fingers on the pips and
splits sixes.

Then, back to Eau Claire.  No need for lunch, most likely, as all we seem to have done is eat since I arrived.  Last night, we had one of those Hobbit's meals like second breakfastes, running from the car through the freezing night into the original Culvers's, a quite excellent fast-food joint with hundreds of franchisees now (mainly in the Midwest).  I had a tuna fish sandwich and Mom had chile and Sweet Junie had a salad, but we could have had their trademark ButterBurger (this is, after all, Wisconsin).

More news, perhaps, after the long drive back northwest through the still, bare forests and frozen dairy farms.

Posted by jbahr at 06:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I note that other people post nonsense entries, just to maintain an unbroken string of blog posts. And, here I am doing it.

~~~


I was razzing CDY about his fabulous life, and he good-naturedly left a comment.  In my fabulous life, I had a pre-drinks drink at the mini-sports bar next to Gate A26 at DIA, which was an indifferent Chardonnay served in a shot glass for six bucks.  My actual drinks drink was some indistinguished Red that accompanied the Frontier Airlines Trail Mix with a cartoon bear on the package.  Sweet Junie picked me up at the baggage section of Minneapolis Airport, and we head first to The Green Mill (absolutely packed, as it was both Saturday night AND Valentine's Day), passed on Country Kitchen and settled on a Denny's Classic Diner, blazing in the back of the restaurant area, a dining establishment that we had heard so much about, and had never had a chance to try.  I had the mini-Grand-Slam with prime rib strips and hash browns.  Junie had two salads, mixed together on a large plate, to which she added her trademark additions from the personalized Tupperware container she keeps in her Louis Vuitton fanny pack.  My postprandial drink was going to be a lemonade spritzer made with the finest Sprite, but I was sated, and also passed on the Giant Chocolate Volcano that I have heard so much about.  At that point, we summoned our driver, climbed into the rare and beautiful 1997 Outback and were whisked away to our little hideout in the Eau Claire Best Western Trail Lodge.  We passed on post-drinks drinks.

Posted by jbahr at 05:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today, I fly to Wisconsin to be with Sweet Junie on Valentine's Day.  It's suppose to warm up to a balmy 22 degrees there today, so I'll bring some T-shirts.

~~~

Sometimes I think that C. Dale tells us about his fabulous life so the rest of us can gnash our teeth. (smiley emoticon)

~~~

Jeff on AWP panels:  "This is a sketch of a series of panelists so in love with themselves that their egoheadballoons begin floating up through the empty room."

~~~

You may already know this, but Cramer is very entertaining.  He yells, pounds the table, hits gongs, plays tracks of crying babies, runs in-your-face clips of raging bears, plays the sound of oncoming trains, and samples Chinese food.

~~~

Junie and I were chatting about the simultaneity of Darwin's and Lincoln's birthday.  If you're like me, both notables are in separate places in your head, and certainly different times. It's like having films of the Civil War and films of the American Indian Wars in separate theaters, even though many battles and massacres happened in the West during the course of the Civil War.

~~~

From Harper's Index:  A California student who hacked into a school computer had 1.9 points added to his GPA, before being arrested on charges whose maximum sentence is 38 years in prison –– the median age of a European advances by two days every week –– only 30% of the residents of former Communist-block nations say they live better now than in 1989 (of course, that may be true for most of us) –– consumer prices dropped in November more sharply than any time since record keeping began in 1947 –– the per capita debt owed by Iceland to foreign depositers is $19,100 –– 28 Israelis have been killed by Hamas rockets since 2001 –– only 1% of all "extraterritorial" U. S. prisoners are held in Guantanamo  –– an undisclosed buyer offered $5,000 for Larry Craig's airport bathroom stall  –– Barbie has held 108 occupations in the past 50 years  –– a whale kebab served in an Icelandic restaurant costs $9 and is called "Moby Dick on a Stick"

From Harper's Findings:  Female investors recently lost less than a third of what their male counterparts did  –– scientists are trying to solve the problem of people outliving their eyes  ––  coyotes are encroaching on Detroit  ––  kangaroos are more genetically similar to humans than previously thought  –– wooly mammoths and early Native Americans were wiped out in 10,000 BCE by a swarm of comets  –– one physicist says that "the universe is a blurry holographic projection of a distant two-dimensional plane.

~~~

Megan on the economics of food:  "Today's Wall Street Journal reports that consumer spending on food registered the steepest drop we've seen since the government started collecting statistics 62 years ago.  . . .  And looking at the list of what America is cutting back on, I wonder if we'll see a reversal of another trend:  America's growing waistline. "

~~~

Something we Americans forget:  "By the way, although WWII raised U.S. real GDP a lot, this response is not typical for the OECD.  If fact, WWII is the biggest economic disaster of the 20th century, out-stripping the Great Depression.  This is, of course, because many countries suffered greatly from physical destruction and loss of life (the U.K. not nearly as much as many countries on the European continent)."

~~~

A stunningly authoritative discussion of the Continental 3407 crash.

~~~

Some interesting pairings would be:  Sharon Mesmer doing a Billy Collins poem ; Sharon Olds doing an Ashbery poem ; Kasey Mohammad doing a Robert Frost poem ; Mary Oliver doing a Charles Simic poem ; Louise Glück doing a Pablo Neruda poem.

Posted by jbahr at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been inspired by CDY's caption contest.  So, here's another one that will tax your poetic abilities, help add a few dollars to the litmag community, and be fun!  Years ago, a gentleman named Whimsy conducted the First Annual Poetic Cross-Dressing Contest.  The rules are simple:  Write a poem derived from one famous poem in the voice of another poet.  Examples of such poems, and the past winners are here, here and here.

A panel of judges, who will be announced later, will judge the winner and runner-up.  The winner will receive 4 one-year subscriptions to literary journals of his or her choice.  The runner-up will receive 2 one-year subscriptions to literary journals of his or her choice. 

The contest will be open for three weeks, beginning today, and ending at the end of the day on Friday, March 6th.

You can submit your entries in the comment box, or via email.  I will post the entries periodically.  Your entry should cite the famous poem you are parodying, and the poet in whose voice you are writing.

As an example, consider this first-place entry by Ciaran Berry:

 

Good luck!

~~~

I certainly have sympathy for the millions of souls who have lost a lot of equity in their homes, particularly those who were counting on it for retirement.  However.  For many of those same people, there's a reason they've lost that equity:  an artificial and unsustainable increase in housing prices in recent years.  Consider this graph of median house prices in the San Diego area:

From roughly 2000 to 2005, house prices rose nearly 250%.  This graph would look similar in parts of Florida, Central California, and the Las Vegas area.  On the other hand, the county assessor says that my house in Boulder County had risen perhaps 5% in those 5 years.  The same is true for large swaths of the South and Midwest. 

"Fed analysts estimated that 35.8 percent of the average family’s assets in 2007 were in “unrecognized capital gains,” such as gains in the market value of houses that people had yet to sell. Slightly more than half of those unrecognized gains came from real estate, and the second biggest source was increases in the value of business assets." :  NYT.

I guess my point is that it would be one thing to lose your savings in non-FDIC-ensured bank (as happened in the 30's).  It's another thing to lose "money" recently made in an unprecedented run-up.  It's not actually that different for the stock market.  We have been in a bull market of nearly unprecedented length and strength:

The stock market indexes are just about where they were 10 years ago.  And there's no reason to believe that they will rise to prior levels any time soon.  Analysts (such as Motley Fool) forget to mention that, although the stock market has risen adequately over the last century, there are long periods of no rise at all, some lasting a decade or more.

~~~

Because nothing says "I love you", like a 6.4 terabit per second router.

~~~

Ormerod defends the bailout:(hat tip to Andrew):  "People are generally right to be sceptical of policymakers. But despite this, and all the current problems, the response of the authorities in September of last year was brilliant. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalised; AIG effectively taken into public ownership; money market funds guaranteed by the Fed; huge, failing retail banks forced into mergers; investment banks eliminated. (OK, letting Lehman go was one Darwinian experiment too many.) But without these measures, we would already be looking at a recession of 1930s proportions, with unemployment rising inexorably over the 20 percent mark. The hotly disputed TARP programme was second-order compared to the measures actually carried. "

Every day, and increasingly, I hear windbags from both the left and right say that Obama isn't doing enough, or he's lost his momentum, or the honeymoon's over or some other inane observation.  We have a guy that, just to take a single example, impressed the military top brass.  Meanwhile, he ended the torture policy, is closing Gitmo, built an administration based upon competence and – oh, yeah – managed to guide the passage of the largest stimulus package in the history of the planet.  A package that was within 5% of his initial estimates, and done with zero Republican support.  Does ANYBODY remember the clown we had for president 6 weeks ago?


 

Posted by jbahr at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Sweet Junie sent me this link to a company that "creates artwork out of your DNA".  That's curious for a number of reasons.  First off, I have to imagine that two humans share 99.99% of the same DNA, since we share 96% of the DNA of chimpanzees.  So does that mean that everyone's artwork looks alike?  Apparently not.  Maybe they know where to look for differences.

~~~

OK, my hit count is declining, and my Bloglines shows many fewer new posts.  Are all you wicked people going to AWP without me?

~~~

Hey, they're going to change the penny again.  It's odd, but we're one of the few developed countries that even bother with anything as small as the penny anymore.  They still make the "hundredth of a Euro" coin (also called "one cent"), but most in most Euro-Region countries it's most common to see prices at 5-cent intervals.

~~~

It is impossible to keep up with the introduction of new journals and ePubs.  For example, Mr. Tong Bliss can be found in BafterC and Mrs. Maybe, about which I know nothing, so they're not in my litmag database.  But, maybe they should be.

~~~

Another Brick in the Wall:  I'm reporting that Shanna is reporting that Josh is reporting on a presentation by Stephanie Strickland.

~~~

Nate on the TARP mess:  "To suggest that Obama or Geithner are tools of Wall Street and are looking out for something other than the country's best interest is freaking asinine."  Outstanding opinion.

~~~

Why banking CEO salary caps are a big joke.

~~~

"Think of Wormtongue as Keith Olbermann".  Like a large number of fantasy and sci-fi authors, Tolkein was very conservative. Try reading Heinlein again sometime.

~~~

Kristy reminds us that Rebecca is having her Sylvia Plath Bake-Off.  I think Der ran into Kristy at the library once in Chicago (that right, Kristy?), and you might run into her at AWP, who knows?  As for baking, I'm with Kristy.  I don't bake worth a damn.  My last attempt with any degree of seriousness was 1985.  I put the dough in the fridge.  I froze all the cooking implements in the freezer.  I cranked up the A/C.  The pie dough was still all wimpy and uncooperative.

~~~

Remember when it was "uncoöperative"?  Me, either, but it's fun to run across in old books.  Apparently, The New Yorker still does it.
~~~

Take a shot at CDY's caption contest.  Jacob is the judge this week.

~~~

Ivy is getting engaged.  Wouldn't it be cool to read in Berlin?  I lived in Germany for a time, and have driven all over, north to south, east to west.  However, that was before the Wall fell, and I never made it to Berlin.

~~~

Thanks, Jilly, for this interesting and alliterative article:  "Pushkin Pays For Bleeding All Over Sofa".  Also check out Katya's Made In Russia page.  Actually, the whole web site is a kick.  Katya writes for The Onion, so everything now makes sense.

~~~

Jimmy Kimmel:  "The Senate passed the stimulus bill — $838 billion. So everything’s fine; we’re rich again..  That’s just under $3,000 for each person in America. Here’s how it’s going to work: On March 30, every American will receive a roll of 30 $100 Obama stimulus coins. You can use them to trade with friends or use them in a machine to buy stimulus nutrition bars."

~~~

You know how big the planet is?  Well, space is bigger.  Imagine blowing up the Earth like a balloon.  More surface area, right?  And one more degree of freedom in space.  So, how would two satellites actually hit each other?

~~~

I'm still mad at all of you for going to AWP without me.

~~~

I had read earlier this year that thousands of people on Wall Street regularly made more than a million bucks.  Turns out that Merrill Lynch paid at least million dollars in bonuses to 696 employees last year, alone.

~~~

Remember that list of companies that might not make it?  Sirius XM is considering filing for bankruptcy.  Are they "too big to fail?"  Maybe they can just renegotiate that deal with Stern.

~~~

Ron has his usual long list of books and journals received.  It's amazing that he receives so many, of course, but it's just as amazing that he takes the time and care to type in all those titles, authors and contributors (with the necessary diligence to get all the spellings right).

~~~

I really like the idea of contests.  Maybe I'll run one. 

~~~

In my email from Facebook today:  "Abdelhak souhaite vous ajouter à ses amis sur Facebook. Nous devons confirmer que vous connaissez Abdelhak pour que vous puissiez être amis sur Facebook."

Posted by jbahr at 05:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is priceless.  A snippet from the wit of Suzanne:   "A friend of mine feels that, even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?"

~~~

Writers and their dogs.  Why do writers have dogs?  Poets seem to have cats.  Well, not all poets, I'm just saying.  Maybe, it's because they're not in the least obedient.  (hat-tip to Joseph).

~~~

I'm beginning to worry about my upper-body strength.  I don't want to push people in front of busses, just open these damnable pickle jars.  I ran them under hot water and tapped the lids with a knife and all the other things you're supposed to do.  Finally, I pulled out a ginormous 16-inch red pipe wrench that weighs 5 pounds and that got it off.  If it hadn't, I would have just broken the top off on the side of the bar, like the cowboys in movies always do.

~~~

I was reading about Zukofsky in Wikipedia, can't remember how I got there.  I find it curious that many poets know little or nothing about him or his work.  Not the LangPo and LangPo-inspired, of course.  Curious.

~~~

Huckabee:  "The stimulus bill is anti-religious".  "You would think the ACLU drafted this bill".  ". . . radical environmental groups . . . all have a seat at the decision making table in Washington these days".  What an idiot.  And to think I kind of kind of liked Huckabee after listening to him on CSPAN early in his campaign.

~~~

This is hilarious.  Republican senators come out against the stimulus bill, while the governors of their states are in favor.  After all, for the senator, it's red meat to appeal to his base.  To the governor, it's billions of dollars to shore up the sagging state budget.

~~~

Also hilarious:  Ron Paul and BHO duke it out in the "Battle for America's Youth".  (hat-tip to Wonkette)

~~~

There are some really great blog names in the blogosphere:  Ask Dr. Pretentious. Possum Ego. Bread And Jam For Frances. robots heart me  panda panda panda odali$qued. Little Red's Recovery Room. Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?  Spoonful of Lightning Bugs  Hyacinth Losers. <[[[[[[-[[[[0{:}0]]]]-]]]]]]>. $650 apartment for $650 And of course, Home-Schooled By a Cackling Jackal.

~~~

For some reason, I receive Architectural Digest.  I suspect the reason is that I signed up for it, actually, but I don't know if it was one of those kids at the door, or redeemed air mileage.  In any event, AD completely cracks me up.  The stuff in any edition is so over the top as to be laughable.  A selection of the "antiques" you can buy (and by "antique", apparently they mean anything made after 1980) includes:  A Tejo Remy chair made out of rags and baling straps:  $7,500 – a model of the Salyut 7 space station, $4,000 – a cast-stone penguin, $3,400 – a green rug with a white arrow, $7,500.  Then, there's a spread about a "tranquil townhouse" in London, about which they say:  "The lawn in the manicured rear garden is ideal for the owner's children".  My italics.

~~~

I've been hunting a bug in audiobook player software today.  This involves going through the programmer's version of Kubler Ross:  "how the hell could that be happening?"  "this code has worked for months"  "damn, how did that get there?"  "how did this ever work?"

~~~

Ray tells you what you should do at AWP.  I would like to add that my son is a terrific jazz guitar player, and is available for your poetry reading gigs, should you be so inclined.  Contact me if your interested.

~~~

Lisa lists the Things to Know About Indiana, which includes the fact that Johnny Appleseed was buried in Ft. Wayne.

~~~

Very entertaining:  The Toy & Action Figure Museum.

~~~

Joseph again:  "The professional poet implicitly makes a claim about the value of the work based on his / her mastery of the canons of poetry; the amateur poet, on the other hand, makes a claim for the value of his / her poetry based on the degree to which it satisfies the human need for self-expression. "

~~~

The Anti-/diode reading should rock:  Hicok, Guest, Fritz Goldberg, Clay, Waldrep, York, Biddinger, Roripaugh, Lawler.  Lord, what a line-up.  Details at Steven's joint.

~~~

All of you dear people going to AWP should know that, somehow, Chicago is number three on the list of America's Most Miserable Cities.

~~~

Keillor on ex-celebrities: "I am seeing Rush Limbaugh as an actor in action movies, a sort of Nero Wolfe supersleuth who, though he never leaves his luxurious New York brownstone and his rare orchid collection and his personal chef Fritz, uses his superior powers of ratiocination to locate the missing uranium bars in the cellars beneath the great mosque in Tehran. I am seeing Ann Coulter as someone who can revive the professional female wrestling franchise, and I am seeing Rudy Giuliani as a name brand of work clothes and steel-toed boots."

Posted by jbahr at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This poet's idea for making it through the recession:  turning his backyard into a graveyard.

~~~

Joseph gets three poems into Beloit, but has to drop the ampersands.  Turns out, he didn't need them anyway.

~~~

Sweet Junie tells me that the Vegas packages get better and better:  discounted airfares, 50% off on better hotels.  If I can just pay my seven mortgages, keep my son in guitar picks, and make sure Miss Emily has shrimp every night, whatever's left may be enough for a short trip.

~~~

Megan McArdle is apparently a new economist-journalist at The Atlantic, and (as I said recently) she's one smart cookie.  She agrees with Will Wilkinson that Paul Krugman's economic theories don't include the sort of personal dynamics that his advocacy does.

~~~

I received my contributor's copy of The Journal a while back and just got around to reading the work (except for my own, which I read instantly upon receiving the litmag, just like any of you would!).  One thing that struck me was the great names of many of the poems and short fiction:  "On Why We Don't Need to Build Forts" (Jennifer Shepard), "A Room of Rain" (Gary Fincke), "Memory is a Disease of Animals" (John Gallaher), "Reverse Deciduous Existence" (Stephen Burt).  And the perfect "In the Class of All Classes That Are Not Members of Themselves" by John Gallaher (an allusion to Russell's Paradox).  Here's a snippet from some of the work that I liked:

"Circles in the Shell of the Ear", Christopher Howell:  "Everything I say I say everything / twice / everything twice, / though I'm a liar."

"Another Fine Mess", Christopher Howell:  "I knew perfectly well what I was like.  And now / look at me, a stove pipe hat at a swimming pool, / a file in a cement pie".

"Old Neighbors", Sydney Lea:  "Garnett's wrinkles / would hold a week // of rain.  His knuckles / are small white onions."

"Waiting", Paul Gibbons:  "Hours of a clock snipping thread. / The cat paces like the desire to speak"

"Nest", Katy Didden:  "Yellow bill, deft needle / braid of reeds and thistle. / Oval in the white sway:"

"Take", Anne Shaw:  "for instance, the tub's one lip, how it curls / back from its gum, one slick drama / glimpsed in koolwhip white."

"Getaway", Clay Matthew:  " I was not so keen as the others on the sing-a-long, / the group hug, the Hello, my name is:"

"Because We Are New to This", Maggie Glover:  "The first time your dad threatens suicide, / we go bowling"

~~~

Sandra announces Barrelhouse Seven.

~~~

I was watching Obama's Recovery Act speech and subsequent press conference this morning.  That guy can sure hold a lot of information in his head.  I had to smile every time he moved his left forefinger in a "down the drain" motion when he was talking about deflationary spiral.  I've seen him do it three times.  He must like it.

Walter Shapiro didn't think much of it.  But, what does he know?

~~~

Lost jobs are taking longer and longer to recover after every economic downturn.  Nate looks at the data and predicts that we are in for a long recession.

~~~

The stimulus plan's proposed $15,000 tax credit on the purchase of a home sounds pretty awesome (it's like tacking on $20 to $25K on your salary), and may result in hundreds of thousands of home selling (and perhaps avoiding foreclosure), but it won't help low-income people.

~~~

Kindle 2.0 is out.  $360 and smaller.  What a great name.

~~~

Caterpillar pancakes.

~~~

On September 18th, over $550 billion was withdrawn from money market accounts over the period of an hour or two.  Without the Fed's intervention, this congressman says "$5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system:", leading to the collapse of the U.S. economy.

~~~

Can you imagine any former president in recent history, or for that matter, any other world leader who has the confidence to answer a reporter's question about his past mistakes this way?

"They [Republicans] were pleasantly surprised and complimentary about the tax cut that were presented in that framework. Those tax cuts are still in there. I mean, I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some and then let them take credit for all of them. And maybe that’s the lesson I learned."

~~~

Don't misunderestimate Barack.

~~~

Very intelligent discussion of big banks.

Posted by jbahr at 07:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

30 mummies have been recently discovered in one Egyptian tomb.  No daddies.  (sorry, couldn't help myself).

~~~

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks bringing 14 children into the world is nuts.  So does the lady's mother.

~~~

I attended Obama's Economic Recovery House Meeting, which was actually in the Longmont Public Library.  The good news is that I bought an atlas, a Dostoyevsky, and a Robert Parker that I hadn't read somehow in the past 30 years.  I'm suck a sucker for Spenser and Hawk and Susan and the rest.  The meeting was supposed to start at 1:30 and by 1:25, 30-odd of us were all seated in Conference Room A, awaiting somebody, anybody, who would lead the get-together.  A nice young man arrived finally and opened a tiny laptop.  After passing around the sign-up sheet, we listened to a short speech by BHO and a much longer one by Tim Kane.  Kane answered a number of emails that captured the various concerns about the bailout/recovery plan.  After that, we went around the room introducing ourselves.  The usual 80/20 rule applied, with 20% of the people taking up 80% of the time talking about themselves (no, I wasn't one of them).  A couple of the ladies (hey, it's not my fault that all the long-talkers were ladies) went on so long (their conversion to the True Faith of Obama-ism, their long hours working on the campaign, their personal circumstances) the crowd tended to look at each other and squirm in their seats.  I would estimate that the introduction phase took an hour, which must be some kind of record, considering that we're talking 30 people, and some of them only took a few seconds (one man followed his wife's 5-minute spiel by saying "yeah, what she said").  One lady started crying, as she related that she had moved from Oregon after losing her job and home, and that she's a cancer survivor with no health insurance.  As far as I was concerned, she could talk as long as she wanted, the dear.  At another point there seemed to be a contest going on regarding who had the coolest Obama T-shirt on.  There were probably a dozen individuals in the retired bracket and the rest were proportionately mixed between 25 and 65.  As is usually the case, those with the least to say took the longest time doing so.  Still, there were quite a few articulate men and women with good questions and comments.  One local small businessman wanted to know what the return on investment was going to be for all this money.  Another (well, me, actually) said that we had to focus on getting the money spent to avoid the deflationary trap, and that investment could take many forms, some unconventional.  One woman said that she had read that an economist recently discovered that food stamps actually produce the highest ROI for the money, based upon a number of criteria.  Health care came up, and the environment, of course.  One lady was from Portugal, visiting family here, and said that she found this grass roots discussion wonderful, and something that she wishes happened more in her home country.  The Longmont Democratic Party guy was a pleasant young man who mainly listened.  Finally, our group leader waded in and started selecting people who wished to speak by acknowledging raised hands.  Some people, of course, ignored that and just talked when they wanted to.  Others wouldn't stop talking once they got the go-ahead.  After two hours, we lost the room to the next meeting.  Handshakes and hugs happened, and the group leader promised to email us all with the handouts that he only brought 7 of.  Isn't democracy a kick?

~~~

"Civil unions only provide 400 of the 1100 rights and protections that heterosexual marriage offers." (hat-tip to CDY).  Being, as I am, a perpetrator of serial marriage, I'm hard-pressed to come up with even 100 rights, but I believe it (it would be nice to see the list).

~~~

Suzanne be on the wireless.

~~~

Thomas likes Jonathan's jazz musings.  I had the same thought about jazz types:  mainly looking backwards 20 to 50 years.  It's interesting discussing this with Derek, because he knows a lot more recent artists and often transcribes their work (or whatever you call learning a piece perfectly, perhaps even moving it from one instrument to your own).

~~~

Math and Mad Hatters (hat-tip to Jilly).

~~~

How does Gina manage to keep taking those great pix?

~~~

I watched about an hour of the Grammy's.  Or is it Grammies?  Anyway, it was dark and I was scribbling notes on the back of a page of the Freescale 3780 Data Sheet, whilst drinking wine and trying to keep Miss Emily out of my lap.  Here's they are:  "Wow, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss!"  "Hey, Kid Rock can put on a show"  "Kanye is such a tool, and what's with the black gloves?"  "Is that Stevie Wonder with the Jonas Brothers?  I'll be damned"  "Hey, Miley can actually sing"  "No way I'm staying up for Sir Paul"  "Craig Ferguson is a funny man" "Cherry Chapstick?  Huh."  "And the winner is (Coldplay, of course, I mumble under my breath) Coldplay!"  "Adele wins anyway, looking like the only person in the joint who didn't know she was supposed to bling it up"  "I like Justin"  "Blink 182?  Aren't they all dead?"  "Lots of black nail polish"  "Don't the backup singers for Hudson look like Supreme Court justices?"

~~~

15 companies that may disappear soon include Rite Aid, Chrysler, Dollar Rent-A-Car, Six Flags, Krispy Kreme, and Sirius/XM.  Yikes.

~~~

"Looking back over years of financial crisis and collapse, and one common thread has been the failure of board governance of public companies. The savings and loan debacle. The collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Enron. Each was characterized by boards who had lost site [sic] of their central purpose: To hire and fire the CEO, set corporate policy, and serve the shareholder interests. "

~~~

The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers reminded me of G. C.'s last book.

~~~

Why it's hard to live on $500K in NYC.

~~~

Sullivan:  "It does seem to me a real question, however, as to why some neoconservatives seem so grittily determined to bring democracy by force of American arms to the deeply dysfunctional politics of Iraq but not to the deeply dysfunctional politics of Palestine."


 

Posted by jbahr at 07:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been thinking about the U.S. salary structure for a long time, but the recent $500K cap on some bank executive salaries got me thinking about it again.  If you haven't heard, executive salary at banks that accept certain parts of the bailout money will have their salaries limited.  This is possible without legislation because it is the result of negotiations between the Fed (who report to the Executive Branch) and individual banks.  Now, these poor stiff who are limited to $500K can still receive the usual zillions of dollars in stock and options.  However, unlike the past, said stock and options will not be redeemable until all the federal loans have been repaid.  Wall Street types, high-end recruiters, and a handful of Republicans think that this is a terrible idea.  "Nobody who was used to making $10 million a year will accept these terms", they say.  There will be a crisis in leadership because the cream of the executive crop will leave the banking industry for greener pastures.

So why are the pastures so green elsewhere?  Because the average Fortune 500 CEO makes 300 or 400 or 500 times more than the average employee in his/her firm (it was 525 in 2001).  What could possibly justify this?  It's my experience that pay grades are fairly linear as you move up the ranks in a big company.  At Wal-Mart, for example (source:  www.glassdoor.com) , a cashier may make $20K a year.  A department manager, $30K.  An assistant store manager may make $40,000.  A co-manager, $65,000.  A regional manager, $80K, and a store manager $90K (these are all averages, they differ in different regions and for different store sizes).  It's difficult to obtain information on the positions between regional manager and top management.  One data point, though is that a former Walmart Chief Information Officer took a job at Microsoft for about $500K.  In 2007:  Vice Chairman, International Division, $13.3 million.  Chief Administrative Officer, $14.9 million.  CEO Lee Scott received compensation of $29 million.  That's roughly $10,000 per hour, assuming he works really long hours (and he might, but so do I).

There are, of course, other benefits to consider for the worker bees.  Or not:

"Full-time employees are eligible for benefits, but the health insurance package is so expensive (employees pay 35 percent - almost double the national average) that less than half opt to buy it. Another benefit for employees is the option to buy company stock at a discount. Wal-Mart matches 15 percent of the first $1800 in stocks purchased. Yet most workers can't afford to buy the stock. In fact, not one in 50 workers has amassed as much as $50,000 through the stock-ownership pension plan. Voting power for these stocks remains with Wal-Mart management."

Clearly, the whole compensation formula goes decidedly non-linear when you get near the top.  And Walmart is not an exception, there are a number of Fortune 500 companies in which a handful of top executives' compensation represents 5% to 10% of the profit of the company.  It was not always this way.  In 1982, the average Fortune 500 CEO made 42 times the average employee in his/her firm.  By 1990, it was up to 107 times.  Is it really possible that this a free-market exercise?  That the pool of talented people has dwindled so quickly in 18 years?  Full professors may make twice what an Assistant Professor makes (and acquire tenure), but more than that is unusual (unless they're a researcher or a star prof, and even then it may be a factor of 4).  Government salaries are famously linear, and a lot of government managers work long hours. 

So what gives?  In my extended family there is good guy (who shall remain nameless) who worked for a very large company.  He was a Senior Vice President at the end of 25 years, and had 30,000 people reporting to him.  I've never asked him, but I think his probably compensation was in the area or low-mid six figures.  He would laugh about the CEO, who, as he put it, "spent most of his waking hours working on his compensation".  The CEO made, of course, many millions in compensation, and of course, had lots of friends on the board of directors.  The board consisted of other CEOs, and ex-CEOs of large companies (and the usual shills, who were happy to take home a thousand dollars an hour for their participation, and who voted the way they were told to).  One important task of the board was to form a Compensation Committee, to independently assess the proper price for the services of top management.   Well, you've seen how that works.  Shareholders, most of whom either send in their proxy statements or ignore them, were happy enough if the stock went up, and in any event, too far from the annual meeting to attend, assuming that their protests would get any traction, which it wouldn't. 

Among the many current obvious flaws detected in unregulated free-market capitalism, top management compensation has to be one of them.  It's more insidious than the investment bank meltdown, however, because the causes are the kind of elite tribalism that has been around for centuries.  You know, the way a complete idiot can go to Yale, screw up continually for a couple of decades, and become President because of family connections.

Posted by jbahr at 06:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I would, of course, love to go to AWP.  In the first place, I really like Chicago.  In the second place, Der is going to school there and it would be fun to hang with him, sleep on his apartment couch, and see how his room-mate Mad Max is doing.  In the third place, it's pretty close to Sweet Junie and we could drive down from Wisconsin together.  In the fourth place, I love meeting people.  At the last Chicago AWP, I got to sit with Junie next the lovely and talented Stephanie G'Schwind (Colorado Review editor), see Mary Jo Bang corral her ex-students at a reading, chat with Gerald Stern at breakfast, meet G.C. Waldrep, and read with Bob Hicok.  The first time I saw Bob in person (we'd spoken on the phone), he was walking down the Book Fair aisle in a trademark T-shirt.  He looked so much like his picture, I exclaimed "Bob!".  He didn't know me from Adam, of course, but was gracious.  Oh, darn, maybe I do want to go.

~~~

The Global Language Monitor says that the English language now has over a million words.  As there are only about 600,000 in the OED, there must be some doozies in the mix (they include "misunderestimate").

~~~

I'll be attending one of our President's Economic Recovery House Meetings.  There's one at the Longmont library today, and I should be able to segue in a pass by Brewing Market.  The meeting itself starts apparently with a video in which Obama Explains Things and then there's a part how the economic crisis is specifically affecting Longmont (or in your case, your local community, should you attend one).  There's last part whereby one can "commit to taking the next steps . . . to help push forward President Obama's plan".  I'm not sure what that entails, but it can't be any worse than sorting socks, which was my gig on National Service Day.

~~~

A really, really, really colorful issue of OCHO is out.  (hat-tip to CDY, and congrats to Didi).

~~~

Eileen:  "In Poetry, the poet always wins the poker game if the poet always bets the entire pot and more, especially objects not owned or known."

~~~

Zachary's in the new Dear Camera.  And since the online journal only features one poet per issue, he's flying solo.

~~~

Yikes.  Matthea Harvey just won $100K.  Oh, and the glory of course:  Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. (hat-tip to Jilly).

~~~

Breaking news:  Dale Smith Deals Death Blow to Flarf:  "We will thus immediately cease writing any poems containing references to squid, assclowns, chicken diarrhea, "pubic" apologies, diaspora-flavored breath mints, crotchless dolphin underwear, or David Hasselhoff (unless we can offer some reasonable political gloss on such references, enabling the free flow of liberatory meaning in a productive discursive context).
"

~~~

"Over 130 different ATM machines in 49 cities worldwide were accessed in a 30-minute period on November 8," Agents Rice said. "So you can get an idea of the number of people involved in this and the scope of the operation."   I've never seen the word "flashmob" before.  I bet the Global Language Monitor know about it, though.

~~~

I gots to get me one a them ray gun pens.
 

~~~

Jon reminds us that this isn't the first time a trillion dollar economic package has been passed.  The last one was the massive tax cut passed in 2001.  That worked out swell, didn't it?

~~~

I am so totally on a roll:  almost two straight weeks of daily blogging.  Hey, I could be the next Andrew Sullivan.  Except that he gets a million hits a month, and I'm lucky to see 100 a day.  Maybe I'll keep my day job.  Sullivan even has some great notions coming from his fan email:

"Wilkinson has highlighted something that I have been feeling for some time.  American media, be it sports, gossip, celebrity, or politics, has for at least the past ten years (I am 24 so my sample size is rather small) presented each story of the day as something that is a really important, defining event. In turn, this has had the effect on me and many of my peers of the feeling that nothing is important.  Which is why I have been so excited to see something truly important happen in my lifetime when Obama was elected.  Now we have another truly important event, the economic crisis, and the media is still making micro events the story and missing the enormous picture.  It truly is dumbfounding to me."

~~~

Obama is losing his mojo.  More and more people dislike the stimulus package.  Except that's not necessarily true.  Words matter.  Just ask the Global Language Monitor folks.

~~~

Four Americans, one Mexican, four Russians, four Indians, a Swede, two Germans, one French woman, a Saudi, and a guy from Hong Kong walk into a bar.  What do they have in common?  They're the richest people in the world.

~~~

The greatest achievements of American socialism.

~~~

For a rough idea of the last decades' trend toward militarism as opposed to diplomacy, consider that "The military has more band members than the State Department has diplomats."

Posted by jbahr at 06:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One half of the entire world's population has less wealth than is represented by my third-best vehicle (a 1995 Dodge pickup).  I'm still trying to get my mind around that.  I found this interesting post on income distribution in the middle ages:

Since the economic ideas of the time were fostered by the Mercantilists, interest was focused upon the money aspects of foreign trade. Production was subordinated to the demand of foreign buyers, and restricted by the produc­tion costs of foreign competitors. Distribution of the proceeds of commercial transactions was again a matter of politics, since privileges of foreign trade were granted by the sovereign to his favorites at the price of taxing their earnings to support his court. The powers of the state were enlisted to ensure a favorable bal­ance of trade. This obviously was not an atmosphere which en­couraged consideration of the problems of either personal or functional distribution.

Really, is it so different now? 

~~~

The best book review is one that you want to read again, and then you want to read the book.  Because the map is not the territory.  Excellent article in The Nation by Jordan on Kevin Davies' The Golden Age of Paraphernalia.  From the review:

"Since the decline of patronage and the rise of the English department, high-minded poets from Ezra Pound and Charles Olson on through the Language poets have spent much of the energy they might otherwise have devoted to vocables and sense to writing essays of noisy, semicomprehensible worry--about poetry's place in society, society's place in poetry, poetry's place in poetry. Davies's poetry is mercifully free of that kind of self-regard, which it has replaced with an even better, more archaic form of self-regard: alienation and self-loathing. This is actually a promising development. For all its proclaimed devotion to negativity, the poetic avant-garde has until now had no curmudgeon with the charm or persistence of a Philip Larkin or Dorothy Parker. "

Here's a bit of from the book:

"If/it isn't sex/why are we thinking about it? • Our prosimian ancestors/less than one ounce,/ankles smaller than rice grains./Scooped up and eaten by owls./Having just done the/wild thing."

~~~

Into this age of CSI and Bones arrives a report by the National Academy of Sciences criticizing forensic procedures.  (hat-tip to Joseph).

~~~

Trish will not have to eat the clam cakes.

~~~

Jenny always moves just in time for the next AWP.  Except maybe Denver, our loss.

~~~

I've read a half dozen comments and posts by poets saying they don't think they'll come to the 2010 AWP in Denver because it's too cold.  Lord, people.  It was 65 yesterday.  In February.  And it was 75 two weeks ago.  And here's the next 4 days, and the sun will be out and it will feel 5 degrees warmer.  This is Colorado, not Fargo nor Minneapolis nor Buffalo, nor even Chicago, where it is uniformly colder and windier.    And besides, you're probably coming from Keokuk yourself, so don't get so snooty.

~~~

The Project Runway of the poetry world.  (hat-tip to Suzanne).

~~~

Reb as empath.  Also a plug for Rebecca's Cadaver Dogs, which was the longest poem in the last Many Mountains Moving.

~~~

I just noticed that Kasey also mentions Jordan's review.  I feel so vindicated.

~~~

Henry would not like to be in any school of poetry that would have him.  Or something like that.  Multi-post self-arguments here.

~~~

Where has Simon been?  Is he still in Chicago?  Will he be at AWP?

~~~

Republicans have been whining for weeks that this is going to end up a spending bill.  Obama:  "What do you think a stimulus is?" Obama asked incredulously. "It’s spending — that's the whole point! Seriously.”

My point exactly.  Also Dr. K's.

~~~

Ten companies that have never laid off anyone.  Including 3 grocery chains and that annoying insurance company with the duck.

~~~

Iceman may run for governor of New Mexico.  Better him than that guy who jumps on couches.

~~~

Glenn Greenwald on Rachel talking about Cheney's latest attempt at Fear Factor.  Greenwald is actually cogent and to-the-point.  Unlike his blog on Salon, which is a bloated, rambling hodge-podge of liberal issues, written as only an attorney could, where every sentence is replaced by a paragraph, and every paragraph is replaced by an entire blog post.  Somebody should drag Glenn into a poetry class and teach him about concision.

~~~

Nadya Suleman, mother to 14 children, explains her decision to take fertility drugs:  "I love my children".  Groucho once reportedly quipped, "I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while."

~~~

Jubak with "Your 5-point economic rescue guide".  Smart guy, I read him 3 times a week.  He debunks the "stimulus didn't help the Depression" meme, too.

Posted by jbahr at 05:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

CDY pointed out in the comments yesterday that AMEX has a Black Card, too (The Centurion Card).  And what a card.  You have to pay a $5,000 initiation fee, and the annual fee is $2,500.  To keep the card, you have to spend a minimum of $250,000 annually (or about $700 a day).  There are, as is to be expected, lots of benefits:  free companion travel, concierge service, upgrades at hotels and elsewhere.  Details here.

~~~

Poetry Foundation best-selling poetry books list has Elizabeth Alexander on top, closely followed by the usual names (Collins, Giovanni, Oliver).

~~~

Stephen is looking for contemporary poetry with superheroes (Jeannine probably is, too).

~~~
Thomas suggests that millionaires and billionaires should fund the bail-out.  In the sense that future taxes will pay it back, they already do (or will).  The IRS says that top 10% of income earners pays 60% of all Federal taxes.  In fact, the top 5% of wage earners pay 20 times more Federal tax than the bottom 50% of wage earners (source).  That being said, the rich are still getting richer.  Income gains have happened most rapidly in the top 1% of wage earners, and somewhat less rapidly in the entire top decile.  There are other sources with more recent data, but it all shows the same trend.  Currently, for example, the top 20% earn almost 50% of all U.S. personal income.

So, if you assume that this trend isn't healthy in the long run, what's the cause?  Erosion of middle-class incomes?  Distorted incomes of highly placed executives?  The famously conservative Heritage Foundation says that the income distribution isn't as skewed as it looks, because it ignores such things as employer-paid health care and Social Security/Disability payments (which ignores the fact that business are paying for less health care every year, if you lose a job then you have no health care, and besides, the Heritage Foundation would probably eliminate Social Security if they had their way). 

The Federal tax burden is remarkably progressive, and (unlike corporations) individuals are seldom able to avoid paying taxes (as Daschle found out).  And, besides, income isn't wealth.  Maybe all those middle-classers with their home equity (well, they used to have home equity) and savings aren't that much less wealthy than the wealthiest.

Nope.  The same skew holds true for wealth.  In this (annoying) chart we find that the top 1% of all households account for almost 35% of the wealth, and the top 10% of all households account for almost 70% of U.S. wealth.  If anything, wealth is more skewed than income.  Gosh, maybe we do need that death tax.

There's probably a reason that the wealthy are getting wealthier (actually a number of reasons):  High income producers stay high income producers – it's not as if, every year, they're all lottery winners and the mix shifts annually.  Second, the wealthy derive a lot of their income from capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate, and which has grown considerably faster than incomes. 

The New Economist confirms that "wealth is shared much less equitably than income".  Worldwide, the richest 2% own more than half of all global wealth.  In the Economist article "Wealth of Nations:  Winner takes (almost) all" (which, ironically, cost me five bucks to download), we find recent numbers for wealth distribution worldwide (the bottom half of the world has an average wealth of about $2,000). 

So, who are the wealthy?  Corporate executives?  It wouldn't seem that there are enough of them.  Small and medium-sized business owners?  Real estate investors?  (not so much, you'd have to assume).  Excluding the super-rich (who do, however, account for a lot of the world's wealth), who are these people?  Surprisingly, I found very little by Googling "Who are the wealthy?" And virtually everything I did find was an article or presentation that I would have to pay to download.  Oh, sure, there were lots of hits on articles by the recently disgruntled (mainly tirades about "bailing out the wealthy"), but almost nothing in the way of details about who the wealthy actually are (by profession, for example).

The Daily Mail doesn't tell us who's wealthy, but it does tell you how to spot them:  "They fidget, yawn and generally appear rude".

~~~

Emily has some interesting maps (I love maps).  These show the distribution of a surname in the US.  The map generator is here.  Not surprisingly, there are a lot of us in Minnesota/Wisconsin/Iowa/Missouri.  My dad was born in Minnesota, and I the descendants of the original immigrants apparently didn't stray too far (except to escape to the warmer climes of CA and FL).


 

~~~

On the flarf front:  Gary Sullivan with "Flarf:  From Glory Days to Glory Hole".  (hat-tip to Kasey).

~~~

The cream of the post avant visit Jonathan in his dreams.

~~~

Joseph reports on poems about money.  Also about "phoney-baloney" intonations that poets always seem to think they must do at readings.  God, don't I know it.

~~~

Sandra Simmons is up at Verse Daily.

~~~

Extremely cool photo at Gina's joint.

Posted by jbahr at 06:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I can almost understand that someone how would pay $5 million for one of the world rarest coins.  Or pay $3-4 million for the rarest and most famous philatelic items in history (e.g., the 1847 Mauritius).  Or a half-million for the finest copy of Actions Comics #1.  Or a couple of million for the finest 13th Century Yuan Dynasty vase.  Or $160,000 for a bottle of wine from the Thomas Jefferson cellars.  What I can't understand is hundreds of paintings can be priced at tens of millions of dollars.  A Pollock is reported to have been sold for $140 million and a Klimt for for $135 million.  What in God's name makes them worth that?  (Oh, I know, the free market does, but we all know how well the free market works – witness the recent activities of investment banks or the real estate meltdown).  For example, Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist Composition" was sold recently at Sotheby's for $60 million.  I'm aghast when a Cubist or Impressionist painting sells for tens of millions of dollars, but Kazimir Malevich?  How many people, even people with a passing interest in the visual arts, even know who Malevich is? 

The investment bankers who used to frequent the New York galleries have a lot less disposable income nowadays, but it doesn't seem to be making a dent in the high-end market.  Maybe the Getty Foundation screwed this up. Someone needs to explain this to me.

~~~

Franken's election to the Senate looks more and more each day like an SNL skit ("Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead").

~~~
John McCain agrees with right-wing gasbag Sean Hannity that the Senate stimulus bill is "a rotting corpse".  John McCain thinks the bailout has been "badly mismanaged".  John McCain will, however, be missing the Senate stimulus bill vote, as he has a trip to make to Germany for some reason.

~~~

The Discovery of Global Warming:  "It is an epic story: the struggle of thousands of men and women over the course of a century for very high stakes. "  OK, that one's done.  Could we do evolution now?

~~~

Or perhaps not.  The Oregon Petition, which questions human's effect on climate, has 31,072 signatures by American scientists!  In 2001, however, "Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition —- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages."

~~~

There was the silver MasterCard.  And the gold Visa.  And the Platinum American Express card.  Now, there's The Black Card, made from carbon, and available to only 1% of U.S. residents.  The annual fee is $495, about $100 more than the AMEX Platinum. 

~~~

When you just know it's finally time to quit smoking.

~~~

IBM wants to help its recently laid-off employees with moving costs.  The catch is you have to take a job in India, The Czech Republic, Nigeria, . . .   On the other hand, a year or two in Brazil might be fun.

~~~

Kell has a messy desk.  Me, too.  Hey, we're Capricorns.  We're practical, ambitious and messy.

~~~

Reb wants all poetry submitters to take Myer-Briggs tests.  Would they all end up with Introversion, Intuition, Feeling?  Heck, I wouldn't.  Maybe I should finally submit to The Motel.

~~~

Jordan (OMG/WTF) in audio.

~~~

Iggy Pop and Minor Literature.

~~~

Jilly's up at Wicked Alice.

Posted by jbahr at 05:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Interesting post by Laura on emotions, natural history, and poetry:  "What's most apparent to me, at least in terms of poetry, is that timidity and apology in writing seem to be sort of sentimental, and more angular or thetic approaches that seek to explode (either tersely or with an eye to sharpen images, etc.: here Lara Glenum's Manifesto of the Anti-Real comes to mind) hegemonies are much more cogent and interesting than the sort of tepidness that I know I'm partly guilty of."

~~~

I'm working on a fun task, which I call the Nintendo mini-project.  I'm implementing a screen whereby you move around selecting letters to build up a name, as you do in some arcade games to associate your score with a moniker.  I know it sounds rather old hat, but the actual implementation is on a small audio player on a limited LCD and the mechanics are a bit daunting.  For my next mini-project, I'm hoping to recreate Donkey Kong.

~~~

I was watching C-SPAN this morning while working and there was a Republican congressman asking the opinions of three economist.  They were from the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and they all wanted to do was cut taxes, particularly for business.  After decades of right-wing money, these and similar institutes are in a position to send their own economists to push their message.  Watching these kinds of things is like watching conservatives talk to themselves.  The particular AEI guy was Kevin Hassett, among whose notable publications is this treatise on the economics of Halloween.  He also co-authored the infamous "Dow 36,000", which appeared just before the dot-com crash.  How'd that prediction work out, Kevin?

Are U.S. business taxes "the highest among developed nations", as conservatives continuously whine?  No, read this.

~~~

CDY has a good post noting the participation of the LDS in funding No on Prop 8.  A couple of commenters wondered what firms also supported No on 8.  As I mentioned last month:

Here's a map of everybody who contributed to Prop 8, including their name and the amount donated.  To find the biggest donor in Colorado, move down to Colorado Springs and click on Focus on the Family.

~~~

Thomas compares
~~~~

Libertarian or Communist?  Which is it, Robert?

~~~

I've been emailing back and forth with Brucie, my friend of over 30 years.  Among his many accomplishments are an MBA, a successful career as a poker player, and introducing me to Pynchon.  Three decades ago, he and I and my new bride and a bunch of friends were playing Weird Charades, where the categories were things like "Famous Polynesian Diseases".  In a fit of alcohol-fueled enthusiasm, we all decided to go on my honeymoon to Europe together.  Little by little, one person or the other dropped out, to the point where my honeymoon consisted of my bride, myself, and Brucie.  I'm sure there's a movie in there somewhere.  Brucie reminded me that at the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, he was the one who tilted the Magritte on the wall just a bit, so I could get a better photo.  Which tilting resulted in a lady rushing in with what we assumed was a large gun in her large handbag.

~~~

We discovered that Sweet Junie and a good friend of mine have the same birthday.  In a room of 30-odd people, the chances are nearly even that two people will share a birthday.  Still, it seems like you don't run into it all that often.  Excepting, of course, Kelli and I.

~~~

Man caught with pigeons in pants.

~~~

Conan O'Brien:  "A tabloid published a picture of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps at a party taking a huge hit from a bong. I think there’s an important lesson to be learned here: Kids, never share your pot with someone who has the lung capacity of a dolphin."

~~~

OOf the 41 Republican senators, 5 of them have voted with the Obama administration more than half the time.  Even Hatch is voting 40% of the time.  One surprising woman on the list is Alaska senator Murkowski, who may have to face a primary challenge from Palin.

~~~
Looks like Rove may be caving.  I guess he didn't like the image of being naked in the prison shower all by himself.

~~~

Cue up Weird Al doing Queen:  Another one takes the bus (Rummy).

~~~

A laptop for $10?

~~~

Comics with Problems, featuring Alpha the Robot in the Marijuana Mystery and Treat Your M-16 Rifle Like A Lady.

~~~

Megapixels don't matter.

~~~

Arianna:  "As Niall Ferguson told me in Davos, "It is time to start new banks; the old banks need to be completely restructured." And this includes an end to paying dividends to shareholders -- not to mention an end to bonuses, redecorating, new jets, Super Bowl parties, and stadium naming deals."
 

Posted by jbahr at 06:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Aggressive Interviews #1 and #2 at Gists and Piths.  A typical question:  "The 'avant garde', 'experimentalism' in poetry, all that stuff: waste of time, yes?"

~~~

Faits Divers de la Poésie Américaine et Britannique:  Mlinko likes it.  Shapiro likes it.  Latta likes it.  And I like it.  The collective is a little hard on Ron and Joshua, perhaps, but they're big boys.  Besides, everybody gets elegantly mauled, it appears.  A sample:

It was night. But at rosy dawn, the enigmatic arrangement of a collision has appeared: Comment-box addicts M. Rohrer and M. Davis, their overlaid bodies in an X, lay prone on a circular white path, in the hydrangea gardens of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains.

~~~

The Gay CPA:  File the Gay Way!

~~~

The anti-manifesto manifesto (hat-tip to Laura).

~~~

I have always loved Magritte, even before living in Belgium.  I saw my first Magritte on the canvas in the 70's at Peggy Guggenheim's small museum in Venice.  Because perhaps of their relatively young age, they seemed as fresh as the photos in coffee table books.  Magritte has made it into my poems many times:  an entire poem called Betrayal of Images, a reference to that pipe that isn't a pipe somewhere else.  I had forgotten that Mark Young wrote an entire book of Magritte poems.  Check it out.

~~~

Joni Mitchell trivia from Wikipedia:  "In early 1976, Mitchell traveled with friends who were driving cross country to Maine. Afterwards, Mitchell drove back to California alone and composed several songs during her journey which would feature on her next album, 1976's Hejira. She states, "This album was written mostly while I was traveling in the car. That's why there were no piano songs..."^{[citation needed]} Hejira was possibly Mitchell's most experimental album so far, featuring legendary jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius on several songs including the first single, "Coyote", the atmospheric "Hejira", and the disorienting, guitar-heavy "Black Crow". The album climbed to #13 on the Billboard Charts, reaching gold status three weeks after release, and received airplay from album oriented FM rock stations. Yet "Coyote", backed with "Blue Motel Room", failed to chart on the Hot 100. While the album was greeted by many fans and critics as a "return to form",^{[citation needed]} by the time she recorded it her days as a huge pop star were over."

I've always loved Hissing of Summer Lawns (OK, I tend to love rather than like, or else I'm indifferent).  There's a line in "Harry's House/Centerpiece" that I always heard as "Baby,you're my centipede".  I think it was a mental segue from "The Jungle Line" and the sense of the conga on the cover.  The brilliant and lovely Jodie, one of Cath's oldest friends, laughed when I asked her what a centipede was doing in the song, and said "It's CENTERPIECE".  Jodie also carefully mentioned that I could de-husk garlic a lot easier by crushing under the blade of a large chopping knife.  I told her I knew all about that technique, but preferred my own awkward method.  I also used to wake Jodie by my insanely rude coffee bean grinding at 5 in the morning, as she was trying to catch the last few hours of sleep on the hide-a-bed. 

~~~

The perfect Valentine book?  237 More Reasons To Have Sex by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh (hat-tip to Eileen).

~~~

Henry translates Lanthanum into Google Russian for some reason (smile).  I'll have to run it by Dima.

~~~

Jonathan re-posts his world famous list of writing experiments.  I particularly liked "Parody your own style.", but I think Frank already beat me to it.

~~~

Which reminds me, somebody should hold a Fourth Annual Poetic Cross-Dressing Contest.

~~~

Did you watch the Super Bowl for the commercials?  BTW, isn't it time for SuperBowl to be one word?  Anyway, I caught the last 45 minutes which was pretty great.  It helped that I really didn't care who won.  Also, BTW, what the hell is drinkability?

~~~

Get your own Joe the Plumber, "a Limited-Edition series of museum-quality Tijuana black velvet painting".  From the Modern American Media Martyr™ series.

~~~

The economic numbers keep getting worse:  "What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell’s soup, Hershey’s chocolate and Spam — the four food groups of the apocalypse."

~~~

Paul ("I've got a Nobel Prize in Economic and you don't) Krugman rebuts the right-wing's "the New Deal didn't help the Great Depression" meme.

~~~

My mistake:  Bank of America axed its divident from $1.28 to four cents on 16 January (now yields less than 1%).

Posted by jbahr at 05:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

◄ Buy it new for $10.36.

~~~

Another idiot worries that we'll be "stimulated right into being another Europe".  God, if it were only that easy.

~~~

The Economist thinks we're even worse off than we think.

~~~

Bank of America common stock now pays a dividend equaling 19.45%.  That's about 20 times the national savings account average.  Of course, that assumes that they don't cut the dividend (which the current CEO has said he won't), and that the stock price doesn't drop enough to wipe out the dividend yield (although the price is only 25% higher than its all-time low two weeks ago).  I like Google Finance with its slidey price history thing.

~~~

Should I be watching the Super Bowl.  At least for the commercials?

~~~

From the hard-to-believe-but-funny-nonetheless pile:  "A federal prison inmate in South Carolina has filed a motion seeking to intervene in a Securities Investor Protection Corporation lawsuit against Bernie Madoff. He accuses Madoff of promising inmates a 16.9% return on their investments, but instead sending their money to Switzerland. Even stranger, the inmate claims he had an intimate relationship with Madoff and that they met at Harmony.com."