Whimsy Speaks Again

Kittens on a Roomba.

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That Megan McArdle is a smart cookie:  "This is one of the little ironies of a severe, deflationary recession:  they actually increase the real income of most wage earners, because wages are sticky downwards.  In strictly material terms, the Great Depression probably increased the purchasing power of people who were in work.  It's just that it did so at the expense of a great deal of suffering on the part of the unlucky 20%, and the pervasive fear everyone else experienced.  We'll probably see much the same over the next few years:  if you can keep your job, it will become easier to buy a house, pay for fuel, go on trips.  But no one is going to want to do any of these things, because they're too afraid of losing their jobs."

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Following one of Ron's links, I encountered this review of Donald Revell's A Thief of Strings.  I don't know Revell personally, nor have I read more than a smattering of his work (which I remember as decent).  Most of what I remember about Revell was his joint gig with Jorie as poetry editor(s) of the quite excellent Colorado Review.  So, you can imagine my shock when I read Poet Hound's assessment of the book, along with specific passages that she admired.  Here are a few:

“Reading,/I find myself/Praying for animals/One hundred years gone/”

“I was reading when my father died/Who could not read,” and goes on to say “I prayed and listened./I prayed and hear/Nothing concerned with men, including my father./He wanted nothing to do with them either./”

“Once he said/My eyes and my sister’s eyes were brown like those of deer.”

“Who’s to say there is no one/Already building a fire in the cabin…On the mountaintop beside one tree?/The wind seems not to reach that high./Smoke from the chimney goes straight up.”

Personally, I think this is dreadful verse.  Painfully bad poetry.  I suspect, however, that you won't find anyone else saying that.  We poets are much too civil for our own good.

Also linked by Ron was this PDF with a review in Chicago Review of August Kleinzahler's Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.  The reviewer, Joe Geltner, provides a balanced, intelligent take.  Here's an excerpt from the book that he considers:

This is a sacred place
I have come here from far away
After many years of wandering
Disillusion
And found surcease here from all my cares
Surcease here from doubt
Here, at the center of it all
On a great slab of Mesozoic rock
This sanctified ground
Here, yes, here
The dead solid center of the universe
At the heart of the heart of America

In case you have to ask:  yes, this is also terrible verse.  OK, maybe not terrible, but banal, artless, derivative, unmusical, surpriseless.  This is poetry that would get annihilated at any decent poetry post-and-discuss site (e.g., Alsop Review or Writers Block).  So, when an entire book of this stuff is created, is it any wonder that the sole market is other poets?

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Every once in a while I buy a box of Black Box Chardonnay.  It's pretty decent, even if it doesn't contribute to my giant cork collection.  In the local stores, it runs about $26 before tax.  I've checked 4 online sites and can purchase it for as little as $18 with a 6-pack case break. However, shipping invariably runs $6-8 per box, making it about the same price as the locals.  I buy wine all time time online and get it shipped to me (in bottles) at far less than it costs at nearby liquor stores.  With boxed wine, there is no bottle – 95% of the weight is the wine.  I could use FedEx ground to ship a six-pack for about $15, so why is everybody charging $50-60 for "shipping and handling"?  Because they can?

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Open Left and Tristero make a lot of sense.  This recession will be so bad, the only thing the Republicans could do was distance themselves from it (and its bailout).  I can only hope that the BHO and team continue to under-promise and over-deliver.

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I'm amazed to find out that The Futility Review still gets a dozen of hits a week.

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I wish I could get Verizon FiOS fiber-based Internet service.  It is reported to deliver at speeds up to 100 Mbps, roughly 70 times what my quite adequate DSL service provides.  The 20 Mbps service is about twice what my (very cheap) Qwest DSL costs.  I have only a vague idea where it is available, but Congress is getting ready to include a little money to Verizon in the bail-out bill, so maybe it will be here sooner rather than later.

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I just bought 4 plastic boxes of blackberries for 88 cents apiece.  They also had blueberries for the same price.  The blueberries come from Chile and are completely flavorless (as Sweet Junie discovered when I bought a mess of them for her breakfast).  The blackberries were quite nice, and came from Mexico.  When I was a kid in Northern Virginia, I would take the culvert under the Beltway and enter the woods.  It was all woods, all the way to Manassas.  In certain clearings, you would find blackberry bushes and I would fill a bucket and carry them back home.  Mom would make a pie or save them for breakfast on cold cereal.  Usually, I would have to get de-ticked, which involved either backing them out with the kitchen match to their ass, or painting them with nail polish.  I don't remember that either method actually worked.  Here's a great blackberry cobbler recipe.