WhimsyLand

Sweet Junie and I worked in the early morning, and then spent as pleasant a day as can be imagined, which included lunch at The Med, shopping, discussing our trip to Paris (sometime in the not-too-distant future,) and planning our wedding (ditto).  I have a couple of ledges in my cathedral-ceilinged-living room-dining room-den and we found some ginormous teacups to place on one of them.  I installed an indoor-outdoor thermometer so I can stop looking at Weather Underground to see how cold it is outside (you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows).  It's currently 33 outside, 66 inside, and 99 somewhere in Ecuador.

Other improvements included replacing dead house plants with live ones, buying more Pale Jade 2 for the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, and moving the jazz painting up a foot.



It's great to have a woman in the house.  I'm a domestic imbecile.
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Reports have it that Skype will soon be available for iPhones.  That has to be a huge win over ATT 3G.

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Sandra links to the Academy's interview of Louise Glück by Dana Levin, which is a little like Fox News interviewing Karl Rove, as Levin was her "apprentice" at one time.

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Flarf Noise Putty.

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Trish and her "husband" try to write a fellowship "application" by means of chicken "illustration".

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Jordan announces The Hat, #8.

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Emily notes the existence of the McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, which is now something I really must have.  "The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes will have you laughing at the dead. John Hodgman, in his introduction, says authors and books are funny “because they are sad. They are as sad as zeppelins are, they wish to soar, but they are using a technology that is old, largely forgotten, highly flammable.”

Hint, hint, to my children and loved ones.

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Get your literary tattoo (hat-tip to Jilly).

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Seth:  "Every day--every day--I feel I get closer to understanding precisely what it is about Ron's School of Quietude construction that's so insidious and offensive. Instinctively I know it's a bad taxonomy, and bad for poetry, but as I've still so much to learn about poetry it's always been hard to put my finger precisely on it."

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If Notre Dame University permits the opinions of some outraged Catholics to "un-invite" President Obama to speak, it would be unfortunate.

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Calculated Risk is one of the more interesting (if somewhat dry) economic sites on the web (though they do run the occasional Jon Stewart clip).  One of the more interesting charts this week shows the relationship between median house prices and consumer spending.  The only conclusion you can come to is that a lot of people were using their rising home values as an ATM, cashing in with home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) to support their habit.

The good news, I suppose is that home values have dropped so much that HELOC's are generally impossible to get now.  So, people have stopped spending and are now saving.  Which is screwing up the economic recovery.  You just can't win, you know?

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"Deficits don't matter" -- Dick Cheney, 2002.

"Congressional Republicans predict deficit doomsday" -- 2009

"In our time, the Republican Party has compiled an impressive history of talking about fiscal responsibility while running up unrivaled deficits and debt. Of the roughly $11 trillion in federal debt accumulated to date, more than 90 percent can be attributed to the tenure of three presidents: Ronald Reagan, who used to complain constantly about runaway spending; George Herbert Walker Bush, reputed to be one of those old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicans; and his spendthrift son George "Dubya" Bush, whose trillion-dollar war and irresponsible tax cuts accounted for nearly half the entire burden. Only Bill Clinton temporarily reversed the trend with surpluses and started to pay down the debt (by raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers)."

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Sweet Junie arrives this afternoon.  A lot of the snow melted yesterday under the Colorado sun, and I'm hoping a lot more will be gone before she gets here.  Well, it's pretty on the mountains, but I'd opt for the roads being clear and dry. 

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Redneck sushi.

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Ways to visualize a trillion dollars:

To transport a trillion dollars, packed in large bricks of $100 bills, you would need to fill the cargo hold of a eighty-four C5 Galaxy transport aircraft.

"Imagine you're given $1T on the day Jesus Christ was allegedly crucified.  You spend $1M per day, every day, 365 days a year without stopping for any reason. 
As of today, you would still need around 700 years to be completely out of money."

A trillion dollars is the total amount of income tax collected by the IRS in 2006.

A trillion dollars can pay the rent of every renter in the US for 3 years.

A trillion dollars would buy every man, woman, and child in American "an iPod, a set of Ginsu knives and 600 Subway foot-longs."

A trillion dollars can pay for one Iraq war, with all its hidden costs.

This would make it easier to carry around:


 

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Thanks to Ron for this hilarious link.  Joe Cocker with subtitles:  "Oh, baby, Hoggify".

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Why Kristy doesn't write fiction:  "Poems have to be so tight there's no room for things to go awry (though things occasionally do but I'm better at controlling them these days and knowing when NOT to control them). But in a short story, or god forbid a novel, there's all sorts of room for chaos, anarchy."

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Lara on Adorno on kitch, cuteness, the Gremlinesque:  "This explosive dialectic between specifically girly kitsch and masculine high art is one that many Gurlesque poets seek to exploit, recognizing that, as Tiffany puts it, kitsch’s resemblance to art “only enhances its catastrophically destructive challenge to the [traditional] values of art”.

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Johannes responds to Joseph:  "Now I am totally opposed to the foundations of pretty much all of his criticism. I am opposed to defending a poem that I love; I am opposed to the idea that there must be some kind of organic unity of the poem that can be revealed through close (but apparently, as you'll see, not very close afterall!) reading; I am opposed to the idea that sharp turns in poems are bad, or that ephemerality is bad; and I am opposed to the use of "avant-garde tics" as a criticism"

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I'm trying to re-do the office.  When my small band left our former office and employer (a victim of the post 9/11 and dot-com meltdown), we purchased (through the kindness of our employer's assent) a lot of big heavy metal office furniture.  We only had a few weeks to make the move, so I had a team come in and build out my basement.  Up went the new walls and door and track lighting.  Then, one weekend, four of us loaded a big truck and moved all that heavy metal furniture into the new office, creating flat surfaces, drawers for keyboards, quasi-cubicles.  That was 5 years ago, and the mildly oppressive aura has bugged me too long. 

This week, Der and his friend Pat (after a hearty Cajun breakfast at Lucille's) helped me move a dozen bookcases and zillions of books into the unfinished part of the basement.  We carried a monstrous laser printer to the garage, on its way to CHARM.  We emptied hundreds of 3-ring binders that held old versions of the USB spec or firmware notes for the Broadcom network processor (if anyone would like a big box of 3-ring binders, email me and I'll send you one).  Meanwhile, I filled three big boxes to send to my buddies at The Computer Troubleshooter:  hard disks, DVD drives, keyboards, motherboards, spare memory, miscellaneous cables, wireless mice.  I turned off and moved to the unfinished area a half dozen computers that we don't really use now (a Pentium-3 Linux system, an old Mac, two generations of Sun workstations). 

Now the place starts to look open.  I've ordered 3 mobile workstations with glass surfaces, which I will sprinkle through the room and move occasionally just to break up the monotony.  Dima still has his big workstation in the corner (which I call The Russian Empire), but the rest of the office is starting to look airy.  Off the main office is another large room, about the size of a Victorian bedroom, in which I sit surrounded by more steel and Formica.  It's going next, but I will need some strong backs to help me get it all out the door.

And then, there's the question of where to take it all.  I could load up my trusty pick-up, but I don't think The Salvation Army wants office furniture.

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Nate explains the Republican's alternative recovery plan:

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If you came to Boulder for spring break, you are now buried under 16 inches of snow.  Longmont (10 short miles away, and where I live) got about 10.  When I first moved to Boulder, we had a week of 70+ degree weather and, of course, I thought winter was over.  I planted tomatoes and peppers and it snowed the next week.  I grow seedlings inside now until about Memorial Day.

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Shanna's been cooking:  The Spicy Sweet Potato Black Bean Soup looks tasty.  Here's a link to her recipes.

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The end of poetry.  Again.  "In 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months," Marc Bain writes in an online article this week, citing January's NEA report "Reading on the Rise."

I'm actually amazed that it's that high.  I frankly don't know anyone who reads poetry outside my poetry buddies.  And my kids, but that's only because I email it to them and they don't have a choice.  

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I should have figured with a name like Agodon, she is mostly French.  Except that's probably not her maiden name.

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"Night before last I dreamed I was being pulled through a kiss hole in the time space continuum and there was a tear in my space suit and now by god if it isn't happening."

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Der decided to go to Spain in May.  Which is dandy, because he has a friend in Sevilla and I have a mega-friend in Malaga.  Cath (his mom) is a nationally-known Spanish interpreter, translator and teacher, so you can imagine that she's for the plan.  I'm suggesting spend a few days in Madrid, run down to Sevilla, then down to Cadiz, over to Marbella/Malaga, then the obligatory trip to Granada, then up to Murcia, where I have another old friend, then up the coast to Valencia, then Barcelona, and if possible, Bilbao to see the Getty. 

The plan to go to Asia was scuttled by a slow succession of hidden costs:  flight fees and taxes, $130 for a Chinese Visa, relatively expensive train fares.

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Sometimes it takes an unselfish act by someone who seems to be a decent human being to understand just how warped the sense of entitlement had become in the financial industry.  And how bizarrely out of touch these people were with anything like the real world.  In his resignation letter, printed in the NYT, Jake DeSantis bemoans the fact that management did not stick up for the "good guys" in AIG's Financial Product division – you know, those guys we want the bonuses back from, and the division that caused a near global meltdown by creating trillions of dollars of credit default swaps.  Mr. DeSantis came from a humble background and earned a degree from MIT on scholarship.  He never dealt in credit default swaps and slaved 10 to 12 hours a day making money for the company as head of business development for commodities.  Various accounts of AIG-FP put the total number of employees at about 400, so Mr. DeSantis couldn't have had that many direct reports.  Still, he seemed to have deserved pretty good compensation, because he's giving back his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 (which is in addition to his salary, let's say, total compensation of $2 million).  Why is he doing this?  Well, partly to avoid the heat of the Fed and NY State.  And partly because "I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust."  Yeah, I suppose if you make over a million bucks a year peddling commodities, you probably put some of it away.

But, then, this is a smart guy.  One of those "smartest guys in the room", I bet.  And he graduated from MIT, which you don't "legacy" your way into as Bush did into Yale. 

So who are all those other schmucks who graduated from MIT?  I mean, besides Richard Feynman and 24 other Nobel Prize winners?  Well, there's these guys (sorry, they're all guys, there are a few noted females, but not that many on the MIT site):

• Ronald McNair, Doctorate of Science, laser development, astronaut on the Challenger
• Tom Scholz, Master of Science, dozens of patents in electronics, found of the band Boston
• Colin Angle, MS in Computer Science, founder of iRobot, maker of the Roomba
• Robert Metcalfe, Bachelor EE, Founder of 3COM, co-founder of Ethernet
• John Sununu, MS in Mechanical Engineering, US Senator
• Steve Altes, BS in Aeronautics, developed Pegasus space booster, Humorist, body double for Brad Pitt, model on the box of "Just For Men" Sandy Blond hair color

Do you think any of these guys consistently made over two million dollars a year (well, maybe Metcalf did for a while).  In fact, let's look at some people at the top of the food chain among the top corporations in America:

Here's seven companies that employ over a million people.  Each of the executives listed probably have 10,000 people or more indirectly reporting to them.  The total revenue of these companies comes to hundreds of billions of dollars.  Many of them are in their 50's and 60;s and have been with the company for decades.  And only about half of them make more than DeSantis's gross salary.

That's what got so whacked about the financial industry.   All financial services accounted for over 20% of GDP, the largest part of which includes leasing and renting services, real estate agency and brokerage.  "Pure" financial services (like AIG-FP's activity) grew from 2% in the 50's to almost 8% of total GDP by 2007.  Every dime of Mr. Desantis's salary, and the profits made by AIG, were a part of the GDP number ( so was Bernie Madoff's income). Economist will argue that pricing and risk analysis (as provided by venture capital firms and financial engineers) are a necessary part of the economy, and that their part of GDP is a reflection of the price society has established for their services.  But the rapid growth in financial services has been as the result of marketing, not engineering. 

A case in point is the credit default swap.  This is an insurance policy in which the policy owner makes regular payments (as you would for home insurance), and is made whole if some underlying debt instrument (say, a corporate bond) goes into default.  CDSs didn't even exist in 1996, and now we have almost $50 trillion of them.  The companies selling these "products" (or financial WMDs, as Warren Buffet famously called them) made billions of dollars for themselves and their employees, all of which was a new contribution to the GDP.  But, what if, in fact AIG-FP (and other issuers) didn't have the resources to cover these insurance policies if they defaulted?  What if they didn't have even 5% of the capital reserves to cover them?  What if they didn't have even 1% of the reserves?  Out of thin air, we have substantially raised GDP and simultaneously enriched people like DeSantis.  Is this real GDP growth?  In fact, was the vaunted GDP growth of the early Bush years even real?  We the people are now covering trillions of dollars of these "bets".  That's the real reason that AIG has become such an expensive proposition.  The supposed GDP gains (and the salaries of many AIG employees) has now been literally and directly converted into public debt.

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As an aside, another distortion of the GDP is that one of its components is rent, which includes "personal income including what the average homeowner would receive from himself in rental income if he charged himself to live in his own house."  When major builders construct more new housing than has ever been built, and sell them to people with loans they can never repay, and each of these people's "imputed rent" is added to the GDP, you have to wonder just how rosy the Bush years were.

The Atlantic had an interesting article in this vein last year, arguing that the McMansions of today will be the development projects of tomorrow, or occupied by squatters, or both.  Particularly, as their distance from jobs and urban centers makes them undesirable. A related article in Slate is called "Homesteaders in the Hood".  This, from BoingBoing:

"Squatting, or unlawfully occupying and making use of land that belongs to someone else, tends to emerge when poverty and homelessness intersect with absentee ownership. It was widespread on the frontier of the 19th-century West, where settlers who couldn't afford to purchase land at market prices often simply occupied land owned by Eastern speculators (as well as land owned by the federal government and by Native American tribes). "

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I am always amazed when seemingly intelligent people report how hard-working Wall Street types "routinely work in excess of 100 hours a week", as Nate did in defense of his friend.  I have been known to work completely insane hours.  I work out of my home, so I have no commute.  I eat generally once a day, unless I'm having a banana at my desk, or peanut butter toast while standing up in the kitchen reviewing code.  Even on my best week, I don't think I've ever worked 100 hours in a week.  Nate's friend, "Vijay" "routinely worked" more than 100 hours a week.  And, "took time out of his day to teach inner-city high schoolers about finance and economics".  Between a commute, at least one meal a day, and the occasional demands of life (renewing your passport, a doctor's appointment, etc.) that may leave you 7 hours a day for everything else, including sleep.  But, "Vijay" had enough time to have a beer with Nate (even though he had to run off to Kinko's in the middle of it).  Unless all Wall Street routinely suffered from sleep deprivation, somebody's math is awry.  Or maybe they did, which would explain a lot, actually.

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I just bought a life-time subscription to Abraham Lincoln.  Now, it's a race to see which of us lives longer.

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I was asked by a client if I could support Arabic in the product for which I write the firmware.  I thought about it a while, and decided that I didn't actually know much about Arabic (and there are, of course, various kinds).  Did it have a fixed set of letters?  Were these augmented by diacritical marks?  Would I have to swap the entire product screen on the X axis, as Arabic reads right to left? 

In a related story, Arabic Facebook has launched.

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A humorous look at "The Lesser-Known Think Tanks of Washington", which includes the Middle Eastern Equivocation Center, the Def Jam Think Tank, and Heritage Foundation RAW, the last of which is "The new home for policy recommendations too crazy conservative for the Heritage Foundation. Rejecting the sissified scholarship of "Red" Roger Ailes and "Comrade Kristol," Heritage RAW's all-white, all-decrepit roster advances an outlandishly reactionary platform in rooms so smoke-filled it is said that members can only identify each other by their hacking coughs."

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I was thinking about Der's travel plans when I ran across The Onion's Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport.


 

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I'm still a little amazed that anyone would send polonium to a 10 year old.  Even in 1950.  Can you imagine how long you'd be in jail if you carried the The Atomic Energy Lab through airport security.  Or tried to mail one to a nephew?

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I had a great dinner with Ky and Derek and Cath and Terry last night:  crock-pot short ribs, mashed potatoes, mixed greens salad, freshly steamed asparagus, and ciabatta.  Yum.  I also pulled a scene from Michael and brought 3 kinds of pie and a gallon of "Alden's Organic Vanilla Bean Ice Cream".  Double yum.  Ky was showing us his plans for a new iPhone app and Der had his laptop out, discussing the pros and cons of traveling to (variously) Asia or Europe in late May.  The basic financial dilemma is:  Europe is cheap to fly to, but hostels and food add up fast.  Asia is expensive to fly to, but the actual traveling is cheap.  I suggested Cleveland as an alternative, which was caused no end of eye-rolling.  However, I do have friends in Cleveland and there's alway the Museum of Rock and Roll.  I also have friends in Spain and Shenzhen, so that's a possibility.  On the other hand, Der is thinking Vietnam or Cambodia might be interesting.  Ah, to be young and restless.

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I don't know why I'm still amazed:  Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh likened President Obama as Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and characterized Michelle as "angry". 

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One thing that amazes me about all the teeth-gnashing about the budget and how it will "burden our children with trillions of dollar is debt" is this:  we already have.  Living beyond our collective means, passing entitlement legislation with no clear way to pay for it, conducting two expensive wars, and then cutting taxes has created a situation in which the need for future taxes much higher than we have recently enjoyed.   This dilemma is not the result of current or near-future economic policy.  The administration's moves at this point are only a plan to face our obligations and spread the pain out over as many years as feasible.  There is no going back to a system where China racks finances a trillion dollars of our party-making, "deficits don't matter", and 20% of the countries personal income accrues to employees of the finance industry. 

Get over it.  We're stuck with this.  Now, let's make the best of it.

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Those IRS.  They have a policy for everything:  "Can I still claim a deduction for child if he or she has been kidnapped?"  "Yes, if two conditions are met:  1. The child must be presumed by law enforcement to have been kidnapped by someone who is not a member of your family or a member of the child's family, and 2. The child had, for the taxable year in which the kidnapping occurred, the same principal place of abode as the taxpayer for more than one-half of the portion of such year before the date of kidnapping."

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Letterman:  "Michelle Obama is making a garden at the White House. While she was out digging, she found three of Dick Cheney’s hunting buddies. "

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Amazing blurbs (hat-tip to CDY, and have a happy vacation!):  "In these pages, the electric linguistic experiment meets a new urban, postnatural poetics, one in which poetry is not just a play of signs and seemings but also a prismatic investigation of our contemporary order."

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Abraham Lincoln #4 is out and I'm ordering it.

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Eduardo on the real world:  "i'm having a hard time re-writing my resume for real world employment. i have a poet's resume. i'm screwed! the human resources people at company xzy will not care about yaddo or the colgate fellowship. i might as well write "i steal" and "i don't shower" on my resume. "

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Seth posts reviews of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, virtually all of them glowing.  Here's one:  "I loved the program. I wish I wouldn't have spent as much money on alcohol. I learned a lot, the faculty was challenging, the funding was ample."

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The Academy would appreciate $25 to help with National Poetry Month programs.  You also receive an anthology.  When you fill out the contact details for yourself, you get to choose among the the most comprehensive list of honorifics that I've ever seen on a web entry form:

Admiral, Ambassador, AS1, Brother, Captain, Colonel, Commander, Councilman, Councilwoman, Ct., Dame, Dean, Deputy Mayor, Director, Dr., Dr. and Mrs., Drs., Father, General, Governor, Hon., Judge, Lieutenant, Major, Master, Mayor, Miss, Monsignor, Mr., Mr. and Mrs., Mrs., Ms., Pf., Prince, Princess, Professor, Rabbi, Rep., Rev., Reverend, Senator, Sir, Sister, Swami, The Earl of, The Estate of, The Family of, SSCM, Sgt., President, Sr., Borough President.

My God.  I sat for minutes deciding.  "Swami" would be nice, but there's also nothing like a Dame.  I like the sound of "The Reverend Doctor", but they don't give you the ability to mix and match.  "The Earl of" would put me in the class of Melrose Plant, but if he can give up the title, so can I.  Maybe I should be "Dr. and Mrs.", but Sweet Junie and I are only affianced at this point.  I'm swinging between Prince and Monsignor at this point, but I'll tell you what I decide later.

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Every year my health insurance with Blue Cross has been going up.  Sometimes 10%, sometimes 20%.  I am a classic underutilizer, going to the doc maybe once or twice a year.  I am healthy, all my relatives and parents are living, I take no prescription meds, and am in pretty good health.  Still, the premium went up year after year, and BC wouldn't pay for anything really wise, like a colonoscopy.  I got what I thought was a pre-approval a couple of years ago, only to find myself in a backless nightie on the a rolling table when the nurse came up and told me that they weren't actually sure that BC would pay for the $3,000 procedure.  So, I got up, got dressed and confirmed that was the case.  Yesterday, I tried my first appointment with a Kaiser doc, after plunking down $299 a month (BC was up to $650 a month as of January).  It's certainly a bit more like going to Target than Bloomingdale's, but they seem pretty efficient and the M.D. I saw was an intelligent young man who seemed to know a lot about everything I asked him (even a few esoteric issues).  He ordered antibiotics for this head cold/flu I have, but told me to try inhaling saline solution first, as it might work just as well and the world doesn't need to overdo on antibiotics (don't I know it, just read a related article in SciAm).  He also scheduled a colonoscopy for $150, and handed me a bunch of interesting pamphlets.  The experience couldn't have been better, so I think I'll stick with these guys for a while.

I wonder why saline solution works.  Does it change the pH of my head to the point where the flora don't like it?  Hmm.  Maybe Peter or CDY can tell me.  And, there's always Google.

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Yikes.  The average amount of mortgage debt is up 250% in the past 20 years.  On the other hand, surely home prices have doubled if not more -- even taking into account the recent meltdown.  Nate analyzes the debt growth, and what he terms "Flip-This-House fetishism". 

Here's a graph of historical median house prices, nationwide.  In 1989, the median price was about $100K and prices peaked in 2007 at about $250K.  Hmm.  So mortgage debt (which includes home-equity loans) has kept right up with asset appreciation.  The problem is that since early 2007, the median price has dropped to $175K, and may decline further.  What doesn't decline is the mortgage debt, which I suppose is Nate's point.

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I have one more Star Wars to eat a burger in front of.  On a related note, Harrison is finally marrying Calista.  Craig Ferguson quipped: "Harrison Ford got engaged to Calista Flockhart over the weekend. This is the first time six carats doesn’t mean her lunch."

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Vermont's Senate just voted to convert civil unions into civil marriages, with such wide margins that the bill is veto-proof.  Good for them.

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I just got done reading an article on AIG by the ever-outraged Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.  He pulls no punches:  "It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. . . . AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire."

And:

"The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger."

Don't sugar coat it, Matt, give it to us straight.

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From BoingBoing:  This is just amazing.  The Atomic Energy Lab, a chemistry set from 1950 that included "four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom) and a government manual "Prospecting for Uranium."

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Got another comment from Franz:  "Nah, Logan isn't saying what "most of us secretly think". Who is "us"--smirking anonymous night of the living blogger nerds? Go ahead, collect my comments--I am proud to bear witness that not everyone on the internet is an 80s nitwit whose mind was formed by David Letterman, sneering his bitter and envious way right into the nothingness awaiting those who who know everything and do nothing, will never do anything. FW "

I actually think I've seen these points made on someone else's blog.  Perhaps, Franz keeps a document of rejoinders that he can cut and paste from?

 

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The wonderful web site "This is why you're fat" includes some of the following scrumptious selections:

White Castle Casserole:  Six White Castle burgers topped with gravy and American cheese.

The Slinger:  Hash browns with grilled onions with two cheeseburgers, topped with fried eggs all covered with chili.

Deep-Fried Pepperoni Pizza:  (self-explanatory)

The Porkgasm:  Bacon strips, bacon sausage, ham sausage, ham slices, smoked pork sausage and roasted pork belly surrounded by ground sausage, shaped like a pig, wrapped in bacon, and then roasted.

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Contrary to what you've heard, Obama's approval numbers haven't budged due to everyone's collective disgust of the AIG bonuses. 

On a somewhat related topic, Donna Brazile gushes about Obama in an editorial in the usually insane and hopelessly right-wing Moonie rag, the Washington Times.

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I have been thinking about why I have stopped writing poetry.  I think, in the end, the answer is:  I have nothing to say.  I spent almost 10 years writing poetry and I loved every minute of the construction, critiquing, submission and publication.  Right now, though, I would be breaking one of my own rules about writing of any kind:  If you have nothing to say, don't say it.

Blogging, of course, is not something I define as "writing", though considering how much time and energy it has taken up on the past 5 years, perhaps it should be.

~~~

I have come to love my burgers.  They are a one-dish meal, and when I pile enough mixed greens and tomato slices on them, they have the potential to be a healthy meal that provides the illusion that I've actually just ordered a phenomenal Abo's pepperoni pizza to accompany my glass of Fat Tire.  What is a burger, you may ask?  It is a big-ass bun sliced into two waiting half-moons on a square glass plate.  One of the bun halves is lightly coated with real mayo, preferably something I've blendered up myself from olive oil, fresh lemon, and garlic, (or maybe a little fresh tarragon) but Whole Foods 365 brand Canola mayo at 100 calories for a tablespoon is just fine (actually, so is Best Foods or Hellman's).  Then, there are the obligatory fried onions.  I alternate between Maui/sweet onions, white onions, and plain old cheap yellow onions, and frankly I'm not sure I appreciate the difference.  Sautéed briefly in olive oil and allowed to caramelize, they add a good 20% to the experience.  Lastly, there's the actual burger.  This week, I'm trying frozen filets of Orange Roughy, which are pretty damn good.  They're a little soft, and don't provide the crunch mouth-feel (don't you love those culinary neologisms?), but I could solve that by sautéing them with a few low-cal Italian bread crumbs.  Last week, I was eating 7% Fat Ground Beef, which was by far the most satisfying innards.  Weirdly, it turns out that 7% Fat Ground Beef has more saturated fat than 7% Ground Organic Chicken, but only 40% of the daily cholesterol (so says the dietary label).  I did one week with low-cal ground turkey, but its numbers on all the bad scales were much higher than either chicken or beef, and of course, much higher than any light white fish.  I've also tried a week of Buffalo, which is naturally less in fat than beef, but they haven't gotten around to producing a low-fat product, so they're out for now.  My short experiment with those weird patties constructed from vat-grown fungus is over.  I can't imagine what I was thinking.

~~~

Why you shouldn't worry so much about being Europeanized:  :  "Consider, for instance, average life expectancy. According to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook, we rank 49th in the world - worse than Portugal, Ireland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and France (where everybody smoked everywhere until a ban was enacted in 2007). Yet despite our lower life expectancy, and a higher infant mortality rate than anywhere in Western Europe, we spend more money on health care - 15.3 percent of GDP - than any of our friends."

~~~

Omigod.  There's an American (Poetry) Idol thing happening.  I rather liked Haute Cuisine by Paul Otrema.  The first time I visited La Plaza Mayor in Madrid at night, we were looking for a restaurant, and there were dozens of wonderful establishments, most of them starting in their dining rooms off the Plaza and then spilling out into the square with cloth-covered tables and frantic Spanish waiters.  One night we tried a restaurant that specialized in cochinillo.  As we descended the centuries-old tile stairs, we were confronted with a multi-tier shelf laden with large white platters, and upon each was sitting a 5-pound suckling pig, smiling weirdly above the thin slit across its throat.  An hour later the waiter arrived with our piglet.  The local tradition is to cut the cochinillo in two with a quick downward thrust of a thin plate, all to suggest the tenderness of the meat.  On another occasion, I sat with Alejandro and that rascal Raimon, eating 6 kinds of Spanish shrimp, each with a different name.  When it came time to pay, I offered, but Raimon was incensed that I was going to add more than a few pesetas to the bill as a tip.  "You will spoil them for us, don't you understand?", he pleaded.

~~~

This just in from Rapture Ponies.

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Dima dropped me an email that there is a new spice store in Boulder that I might want to visit.  I really have plenty of spices, but I'm always looking for an easier place to buy saffron.  I should probably just ask Alejandro to send me some from Malaga, as it's invariably cheaper in Spain, but I never get around to it and just end up spending a hundred bucks on a small plastic box of the stuff.  I knew saffron threads were hand-plucked from crocus flowers, but never really got around to looking up the details until this morning.  Each of the half-dozen flowers on the average crocus contributes 3 long stigmas, the female part of the flower.  Each long stigma is red at the top and fades to yellow near the bottom, where it is less potent.  There are between 400 to 500 threads per gram, which usually costs about $10 at most spice stores (a one-ounce tin from La Tienda runs $199).  The Spanish word for saffron is azafran, which is from the Arabic (the Moors first brought it to Spain). 

And this from Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653):  "It is an herb of the Sun, and under the Lion. Not above ten grains must be given at one time; a cordial if taken in an immoderate quantity, hurts the heart instead of helping it. It quickens the brain; helps consumptions of the lungs, and difficulty of breathing, it is excellent in epidemical diseases, as pestilence, smallpox, and measles. It is a notably expulsive medicine, and a good remedy in the yellow-jaundice."

~~~

Sweet Junie is just back from Disney World, and had a good time with her boys and sister.  It was surprisingly crowded, but the Fast Pass system saved long waits more than once.  This is a very cool idea, basically a way of having you wait in a virtual line so that you can walk around and buy more Mouse hats and Goofy caps (or be on another ride).  The last time I was in a Disney park was in Anaheim, joining my brother for dinner.  He had snagged a reservation to Club 33, the "secret" restaurant near New Orleans Square, and the only place in Disneyland that will pour you a glass of wine.  Junie said the food was actually pretty good (and relatively healthy) at various restaurants in Disney World (though expensive).

~~~

Andrew finished the first round of painting, climbing up and down his 20-foot ladder yesterday touching up.  He tells me that all construction jobs in Denver/Boulder have gotten hard to come by, and he has had to cut his labor rate in half just to keep moderately busy.  He tells me that one of his biggest monthly expenses is car insurance, a side effect of his love for fast cars.  We talked about his driving to Eau Claire and helping Junie out with some home improvements, and he said (with a small smile) that his record to Minneapolis was under 10 hours (AAA recommends allowing 13), so it's not out of the question.

~~~

I'm back to the beginning in the Star Wars series, watching Episode IV last night.  I first saw the film with Cath in little theater in Xenia, Ohio.  Back in L.A., lines were wrapping around the block, but the theater we were in was only half-filled. 

On a related topic, Boing Boing displays some Galactic Empire money.

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The check is in the mail:  "A woman's postcard bearing greetings from Montana has finally arrived in northeastern Ohio — 47 years later."

~~~

One of the things that interests me about the Bernie Madoff story is how he could have lost so much money, reportedly between 50 and 65 billion dollars.  That's a hell of a lot of money, like, the GDP of Luxembourg.

Madoff himself has assets of less than a billion, and auditors have found another billion still in the firm.  That leaves a lot of billions.  The Madoff organization was housed in expensive real estate and paid a large staff relatively lavish salaries.  Still, you really can't see how that would amount to enough. You could also figure that he had leveraged losses that might (like they did at other investment banks and hedge funds) amount to tens of billions more, what with the current meltdown.  

One plausible answer is that a lot of the money went back to investors in the form of higher-than-normal returns.  Madoff says that he started the Ponzi scheme in the early 1990's, paying investor returns.  Paying 5% or 10% more than the actual returns on capital, for 15 years, on an invested base of $50 billion would add up to a lot of money. 

That brings up an interesting point.  If you invested $100 million with Madoff in 1995 and collected $120 million in returns during that period, you're not actually as bad off as you think you are.  If that's true, it means that the endowment, pension, non-profit and private funds that invested so much with Madoff never really had the asset appreciation they thought they had – which is what a lot of America is finding to be true about their home values and 401(k)s.

There are not enough details at this point to draw a conclusion.

~~~

Sandra fights off an allergy attack.  Who knew that mangos were in the same family as cashews?  It says here:  "It belongs to the sumac family (Anacardiaceae), along with poison oak, poison sumac and the cashew tree. People who are hypersensitive to poison oak can get a mouth rash from eating mangoes."

~~~

Seth completes Section V of his posts on Bolaño's 2666.  I am duly chastened now that CDY pointed out his recent award. 

~~~

Nada notes that there's a big dip in cab riders.  I admit to forgetting where Nada lives (Greater NYC?), but it makes sense.  I just read today that Colorado sales tax revenue is down almost 20% from a year ago.  That's a big shortfall and points out how recessions have self-reinforcing effects:  projects are cancelled, people are furloughed, and it all adds up to even less spending.

It all amounts to a huge shift in American behavior:  "The hum of ambient noise in Midtown Manhattan is several decibels lower than it was a year ago. Fewer black Town Cars idle outside the investment bank offices on Park Avenue. The aisles of the flagship Saks Fifth Avenue are so quiet, you'd think you were in a library. The restaurants and shops at Rockefeller Center are open as usual, but they seem oddly depopulated."

~~~



Junie and I bought the Lotus Sanitizing System for our homes.  It works by creating O₃ molecules (ozone) in the water, which in turn, destroy bacteria.  The good thing about this is that it's completely eco-friendly.  The ozone rips apart bacteria, which, unlike antibacterial soap, is not something that they can evolve superstrains to avoid (basically, what has happened to create "super-bugs" in hospitals).  In the case of fruits and vegetables, you immerse them in ozone-laden water, and come out with items that are free of nasties.  You can also "ozone-ize" plain water and use their spray bottle as a kitchen top cleaner.  The ozone in the water has a very short lifetime, so after 15 minutes, it's gone. 

~~~

Good take on healthcare initiatives:  "Give conservatives credit here: At minimum, this argument had a logic to it, however flawed. Sure, it is belied by data: The Urban Institute reports that private insurers spend up to 30 percent of their revenue on administrative costs (read: salaries, paperwork, etc.) while government programs spend just 5 percent, and polls show Medicare recipients are far more satisfied with their healthcare than those in the private system. But, in nonetheless claiming that the private sector will always outperform the government, Republicans at least presented an ideologically coherent (if fantastically inaccurate) hypothesis.

~~~

The Pentagon is developing a spy-blimp.  It flies at 65,000 feet (about twice that of commercial aircraft) and is solar-powered.  I guess my only question would be:  Wouldn't a 450-foot spy dirigible be pretty easy to shoot down?

~~

Robert on the Michael Jordans of philosophy: "Why did the German-speaking parts of Europe give us Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Schiller, Schelling, Schleirmacher, Schopenhauer, Herder, Fichte, Lessing, Feuerbach, Frege, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Jaspers, Popper, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas, etc., while England gave us Bentham, Mill, Bertrand Russell, and, uh... Alfred North Whitehead? I mean, you have to go to the B-list pretty quickly when naming English philosophers. And it goes for the whole continent: while there are individual stars (Kierkegaard, say), no national tradition racks up the points like the Germans. Why?"

~~~

The Spring 2009 issue of Colorado Review is out.  Among the work I liked:

Jennifer Chapis, "The Long Self":  "The sun sits between peaks. //  Backward-flying helicopter. // // His long self bending out of pain lifts the drink."

Gregory Mahrer, "Travelogue": "When I say blood oranges I mean the fidelity of sunflowers, / story the distance between sill and toppled chair."

G.C. Waldrep, "Like A Fire From Which Sparks Emitted Do Fly Upwards":  "Chess is a system in which some men drown.  Fewer women.  The board hypnotizes the same way a thaumatrope whirls in sunlight, the here and the not-here, the phantom engine."

William Stob, "Abrupt or Not Sonnet":  "A few years running a satellite snap / storm swirl over Antarctica's Q-tip / 's the most beautiful thing I can find."

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My brain is still in a fog, owing to this cold/flu/whatever it is I have.  For that reason, when I looked over from my basement office desk into a small room of computers and saw water on the floor, I naturally thought I was hallucinating.  It turns out that there was water bubbling up from the shower in the adjacent bathroom and a pool of water over by the water heater, too.  As I wasn't doing the wash upstairs, all of this water could only have been the result of the quick shower I had recently taken.  Gads, the waste water is backing up!  I called a Rooter place (there are so many of them), and eventually an older and seemingly competent guy showed up with a panel truck filled with huge snake-and-motor contraptions.  He actually used a battery-powered electric crane with a swinging boom to lower it onto the ground.  45 minutes later my drains were clear and I had a bill for $195.  That seemed like a lot of money for 45 minutes, certainly three times what I make.  Admittedly, he had a panel truck and those giant snake things, but I have $40-50K of computer stuff in the office to get the work done that I need, and I don't make $195 in 45 minutes. 

It reminds me of that old joke:  An attorney comes home to find his basement flooded with water.  He calls a plumber, who shows up and gives him an estimate to fix the problem, and it amounts to a lot of money.  "I can't afford that", he says.  The plumber says "I couldn't either when I was an attorney".

~~~

Cath's brother is a ghostwriter and does very well for himself.  He announced some time ago that he had landed a primo job, but the contract expressly forbid him from saying who the ghostwritee was.  I guessed James Patterson immediately, and it turned out I was right.  If you've been traveling in the past 5-10 years, and wandered around airport bookstores, you can't help but notice that Patterson could crank out 3 or 4 books a year.  That's simply impossible, even for a hack mystery writer like Patterson.  Recently, Patterson has begun naming his ghostwriters as collaborators.  Of the 15 best-selling fiction books in 2007, four of them are Patterson collaborations.

~~~

There was a time when I would read The Atlantic, Time, Harper's and what have you and tell you what you missed.  Not necessary now, just go read Slate.  This from The Economist:  "To strengthen the economy "in the long term, [politicians] need flexible labour markets. That will mean abolishing job-subsidy programmes, taking away protected workers' privileges and making it easier for businesses to restructure by laying people off."

Just what we need, more unfettered capitalism.

~~~

Gary Sullivan:  Poetry & Comics Living Together!

~~~

Megan on the Stewart-Cramer debacle:  "I think Jim Cramer should be illegal.  Anyone who invests money based on one of these networks, or Wall Street Week, should seriously consider making themselves a ward of the court. "
 

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Matt Yglesias and Nate tread the same marginal tax rate ground that I was opining about earlier this week.  Nate notes that, although marginal tax rates have been much higher than those that will exist when the Bush tax cuts expire, they kicked in at much higher levels.  Today's top rate (and the top rate in 2011) begins to affect income earners at $250,000.  Nate and Matt ask:  "why not higher rates for very, very high income individuals"?  Adding a few more brackets for incomes over, say, $1 million and $10 million would bring in a lot more money to the Treasury. 

~~~

Google is introducing a phone service that lets you make free calls in the US and cheap calls worldwide.  Another interesting aspect is that Google's technology transcribes voicemails into text and sends them to your email account.  I'm terrible about checking my voice mails, so I would love that feature.

~~~

There was an interesting discussion yesterday on NPR regarding the roadblocks to digital integration of PCs, television, music, film and the Internet.  There is plenty of existing technology and bandwidth to make the "Internet experience" of selecting what you want to see/read/listen-to available from that big flatscreen in your living room.  The roadblocks are those put up by the cable and satellite companies (and to some extent, the traditional film and TV production companies).  Why should Comcast let you get everything over the Internet (web surfing, movie downloading, music listening, phone-calling) when they currently charge separately for each of them?  It's only a matter of time, though. When the average Internet user has 10 to 15 Mbit/sec connections, there will be plenty of 3d party companies providing all of these services.

~~~

Joshua:  "Here's my trouble with fiction: the labor, or rather the mechanics, required to interest most readers bores me silly."

~~~

"Please join us on Wednesday, March 4 for an ENGLISH FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENT COLLOQUIUM on Poetry, Entropy and Information."

Actually, that sounds pretty interesting.  I wonder, though, whether they're really going to talk about entropy and information in any definitive way.

~~~

And from Second Life:  "All adult goods and services will be confined to a specific "geographic" area in Second Life, meaning (we think) virtual genitalia and bdsm gear will no longer be offered in Second Life's malls next to the shoes and custom hairstyles. "

~~~

Sesame Street is laying off 20% of its workforce.  Ernie may have to sell his bottle cap collection.

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I have some kind of miserable cold, which I'm trying not to give to Dima by washing my hands a lot and sneezing into my underarm.  The only trip I made today was to pick up my pick up.  It's a dented blue 95 Dodge Dakota 4WD and it doesn't have a name yet.  I bought it on a complete whim, as Der needed a car to drive around when he's home from college, and I also thought it would reduce my Home Depot delivery bills.  Another benefit is that it has a lot of clearance, big bad tires, new shocks and the aforementioned four-wheel drive.  That has served me well in the occasional heavy snow we've had (actually, it was in the low 70's last week, but you never know in Colorado).  After I put a good stereo deck in it, I figured that was all I wanted to spend on a vehicle that I drive maybe 100 miles a year.  What changed my mind was the trip home from DIA in December when the temperature was minus 18, which doesn't count the wind chill factor. I bit the bullet today and got a new thermostat and fan clutch put in, and now it pour out heat like crazy.  Der will probably be happy to hear this, as he will not have to wear gloves and a hat while driving around anymore.

~~~

Let Reb help you with your radical poetry make-overs.

~~~

While I was out picking up the Dodge, I stopped by Brewing Market and read the Wall Street Journal.  For sheer journalism, it's hard to beat, but you have to skip by the highly conservative editorial pages as quickly as possible.  One of the big stories was the announcement by Neiman Marcus that they lost half a billion dollars last quarter, which is nearly 3 times what they usually earn in a year.  Looks like luxury retailing may not be a good place to be for a while. 

~~~

Kristy is running a sale on all 2009 titles from Dancing Girl Press, which includes over 30 publications and chapbooks, for a hundred bucks.  Sounds like a deal to me.

~~~

Congratulations to Zachary.  The Man Suit is #11 on the SPD best sellers list (hat-tip to Jilly).

~~~

Steve mentions the churlishness of selling review copies on Amazon.

~~~

Nate analyzes a report on the country's attitude about just about everything.  The conclusion:  less confidence in everything.  Almost. 

"The only major institution to have gained a statistically significant about of trust since 2000 is the military, which is now the most trusted major institution in the country ."

~~~

The Axis of Weasels:  The Men Who Ruined the Economy.

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Welcome to Nationalized Citibank (NSFW Language):  "Take a number, wait your f*cking turn".

Actually, Citibank stock rose almost 40% today on news that it's making money hand over fist, just like Buffet said it would. 

~~~

One of the slow, destructive aspects of the Bush administration was the willing suspension of disbelief in obvious fantasy.  It took the form of scientific obstructionism, an abstinence-only education program that did not work, the initiation of a war on false pretenses, and the remnants of roundly discredited supply-side economics (just to name a few).  Large right-wing think tanks (mainly supported by the same half-dozen billionaire nut cases) continued to write opinion papers to maintain the resonance of the echo chamber (a good example being, Kevin Hassett, co-author of Dow 36,000 who is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute).  The propensity to run the country as if it were the backdrop in a piece of speculative fiction became so acceptable to conservatives that, now that we have an evidence-based presidency, they don't seem to know why shouting the same lame ideological nonsense doesn't still work.  A good example is the current meme that the New Deal didn't work.  It's very important for them to believe this, because otherwise the free market isn't the answer to everything and unfettered capitalism isn't the end-all and be-all of economic policy.  Belief is the key word here, as it was in the need for Guantanamo or the efficacy of faith-based initiatives.  The latest darling of the right is Amity Shlaes, whose The Forgotten Man:  A New History of the Great Depression has given Republicans one more poorly researched document to point to in support of the meme.  Jonathan Chait of The New Republic does an excellent job, over the course of many pages (you'll need 10-15 minutes to read it, but it's worth it), of debunking this screed:

"A generation ago, the total dismissal of the New Deal remained a marginal sentiment in American politics. Ronald Reagan boasted of having voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Neoconservatives long maintained that American liberalism had gone wrong only in the 1960s. Now, decades after Democrats grew tired of accusing Republicans of emulating Herbert Hoover, Republicans have begun sounding ... well, exactly like Herbert Hoover. When President Obama recently met with House Republicans, the eighty-two-year-old Roscoe G. Bartlett told him that "I was there" during the New Deal, and, according to one account, "assert[ed] that government intervention did not work then, either." George F. Will, speaking on the Sunday talk show "This Week," declared not long ago, "Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn't work?"

You have to have serious history-rewriting issues to dismiss the thousands of public projects that took form because of the New Deal and its various programs, most of which persist to this day. 

I worry every day about the erosion of Obama's mandate because of the incessant compulsion of the right to tie him to the complete disaster which is his legacy (e.g., Iraq, the stock market, the GDP, you name it).  It's feels good to read at least one critic who gets it.

~~~

CDY and his band of trusty commenters are talking about Willy the Shake (as Joni Mitchell called him) and a newly discovered portrait.  I remember reading in Scientific American 15 or 20 years ago (?) an analysis of the portrait that we all associate with Shakespeare, and the conclusion that it had been modeled on Queen Elizabeth and may not look like WS at all.  This portrait sounds like the real deal.

~~~

You know how you've never heard of something or someone, and then you hear it all the time.  This week it's Roberto Bolaño.  Seth is doing his usual phone-book size take on 2666.  CDY (in the same post as the WS portrait) mentions him.  Jonathan did a mini-review of Nocturno de Chile.  Seems like I ran across a couple of other bloggers discussing him, too. 

~~~

Congratulations to Jonathan for making full prof.  If his online scholarship is any evidence, the university has made a wise choice.

~~~

I also seem to have heard a lot about dreams on the blogosphere lately.  The definitive dream site is perhaps Lynn's Annandale Dream Gazette.  Sweet Junie and I often tell each other our dreams in our morning emails, when we can remember them.  Jilly links to an article that describes a link between dreams and behavior.

BTW, Lynn!  If you're out there, what is the source of "Annandale" in the title?  I ask because I lived in Annandale, VA for 7 years and went to Annandale HS and was an Annandale Atom.

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CDY is running a poll to determine the number of literary magazines to which poets and writers subscribe.  The results are here, with the largest category of 1 to 3 journals. 

~~~

Meanwhile, Jilly links to January's post on a similar topic:  "How many professional literary organizations do you belong to? How many literary journals do you subscribe to? "
~~~

A poet who is allergic to a dozen common foods, and was once a food critic, announces a memoir.

~~~

Zach is reading at Powell's Smallpressapalooza.  I used to buy Ted Hughes' Crow and give them away.  Although not rare, they became increasingly difficult to find.  Eventually, I bought every one available at Powell's over the Internet.  As of this morning, I see they have two copies.  Amazon has a couple of dozen at prices that are about double that of Powell's (used, paperback).    Alibris has a second edition signed by the author in fine condition for $935.

~~~

Thomas analyzes TT's "I Am Not the Pilot".  I remember liking this poem when I first read it, but not knowing why.

~~~

Emily ponders the 10 Lines Meme and quotes from Russell Edson's "Counting Sheep".

This probably doesn't happen to most people, but when I read "He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess, if they have any sense of scale.", I think of how their physics would be so different.  How they could fall 20 times their body length and not get hurt and how they could probably leap over each other with ease, as their mass decreased by the cube and their strength decreased by the square.  How even friction would act differently, as they walked across the tiny grassy knoll.

~~~

Brian is giving it to Billy over at the Verse site:  "Collins’s poems are full of redundancies, imprecision of thought, and lame narratives. Even Collins’s concept-driven poems stem from the most banal concepts. Consider the beginning of “Schoolsville”: “Glancing over my shoulder at the past, / I realize the number of students I have taught / is enough to populate a small town.” This would seem trite and poorly written in prose; that it is cast into lines does not help the idea gain substance. Collins’s set pieces—“Advice to Writers” and “Introduction to Poetry”—are really just two innocuously tongue-in-cheek didactic poems that read like watered-down Kenneth Koch. That said, “Introduction to Poetry” is practically the only poem of any imaginative worth or vigor in Collins’s first book."

When I first read The Apple That Astonished Paris, I admit to being charmed by a lot of the work.  His last few books seem like he's phoning in the poems, though.

~~~

Nate slams conservative hack Kevin Hassett (co-author of the infamous Dow 36,000) and posits the five stages of stock market grieving:

1. Denial (Nov 2007 - Sept. 2008) : Markets surprisingly resilient in face of recessionary pressures.
2. Anger (Sept. 2008 - present): Wall Street throws tantrum; markets crash.
3. Bargaining (Summer 2009?): Bear market rally.
4. Depression (Fall-Winter 2009?): Dow gives back most of gains from rally (and then some, perhaps); sits near 15-year lows as volatility and volumes decrease.
5. Acceptance (2010?): Market finally capitulates; Dow rebounds to an historically sustainable valuation of perhaps 9,000 points.

~~~

Mad Man Cramer gives us a company-by-company assessment of the worst case for every stock in the Dow 30.  It's pretty grim.

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Two very interesting posts at Nate's Place:  one on Who Sits Where at White House press conferences, and why, another on the likelihood that rich people voted for Obama (or not).  Someone makes the excellent point that Comedy Central should have a front-row seat.

~~~

I don't tend to anthropomorphize my pets, but I do like my Miss Emily.   I was talking with Die Cloud last night and she pointed out a pretty funny cat site.  Cloud and I had one of those rapid-fire exchanges of favorite web sites that happen when you haven't talked with someone in a while ("Of COURSE I read Wonkette, do you read BoingBoing?").

~~~

You know the country is focusing on economics when "the N word" is nationalization.

~~

Warren Buffet was a reassuring presence on Squawk Box this morning (more here).  His basic message was 1) The economic mess is real, but we'll get through it.  2) We should treat the current crisis with the same seriousness as a war.  3) Both sides of the aisle should be focusing on the crisis, not politics.  He also mentioned that the banks are making money hand over fist, with average borrowing rates of 1.5% and a huge spread between that and the average loan-out interest.  As Buffet says, "the banks will earn their way out of the hole they're in".  Buffet owns large chunks of AMEX and Wells Fargo.  My favorite Buffet quote:  "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked." 

~~~

Retail sales of foreclosures are growing.  A town of choice is Detroit where investors are buying 10,50 or 100 homes at a time, some for as little as a dollar.  The plunge in Detroit home prices has been devastating:   "Even the sale of U.S. Housing and Urban Development homes has been impacted by the poor housing climate in Detroit. The average sales prices of such homes plunged from $46,702 in 2003 to $8,692 last year."

~~~

Latest from BoingBoing:  "This St Thomas Creations toilet flushes basically, anything. Huge, vasty supplies of euphemistic carrot-batons, entire chess-sets, and so on. I kept waiting for the child safety warning about its capacity to swallow whole toddlers."

~~~

Samuelson rips into Obama pretty good this morning, most of which I disagree with (he's ignoring the fact that politics always involves compromise).  He's right on in a number of places, though:  "Is it in the public interest for the well-off elderly (say, a couple with $125,000 of income) to be subsidized, through Social Security and Medicare, by poorer young and middle-aged workers? Are any farm subsidies justified when they aren't essential for food production? We wouldn't starve without them."

~~~

The future of publishing and the role of Kindle (hat-tip to Andrew).

~~~

David Brooks:  "The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem."

Reagan is misquoted constantly by the right.  In his first inaugural address he said, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

~~~

My mom at 83.  Amazing.

~~~

And the award for worst poem goes to . . . A sample:

Her womb
like an oven
where the cupcakes of fragility
and abundance
baked.

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So there we were at the Huntington Beach Hyatt Regency, and I was thinking "wow, what a white place".  Each of the walls in the entry hall was adorned with flowers wrought from Brazilian clusters of agates and quartz.  A young white fellow took our car to valet parking and a young white man held the door.  There was the sound of silence among the tropical plants and exotic flowers.  My parents were seated just in the distance, my mom with a white wine, my dad with a slender goblet of something translucent.  It was a lovely lunch, white fish, white asparagus, white napery.  And the winding path to our exquisite room was white concrete winding around two entwined white dolphins frolicking in the mist of a parabola of white water.  It was, I suppose, the ultimate of Orange County whiteness.  But, a little diminished by the current troubles in the economy, the stock market, the housing market.  There was no one in the beautiful pool just beyond that banana trees the curved over our terrace.  And only a couple of fanatics in the spa/exercise room, where Junie and I performed our morning treadmill walkathons.  As I walked on my treadmill, replete with a personal TV, switching between CNN and MTV, I thought about how I had been been brought up an Army Brat.  On bases and in places where color didn't much matter (thanks to Truman), but seldom encountered (there were few officers of color in the 60s).  And how, when I worked as a teenager, I was often put into black teams:  apartment concrete crews, apprentice carpenter assignments, short-hauling on a moving job.  I was a "college kid" in the 60's, which meant in Northern Virginia that they could place me among experienced teams of non-white experts and do what I was told.  I never lost the respect of the competence of the masters who taught me how to do the job that I was hired to help with.  And then came the 70's and the 80's and the 90's.  With Chavez and Aretha and Stevie Wonder and Gloria Esteban and Ellen and JayZ, and God Yes, even Oprah, and finally our current president.  And of course, I'm leaving out a lot over the past 40 years, but you get my point.  It's easy to despair, what with the economy and the challenges of finding work and doing what is important with your life.  But, I guess  it could be worse, and it's better now because we're not one of those dreaded melting pots that I heard so much about before many of you were born.  We're a wild and vibrant friction of influences and it makes us stronger.

Posted by jbahr at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Completed the whirlwind trip to LA, including a United flight, blast down to Huntington Beach via Mr. Hertz, rollicking wedding and reception on the a slightly larger version of the SS Minnow, tour around the harbor, decadent stay at the Huntington Beach Hyatt Regency Extravaganza (you know, individual televisions in the treadmills, tropical flowers everywhere, that kind of thing), breakfast at an Irish pub with the whole raucous extended family, tour around Palos Verdes/Redondo Beach/ Hermosa Beach/Manhattan Beach, showing Junie all the homes and condos I owned when I lived there (many of which had been scraped and rebuilt into zillion dollar homes), lunch at Wolfgang Puck's and a long nap for both of us on the flight back.  It's nice to be home and back in the saddle.

Posted by jbahr at 07:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Am I the only one who, when Reb says "show up early", feels compelled to put on a jacket and leave RIGHT NOW, even though I live 2,000 miles away and can't get there in time anyway?

Mothers.  The voice of authority.

~~~

Henry starts reading Gabe's Rhode Island Notebook.

I, too, drove across country once.  I used to drive an Atlas Van Lines moving truck up and down the East Coast, but that doesn't count.  The only real coast-to-coast trip was when I was 20, leaving Johns Hopkins to take studies at USC.  My dad had just left the Army and was taking a professor job in the Business School.  What with his sudden increase in salary, I had lost enough of the dollar value of my National Merit Scholarship that I really had no choice but to transfer to USC for the free tuition.  I didn't know much about it, except that OJ had won the Heisman there, and USC had won the National Championships 3 years before (they went on to win again in 72, 74, and 78 while I wandered through undergrad, grad and PhD programs).  But, I digress.  Dad asked me to drive our family's second car, a '64 Impala, out to LA and take my 17-year old brother with me.  The night before we left, I took my brother and a couple of friends bar-hopping in Georgetown, back when it was filled with cheap bars that catered to kids with fake draft cards.  My brother got in on the strength of my say-so and an up-front order for two Singapore Slings.  Four hours later, we were back at the motel, trying to get in without waking Dad, who told us 30 years later how much he had to stifle laughing when he heard my brother trying to take his clothes, drunk as a skunk for the first time. 

We left the next morning.  I was driving, hung over, and my brother slept under his jacket.  He continued to sleep under his jacket for the next two weeks, except when he was sleeping in the bed of whatever cheap motel I could find.  This was 1970, so the South was still the South.  We ate breakfast for a dollar in places where the menu said "Breakfast:  $1.00", which was usually fried eggs, some kind of meat and a mountain of grits.  In Mississippi, we stopped at an all-you-can-eat catfish diner, and for two dollars ate so many catfish and hushpuppies that I had to nap on the side of the road for three hours afterward.  Day after day we traveled mainly blue highways, filling up with gas, buying a Coke, thumbing through the girlie magazines at small drug stores.  We didn't have a credit card, and ATM's weren't invented yet, but I can't remember what we used for money.  Traveler's checks?  By the time we hit Texas's east border, I knew we had one more long hard haul to get to Dallas.  My best friend at Pomona had just graduated and moved back home, and he said we were welcomed any time.  He wasn't expecting me, but I had written down his home address from a label on his underwear that I had somehow ended up with.  When we pulled up to the house, and knocked on the door, his mom answered the door and said, "Well, hi, Jeff, come on in.  Frasier will be back in a bit".  She then pulled down a half-dozen albums of Frasier from ages 5 to 18:  Frasier in karate class.  Frasier at high school graduation.  Frasier with his Indian grandfather.  There was one page with Frasier in front of his new 1965 Jag Roadster, and another one with him in front of a pile of metal, and a third one in front of another Jag.  Apparently, at 16, he has completely torn down the sports car, improved on everything and then put it back together.  This did not surprise me, as Frasier was a complete phenomenon at Pomona.  He was majoring in physics, but took lots of pre-med classes, and in his spare time made piles of aspirin so he could save having to buy it in bottles.  He was also aggressively courted by all the fraternities for his ability to make 6 kinds of hard liquor with a home-made still (crushed marbles inside copper tubing, atop a hand-fashioned boiler). 

Eventually, Frasier walked in and smiled. "Let's drive to Oklahoma", he said.  And we did.

~~~

Kasey asks:  "Best bad poem ever?"  Damn.  Didn't know they had a contest running.

~~~

Emily points out an article by Clive Thomson on "microcelebrity":  "However "great" John Ashbery may be, the majority of the people I know don't recognize his name."  I've often thought about this.  It's perhaps a little easier for me because I've had a foot in a number of disciplines and understand the idea of a local luminary.  As a buddy on the literary boards once said:  "You can be the most famous living poet in the world, and even your mom may not know you."

~~~

Kevin Drum has an article in Mother Jones called "Screwing the Poor" (hat-tip to Andrew):  "There are lots of things to hate about our current medical system, and all of us have our own favorite things to hate. This is mine: the fact that the system massively overcharges you if you're uninsured, and they do it just because they can. If you're uninsured, you've got no leverage, no alternatives, no nothing. So you get screwed. It's like the shopkeepers who charge twenty bucks for a pair of flashlight batteries after hurricanes. Maybe it's the free market at work, but if so, that's all the worse for the free market. In the healthcare biz, it just doesn't work."

I've often been disgusted to find what a difference having the clout of a Blue Cross does to the cost of a medical procedure or the price of a drug. 

~~~

A man walks up to a cliff and throws a bucket off the edge, holding on to a rope that's tied to it.  It doesn't seem to be hitting the bottom, so he ties an anvil to it.  The anvil starts to edge toward the cliff, so he ties an anchor to the outhouse.  Shortly, thereafter the outhouse starts rocking toward the cliff edge, so he ties the outhouse to his car.  The car moves in fits and starts toward the cliff edge, so he ties the car to his house.  After a few minutes, the house starts rocking on its foundation and makes its way toward the cliff edge.  At that point, the man ties a rope to his house and motions Barry to come over. 'Hold this, will ya?", he says and walks off into the sunset. 

That's what I think of every time some right-wing commentator starts talking about "Obama's economy" or "Obama's stock market decline".

~~~

Thomas has flarf fatigue.

~~~

Sweet Junie and I will be flying out this morning to L.A., to my niece's wedding.  The wedding and reception is on a big ass yacht in Huntington Harbor, and I was told that I would be disowned if I didn't make it.  So, we'll be In-and-Out, so to say, there about 24 hours and missing the aforementioned burger, most likely.  Wish me luck with the traffic.  It gets worse every time I'm there.
 

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

I don't know why, but the idea of Zach Schomburg reading with Matthew Dickman seems odd.  What's next, a pairing of Dickman with Kasey?

~~~

Hearing the news about Dickman's recent accomplishments, Kiala gives up.

~~~

But, Kelli approves.

~~~

Nate makes some good points:  "Rather, the Journal is engaged in an ongoing project to use the stock market as proxy for the performance of the economy as a whole, and by extension, the performance of the Obama administration. (It is certainly not alone in this regard; tune on CNBC or browse the archives for other examples.) "

The stock market was largely flat from 1970 to 1982, but the economy was still growing.  Linking the stock market's level to the health of the nation has created a lot of the delusion that we are currently suffering withdrawal from.

~~~

Josh on teaching poetry, heads and tails:  "But I believe that poets, especially young poets, whether they realize it or not, write not to express the self but to discover it: to open the Russian doll of themselves, to give birth to multiplicities, to contain multitudes."

~~~

Travis Nichols recaps the discussion of greatness and Orr's essay:  "The essay has not stirred up the kind of storm William Logan's review of Frank O'Hara did a few months back, but it has caused some internet grumbling."

~~~

Videos of Ralph Angel, Rae Armantrout and Mary Jo Bang reading at the American Hybrid Reading.

~~~

Who is Tryfon Tolides and why does he name seem like one out of Gravity's Rainbow?  Steve will tell you.  "What's that? You haven't read Tryfon Tolides? Yeah, neither has anyone else, but he's been published by Penguin and appeared in places that have more circulation than most of us will ever achieve. And his poetry is just awful."

~~~

Nearly everybody likes Matthew Dickman's All American Poem.  At least on Goodreads.

~~~

Joseph on SoQ vs. PA:  "The first thing such a division does is erase all sorts of useful distinctions among members of those groups — Lutherans are different from Pentecostals, etc. — and the second thing it does is consign to oblivion anybody who won’t fit into one of the baskets — Jews, in my analogy, or Animists."

~~~

The Democrat Party and the Bitch-Slap Theory.


 

Posted by jbahr at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Nice set of interviews with poets sponsored by 32 Poems.  This from Serena Agusto-Cox's interview of Mary Biddinger:  "I have had good and bad experiences in writers’ groups. The better experiences have always been with writers who shared some aesthetic sensibilities with me and who swapped poems beforehand. I’ve been told that my poems are difficult to understand on a first read. I was always the girl in the workshop who finished reading her poem and was met with resounding silence and befuddlement. I can’t workshop well with readers who want all of their questions answered in a conventional way. "

~~~

Robert discusses the aforementioned (in a prior blog post) "negative" review section by Jason Guriel in Poetry (also discussed by Seth).  Robert:  "I'm sure there's life in an aesthetic of imprecision and distrust of order. And some of my best friends write in rhizomes. But I'm even more sure that too many of the poems I've seen in the past decade fall into the techniques Guriel describes out of an uncritical acceptance of the aesthetic predicated on those techniques. Call it Jorie Graham's Disease."  And what are these 7 Deadly Sins?

1. "reliance on buzzwords" (think: absence, abjection, the body, ellipsis, etc.)
2. "distrust of order" (as both theme and compositional principle)
3. "distrust of linearity and having a point" (call it Ashberying)
4. "anxiety over what words mean" (or, I'd add, the pose of anxiety)
5. "romantic bluster" (think Hart Crane on a bad day)
6. "imprecision" (I bet a comparison of contemporary poetic syntax and that of Swinburne would be instructive)
7. "sympathy for small critters" (I think this one's pretty self-explanatory)

Some of these are implied in the questionnaire at The Futility Review.

~~~

Coincidentally, the same book that Guriel reviewed by Jane Mead (The Usable Field), is reviewed on the Verse site by Christina Pugh.  And more favorably:

"The Usable Field is not quite a dream book, not quite a landscape book, nor exactly a book of elegies -- though in another sense it is all of these. It is first and foremost a book about the phenomenology of personhood finding its integrity and often its literal bearings in a world that, though familiar, feels perennially unmapped -- a place in which persons must search not only for the content of the soul, but also for the delineation of its very boundaries."

Oddly, I sense that Jason and Christina read the same words, and came to the same preliminary conclusions about the text.  At that point, they diverged.

~~

Steven goes from swearing off desserts to swearing off booze.  The man is a glutton for punishment.  Personally, I liked the idea of swearing off Lent for Lent.

~~~

Court Green's call for submissions specifies poems about the 70's.  That could be interesting.  I listen to "#1 Hits of the 70's" sometimes when I'm on the treadmill, and it seems impossibly long ago.  Except for Queen, who sound fresh as ever.  The videos are often unintentionally hilarious, as well.  There was one this morning, where Abba is singing "Dancing Queen" at the Royal Theater in Stockholm in bad pants suits and barely synchronized swaying. 

~~~

This must be Negative Review Month.  Michael rips into All-American Poem, by Matthew Dickman.  It won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and he, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.   It was published by Copper Canyon Press.  Here are some blurbs:

"Matthew Dickman’s first book of poetry,All-American Poem, delivers the way those LPs delivered. It is a great book of poetry, one of the great first books of poetry to arrive in the last ten years. Dickman’s poetry will be compared to Whitman’s, O’Hara’s, Stern’s and Koch’s. His poetic voice is full of singular magic, Dickman magic. It’s a poetry so good, I can’t stand it."

"All American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. "

"And how frightening, too. For “Trouble” also recalls Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which suffering consumes those experiencing it while the rest of us appear cruel without meaning to. For the tortured, nothing else matters but the torturer, even as his “horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Life goes on despite that tiny shudder that comes from knowing that as you read this sentence, someone somewhere is in pain."

"His authority is that of the native, unwavering and resolute. But it is his artfulness and large spirit, telescoping without sentimentality the single outlook of a speaker who has escaped such conditions and now looks back, as bluesy as such projects go, that gives his poems a universality of feeling, an expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure." -- Major Jackson, Boston Review.

 “Matthew Dickman's all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character-free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration...We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.” —Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge.

To be fair, I looked for as many of his poems as I could find on the web.  Here are some excerpts:

"Roma":  "Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, / you know, the way bodies do / after spending the afternoon having sex / on an old couch while responsible people are suffering / with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries."

"Love":  "We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses / of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang / on the lattice, our bodies throb / in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games / and we can’t keep our hands off each other / until we can— / so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, / falling in love again."

"Grief":  "When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla / you must count yourself lucky. / You must offer her what's left / of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish / you must put aside / and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,  / her eyes moving from the clock /  to the television and back again."

"Trouble":  "Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills / to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter  / hung in the Tahitian bedroom / of her mother’s house,  / while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes / you can look at the clouds or the trees / and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground."  (from The New Yorker).

Oh, my.  This really is terrible stuff, what Seth describes as "truly, truly horrific poetry."  You read this juvenile fantasizing, adorned with titles you would expect to see scrawled on the insides of a 4th grader's Valentine note, and think "did someone just make a terrible mistake?"

~~~

Junie and I watched "I'm Not There", the Bob Dylan movie.  Or whatever it was.    I can imagine this being one of those movies that everybody wanted in on.  There's Christian Bale, Richie Havens, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson and Heath Ledger (only a few of them actually playing Dylan).  It was very enjoyable, and Cate Blanchett was brilliant as the young, chain-smoking, irascible Dylan in black shirts and shades. 

 

~~~

America's 10 Saddest Cities:  A somewhat surprising list of cities with the highest depression rates, most suicides, and high numbers for crime and divorce.  Surprisingly, #1 is Portland, followed by St. Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Nashville, Cincinnati, and Atlanta.


 

Posted by jbahr at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I (for some reason I can't fathom) received this email from the Republican National Committee, signed by Michael Steele, the new RNC chairman:

As you know, my mission as the new Chairman of the Republican National Committee is to rebuild our party from the grassroots up – using new technology to spread our conservative message and remind voters that our party is the one and only true party of the people.

But before we get too far down that road, we’ve got some unfinished business to attend to. Specifically, we’ve got to stop liberal Democrat comedian Al Franken from stealing Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota.

As you may know, Norm Coleman won re-election on November 4th by 215 votes. But a subsequent recount -- tainted with inconsistencies and improperly counted ballots -- awarded a temporary 225-vote margin to Franken.

As I write to you, Franken and his allies are working feverishly to persuade a panel of judges in Minnesota that certain un-counted ballots must remain un-counted… and deny the one-person, one-vote principle which is the very foundation of our democratic process.

The Republican Party is so used to being able to lie with impunity, that they continue to do it, even without the cover of the White House.  Coleman did not "win" the election on November 4th, any more than George Bush won the election on Nov 7th, 2000.  Both required a recount.  From Wikipedia:

"On November 18, 2008, the Minnesota State Canvassing Board's certification of the pre-recount results of the election showed Franken trailing Senator Norm Coleman by 215 votes, or less than 0.0075 percent of the over 2.8 million votes cast.^[3][4][5][6] However, under Minnesota state law, an automatic recount was mandated, because the official margin was less than 0.5% percent of the total votes cast. The recount began November 19, 2008.^[6] By January 3, 2009, Franken had taken the lead by 225 votes.^[7] The canvassing board certified Franken's winning margin on January 5, 2009, officially completing the recount.^[8][9] Coleman's campaign filed an election contest on January 6, 2009."

Maybe I should write Steele back and him to research his claim further?  Nah, not worth the time.

~~

Rauan interviews Rebecca (hat-tip to Reb for the link):  "L’Orchestra du Roi Soleil, Raymond Scott, Sibelius, Mozart, The Beach Boys’ song In My Room, and the gravicèmbalo col piano e forte all make appearances in Cadaver Dogs, as well musical terms like hemiola and tactus."
 
~~~

Square Root Day is a humorous holiday celebrated on dates where the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits in the current year.^[1] For example, the last Square Root Day was March 3, 2009 (3/3/09), and the next Square Root Day will be April 4, 2016 (4/4/16). The final Square Root Day of the century will occur on September 9, 2081. Square Root Days fall upon the same nine dates each century.  (hat-tip to Jilly).

~~~

Apparently, this blowhard is less popular than Bush.  So, why do leading Republicans keep apologizing to him?

~~

A new study predicts that 87% of all house declines in near-term years will be in exactly 4 states:  California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. 

~~

Interesting article in The Atlantic.  It says, among many other predictions,  that the Southwest is toast, suburbia is in for problems, and that large urban areas have the greatest chance to prosper all over the world.

~~~

Yeah, I can get behind this:  "Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.", "Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.", "Done is the engine of more."

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Maureen:  "Speaking of the Enterprise, Mr. Obama has a bit of Mr. Spock in him (and not just the funny ears). He has a Vulcan-like logic and detachment. Any mere mortal who had to tell liberals that our obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan are far from over and tell Republicans that he has a $3.6 trillion budget would probably have tears running down his face. "

~~~

Didi continues her seriously cool portraits of various poets and one president.  Shanna Compton is the latest.

~~~


Sarah Gingrich.

From  The Free Library:  "Neither woman pulls her punches when it comes to the Speaker of the House. Molinari paints Gingrich as nothing short of an incompetent, delusional megalomaniac. An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions. . Her behind-the-scenes description of last summer's failed coup attempt against the speaker reveals a world of ruthless backstabbingand deft double-crossing that would make Machiavelli proud. Molinari says Gingrich compared himself to Napoleon, FDR, Churchill, and Eisenhower and was overwhelmed by his own grandiosity. When Gingrich's four top henchmen, among them Molinari's husband, Bill Paxon, Republican congressman from Buffalo, NY., arranged an "intervention" to tell the speaker that he had to shape up, Gingrich dissolved into a rage. "People all over the world are listening to us, watching what we are doing. I'm at the center of a worldwide revolution," he huffed, turning to Paxon, adding, "You will never understand that, Bill."

~~~

Paleogenetics:  "Still... I wonder what 75Myr-old mammal meat would taste like? What would be the medicinal properties of ancient herbs? How big were ancient octopi, or spiders? How many genes were in the first bacteria? How long was the first self-replicating RNA sequence? "

And for the mathematician who has everything?  π ice cubes.

~~~

An astounding display of guts and determination from Barry O:

That's what happens when the "special interests" who elect you are the American people.

~~~

Fortune (link via CNN Money) has an article discussing "HENRYs", those who are High Earning, Not Yet Rich.  These include families that make from $250,000 to $500,000 and the article bemoans the fact that high taxes are really tough on them.  Most of the couples cited in the article are professionals (lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, small business owners) with taxes equaling about 40% of their income, which includes state and federal taxes, real-estate tax and local sales taxes.  I haven't done either the research or the numbers, but I would guess that HENRYs, though they do pay a higher percentage of taxes, don't pay that much more than a person making $50,000 from a sole proprietorship (Let's call her Sally).  First off, the FICA/Medicare taxes on the wealthy stops at about $100,000 of earnings.  Sally, however, pays the entire near-15% of FICA/Medicare.  Since it's at least 50% probable that Sally rents, she doesn't receive any tax benefit from mortgage interest deductions, either.  The HENRYs may complain that they don't seem to be able to save enough (what with the necessities of private school bills, in-house day care, and the like), but in general they do save, mostly in the form of tax-deferring IRAs and 401(k)s.  None of this is consumption, and none of it is subject to sales tax.  Sally, on the other hand, has two kids in public school, a car payment, rent, and grocery/household expenses that eat up nearly all of the $35,000 the has left after taxes and social security deductions.  The grocery/household expenses (food, clothes, household items, fast food, the occasional movie) represent most likely a much higher percentage of her income than for the HENRYs, and are all subject to sales tax.  Both the HENRYs and Sally drive cars, and pay about the same dollar amount of state and federal taxes at the pump.  My back-of-the envelope calculation is that the HENRYs may pay 40% of their earnings toward tax, but Sally pays over 30%.  That may be progressive taxation, but it's not that progressive.

~~~

'Becca on Rauan Klassnik's Ringing:  "I love this book and the fucking inside of it. There's a lot of it. It made me happy. I love good honest fucking in books. I’m not prim. I like forthright language. And I’m sick to death of polite poetry, poetry that is afraid to show its red teeth, poets that are afraid to step out of the circle of sameness, afraid of their own voices. I am sick to death of mediocre poets pretending to greatness because they follow the rules. These poems break rules and don’t care who knows it."

Also:

"Memes, for one thing. Memes are for lemmings, some sheep, and people who can’t think of anything original to write on their blogs even if that writing sucks canal water. People would rather copy and paste from other blogs in a continuous chain letter of lists (Name 100 boring things about your self! What music is on your iPod right this minute! Pick up a book on your desk and turn to page 27 and write that line down!) than make fools of themselves with their own words. It's not so bad to look foolish or tread murky waters. Trust me."

Hah!  I just got another few lines posted and all I had to do was cut and paste!

The other notable thing about Rebecca is that she's the only person left on earth who refers to me as Dr. Bahr.

~~~

Charles wants to change the meme to "20 Poetry Books I Couldn't Stand":  "I don't like a lot of the poetry I should like. I remember teachers in my MFA program looking at me with great sympathy and confusion when I said I'd rather stick red hot pokers through my eyes than read any more Wallace Stevens (the only poem of his I can stomach is "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"). I actually described Stevens's poems as "word noise" in that class. I would rather replace my shower soap with sandpaper than have to read Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Poems again. And I, too, dislike almost all of Marianne Moore's poems."

~~~

OK, I'm leaving now to go pick up Sweet Junie at DIA.  It's still Sunday, but consider this the Monday post.  I probably won't have time tomorrow, what with all the hugging and smooching.

~~~

UPDATE:  Der says you can find him playing with a jazz group at Ethiopian Diamond Restaurant, usually on Saturdays from 6 to 9 PM, but check their schedule.
 

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From Shaq:  “I’m the only player,” he said, “who looks at each and every center and says to myself, ‘That’s barbecued chicken down there.”’

~~~

Sweet Junie will be here tomorrow, so I'm busy doing my Tea Ceremony activities:  cleaning bathrooms, tidying the garage, laundering everything, brushing Miss Emily (Junie is unfortunately allergic), mopping the kitchen tile, dusting, . . . oh, you know.  I made a run to Lowe's to get a good mop, which like a good man, is hard to find. 

I'm trying Mop-And-Glo, which seems to work well on the tile, and Swiffer Dusters, which are a little weird, but seem to pick up the dust that is inevitable in a forced air heated house.  Miss Emily is helping by following me around and encouraging me, which takes the form of being plumb smack dab in the middle of anything I'm trying to clean. 

~~~

Der will be playing with his jazz combo at the Ethiopian restaurant he has his weekly gig at.  This is in Chicago, and I wish I could tell you where.  Hey, Der!  Where is this place?  I would call him right now, but I washed my Samsung Juke with my jeans, and it doesn't actually have a working microphone right now.

~~

Got the new Cook's Illustrated last week.  Of course, since that was late February, it was the March/April edition.  I'm not sure why magazines do that, but they all seem to.  I avoided the schmaltzy Kimballesque descriptions of Vermont which began "The president of the Old Rabbit Hunters Association likes to take his time on a dark morning in deer season."  Notes from Readers:  White anchovies are all the rage, but they are the same small fish in the herring family, but haven't been brined and stored for 10 months, which is what makes "normal" anchovies much darker.  Pitted olives tend to be saltier and mushier than their unpitted brethren.  Testing showed that using canola oil instead of butter yields a roux that most of the tasters could not differentiate.  Salts can differ radically in price, from Morton's to the pricey Esprit du Sel de Ile de Re at $35 a pound, but CI testers could tell no flavor differences if the salts were used in cooked applications.  Quick Tips:  Always make more rice than you need.  Then, take the overflow, spread it on a cookie sheet to cool and package up to freeze in a Baggie.  Use waffle makers for interesting paninis.  When trimming the husk from a fresh pineapple, use a small melon baller to remove the "eyes".  The Best Beef Tenderloin isn't something I will probably be eating (well, maybe once a year, if I have the kids over).  In the first place, two pounds of Châteaubriand will probably run $50 at Whole Paycheck.  In the second place, I should probably be eating steamed white fish or something.  Anyway, the Best tenderloin is salted and let set for an hour, rubbed with softened butter, roasted on low heat until cooked throughout, seared in a large pan and then topped with more herb butter.  Yowzer.  Better Glazed Roast Chicken argues for glazing at the latter stages, with a chicken sitting on the NORPRO Vertical Roaster or, alternatively, on a beer can.  Rethinking Thick-Cut Pork Chops involves salting, slow roasting, and then searing (sounds like the tenderloin trick).  There are corollary recipes (Garlic and Thyme Pan Sauce and Cilantro and Coconut Pan Sauce) that sound yummy.  Fish en Papillote? was pretty interesting, as I've never tried this at home.  The choice of vegetables include leeks, carrots, garlic, zucchini, tomatoes, fennel and shallots, all good.  The tricks include:  1) don't use "paper', use foil and 2) spread herbed butter over the ensemble before wrapping up.  Seems like butter improves about anything, but they already know that in Wisconsin, don't they, Junie?  Rescuing Baked Ziti elicited no interest from me.  Keeping Kitchen Staples Fresher Longer included these tips:  Don't toss out old vinegar, it has effectively an infinite "use by" date (Hah! take that my children).  Olive oil has a shelf life of 3 months if opened, otherwise one year.  Keep out of sunlight as the chlorophyll in it will oxidize.  Other oils should be tossed after 6 months, unless it's the peanut oil I used in Robert's chicken recipe that was 8 years old and worked perfectly fine, thank you.  Ground and dried herbs last one year, except the ones in my cupboard that I have been using for most of a decade and work just fine, they have just lost some of their pep, so I use more.  Discard eggs after 3 to 5 weeks, sooner if they have an "unpleasant odor".  Toss soy sauce after 1 year.  Sure, like I'm gonna do that.  My best tamari lasts virtually forever.  Toss granulated sugar after 2 years.  Hey, this is Colorado.  We have no humidity to speak of, no bugs whatsoever.  I don't EVER toss flour or sugar.  Deal with it.  Mashed Potatoes, French-Style sounded delicious.  You use Yukon Gold potatoes, 6 tablespoons of butter (we're talking French-Style, after all), garlic, and a cup of cheese (equal parts Gruyère and mozzarella), and some black pepper.  The secret is to do what every mashed potato person knows is a no-no:  whip 'em, whip 'em good.  With a food-processor or hand blender.  This releases amylose, the "tacky gel-like starch" that is usually a disaster, but with the addition of cheese, adds up to wondrous stuff.  Easy Chicken Cutlets with Porcini Sauce sounded interesting, but not interesting enough.  Dressing Up Brown Rice tries to jazz up the flavor of a hopeless side dish.  As CI says: "Let's face it.  Brown rice has issues".  There's an article on how to make authentic ciabatta.  As available as it is nowadays, why bother?  Unless you're 'Becca or one of the other bakers out there, in which case you can FedEx me a dozen at my cost for shipping and material.  Emergency Chocolate Cake is made with mayonaisse, which may seem weird, but really, it's only oil and egg yolks.  The recipe arose during WW II when butter and eggs were scarce.  CI recommends using a REALLY great chocolate infusion, like Callebaut Intense Dar L-60-40NV.  In their retrial of real vs. artificial vanilla, CI finds again that the best artificial is still as good as the extracts.  In Search of a Better Blender was all spin (sometime, I crack myself up).  My God, another Kitchen Notes.  Equipment Corner reviews yet another garlic press (just smash it under the blade of a heavy knife), an electric egg cooker (what's wrong with boiling water?), a collapsable funnel (yeah, like I use that every day), and various counter-top protectors (I haven't succumbed to the siren call  of quartz or granite based counters).  They're still recycling back cover illustrations.  This month:  Carrots, including White Satin, Kamaran, Imperator, Yellowstone, Chantenay (I've actually grown those), Atomic Red, Purple Haze (no, they won't set your guitar on fire), Round, and Nantes (never grew them, but I've been to Nantes, great place to eat seafood).

~~~

English words that will likely become extinct include  "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad".   (hat-tip to Jilly).

 

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