Whimsy Speaks Again

I just received my copy of Abraham Lincoln #4, a joint production of Kasey Mohammad and Anne Boyer.  It's the usual rollicking volume of eclectic verse that tends toward the flarfish (I mean, what did you expect?).  It's the second or third AL that I've received and my current theory that having a lifetime subscription puts my life in Kasey and Anne's hands.  The just-inside-the-cover page has a photo of what seems to be Farah Fawcett in the '70's, but I could be wrong about that.  There is also an attenuated comic strip from Logan's Run, and an ad for Official Logan's Run stuff:  lifeclocks and citizen's costumes. 


Contributors to AL #4 include (and this is a random selection) Clark Coolidge, Rob Halpern, K. Lorraine Graham, Sandra Simonds, Sharon Mesmer, and Gary Sullivan.  Some excerpts:

Clark Coolidge, "Eaten By Paint":  "This big guys is what?  Dude of the Gods? / Willie Wheatment is who stood here / man days gets his kicks light up wasp nests"

Rob Halpern, "The Insensate Requirements of Mass Meat":  "Dreaming of tar sands bad specie / Oils things we call common being / Bituminous leaves a boreal forest / A soldier on my bathroom floor"

Mel Nichols, "Confessions of a Pioneer Woman":  "What's brown and sits on a haunted house? / I have a rule about putting Scooby's doo on my tongue / to which I rarely make exceptions. / Shaggy was a closet vegetarian too."

K. Lorraine Graham, " Archive for the General Hilarity Category":  "It is marked $800, he said, but I can let it go for five".

Daniel Bailey, "People Are Getting Chopped in Half All Over the Place But I Am Still Intact":  "i want to talk about life / do you know what's happened recently?  / some guy in switzerland took a bath / he is clean now / good job swiss dude"

Sandra Simmonds, "I Think I Owe Him Three Hundred Dollars for the Pekinese Dog":  "Lux has to piss, but why not write the poem first?  / Jorie Graham would never write a line like that, Lux.  // Neither would I, says Lux, if it wasn't true".

Sharon Mesmer, "Non-Pimpin' Huggy Bear":  "We laymen have always been curious to know -- / like the Cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto / from what sources that strange being, / non-pimpin' Huggy Bear / draws his inwardly riven non-pimpin'."

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It's curious that I just mentioned the other day that Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar.  The recent Rolling Stone has a long interview with "The Last Outlaw", and it's pretty interesting.  The son of an Air Force major general, he attended Pomona college (one of my alma maters), graduated summa cum laude, and revived the Claremont rugby team.  After his Oxford studies, he joined the Army to fight in Vietnam as a captain and flew helicopters.  Then, he began at the bottom of a long career of singing, songwriting and acting. 

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IBM, one of the largest employers in Boulder County, has withdrawn (for now) its bid to buy Sun Microsystems (also a large employer).  Apparently, IBM lowered its bid from $9.55 a share to $9.40 and the Sun board balked.  Prior to rumors of the IBM bid, Sun's shares were about $4.  Go figure.

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Nine words/phrases that were invented by science fiction writers:  robotics, genetic engineering, zero-gravity, deep space, ion drive, pressure suit, (computer) virus, (computer) worm, gas giant.

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Like I was saying:  "This crisis has been a long time coming, but bad times have brought it into clearer focus. In the past several decades, the cost of higher education has climbed at an astounding pace -- faster than the Consumer Price Index, faster even than the cost of medical care. Over the past 30 years, the average annual cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board has increased nearly 100 percent, from $7,857 in 1977-78 to $15,665 in 2007-08 (in constant 2006-07 dollars). Median household income, on the other hand, has risen a mere 18 percent over that same period, from about $42,500 to just over $50,000. College costs, in other words, have gone up at more than five times the rate of income." (hat-tip to Andrew).

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I occasionally read the nut-cases at AOL:  "The president's presumptuousness most certainly did not stop with the poison gift of the I-pod. Instead of holding tape recordings of quality music from Great Britain, rumor has it this device was filled with 30 gigabytes (or, a half hour's worth) of sexual American music by the likes of Barry White or Boz Scaggs, with perhaps a sleazy helping of disco fornication music by this Beyonce, or Miley Cyrus."

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Jasper telegraphs his dissertation:  "While it is true that the entirety of Marx’s system is, in effect, contained within his reflections on the theological whims of the commodity, there are many useful (and, for scholars in the humanities, under-examined) terms and concepts elsewhere in Marx. I am at pains, therefore, to work out a phenomenology of labor that can be applied to literature and art, particularly through a reading of Marx’s analytic of capital and labor, with its dynamic ensemble of overlapping pairs: dead and living labor, fixed and circulating capital, constant and variable capital, formal and real subsumption, technical and value composition of capital, etc."

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Steven deconstructs his poem:  "I stole the title from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, the first line from Mark Strand, a couple other bits from my Bob Hicok and William Logan lists, and the last line from Jesus (to the Wandering Jew). "

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A "Collection of Terrifying Reagan-era Children's Books" (hat-tip to Emily)