April 26, 2005
Tuesday News
The new BusinessWeek lead article? Blogs will change your business. 27%
of Internet users read them. There are sidebars on moblogging
(posting to a blog on the go from a PDA or camera phone), vlogging
(posting video diaries), flogging (creating fake blogs, generally as an
advertising gimmick), podCasting (creating audio contents for downloading
onto audio players). For such a large social phenomenon, the business side
is small, with little venture capital involvement —
but expect many leading companies (Six Apart, Technorati, et al.) to get
acquired, as did Flickr, the photo-sharing service co-founded by
Caterina Fake. With viewers hopping
over TV advertising (thank you, TiVo), expect more product placements in movies.
MTV will launch a music download service to compete with iTunes. Samsung
just released the P207, a phone that performs voice recognition for text
messages, eliminating the need to type on those tiny keyboards. China now
sends one-third of its exports to the U.S., manufactured by workers who average
just 4.5% of U.S. factory wages. Private hedge funds are now huge, with assets
in the $5-$10 billion range and growing. GM's market capitalization is $15
billion, and a savvy fund might buy it, dump the auto manufacturing division
(and hundreds of thousands of jobs), and keep the auto financing, mortgage and
insurance businesses worth $22 billion. Look for the creation of a new
OPEC for natural gas, a resource whose producers (Russia, Iran, Qatar) are even
more highly concentrated. Sirius satellite radio is paying Martha $30
million for a four-year talk show deal. The GOP-led Congress are well on
their way to a $550 billion deficit this year, as tax cuts become permanent and
planned trimming of Medicare and farm subsidies never happen. Prices for
quality photographic artworks have risen 80% in the past 4 years. Verizon
has announced plans to build a 100-channel home video service, based upon its
extensive fiber-optic network. Bank service fees (including overdraft
charges) now account for 50% of the profit of most banks, abuses are on the
rise, and regulators are starting to take notice.
John Poch, the poetry editor for
Deborah's 32 Poems, discusses Clichés
in Contemporary Poetry in the recent AWP Writer's Chronicle.
The list of 12 tired topics include: [1] Screaming and crying
[2] Geography (of the soul, of your back yard, ...) [3] Desire [4]
Scapulas as wings [5] Butterflies as originators of hurricanes [6]
The homeless (think The Odyssey) [7] The word SUV [8]
Student mistakes [9] Lot's wife [10] Indictments of God
[11] 9/11 [12] Wordlessness. Sarah Anne Johnson interviews
Change-rae Lee, the author of Aloft, who coincidentally taught at the
Napa Valley Writer's Conference that I attended last summer. Eric Pankey
reviews and discusses the work of Donald Justice. Panel proposals for
AWP-Austin-2006 close on May 1st (sheesh). Tom C. Hunley discusses poetry
writing instruction, and fiction-related articles by Ronald Goldfarb, Michael C.
White, and Debra Spark.
The Wall Street Journal's lead sidebar is
about James Sorenson, who is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a
DNA database for the ultimate genealogical search engine. Boeing beat out
Airbus for the $15 billion order by Air Canada. The Bush Administration is
incurring political damage over high gas prices, and the President's meeting
with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah went nowhere. The 9/11 Commission
recommendations are foundering, due to other Administration priorities and
special interest lobbying. In a blow to Oracle, software monster Microsoft
and leading business application giant SAP joint forces to develop business
software. San Diego's mayor (who just barely beat out a surf-shop owner
earlier this year) steps down in advance of a federal probe into city's pension
fund. The world's top killers are malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis and Bill
Gates' foundation will steer billions of dollars toward vaccine production and
distribution. Burger King's new CEO, Greg Brenneman, has turned the
company around with cost cuts and new products, like the 760-calorie Enormous
Omelet Sandwich.
And, speaking of 32 Poems, I received my
contributor's copy, noting
Steven and Jeannine are
in there with me. I received an acceptance from
Barrow Street 14 months after
submitting a
poem taken by Spoon River
Poetry Review. Sigh. Barrow Street was my first good
credit, some years ago, and I'll just have to write them and admit that I lost
track of the submission.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Articulate and funny review of Graham's Overlord over at the NYT. An excerpt: In this uncertain atmosphere, Graham is a uniter, not a divider. For one thing, she's nice. In interviews, Graham comes off as kindhearted and eager to praise -- the sort of person you'd want as a colleague or mentor. She has friendly words for avant-gardists like Susan Howe; friendly words for formalists like Anthony Hecht; and friendly words for her tribe of former students (''I love all of them,'' she says, and it must be true, because they show up with remarkable frequency as winners of the many contests she judges).
Posted by jbahr at 07:14 AM | Comments (1)
April 25, 2005
Poetry Arrives
The May issue of Poetry arrived with cover art that looks like an
industrial voodoo doll. As usual, I began reading randomly, beginning at
the last page, where The Poetry Foundation announces the Emily Dickinson First
Book Award. Zounds! You have to be over 50 to submit. Amazing.
A contest in which the finest and most familiar of my peers cannot even compete.
The prize is $10,000 and publication, and I have to wonder how few poets of
consequence have managed to get to 50 without a published book. Perhaps
more than I imagine, but I'm entering anyway. It seems a bit unfair to my
many poet friends struggling in the First Book Wars, but wish me luck.
The actual poetry this month is as quiet as I've seen in a long time from
Poetry. With the exception of Atsuro Riley's small, spare works (Drift-Raft:
"Some nights, blank nothing: / The ice-box, milk-purling in the kitchen. / The
eye-of-pine floorboards ticking, clicking, planking themselves cool."), the
verse is uniformly narrative, anecdotal, descriptive, or some combination.
Craig Arnold begins with Incubus: "... She stalls in the kitchen,
putting the kettle on, / buys herself a minute looking for two / matching cups
for lime-flower tea.", followed by Komunyakaa's Togetherness:
"Someone says Tristan / & Isolde, the shared cup / & broken vows binding them, /
& someone else says Romeo / & Juliet, a lyre & Jew's harp / ...". Wendy
Cope supplies a villanelle (Lissadell: "Last year we went to Lissadell. /
The sun shone over Sligo Bay / And life was good and all was well."), and this
by Robert Bly — The Night the
Cities Burned: "It must have been Saturn and the other old men / Who
arranged this night of darkness for us. / So much of our life goes by in the
murky dark." Two poems by David Yezzi, including a tritina (which appears
to be a miniature form of sestina); a long, skinny poem by Wendy Videlock
(North of Mist: "Just north of mist, / along the border, / half a color /
from the water,"), Aperture by Jennifer Tonge ("Open the window and you
want to fly out, / though you never actually do
—"), standard fare by Mary Oliver ("The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted,
/ rode the wind. Its eye at this distance looked / like green glass; its
feet were the color / of butter. Speed, obviously, was joy. But") which
manages later on to break on an article twice, which struck me as odd.
Jane Hirshfield is typically deep and mystic in Assay Only Glimpsable for an
Instant: "Moment. Moment. Moment. // — equal inside you, moment, / the
velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling, / songs of children,
iridescence even of beetles", which uses a word (velocitious) that
eludes even the OED. Elaine Sexton with a pantoum ("Always a bad sign /
people on the sidewalk looking up. / A crowd forms, cars slow / then stop,"),
Ethan Stebbins shaking things up (On Munsungun: "My father in the
aluminum stern, cursing / another fouled blood-knot: all the shits / and
fucks as integral to the art of fishing / as the bait-fish, little silver smelts
/ I sewed like a manual transmission, / the same inbred order and precision").
Joshua Beckman continues the breaking-on-article theme: "They, lost, and
to the / touch of one another do go / and to say such things / in the grass
plain of day /"). Louise Glück demonstrates again why she is the Duchess
of Dour in the long Averno: "You die when your spirit dies. /
Otherwise, you live. / You may not do a good job of it, but you go on — /
something you have no choice about. // When I tell this to my children /
they pay no attention. / The old people, they think — / this is what they always
do:".
Reading front to back, I found myself exhausted
by all that craft (and little guile). Perhaps, it's just my mood this
morning, but I was expecting someone to say something. I'm not sure
quite what, of course, but I'd have recognized it. It could just be that I
saw Sin City last night with my son, and am ill-prepared for all this
Quietude.
Mary Kinzie pens The Poems I Am Not Writing,
in which she discusses (among other things) poems hidden in the mental
underbrush, poems that scurry away as you approach them. Vivian Gornick
reviews 3 memoirs: The Best Day The Worst Day : Life with Jane Kenyon,
Donald Hall; Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn; Cutty,
One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained, by August
Kleinzahler and I wonder immediately if poets abandon economy when considering
titles. All three get an ultimate thumbs down: Hall for his
"unexplored clichés about nature", Flynn because the "anecdotal tale of his own
drift repeats and repeats itself", and Kleinzahler because "[he] is content
simply to exercise his considerable talent for original phrasing". John
Lee Clark examines the work and trials of various deaf poets, including John
Carlin, Laura Redden, and Earl Sollenberger. Brenda Wineapple reviews
Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of the Print Culture, the latest
from Dana Gioia, poet, former executive, and current Chair of the NEA. Ms.
Wineapple notes the themes that dominated Gioia's Can Poetry Matter
(academic clubbiness, increasing irrelevance) are echoed in this new book
in which Gioia suggests that the New Media may well revitalize the world of
verse through visual and "spoken word" poetry of the non-academics. The
Letters to the Editor are largely uninteresting this month.
~~~~~~~~~~
I may have to take Tony off the RIP list, as he just used his blog to announce his new online journal, Fascicle (and thanks to Zach for pointing it out).
Posted by jbahr at 08:09 AM | Comments (3)
April 23, 2005
Farewell To HG
I will sorely miss HG Poetics,
as Henry has decided to discontinue his extraordinarily articulate weblog.
I had unthinkingly developed the habit of reading
Ron's weblog and then Henry's
— a sort of yin and yang to keep my aesthetics in
balance. Strange, how the end of a weblog feels like the death of a
friend. It reminds me that I should take a walk around the blogosphere
more often.
The new American Poet arrived, the quarterly journal of the Academy of
American Poets. They have continued their tradition of running the
commentary of one poet on another: Rosanna
Warren on Mark Strand, Kay Ryan and David Baker on Jane Hirshfield, Mei-Mei
Berssenbrugge on Laura Hinton, Ernest Hilbert on Anthony Hecht, Brenda Hillman
on Donald Revell, Andrew Carron and Justin Jamail on James Schuyler, Mary Jo
Bang on Jeff Clark, Nathan Hill on Jackson Mac Low. Most of the
articles run poems by both poets, an interesting effect in which one often
finds the poetry to be quite different between the reviewer and reviewee.
This is not the back section of Poetry, so the articles are laudatory,
even fawning at times. The discussions of Revell and Hirshfield's work
revisits the value of nature writing, something that
Josh has commented on recently.
I have not yet read much of Jeff Clark's Music and Suicide (also
reviewed by Ray McDaniel), so I was happy to hear what Mary Jo had to say
(keeping in mind that she was one of the judges that awarded M&S the
James Laughlin Award). Bang's work is so accommodating, while
Clark's tends to darkness, though they share overt musicality. The
Re:Print section contains poems from Ten Remarkable Recent Books,
including The Area
of Sound Called the Subtone, by
Noah Eli Gordon. In Memoriam for Mona Van Duyn, the nation's
first Poet Laureate. Short reviews of Prose on Poetry includes
Bloom's The Art of Reading Poetry, Padgett's Joe: A Memoir of Joe
Brainard, and Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn (they were kind)
— which reminded me to re-read Kasey's
piece on
lyrical equivalence, which has Padget's smile-inducing Nothing In That Drawer
sonnet. Translations synopsizes a dozen new books, including
Erotic Love Poems from India by Andrew Schelling, a Naropa prof whom I've
heard read at the Many Mountains Moving monthly literary salon. New
chancellors of the Academy include Robert Pinsky, Susan Stewart and C. K.
Williams.
The Foetry Saga continues with comments by
Ron and a remarkable
segment
on NPR's Talk of the Nation, in which Alan Cordle actually called in (why was he
not a guest on the show?).
Inc. magazine is mainly as boring as ever, with articles on how small
business people can reduce health costs and shrinkage. One interesting
piece ranks cities with the highest employment growth: Reno, Boise, Caspar,
and Green Bay top the list with Florida and Virginia cities showing up multiple
times. Steve Lipscomb has the hottest company in America
— World Poker Tour, a public corporation with a
$300 million market capitalization. Inc. also rates the new Republicans
who have replaced Democrats on the Senate Small Business Committee, most of whom
focus more on tax cuts and deregulation, as opposed to the Dems' interest in
health care cost and women's issues.
News from the Wall Street Journal yesterday
included: Google reported a 6X increase in net income last quarter, and
the Dow rose 206 points for the biggest one-day gain since 2003. Saudi
Arabia will invest $50 billion over the next 5 years in response to world pressure
that it raise output. Pope Benedict XVI reappointed virtually the entire
Vatican hierarchy, signaling a continuation of John Paul's priorities.
Honda will sell Civics in California that can be fueled at home from residential
natural gas. A bill allowing gay marriage is progressing through Spain's
general assembly. EMI Group is marketing Amos Lee with the same formula
that worked for Norah Jones, with whom he shares "doe-eyed, ethnically ambiguous
good looks". Seattle researchers have managed to force mice into suspended
animation by reducing their core temperatures and submitting them to low doses
of the normally toxic hydrogen sulfide. TV chefs are pulling in big bucks
from food suppliers who get their items used in the show (frozen shrimp, veal,
Alaskan seafood, American caviar). Omigod, Jaguar just released a station
wagon. The WSJ likes Kidman and Penn in Interpreter.
Honda and DaimlerChrysler will soon start exporting automobiles from Chinese
plants, "spelling bad news for older car plans in the U.S. and Europe, and the
highly paid unionized workers who staff them". Americans
for a Republican Majority collected large checks from the PACs of Wal-Mart, the
NRA, and the American Trucking Association. France's acceptance of the EU
Constitution is at risk by French Armenians, who want E.U. candidate Turkey to
acknowledge the 1915 genocide of Armenians.
Posted by jbahr at 08:41 AM | Comments (3)
April 21, 2005
Thursday News
By now, you've probably heard that the founder of foetry.com was outed.
The New York Times had an
article that mentioned
whoisfoetry.com and Janet as those
who collaborated to un-anonymize Alan Cordle, a reference librarian married to
poet Kathleen Halme. I can't help but feel badly for Kathleen, who was
apparently a spousal dissenter in the venture, and published in the
Contemporary Poetry Series
and by Sarabande — both of which were cited by
foetry.com as corrupt.
BusinessWeek's cover article is Downsizing the CEO, referring
to recent activism among auditors, shareholders, and board members to keep CEO
excesses in check. Accounting firms have certainly gotten religion after
the demise of Arthur Andersen, but it's not clear that the unseating of HP's
Fiorina and Boeing's Stonecipher are enough to think that the "days of the
imperial chief executive are over". RIM, the company that makes the
Blackberry PDA, paid $450 million recently for patent infringement to a NTP, a
small firm that just had its patents rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trade
Office (that has to be embarrassing). Eliot Spitzer, the New York pitbull-attorney
general, is taking on spyware offenders. The percentage of U.S. securities
traders who work in New York City continues to decline to its current 24%,
putting the hurt on NYC, which obtains almost 20% of its total tax revenue from
the securities industry. The Business Outlook section claims that growth
in the U.S. economy should continue, even with higher oil prices. The Next
Big Thing is WiMax, Intel's technology that provides DSL-like Internet
connection speeds without wires, much like cell phones. China will soon be
the No. 3 ad market in the world, and Western ad agencies are jockeying to
handle Chinese accounts. India's $10 billion call center industry took a
credibility hit this month, when 14 employees of MphasiS BLF were found to have
transferred $426,000 to their own personal accounts, after asking U.S. bank
customers for their account passwords. A new generation of potential iPod-killers
includes offerings from Samsung, Sony, Motorola and Nokia, all of whom intend to
merge cell phone, camera and player technologies. 19% of all U.S.
households make minimum payments on credit cards, and the newly passed
bankruptcy bill has encouraged credit card companies to raise payment level
demands and interest rates. Attorneys from the oddly-named American Center
for Law & Justice, founded by conservative Christian figure Pat Robertson,
have been tapped by the White House to rally the religious right to demand
conservative Federal court nominees. Suddenly, eco-friendly cars are
everywhere, topped by the new Lexus RX 400h, a luxury SUV that gets 29 MPG and
costs $50,000. In the past 50 years, few investments have equaled the U.S.
stock market, but quality Abraham Lincoln documents and autographs is one of
them.
Posted by jbahr at 10:22 AM | Comments (1)
April 20, 2005
Back, At Last
Omigod, my blog went dark. I've been at a client whose IT policies were
so strict, I couldn't even get to my email for 3 days, much less my blog.
It was Security Overkill and I made enough noise that they eventually opened up
sites and ports for me. On the weekend, Junie and I drove down to my
sister's ranch in the mountains overlooking Arroyo Grande and San Luis Obispo --
where there was no cell phone service and Internet access only by satellite.
OK, enough excuses, I'm back on the job.
I made the same killer paella recipe for my collective family, who had
gathered at the ranch to meet Junie for the first time, which was about time,
as I've been talking a
bout
her for 5 years or more. The paella requirements justified a trip to Morro
Bay to buy seafood to anoint a basic paella of chicken, chorizo, red peppers and
asparagus. My brother-in-law Roy drove us to a fisherman's
store-cum-restaurant for the mussels, clams, scallops and shrimp.
This fisherman sends out emails to customers when he's going out to sea, and
another when he gets back, so that regulars can drive down and pick up freshly
caught salmon, halibut, and whatever is running. The weather was perfect,
so we had lunch at a fish restaurant on the docks, with a view of Morro Rock in
the near distance. Morro Rock is one of the "nine sisters" -- volcanic
cores that stretch inland, the results of a hot spot that moved beneath the
tectonic plate, pushing up volcanoes much as the Hawaiian Islands were formed.
Although I brought along a few poetry books, most of the week was taken up
with work, a weekend with Junie, and drinking wine with my buddy in the evenings
at Casa Paulsen. After a short flight home, I arrived to find a 3-foot
stack of mail and magazines. My newest subscription is Worth,
compliments of frequent-flier miles. Like Fortune, Worth
dedicates its articles to people of means (the cover article is Protect Your
Wealth Offshore), and is jam-packed with advertisements for luxury cars,
expensive watches, destination resorts, vacation-home venues, and yachts.
Typical of the articles that are useless to most of us was Trust Busting:
How To Fire Your Trust Fund Administrator. The new Poets &
Writers was also in the stack, but the issue was virtually all
fiction-oriented, so I only gave it a skim. In a review of Hunter S.
Thompson's life is a excerpt from the Gonzomaster obituary of Richard Nixon:
"His casket should have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that
empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man
and a jabbering dupe of a president." The Literary MagNet section
provides quick takes on Beloit Poetry Journal, Sonora Review,
Conduit, and the new Grove Review out of Portland.
There was no getting away from the Papal Chronicles this week, though the
actual conclave was mercifully short. The Wall Street Journal this
morning has a sidebar article echoing the same characterization of Benedict XVI
that I've heard for two days: a brilliant liberal-turned-conservative who
is expected to maintain John Paul's tradition of political liberalism, sexual
moralizing, and a (Roman) centralized power structure. Bush's nomination
of the ascerbic John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador appears to be in trouble as more
stories of his abusive behavior comes to light. Tata Consultancy, one of
India's largest IT outsourcing specialists, had a 34% drop in earnings,
reflecting the weak dollar and rapidly growing salaries of it employees. A
Russian court froze the rest of Yukos' assets, signaling the possibility of
continued Kremlin nationalization of energy companies. The USDA has
revamped the Food Pyramid, rescaling amounts of each food group in terms of cups
and ounces (instead of portions), and permitting the Pyramid to be
individualized, based upon a person's age and exercise habits.
Time's cover is graced (and I use the term loosely) by Ann Coulter,
the conservative "harridan of hate", as some liberals designate her. The
article is actually quite interesting, and one is not sure by the end of it
whether the hard-drinking, two-pack-a-day, Coulter is serious or just having a
lot of fun at other people's expense. A ranking of successful mayors puts
Denver's own John Hickenlooper near the top. Saudi Arabia's top religious
leaders have denounced the practice of forcing women to marry against their
will. Only 107 of 300,000 students had a perfect 2400 score on the new SAT
exams. Tom Delay's in trouble again, and this one may get him: an
opulent London trip, coordinated by a conservative lobbyist. Japan is the
strongest market in the world for luxury goods, and Coach is gaining on Louis
Vuitton. Daniel Yergin, a noted oil expert, says that we'd better get used
to high petroleum prices, due to Chinese and Indian demand, and the increasing
difficulty of extraction. Chinese truffle farmers are managing to
pass off their significantly inferior product as Italian, French or Spanish in
upscale markets. Eric Idle's Broadway hit Spamalot, continues to
pack 'em in. A British study shows that waist size is a good predictor of
heart disease and diabetes. A picture of a chagrined Bono, who forgot he
had invited Mikhail Gorbachev over to his place for lunch. Toyota is only
a couple of percentage points away from being America's most popular auto brand.
Posted by jbahr at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2005
Flying
I'm off to San Jose this morning for client meetings all week, but I'm hoping to get a few blog entries in. All the motels in Silicon Valley seem to have broadband now-a-days, which makes remote computing life a lot easier. Junie is flying in to meet me on Saturday to spend the weekend at my sister's ranch outside of San Luis Obispo. Famous Corn Crabcakes are on the menu.
I think I like Tony Tost for Cyclops, and Tony Robinson for Loki, and Jonathan Mayhew for Dr. Doom.
Posted by jbahr at 05:32 AM | Comments (1)
April 12, 2005
S'Marvelous
I own exactly one share of Marvel Enterprises, just to get their annual
report, which is certainly one of the most colorful ones I receive. The
innards of this comic book-like publication is a lot more business-like, of
course, discussing licensing revenues and upcoming movies (more than a dozen).
As I was paging through it last night, I was making a mental list of Poets As
Superheroes. You know, Franz Wright as The Incredible Hulk. Reb
Livingston as Rogue. C. Dale
as The Silver Surfer.
LeeAnn Roripaugh as Susan Storm,
the Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four. Dean Young as Spidey. Jim
Behrle as
The Green Goblin. Kirsten Kaschock as the beautiful mutant,
Mystique.
Now, who would be Wolverine?
MIT Technology Review is a special issue discussing 10 Emerging
Technologies, including airborne networks (permitting aircraft to fly
without ground controllers), quantum wires (carbon nanotubes with much improved
heat and electrical properties), metabolomics (analysis of blood sugars for
early diagnosis), and bacterial factories (for producing cheap drugs for
diseases like malaria). MITTR asks whether instant access to all forms of
information on the Internet spells the death of libraries. Alternative
energy sources suffer from official neglect on the part of the federal
governments research funding (wind power is the fastest growing source of
electricity). U.S. companies spent $200 million last year placing
advertising inside video games. Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth
Catalog believes that "the environmental movement will reverse positions on four
core issues": nuclear energy (it's the only alternative to fossil fuels),
genetic engineering (it's good for you), population growth (it's going down),
and urbanization (it's going to continue). Six men, ranging from corporate
VPs to Federal Department undersecretaries, oversee $120 billion in research.
New economics theory takes human behavior into much greater account.
Joseph Romm pans Michael Crichton's latest anti-environmental book, calling it "intellectually
dishonest".
Posted by jbahr at 08:57 AM | Comments (6)
April 11, 2005
White Monday, Blue Tuesday
It continued to snow, eventually piling up to almost a foot in drifts.
My newly arrived daffodils were not happy. The roads were clear, but
driving was somewhat problematic as the snow was driven almost horizontally for
hours, which clogged the stoplights facing north with 4 to 5 inches of snow.
Anyone traveling south was faced with stoplights that seemed to be out of
commission, as you couldn't see the lights at all through the thick snow that
had accumulated in the cylinders that protect the lights. Tomorrow, it's
supposed to be 60 degrees and sunny. Of course. This is Colorado.
I finished the bitchy C++ to C conversion project this weekend, and even
managed to fix the stuffed pork chops that were featured in Cooks Illustrated,
deciding in the end on a cheese and spinach stuffing. They turned out
pretty decent, but what would you expect from brined first-class cuts from Whole
Foods? Accompanying the chops were Asian cole slaw, Parmesan risotto
cakes, pickled beets and carrots, steamed asparagus, and a nice Barbaresco that
pretended to be a Barolo but wasn't fooling anybody.
This week's Time has, of course, Pope John Paul on the cover, and a
long retrospective on his life inside. Other items: congressional
legislators are lobbying hard to prevent the hundreds of base closings that
Rumsfeld would like to see (the most vocal opponents are from the base-heavy
states of Florida and California). Republicans are using the Food-for-Oil
program scandal to step up attacks on Kofi Annan, but the latter says he isn't
stepping down. The Cheney clan is widening their influence, including
Lynne (a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute), daughter Elizabeth
(#2 diplomat for the Middle East), daughter Mary (campaign strategist), and
son-in-law Philip Perry (appointed general counsel at the Homeland Security
Department). Sony has upgraded their popular online multiplayer game,
EverQuest II, to include a feature where players can order from Pizza Hut
without stopping game play. A popular new business book, Likeability
Factor, declares that likeable bosses get more from their employees.
Global sales of anti-aging skin care products totals $10 billion. The
newest "Tupperware" business is Petlane, where small distributors hold parties
to sell pet products. Jane Fonda discusses her long and interesting life.
And this from Business Week: MacDonald's plans to recruit
hip-hop and rap artists to feature Big Macs in their songs. The arts,
entertainment and recreation is the industry segment losing jobs the fastest, as
people stay home and watch their DVDs and listen to their iPods. President
Bush is ready to unveil his proposals to "simplify" taxes, a code word for
shifting the tax burden from income (read: the wealthy) to consumption
taxes (read: the rest of us). U.S. corporate profit margins are at a
7-year high, as the ability to raise prices becomes a reality, and foreign
income rockets up with the weak dollar. Oil prices continue upwards, even
though commercial stockpiles of crude grow (conspiracy theory, anyone?), as
traders look for global demand to continue (particularly India and China).
The asbestos trust fund that Congress wants to compensate those with related
illnesses isn't going anywhere, even after asbestos litigation has bankrupted 60
large US companies. Republicans are planning a campaign to convince blacks
to "join the party of Abraham Lincoln" (fat chance). The shares of Ampex,
the venerable old-line technology pioneer, have risen from $1 to $40 in the past
year as the firm has begun to file lawsuits against infringement on hundreds of
key patents they own. Microsoft and IBM are fighting to control the market
for virtual meeting software. Robert Wayman, who took over as HP's CEO as
an interim assignment when Carly Fiorina was let go, earned $57,692 a day for
his two-month stint. Marathons are popping up everywhere, including new
ones in Antarctica and Kenya. The nation's upper middle class are
increasingly hiring chefs to come in and fix dinner. NASA has launched the
Centennial Challenges, a prize for those contributing to the technology to build
the first space elevator. The European Commission is planning to build the
world's most powerful optical telescope with a diameter of 100 meters, larger
than a football field. For another good year of Yahoo!
performance, CEO Terry Semel received salary, bonuses, and options worth $120
million this year. By 2008, 40% of all U.S. stock market trades will be
performed by computer algorithms owned by program traders.
Posted by jbahr at 08:54 AM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2005
Sunday Snow
I drove down yesterday to pick some wine that I had ordered from The Boulder
Wine Merchant, who was running a 25th Anniversary Sale (20% off the normal case
break). It was a beautiful day, and so warm that I had the air
conditioning on. I'm making the Cook's Illustrated stuffed pork
chops
that
I mentioned earlier, and the temptation to get them at the Boulder Whole Foods
was too great, even though WF is usually a budget-buster. Lo and behold,
they had beautiful, thick rib chops on sale for $4.00 a pound, and I managed to
have lunch for free just schlepping around the store looking for handouts
(polenta chips, Fontina cheese, olives, sour dough slices, and samples from
their amazing deli). After driving back to Longmont, I went back to work
on this C++-under-Linux-plus-NASM-assembler-to-C-plus-MASM-under-Windows
conversion I've been doing since Wednesday, knocked off at 6 PM and still had
time to do some weeding in the warm weather.
That was yesterday, of course, and this is Colorado, so of course,
it's snowing like a sumbitch this morning -- big, fat spring snowflakes that
have already piled up 2 inches on the backyard lawn. Rolling Stone
arrived yesterday, a big fat issue featuring the "100 Greatest Artists of All
Time". The judge panel is the usual interesting mix of artists and
critics, including Ric Ocasek of The Cars, Quentin Tarantino, The Whos' Pete
Townshend, L. A. Times critic Robert Hillburn, The Edge, Art Garfunkle, and a
couple of dozen more. Number One and Two are the Beatles and Dylan,
respectively. Duh. Then it gets interesting: Elvis, The
Stones, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin,
Ray Charles, and Bob Marley. That's 7 black artists in the top 11, it
occurred to me, and 6 of the next 10, which I won't give away
— you'll just have to drop by a Borders and look
for yourself. One interesting aspect of the list is that RS has
paired up every artist chosen with another artist who wrote a piece on them:
Jewel on Joni Mitchell, Rod Stewart on The Temptations, David Bowie on Nine Inch
Nails, 50 Cent on Tupac, and so on. The Newest Thing is the Rock Vacation,
packaged deals where you get air travel, accommodations, a rock concert and
backstage passes. Cruise lines are getting into the act, too — last
Thanksgiving, 1,000 vacationers joined Styx, Journey and REO Speedwagon on a
7-day Carribean cruise, with nightly shows and the opportunity to meet the band
members. Jerry Springer just signed with Air America, and they're billing him as
the "Limbaugh of the Left". DVD sales have exploded to $20 billion
annually. In The Crusaders, Bob Moser details the history and aims
of the Dominionists, the far-right Christian conservatives who believe that
Christians should "take back" every aspect of American life, including schools,
courts, science research, the legislatures, the Executive, you name it.
Their annual get-together is funded by wealthy conservatives, hosted by Moral
Majority co-founder D. James Kennedy, and sprinkled with conservative "stars"
like Judge Roy Moore of granite-10-Commandments-in-the-courthouse fame, who once
penned an opinion that practicing homosexuals should be executed. The
RS Review likes the new Garbage album, loves Z-Trip and Nine Inch
Nails, and pans Will Smith. Sin City, which I'm going to see with my son
today, gets 3 ½ stars for its "restless bug-fuck vitality".
Posted by jbahr at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2005
It's Friday Already?
Long time, no blog, as I've been working on various programming projects
pretty much day and night. You know the look: unshaven, eyes glazed
over, slow to respond to phone calls.
Lots of great AWP stories and pictures on the blogroll. Wish I could
have been there, but I suppose I'll see everyone in Austin next year.
Notes from today's Wall Street Journal: Thomas Coughlin,
recently fired Wal-Mart Board member, has been abusing expense accounts for
years, getting subordinates to dummy up receipts for such things as a $1,359
pair of boots and a $2,590 dog pen. Comic strip writers are increasingly
introducing current events and pop icons into their strips, to wit:
Blondie's daughter is dressing like Britney Spears and Little Orphan Annie is
foiling North Korean terrorists. General Motors has suspended its $10
million advertising budget with the L.A. Times after a series of editorials
criticizing its management. The pope's funeral may be one of history's
largest gatherings, with an estimated 4 million pilgrims attending.
American men now spend more on videogames than all forms of music. The
Clay Mathematics Institute has announced a $1 million prize to the first person
to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, a mathematical conjecture about prime numberss.
Buyers of (very) old homes are hiring dendrochronologists to analyze the house's
wooden infrastructure to pinpoint their age. Summer movies will include a
Ridley Scott "bloody-sword epic" set during the Crusades, and Will
Ferrell/Nicole Kidman in a remake of Bewitched. Visa International
is pleased to report that card charges in the effected areas are up to their
pre-tsunami levels.
Posted by jbahr at 07:30 AM | Comments (2)
April 04, 2005
Monday Morning Maundering
Connections has a online audio interview with Jorie Graham available.
She provides thoughts on Normandy (where she has a home), and reads from
Overlord, her new book.
I made the paella recipe from Cook's Illustrated last night, and it was as
delicious and trouble-free as CI indicated it would be. There are more
varieties of paella than there are Valencianos. They all start with
sautéing a sofrito of (8 cloves of) garlic, (one diced medium) onion, and
(a 14-ounce can of ) diced tomatoes, then adding Arborio rice (or Spanish paella
rice, if you can get it), sautéing again for another 5 minutes or so. Add
3 cups of stock (CI recommends Swanson's Organic FreeRange chicken stock)
and one-third cup of white wine for each 2 cups of rice, together with 15
threads of saffron, a bay leaf, and a little salt and pepper. Before
you start, debone and cut onto largish chunks, a pound of chicken thighs, and
2-3 chorizo sausages which have been cut on the diagonal into half-inch slices.
Slice a whole red pepper into half-inch strips and sauté in a little olive oil
on medium-high heat, until they are limp and a bit charred, if you can manage
that. Brown the chicken pieces on both sides, and then throw the chicken
and chorizo into the rice. You can now bake for 30 minutes, or cook on
medium heat until the liquid is absorbed. If you bake/cook uncovered (like
in a big skillet or paella pan), you may need a little more stock. Arrange
the red pepper strips on the top, and sprinkle a half cup of defrosted frozen
peas. Arrange shrimp, scallops, mussels, clams and/or lightly sautéed
calamari pieces on the top and cook covered for 10 minutes, allowing the
shellfish to open, and the shrimp to become pink and translucent. Serve
with a nice Spanish Rioja or crisp white wine.
I received and have read a little of Jeff Clark's Music and Suicide,
winner of the AAP's James Laughlin "second-book" award, judged by Mary Jo Bang,
Susan Stewart, and Elizabeth Alexander (Josh provides a
mini-review).
William
Waltz says that "It scurries through alleys, its tiny pink hands caressing
the dark's darkest secrets. He squeezes enough violence, bad sex, and death into
the 24 verse and prose pieces collected here to beget a season of the
Sopranos." The actual verse is a mixture of disjunctive prose poetry
and elliptical free verse, as befits the acknowledgments which include
Chicago Review, The Hat, Explosive, and Purple.
I found the prose to be thoughtful, casual, occasionally wandering off into
surreal anecdote. The verse reminded me of Mary Jo Bang in a fever dream
— disparate images floating in a light stew of
assonance and alliteration. This, from Missing is a Stimulant:
a circuit, bled memory
a séance of the veins, a liquid hinge
Deceit, the tones of dreamed sceneries
defaced by a single face
the day itself more marred
by these traces of fragrance
changes to fathom her absence
The biggest phone surprise of last year was picking up a call and hearing "Hi, this is Bob Hicok", to which I said with consummate aplomb: "(gulp). THE Bob Hicok?" I don't know why I was so surprised, as I had emailed Bob to participate in the poetry database project. Still, I wonder if I'm the only one who remains star-struck with my favorite poets. Living in the Mountain Region means I don't run into a lot of poets, as one might in NYC or the Bay Area. My biggest phone surprise of this year happened yesterday when I was reviewing my cell phone messages: "Hi, this is Albert Goldbarth." AG went on for a full minute, thanking me for a solicitation, apologizing for not actually using computers (his department chair gave him a hard copy), and leaving me his home address and phone number to discuss the solicitation. I think that reading a poet's work creates a strange sense of connection with someone whom I begin to unconsciously imagine as a minor deity on a distant planet.
Posted by jbahr at 08:30 AM | Comments (2)
April 03, 2005
Lost Time
Daylight Savings Time came again, a practice that, as an early riser, I
abhor . And not that I noticed, of course, until I realized that my PC's
clock was off by an hour.
I received Suzanne Frischkorn's
delightful chapbook, Red Paper Flower this week. Of the many wonderful
poems (that you could read, too, if you go over and purchase a copy) is Peony:
My husband hands his fever over
as if he slit open a woman
to reveal a yellow spray —
warm, firm, and infinite.
I whisper through wax red petals,
"I am not your mother."
I'm also reading again The Measured Word:
On Poetry and Science, a book that my sweetie bought for me, and that I had
started and forgotten to finish. The book includes an introduction by
Albert Goldbarth, and outstanding essays by Pattiann Rogers, Forrest Gander,
Alice Fulton, and Paul Lake, among others. Daniel Tobin writes on A. R.
Ammons and the Poetics of Chaos. Jonathan Holden reminds us that Paul
Valéry said that he wished his poems "had the solidity of certain pages of
algebra". Gander notes that "neither good poems nor good science simply
corroborate the assumption of presumed values".
May's The Atlantic has arrived rather
early, with a feature article on the state of America, written by French
philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. The Letters To The Editor include
responses to a prior article suggesting that fear of outsourcing is unjustified.
One letter writer notes that inflation-adjusted incomes have drifted down in the
past 30 years, while median income of the top 5% has sky-rocketed, and that most
of those service jobs that can't be outsourced are minimum-wage or entry-level
or both. Benjamin Schwarz asks "Will Israel Live to 100?", citing the high
birthrate of Palestinians, the intransigency of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the
near unanimous desire of Palestinians for the "right of return". Robert
Bryce reports that the military's demands for fuel has significantly complicated
Iraqi operations, as long supply lines lead to roadside bombs, which requires
heavier armor on vehicles, which leads to more fuel needs for military
gas-guzzling tanks and trucks (70% of the tonnage of material moved to the
battlefield is fuel). Conservative Christian billionaire, and ex-founder
of Qwest, Philip Anschutz is getting into movie making, funding the first
of C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Odds outlines the chances of each of Kim Jong Il's successors,
including sons by two wives, a sister, and an illegitimate son. Joshua
Green "It Isn't the Message, Stupid" takes exception to the Democrats' new
obsession with George Lakoff, whose message is that most of what ails the Dems
is "bad framing of the debate", and that they should take a cue from the
Republicans who turned "estate tax" into "death tax", by translating "trial
lawyers" into "public-protection attorneys". Benjamin Wittes opines that
the only serious assault by the judiciary on liberal causes is not
abortion or civil rights, but the erosion of environmental protection.
There are dozens of products available now to beat drug testing, including "The
BioWash" which guarantees to get drug residue out of your hair follicles, and
"The Wizzinator", a "very realistic prosthetic penis" attached to a bag of
test-passing urine. Primary Sources reports that studies show that
real estate agents recommend taking offers too quickly, and that the military is
slowing down its dismissal of gays due to high training costs for replacements.
Charles C. Mann notes, only half-humorously, that the world will soon have a
shortage of dead people as life expectancy climbs, creating problems for
societies without the institutions for multi-generational coexistence. B.
R. Myers pans Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close as
the author's second example of the excesses of postmodern fiction. Christopher
Hitchens reviews John Brown, Abolitionist, a book that credits Brown as
an intelligent, principled man, and a most important catalyst of the Civil War.
Word Fugitives asks readers for a word or phrase that describes "that
restless feeling that causes one to repeatedly peer into the refrigerator when
bored" and gets: Cold comfort, refrigerator magnetism,
smorgasboredom, bored chilly, procrastifrigeration, and
fridgety.
~~~~~
Congrats to my buddy Frank, for his placing in the Frieda Stein Fenster Memorial Award for Poetry.
~~~~~
I don't post poetry on my blog, but I put some new work here. The title of my latest is taken from a Creeley's poem The Mirror (and thanks to RHE for the attribution correction).
Posted by jbahr at 09:27 AM | Comments (1)
April 01, 2005
Delay Yesterday
DeLay said he would make sure that the GOP-controlled House "will look at an arrogant and out of control judiciary that thumbs its nose at Congress and the president."
So much for separation of powers.
Posted by jbahr at 09:35 AM | Comments (2)