February 28, 2005
Happy Birthday, Blog
Whimsy Speaks is 6 months old. That's half a decade in Chihuahua years, and an eternity in Internet-time.
Posted by jbahr at 03:16 PM | Comments (1)
February 27, 2005
In The Mail This Week
These magazines are relentless. I think Rolling Stone comes
every three days, and BusinessWeek comes weekly (imagine). The new
APR features Stephanie Brown with 12 poems about (as closely as I can
figure) the office, the university, the neighborhood -- fitting, perhaps, for a
poet whose last book was
Allegory of the Supermarket, which Kirkus Reviews called "sly and
sexy, dry and ironic, jaded and funny, ... [but] the humor isn't all one-note
jokes and giggly post-feminist wise-cracks." Library opens:
"Potions and lotions, which all smell gross, / And regressions to the past, the
past self / Pierced tongue, pink hair, potty mouth / Voodoo doodoo. Wiccan
crap, fake religion borne out / of the Englishman's loss of the oral trad."
Instead of my manuscript, Heather McHugh chose Geoff Bouvier's Living
Room for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Christopher Janke has
five small, engaging poems. This from god and body psalm:
"having pondered a limit // the prophet stretches out / and strokes himself //
the body wants more body / and the god more god". Donald Hall writes a
surprisingly poignant article, Knock Knock II: "At a mere
seventy-six, I anticipate my own death -- casually (I just ordered a new car
that might do 250,000 miles. Idly, I don't suppose I have so many.)"
He notes that Frost and Eliot have faded, that Pound is consigned to poet's hell
for his politics, and that he enjoys performance poetry more for the performance
than the poetry ("Poetry out loud is never quite so beautiful as poetry read in
silence"). Mary Kinze discusses Louise Bogan, whom Auden called "only one
of four American poets" (the others were Moore, Riding and Eliot). William
Kulik translates 12 poems by Robert Desnos, a French surrealist who died shortly
after his liberation from a concentration camp. Other poetry includes
Samuel Amadon's A Dirty Trick ("I rub my walls down. You rub your
walls down. / The old stains come clean. / You're sore. I know."),
Kate Northrop's The Sculpture Garden ("The statues here are like the
living dead, or no, / these are the ones stopped"), Katy Lederer's Parable of
Time Square and Intimacy ("These three bridges, like the brain, / lit
up and heading out toward Brooklyn. / I am slumped in the cab, thinking heady
thoughts of heady things."). Quincy Troupe is interviewed next to his
The Architecture of Language ("the wind swirling through the blue print of
speech, / bare bones of utterance found wrapped there / inside sound, a
language, a history"). Michelle Cliff translates seven poems by Lorca, who
sounds, not surprisingly, like a perfect parody of Lorca ("I desire that the
water lose its river-bed. / I desire that the wind lose its valleys. // I
desire that the night lose its eyes / and my heart be without its gold flower.")
Lucia Perillo
is back with five poems -- this, from Shorthand: July 5th: "is not
day of independence, when my slipper bursts into flames / Had been talked into
holding a sparkler, bad idea / when wearing sheepskin shoe . . . ". The
ever genial Paul Hoover contributes five poems. This, from The World as
Found: "Mariposa, what a clean word is that! / It can fly
around all day / and never get mud on its wings. / It makes a clean sound as it
passes right through me -- / almost nothing really." Susanne Jorn
translates Helle Nyberg from the Danish. Paul Celan's Majestic Black
graces the back cover, translated by Jack Hirshman.
Time's focus is on pain this week (mainly what to do about it), and they
have Ten Questions for Gerhard Schröder who answers
diplomatically, particularly about relations with the U.S. North Korea is
apparently using Iran to test its missile designs and the countries are sharing
the test-launch data. Senate Leader (and prospective
Anti-Christ) Bill
Frist might take a run at the 2008 Presidency. Hawaii may be the first
state to prohibit smoking on beaches. Jerry Springer is considering the
governorship of Ohio. The Oscars folks hope that Chris Rock props up their
sliding ratings (is it really possible for Rock to MC for two hours
without saying the F word once?). Great
article by Joe Klein on Bush as the first Blink President -- the notion that
what most characterizes our President is not his conservatism, but his "wanton
decisiveness". The U.S. has been holding secret dialogues with the Iraqi
insurgents. U.S. soldiers are AWOL'ing to Canada, but they need obtain
refugee status to stay. Economists at Davos generally agree that the U.S.
deficits (trade and economic) could spell big trouble for the world economy
soon, but the Administration isn't listening. The Defense Department has
spent $16 million designing a new video game called America's Army, in
hopes that some of the millions of gamers might join up. Good interview
with 74-year old Clint Eastwood -- he's asked "if he feels lucky", and he says,
"sure". Paramount is trying to recover from a series of non-winners (Lemony
Snicket, Manchurian Candidate, Stepford Wives, Sky Captain).
Annie Leibovitz must be as old as I am, judging
from how long I've been admiring her photography. I've got a terrific
coffee-table book of her work that someone gave me in the late 80's (which
includes this picture of the Eurythmics). Annie has a terrific set of
photos of Bob Marley that accompanies the
lead article. Every successive issue of Rolling Stone leads with
more and more advertising -- usually clothes or perfume linked to hot bands,
scantily-clad ladies and buff preppies (and inevitably, Madonna & Paris).
There's an absolutely killer ad, though, for Amex (Ellen DeGeneres playing poker
with her dog). Dylan is planning a new tour in a cowboy hat. Trent
Reznor actually looks respectable. Mariah Carey appears to be baring her
(new?) breasts. Upon finding that MTV skews female, they're twisting MTV2
with more hip-hop and Green Day (whom Triumph the Comic Dog calls a "less
queer Blink-182"). 65-year old Tina Turner has a hit album (#2 on
BillBoard) and lives (of all places) in Zurich. The newest thing is The
Mars Volta's prog-rock salsa funk-emo. Bono mugs for the camera with
Steven Tyler, who looks increasingly like Joan Rivers to me. Alicia Keys
adds 4 more Grammies to bring her total up to 9. I generally stay away
from crazed Tori Amos aficionados, but the photo accompanying her ad for The
Beekeeper is quite lovely. A good article on The Online Insurgency
(is MoveOn.com innovative or electoral suicide?) sits across from a Skyy Vodka
ad with a heart-stopping blond in a gossamer frock. Another article on
hip-hop superstar Game, who drank Hennessy in fourth grade, dealt crack in high
school, and has 5 bullet wounds. Excellent article interviewing the young
veterans of the Fallujah campaign. Lots of pics and gossip about Kings
of Leon ("Our vices are what inspire us"). Judas Priest, born
35 years ago in Birmingham, England, gets 3-and-a-half stars for their new
album, Angel of Retribution.
The Smithsonian's feature article is on
Alaskan seals and the mystery of their slow disappearance. Good piece on
Amadeo Modigliani, who died impoverished of tubercular meningitis at 35, and
whose landlord accepted paintings for rent, using the canvasses to patch old
mattresses. Cathy Wilkerson, now 60, works in math staff development for
the New York City schools. She is famous as one of the four radical
Weathermen. The Smithsonian recently inducted Jerry Seinfeld's famous
foppy lace puffy shirt into the showbiz history section. Ongoing
excavations in Deadwood reveal a large Chinatown that thrived in the 1860's.
The Smithsonian has co-published Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes
and Traditions, which includes recipes for buffalo, boar, and milkweed.
Devastating earthquakes are more common than once believed, and the Pacific
Northwest is due for one. For $99, you can own the Stauer EMC Analog
Atomic Watch that loses one second every 20 million years by synching up with
the F1 U.S. Atomic Clock, right here in Boulder, Colorado. Good article
and eerie photographs of the "Holy Ghost" mural, one of 80 figures left by
Native Americans 7,000 years ago on the Colorado Plateau. One reporter's
diary (Afshin Molavi) of a trip to Iran, which he says has the most pro-American
populace in the Middle East. Ireland's economy has been booming for 15
years, and (from the pictures) they still know how to party. Nice,
balanced article on Winston Churchill, who beat out E. M. Forster for a Nobel
Prize in Literature and died in his nineties.
Posted by jbahr at 09:43 AM | Comments (1)
February 25, 2005
Big Bang
And
speaking of Mary Jo Bang, I've been reading the delightful
The Eye Like A Strange Balloon, which is series of ekphrastic poems
about artwork from the 21st century back to 1 BCE (including a mixed-media work
by Ms. Bang herself). The poems in this book are wonderful alone, and only
improve if you have the artwork in front of you or in your mind's eye.
This, from
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon:
... If we seem vulnerable
under the past-pattern of clouds
in motion, over a pale blue
conveyor-belt ocean, it's because we are.
Sometimes we act like we love
small Peruvian parrots.
We hide them in our hair.
Coincidentally, I also found Ms. Bang in my contributors copy of
Notre Dame Review (in
fact a poem from TELASB), in the "& Now" section that runs halfway
through the volume. If you turn the book over, you get the "And Then"
section, which is upside down and backwards from the other section. The "&
Now" section was intended to be a "festival of new writing" celebrating the
"premise that the world changes
and that people think in contexts other than their forebears ..." I keep
thinking that I should recognize some of the people (poets?) on the cover, but
I'm stuck, thinking that maybe I spot Sharon Olds and Olena K. Davis.
I'm not sure I know what it means that my
poem
is in the "And Then" section, but I'm not sure it's a good sign.
Junie, my sweet, sent me The Tether and Coin of the Realm by
Carl Phillips, a fact I mentioned earlier this week. Coin of the Realm is
a collection of essays "making a case for beauty ... [and] ... thinking about
the nature of race and gender, myth and fable in American poetry."
Phillip's background (like Anne Carson) is in classical literature. He
writes in a very straightforward, but compelling style (unlike the occasionally
tortured syntax of his poetry). My favorite essay so far is
"Association in Poetry", in which he discusses the power of metaphorical
distance, "poetry that works almost entirely by means of association -- no
connecting narrative pieces, often no syntactical connection, poetry that is
characterized by leaps not just from stanza to stanza, but from one image to the
next ..." Some of my poetry has been criticized as displaying a certain
glue-less-ness, so I was delighted to get the green light from Carl. The
essay is not an apologist for all post-avant excursions, but takes the middle
road, citing examples from the work of Gregg, Komunyakaa, James Wright, Frank
O'Hara, Robert Hass and George Herbert. This particular piece is a kind of
primer and as instructive as it is enjoyable (as opposed to, say, Vendler, whom
I find to be merely instructive).
One particularly interesting example of (wildly) associative poetry is Homage
to Thomas Wolfe, which I found in the aforementioned copy of Notre Dame
Review. This, and two other poems (The Division of the Soul and
Non-Additive Postulations) use algebraic notation as a means of
expression. It's the only time I've seen a sigma used in a poem, outside
of my own work
(though I'm sure neither of us are the first).
~~~
It occurs to me that I once referenced Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in a poem, too. OK, it's a little silly but it was fun writing it.
Posted by jbahr at 08:53 AM | Comments (4)
February 22, 2005
The Case of Tate V. Young
Jonathan has a quiz up, with short takes from the work of Dean Young and
James Tate. He has made the point that they "share 99% of poetic DNA", and
is withholding the secret of their difference. Jonathan is one of those
maddening bloggers without comment entry, so I'll leave my thoughts here.
My quick guess on Jonathan's challenge was that B, C and F were Young, BTW.
I don't find Tate any more like Young than Mary Jo Bang is like Lucie
Brock-Broido. In fact, I find Tate most often garrulous and pointless.
For all the claims of surrealism, he still doesn't employ Young's head-spinning
changes of reference. Young is like watching a hummingbird, appearing
suddenly a couple of inches away from where he was last, but still tending the
same flower patch. Consider this, from Tate's The List of Famous Hats
:
Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as
a famous
hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for
show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all hon-
esty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a
corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The
first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing
cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his
childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a
chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well,
Note the gratuitous colloquialisms, the mindless repetition of hat,
the needlessly convoluted prose, the petty put-downs that are so common in
Tate's work. Can you imagine Dean Young writing this? I can't.
Posted by jbahr at 06:12 PM | Comments (5)
February 21, 2005
Mohammad's Metrics
Kasey Mohammad has an interesting
entry on his weblog, summarizing his discussion in another group about the
function of book-publishing and audience. I would have liked to hear
more about the "social dynamics of poetry publishing", but it's still a great
take on the "fundamental triad of author-sponsor-readership." Kasey
distinguishes between valuation and evaluation. The former
is a term to describe a rise in value associated with the act of publication —
and in Kasey's view, book publication especially. The publication of one's
poetry adds to the perceived value of the poet — a sort of capital stock
that can be used to generate tangible dividends (better teaching positions,
guest editorships, workshop gigs). Most of these tangible benefits are
what Kasey calls perpetuating "a need for trainer/apprentice relationships":
To whom do we go for instruction in the art of poetry? To someone we
acknowledge (or that we know an acknowledged institution has acknowledged) as a
skilled practitioner in the art. How is such skill measured? In a number of
ways, but significantly and overwhelmingly by an impressive record of
publication. The book is the most prestigious form of poetic publication.
Kasey describes evaluation — the assignment of worth to a text
beyond, say, its obvious attributes of scansion, conformance to form, or
cliché avoidance — as a metric that is ultimately too personal in nature
to be homogenous among all readers of poetry (you like Olds, he likes Armantrout).
I particularly liked Kasey's describing the "function of poetry instruction as
the transmission of craft mysteries to that of trade
secrets". Another interesting statement was " I can't rely on
tenets of craft to form guidelines for evaluation, only to supply a vocabulary
or repertoire that is in itself value-neutral."
I think this model makes a lot
of sense to those involved in — for lack of a better phrase — The
Poetry Biz, but I can't say that it fits my particular life choices. By
The Poetry Biz, I mean not only MFA programs, English Lit graduate studies,
summer workshop instructorships, grants and awards, book publishers, and
literary journals but any cog in the Machine that affects a poet's lifestyle and
livelihood. There are still a small number of poets, like me, who publish
for the joy of it, or as a result of a competitive nature, or just to see if we
can. And for me, book publication is just another challenge. I see Kasey's point, and I agree that the simple act of getting a book published
(excluding self-publishing) does raise the value of one's stock (heck, people
might even read my weblog more often). Still, I find the mini-obsession of
book publication to be odd. I read the bios in the back of dozens of
journals a year and I never care how many books a poet has published
— I'm looking for Paris Review,
Jacket, New Yorker, Kenyon Review, New American Writing —
icons that tell me, it seems, a great deal more about the poet's stature.
Frankly, there are thousands of poets with books, many published by their own
university press, now-defunct publishers, or their great aunt's largesse. And
yet, I've been asked many times, in tones of incredulous urgency, have you
published a book yet?
Anyway, I'm getting off-topic. I liked Kasey's
take because it seemed rational without being overly cynical.
Posted by jbahr at 04:53 PM | Comments (6)
February 20, 2005
Whimsy and Parody
I felt this odd burning about the ears this afternoon and checked the
blogroll. Sure enough, both
Kelli and Jonathan were
discussing whimsy. Jonathan was also doing some decent parodies,
one of James Tate and one of Jorie Graham (he's even taking orders via email to
attempt other poets). For a while, I was doing parodies myself. It
started as a challenge by my compatriot Whimsy, on the
Alsop Review
poetry forum, in which the participants were challenged to rewrite a famous
poem by one author, in the style of a second poet. This resulted in some
pretty good
attempts, and the contest was held a
second year,
and a third.
My own approach to parody started with completely engulfing myself in the
work of a poet, often night after night for weeks at a time. I would read
straight through, say, the Jorie Graham's first 5 books, taking notes about
voice and trends and tics. Often, I would be writing the uber-poem
as I went along, inserting a standard image here, adding a typical allusion
there, shortening or lengthening lines, trying to match the sense of where the
poet made line breaks. My Jorie poem started out:
This leveling, the scythe with its projecting
pegs. See: the frontier of grain recedes,
the future behind us (who’s been left hungry?)
and was eventually published in
Canary. Another
poem, published in 32 Poems, was a
parody that resulted from my complete inability to understand Matthea Harvey's
award-winning poem, Sad Little Breathing Machine.
One in the style
of Ted Hughes was a tribute.
One
was an obvious Ashbery knockoff.
One was a
Billy Collins. One
submission was a quartet.
One thing I discovered pretty quickly was that editors don't like parodies,
and don't like Afters much, either. In almost all cases, I had to
eliminate the original attributions (in the title, in an After epigraph,
et cetera) or a poem just got rejected over and over again. I truly
believe that most editors think that parodies are dishonest, or at best
derivative, or perhaps too whimsical.
I'll close with my parody of Bly:
A Wolf and An Old Woman Sit Next To Each Other
An old woman and a wolf sit on a porch
in the sun and her hand strays to his head
in the heat and he
knows
that his age rushes sevenfold like the book
in her lap fanning time in the wind
as they breathe the gold air as she knits
and he kneels and he chews the white bones
of Red's clavicle.
Posted by jbahr at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)
Sunday Reading
The last time I saw Carl Phillips, he was towering over Mary Jo Bang at the
Washington University reading at the last AWP. After the reading he made a
beeline for the door and I didn't get a chance to say hello. I suspect
that he's a bit withdrawn, judging from his books that I'm currently reading:
Coin of the Realm and The Tether. The second is his latest
book of poetry. The first is a series of "Essays on the Art and Life of
Poetry." They are both economical in their language, a spareness that is
associated with Phillips. Junie really likes Phillips, so I'm going
through The Tether with less impatience than I usually have for most
poetry. Coin of the Realm has kept my attention nicely. I'll
have more to say about each later this week.
The newest Poets & Writers showed up, featuring their annual view of
writer's retreats. Joe Woodward has a nice piece on Don Quixote,
which celebrates its 400th anniversary this year. He notes that it has
long occupied a "preeminent place" in Western canon, and that among its
champions were Mann, Flaubert, Melville and Twain. Kevin Larimer points
out that book contests can yield more than just money (e.g., exposure,
guaranteed sales, contributions by the editor to charity). Small Press
Points notes that Sam Hamill has stepped down from his editorship of Copper
Canyon Press. There's an interview with the plain-spoken Laureate, Ted
Kooser, and a long article on The Art of Reading Kenneth Koch by Amy
Rosenberg, his work-study assistant for 3 years at Columbia University.
John Freeman writes a long piece on 80-year old Jack Gilbert, which discusses
his "elusive and mysterious life" since his fame in the 60's. Gilbert
still writes, and well -- this from Kunsthammer:
We are resident inside the machinery,
a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.
We exist with a wind whispering inside
and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,
inside the basilica of bones. The flesh
is a neighborhood, but not the life.
P&W has the usual fat section of contest listings, recent winners, and
upcoming conferences. I can just hear the
Foetry folks screaming as they read that Donald Revell won the Lenore
Marshall Poetry Prize, judged by Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, and Harryette
Mullen.
Short Takes from the Blogosphere: Outstanding pictures of
radiant Reb and her beautiful baby
here.
Frank advises us just when
and how to repair poems. Didi
is considering setting up a group for publishers of web-based magazines.
Check out Steve's book
contest. Does Milford
look like Orson Welles or what?
Allen flarfs Lowell with mixed
results. It's curtains for Nada.
Charles is up at the
No Tell.
February 17, 2005
Places
My fellow bloggers have been recording the states they've lived in and
visited. Thinking back, it seemed more interesting to do countries:
Green the countries you've been to, Blue the countries you've stayed more
than a week in, Red the countries you've lived in and Black the country you're
in now:
Belgium / USA /
India / Hong Kong /
North Korea / Luxembourg
/ Iran / Poland /
Russia / Lebanon /
Egypt / Turkey /
Greece /
Japan / France /
Holland / Italy /
Denmark / Spain /
Thailand / Portugal /
Andorra / UK
/ Ireland / Australia
/ New Zealand / Switzerland
/ Tahiti / Canada /
Germany / Mexico /
Iceland
It's funny, looking back, how so few situations led to so many countries,
although I'm dismally short on South American and African countries. My
sister scared
me with stories of dwarves on the boat to Kobe. My dad was in the
Army, which accounted for my extended time in Iran, and short airport stops in
other countries (e.g., Egypt and Lebanon). We visited Beirut on holiday twice,
when it was the "Paris of the Middle East". Coming home, we vacationed in
Athens, back when you could see the Acropolis from a distance the bay was still blue. I worked for a Japanese company, which involved
visiting Japan via our European clients, thus a stop in India
— because, those were the days in which Free World commercial air routes avoided Soviet airspace. In
1988, I stayed in Bilbao one day every second week for a day, eating tapas,
drinking wine, and once driving to Andorra. I ate frog soup in Thailand,
waiting for a plane to Hong Kong. I spent a week in Italy with my Cath, my
ex, on which trip the train separated, sending our luggage to the Dolomites and us to the
Grand Canal. I was the guest speaker at a software conference in
Sidney and got fired in the US while in Australia, so I spent 5 weeks living in a
hotel, reading Pynchon and feeding the larakeets on the lanai.
I lived in Europe for a few years, which is why I've got a (red) Germany and
Belgium, and a lot of trips to other (blue) European countries within driving
distance. Denmark is blue because I got lost coming home from Hamburg.
We drove to Luxembourg once to see the bottles on the pear blossoms that becomes
Poire William. The only time I've been to Canada was when I visited the Amazing John Mumey, who
was interning at Detroit General in Emergency Medicine, because he said it was
the closest thing to a war zone he could imagine. My European
distributor lived in Zurich, where I would stay the week before Hanover Fair in
their upstairs guest room. I started a Russian software
development center and visited my one American employee in Moscow (in the dead
of frigging winter) repeatedly for meetings, a business we discontinued
when the Russian Mafia started showing up for weekly protection payments.
I've had a small software company for almost 20 years whose biggest market is in
Spain, so I've been there dozens of time -- which led to side trips to Portugal.
I had skate in a London restaurant. The only time I've been to Mexico was a day trip
from Pomona College to watch the dogs run at Agua Caliente. North
Korea was pitching a business plan to Samsung. I've driven through
Liechtenstein, but I think it's a Principality and not actually a country. After
one of my many Hanover Fair
stints, the only available
flight was "Saga Class" on Air Iceland, which involved a one stop and
a chance to pick up a T-shirt at Hard Rock Cafe Reykjavik, which is a
bandstand and 6 tables at the airport. I'm sure I've been to Poland,
because I have this stein that says so. Probably Czechoslavakia, too, but
I'm not putting it on the list, because now it's two countries and I don't know
which one I was in. I was also in France another week on my second honeymoon, the
time when Bruce couldn't take a hint and came along and dragged us to the Côte d'Azur for a week where I won $800 in roulette in Monte Carlo and he took
pictures of anything topless, which became an album called "Mammaries of
Nice". There was a time when many European flights stopped at Shannon
Airport, 15 miles from Limerick City. Tahiti was because you can't
get to Australia in one hop going West.
~~~
Spin has "20 Years of Classic Photos" this month, including one of
Trent Reznor looking like a young Alan Rickman in a Snape getup, and Marilyn
Manson as a deranged school crossing guard. Tears for Fears
is back with an album. Judging from the Letters, everyone either loves or
hates U2. Ozzy Osbourne uses variants of fuck 38 times in a
one-page interview. Whoa, Emily VanCamp is a doll. Spin readers
vote: Best Band - Interpol. Worst Band - Good Charlotte.
Best Dressed - Karen O (edging out Gwen Stefani). Most Overrated Artist:
The Killers. The nouveau-folk scene is on the rise. The
Foo Fighters are holed up in Reseda recording two albums.
I'm getting Business Week again, which is an informative and
politically balanced magazine. The cover story is on the recently
fired Carly Fiorina and the challenges facing the next CEO of HP, which makes
68% of its profit from printer ink cartridge sales and little else on everything
else. More than one-half of Iraqi's security forces will be trained, not
by NATO allies, but private companies like Science Applications, for which we're
paying the bill. Apple is pummeling Microsoft in the digital music world.
Five generations have lived large (and had a profound affect on the art
world) on the vast wealth acquired by Meyer Guggenheim varied business interests
(mining, textiles). Google surprised Wall Street with higher-than-expected
earnings from web advertising (the most expensive keywords are "background
check", "car loan" and "refinance"). The new Krispy Kreme CEO is cutting
125 jobs and selling the corporate jet. After enjoying Bush-era billions
in subsidies that account for 25% of all farm income, farmers should expect
large cuts in the 2006 budget. Toyota continues to drive down costs
through continuous improvements (keiretsu), in the expectation that
low-cost Chinese firms will enter the auto market. The looming Medicaid
crisis (this one is real) is the result of huge costs for the long-term care of
the elderly and disabled. Southwest Airlines is no longer the underdog --
they carry more passenger traffic now than any other US carrier. Bloomberg
says it's necessary to snag the 2012 Olympic Summer Games, but critics say the
proposed $1.4 billion stadium is just a gift to the New York Jets. Few
analysts expect the merger of family-run Coors and Molson to go smoothly.
There has been a steady rise in "extreme commuting" as employees travel 2 and 3
hours a day to have good jobs and affordable housing. Auction prices for
computer memorabilia have risen rapidly (an Apple I in good condition recently
fetched $16,000).
~~~
Here's a very, very funny
comic sent
to me from a high school buddy who found me after 30 years by Googling.
Posted by jbahr at 05:46 AM | Comments (10)
February 14, 2005
Valentine's Mish-Mash
Happy Valentine's day to all you lovers out there, and a special V-Day smooch
to Junie / For those of you on a budget, a
psychotherapist says that kisses are better than chocolate and flowers. /
The dictionary.com
word for the day is inamorata. / Now, for some
anti-V news: the "divorce party" is latest thing.
When I was a kid, there was AT&T, the world's largest monopoly and the "stock
for widows and orphans." Until they brought out the Princess Phone, you
could have any kind of phone you wanted, as long as it was ugly, squat and
black. Calls from a pay-phone were 5 cents, and I got pretty good hitting
the coin-return plunger just as I was dropping the nickel in, which
resulted in my nickel back and a free call. Cell phones were 30 years in
the future. There was only one Phone Company, an entity so powerful that
it was the Evil Empire in
James Coburn's great 60's movie, The President's Analyst. Well,
today Verizon
announced that it's buying MCI. Nextel has merged with Sprint.
SBC has acquired AT&T, the latter a shadow of its former self. How long do
we have before we're back to one Phone Company, ugly black phones, and much
higher rates?
GC Waldrep discusses Gongorism, the fallacies of the Aesthetics Wars, and
Houlihan at
Writer's Block. By coincidence, I was looking through my POOL
contributor's copy and noticed GC was in there with me. His
poem is up at the
POOL site. / There's a truly amazing application called the
Baby Name Wizard
that gives you the distribution of first names in recent history, and when a
name peaked in popularity. You can even type in parts of names, or first
letters, to see their frequency, and it all happens in real-time. /
Good
article on Wendy Lesser and the
Threepenny Review's 25th anniversary. / There's a
Jeffrey Bahr who combats obesity. / I was just looking at an
eZine review that
Whims,
Watson, and the rest of the crew did 5 years ago (Whims look a lot younger).
This website was the forerunner to my
print publication
database, and a lot of the comments are pretty dated. There are also a
whole lot more good online poetry journals now. /
Reb is still on
"baby-watch" / Japan could
lose as much as $40 billion on currency losses supporting the US dollar with
Bush's new budget / Ray Charles
won 8 Grammy's for
Genius Loves Company / Someone
commissioned a Hello Kitty crop circle
Posted by jbahr at 08:41 AM | Comments (5)
February 13, 2005
Silver Palate Crab Cakes
The year I attended Johns Hopkins, my dorm mates and I went to a crab cake
contest by the Chesapeake Bay. I remember all the recipe contenders as large black women, patting the cakes and frying them in cast-iron skillets.
My buddy Dave Paulsen has helped with the patting over the years on this recipe.
He's the wrong gender and ethnicity, but he is 6'5" and 20-odd stone, so it's a
reasonable illusion.
The original recipe came from the Silver Palate
New Basics, still one of my favorite cookbooks. You can make it a
couple of hours ahead of time, so it's a good recipe for when you'd rather be
drinking wine with your friends instead of in the kitchen. Here's my
ingredients:
3 6-ounce cans of canned crabmeat (Bumblebee is reasonable)
1 cup of cooked corn
One-half cup of diced onions
One-half cup of diced celery
One-half cup of diced red pepper
1 cup of mayonnaise
One-half teaspoon of dry mustard (or a teaspoon of Dijon)
A pinch of cayenne pepper (or a couple of splashes of Tabasco)
1 beaten egg
One-and-a-quarter cup of saltine cracker crumbs
2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 tablespoons of butter
I've used supermarket crab-in-a-can, and it was pretty good, and not much more expensive than chunk white tuna fish. Costco has some really incredible canned crabmeat, if you can find it. I find that frozen corn tastes better than canned, but you need to microwave it
until it's tender -- fresh corn is nice, too, but not that much better than
frozen. I've also used a combination of saltine crumbs and those bread
crumbs that come in a tall can. A food processor makes quick work of the
saltines. Combine the corn, crabmeat, onions, celery, red pepper in a bowl
and mix it up until it's uniform. Mix the mayonnaise and mustard with the
cayenne (or Tabasco) and toss it into the bowl, remixing everything for
consistency. Fold in a quarter-cup of the bread/cracker crumbs and the
beaten egg, working the mixture again gently. Now, you're ready to make
the cakes.
Pour the rest of the bread/cracker crumbs in a bowl. Get out a cookie
sheet or large plate that will fit into the refrigerator. Take a small
handful of crab mixture, make a patty, and then drop it into the bread/cracker
crumb bowl and coat it with crumbs. Place each crab cake on the cookie
sheet and, when you're done, cover with wrap or aluminum foil and chill for
about an hour.
Now, you need to make the tartar sauce, which is at least as important as the
crab cakes. You'll need:
1 cup of mayonnaise
2 tablespoons of lemon juice
1 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce
A dash of Tabasco
One-quarter cup of finely diced dill pickles
One-quarter cup of diced parsley (curly or Italian)
2 tablespoons of diced shallots (scallions work OK, too)
2 tablespoons of capers
Salt and pepper to taste
It probably works easiest to mix the mayo, lemon juice, Worcestershire and
Tabasco together first in a small bowl, then dump the other ingredients in and
mix thoroughly. Put a cover on the bowl and chill for an hour, if you have
it.
Back to the crab cakes: Heat the olive oil and butter (if you're worried
about cholesterol, just use olive oil) in a skillet on medium heat. Cook
the crab cakes until they're golden on both sides (everything is already cooked
anyway, you're just heating them up and giving them a nice crust), maybe 2-4
minutes per side.
Serve immediately with the tartar sauce and white wine. This makes about 8
good-sized crab cakes.
~~~
Short Takes: My buddy Frank provides a fascinating discussion of
wok hay /
Kasey lands Linh Dinh for a reading
/ Watson outs himself
on Foetry / Steve and
Jeannine Hall appear in the
American Poetry Journal
/ Didi is looking for poems
/ Robin give us an
"exercise out of Oulipo" / Ron
has a good piece on the Paris Review /
CDY reports on the "filthy whores" of Vegas /
Mike has pics of the Lucifer
Poetics Group / Amanda finds that
Georgia has changed /
AnnMarie is back to Morse Code.
Posted by jbahr at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2005
In The Mail This Week
Well, it looks like my (Ever-Expanding) Poets With Weblogs is
Occasionally Contracting: Laura Carter, Tony Tost, Aaron McCollough and Aaron Tieger gone.
I can't find Jodie Reyes' blog anymore.
Sabrina has gone to website
format. Maybe there's a new, hip technology (pod-casting?) that the
illuminati are adopting. I'm always so one step behind.
Rolling Stone's feature article this month is on Green Day, and there's a
great shot on the front of them mugging for the camera, as usual (Mike Dirnt
doing that wide-eyed crazy look). I always liked GD from the time my kids
started playing it, somewhere between their infatuations with Ace of Base and
System of a Down, as I remember. These guys get around. Once, in a little dusty shop outside
Granada, I once saw two cassettes for sale on a tiny rack: one of Andrés Segovia and one of Green Day.
Their anti-Bush American Idiot debuted in September as the #1 album and
hasn't been out of the top ten since. New star rapper, The Game, whose
debut album sold 600,000 copies the first week, was the unsuccessful target of a
drive-by shooting. The Dave Stewart-Mick Jagger rocker from Alfie
won the Golden Globe, but wasn't even nominated for an Oscar. It took less
than 2 hours for the Cream reunion concert at Royal Albert Hall to sell
out, and tickets on eBay are going for $2,500 each. U2's Bono recently
lunched with Angelina Jolie, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair at the Davos World
Economic Conference. MiniKiss is a band of vertically-challenged musicians
with face paint. A great tribute article on Johnny Carson, including
pictures from Tiny Tim's on-air wedding (45 million people watched).
Pharmacies are "squeezing out whorehouses" on Mexican border towns, as Americans
drive over to buy cheap prescription drugs. The Eagles will
play at your corporate bash for $2 million (they've had 5 gigs already).
Goodness, did Mariah Carey get enhanced? 25 years ago, Paul
McCartney got busted at the Tokyo airport for pot possession and spent 10 days
singing Beatles songs with other inmates.
This month's The Atlantic features an article on Hania Mufti, who
methodically built a case for genocide against Saddam Hussein and his cronies.
The Letters section includes responses by various economists citing the
rapid increase in wage volatility, steady erosion of median incomes (and
attendant increase in wealth disparity), and the role of software (not
offshoring) as the major source of white-collar job loss (think ATMs, automatic
checkout, and web-based services). Robert Shiller expands on this idea in
American Casino, where he argues that Bush's "ownership society" is
introducing much more risk into society than even businesses entertain.
Rich Masters of Qorvis Communications can teach you how to be a loudmouth pundit
like Bill O'Reilly. The betting firm, sportsinteraction.com, has Ewan
McGregor at 4-to-1 to be the next Bond (sorry, Henry), and Colin Powell at
500-to-1. The top four most dangerous cities for pedestrians are all in
Florida. Better transportation has lowered the lethality of Iraq War
wounded to 10%, the lowest in history (it was 42% for the American Revolution
and 30% for WWII). Teen sex has dropped dramatically, but teen birth
control has risen dramatically. Afghanistan's opium production, now 87% of
the world's total, will be difficult to reduce as it is the principal
income-generator for the country's warlords. There is a long article
on Vladimir Putin, a complex man who has slowly changed the "Rule of Law into
the Rule of Putin." A professor at Harvard is so sick of the pressures of
giving all students high grades that he issues two grades, one that goes on the
transcript, and one that indicates what the student really should have received.
The newest child-rearing books demonstrate that "the age of parents-as-friends
is over." Gilles Kepel, author of Jihad: Expansion et Déclin
de l'Islamisme argues is that radical
Islam is already in decline, and only actions like those of the U.S. keeps it
propped up. The world's best pool player, Efren Reyes, is so much better
than everyone else that other top pros won't play him without being spotted a
ball or two. The Puzzler this month is a bitch. Poetry by John
Updike and Frannie Lindsay, the latter a recent winner of the May Swensen Award.
Posted by jbahr at 11:19 AM | Comments (3)
February 10, 2005
Work Avoidance
I was dutifully working today, trying to make a USB-based keychain storage
device format on a new router product, when I noticed a blog entry comment by
Laurel, which reminded me of my own
web-photo of a buffalo statue that
Junie and I saw in Caspar, WY, a trip that eventually led to a
poem,
but, anyway, I jumped over to Laurel's
blog and saw that she had a piece on Foetry,
which I jumped to, to see Jim Berle's
latest high jinks, and followed some links to an
article
on Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica that
is just fascinating. See how easy it is to avoid work?
I first ran into Dan's strong opinions about poetry
after reading a review of his site by
Bodega Babe that started with:
"His website and others like it are a
disease. Strap on your SARS-ophobic surgery masks and proceed with extreme
caution." After listening to the War of Aesthetics on the blogroll
for the past few months, it was refreshing to find someone who basically thinks
that it's all crap, from Yeats to Eliot to Ashbery. He
sincerely believes that he's a better poet than, well, just about anyone,
including Walt Whitman. You can hear him on his Internet radio
show
if you enjoy the strange pleasure of a New York accent coming to you from
the Twin Cities.
I've already gotten another Time, as the one I read Monday was from
last week. The lead article is on A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientists who
quietly built a network of contacts to distribute nuclear weapon technology -- a
network which included Iran, Libya and North Korea. Once hailed as a hero
in Pakistan (and he still is among many Muslims), Khan is currently under house
arrest. The Pentagon is lobbying to have military death benefits raised
from $12,420 to $100,000 -- which is still less than the $267,000 that the
Federal government gives to survivors of police officers killed on duty.
There are lots of pictures of Condi (Condi in the UK, Condi in Paris) and all of
them manage to make her look pleasantly overwhelmed, which is exactly how she
sounds to me in her recent speeches as Secretary of State. Time
(finally) does a terrific job of laying out the details of Bush's plans for
privatizing parts of Social Security: 1) nearly one-third of
employee-plus-employer contributions (or 4%) can be directed from Social
Security and to a private investment account owned by the employee, 2)
Only persons 55 and younger can elect to do so, 3) The system will phase in over
3 to 5 years, depending upon your age, 4) There will be a small number of
conservative mutual funds among which you can choose, 5) At retirement, you are
forced to take your private account and convert it to an annuity that, together
with Social Security, keeps you above the poverty line, 6) Any funds left
over after buying the annuity is yours and can be willed to your heirs (but not
the annuity), 7) If you die (God forbid) before retirement, the entire private
account is inheritable. Now, that doesn't sound too bad -- except that
yanking one-third of the incoming Social Security stream out of the system is
going to cause trillions of dollars of shortfall before the last of the
older Social Security recipients "leave the system" (a nice euphemism for
dying), and the younger employees start collecting the lesser Social Security
amounts. Meanwhile, Bush says that his plan won't affect anyone over 55 --
but, in fact, Social Security will be quickly under water and unable to pay
current retirees without big changes. There's a great article on Cirque du
Soleil, which is now a half-billion dollar enterprise, and complete juggernaut
in Las Vegas. The drop-dead gorgeous, ex-Miss-World, Aishwarya Rai is
starring in the Bollywood rendition of Pride and Prejudice.
The latest yuppie avocation is buying green coffee beans and roasting them
yourself -- it only takes an inexpensive popcorn popper. The biggest
theological shift in this country is the rapid growth of Roman Catholics in the
Red States previously dominated by Protestants.
Posted by jbahr at 05:35 PM | Comments (7)
February 09, 2005
A Walk Around The BlogWorld
Congratulations to Suzanne
Frischkorn for the well-deserved win of the 2004 Annual Aldrich Poetry
Competition, judged by Mary Oliver. Way to go, dear. /
Everybody think happy thoughts for
Reb Livingston, who is
days (hours?) away from being a new mom. / Typical outtake from
Tricia Lockwood's hilarious
diary:
Me: I'll see you tonight. Oh! Try and identify the student who wrote, "We should be grateful to our forefathers who gave their lives for our country, and possibly in the future," in his paper. I want you to bring him home so I can sleep with him.
Professor: I totally will.
I've decided that HG definitely
has the coolest self-photo of any guy on my blogroll. I think he should
get into the race to be the next Bond. "Gould. Henry Gould." /
First, it was Victoria Chang. Now,
Tony Tost and
Aaron McCollough have bowed
out. A loss for the BlogWorld. /
Josh Corey has an
article up at The Academy of American Poets about the classic poetry primer,
Richard Hugo's Triggering Town. "Read at the right angle, The
Triggering Town can help bridge the gap that now yawns so wide between a
poetry of subjectivity and a poetry that foregrounds the operations of language,
that seeks to demonstrate the fragile constructedness of our selves and the
world." / A.D. is looking
for advice on finding a job. Paul
just got his lectureship funding cut. I don't think this vibrant,
"ownership" economy is working for everyone. /
Janet Holmes relates an interesting
tale about encountering intolerance for TKOP (That Kind Of Poetry):
elliptical, post-Language-school, Fence-magazine-friendly,
non-mainstream. / Mike
Snider continues his discussion of Contemporary Theory and its corrosive
effect on the arts, trading shots with
Jonathan, who's trading shots
with Nick. /
Scoplaw discusses How Poets Talk To
Each Other. / Tony
Robinson recommends out
Dancing with professors: the trouble with academic prose / LeeAnn
Roripaugh hasn't posted an entry since October. Come on, LeeAnn!
I want to hear more about Artichoke Hearts, particularly with V-Day coming up.
/ C. Dale loves his new car. / Lucia
Perillo (the only MacArthur genius in the blogworld?) discusses race in
poetry: "A couple of white people like Tony Hoagland have tried to write
about race recently, brave attempts that nonetheless make me squeamish, I think
because the white person enters the poem with lopsided odds" /
Gary decides that the
High Plain Writers: The
Conservative Arts Renaissance makes him "puke a little." / Katey
whips up a
collage.
/ Aimee links to
Gabe's outstanding
On Being Asked for a Love Poem Article by a Cub Reporter for a Student Newspaper
about Giving Advice to Undergraduates about How to Write Love Poetry /
David Hernandez
convinces me that Field is more than a rejection-slip engine. /
Noah Eli Gordon reviews Liz Waldner
Etym(bi)ology / Hannah
discusses Ivy’s chapbook. /
Eduardo reports that
"A German zoo has imported four female penguins from Sweden in an effort to
tempt its gay penguins to go straight" /
Ana's dad is visiting from
Croatia. / Allen Bramhall
differs with Ron Silliman on
Stephen Vincent. / Jim continues his very funny
commentary on poet's "author
photos." Re: David Lehman - "David, I would probably bananaclip the
pomp. And put down the Rubik's cube." /
Kelli attends "a fantastic poetry
reading ... by Jeannine Hall
Gailey & Natasha Moni." / Laurel definitely has the cutest new
photo among the bloggers of the female persuasion (and I didn't know that it
snowed in Atlanta). / Jennifer tells us that the world's best ice-cream can be made
with liquid nitrogen.
Posted by jbahr at 09:50 AM | Comments (7)
February 08, 2005
Back Home
The next time I'm away from the weblog this long, I'll turn the lights off
and turn down the heat. My stint in San Jose was the usual grueling ordeal
of 14-hour days in the lab, which left no time to see any poet friends.
However, the weather was pretty nice (not that I saw much of it) and Holiday Inn
decided to put me in a cavernous suite with enough rooms to raise a small
family. I drifted off to sleep each night with Moby Dick, which was
just as wonderful as the last two times I read it. On the late-night plane
ride back, I treated myself to a white wine and Martin Cruz Smith's latest
Arkady Renko mystery, Wolves Eat Dogs. MC Smith is one of those
authors whose work I can never wait for in paperback (ditto, Martha Grimes and
Walter Mosley).
I returned home to a lot of mail which had not yet filled my outsized
rural-type mailbox. One check from a client (huzzah!). 5
rejections (Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Massachusetts Review,
Georgia Review, Field) and two acceptances (Green Mountains
Review and Verse). I was particularly happy about Verse
as the poems
I sent were a lot edgier than usual, and I really like the work I've seen there.
I'm convinced that Field isn't really a literary journal -- it's an
organization whose sole function is sending out rejections. I got to sleep
by 2 AM and was up again at 9 to pick up Junie at DIA, then on to the Boulder
Whole Foods to buy groceries for the weekend's cooking. WF always amazes
me: fresh whole flounders, live crawfish, fresh monkfish filets -- and
I live 1000 miles from the ocean. It's a good thing that I don't live
closer to WF, or my grocery bill would exceed my mortgage payment.
But enough about me. Our President was out stumping for his new plan to
gut Social Security last week. I think he's finally bitten off more than
he can chew. My AARP Bulletin (don't laugh, you'll be old one day,
too) had not one, but three, feature articles on 1) why Social Security isn't
broken and 2) how this latest move toward privatized accounts is just another
conservative ploy to dismantle 60 years of Democratic safety-net legislation.
The AARP has 35 million members and damn near all of them vote. Even
Republican legislators are nervous about supporting this Brave New Notion,
remembering what happened to the Democrats in the House elections following the
Republican's ravaging of HillaryCare.
Time features "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America," a list which
includes Billy Graham and son, James Dobson (think: Focus on the Family),
Tim and Beverly LeHaye (think: Left Behind), and Charles Colson (think:
Watergate). Number One on the list was Rick Warren, author of The
Purpose Driven Life, the best-selling hardback in America, and pastor to the
22,000 congregation of the "Saddleback megachurch." Time poses 10
questions for Muammar Gaddafi, who answers with uncharacteristic cogency
regarding foreign policy and WMDs. Margaret Spelling, the Secretary of
Education, is quoted as being opposed to the PBS show episode of Postcards
from Buster, in which the animated bunny visits a Vermont family headed by
two lesbian mothers. Two months after receiving the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, ex-Iraq CPA chief Paul Bremer is under assault by the Administration's
own inspector general for leaving the $8.8 billion Iraqi treasury open to
"fraud, kickbacks and misappropriation of funds." New artists on the
hip-hop scene includes Maxi Jazz (a Buddhist who raps against the war in Iraq),
Matisyahu (a Hasidic Jew with a reggae rap style), Litefoot (a Native American
who raps in Cherokee), and Capital D (an Orthodox Muslim who won't perform where
alcohol is served). Time duly notes that the President's budget will
create annual deficits exceeding $500 billion, if you count the off-budget Iraq
and Afganistan war costs (that makes 3 record deficits in a row). The
Hardee's Monster Thickburger has 1,418 calories, twice as much as a MacDonald's
Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Joe Klein sees a ray of hope for Iraq
as "our universe of potential idiocies has been diminished" and a lot of NeoCon
rats are leaving the ship (e.g., Douglas Feith). Russia has more spies in
the US now than at any time during the Cold War. Merger mania is back with
Proctor & Gamble acquiring Gillette, Baby Bell SBC acquiring AT&T,
Sears-plus-Kmart, Nextel-plus-Sprint, and lots of chatter on the horizon about
other merger possibilities (e.g., Kimberly-Clark and Colgate). The Time
article notes that 75% of all mergers work out poorly for investors (but not for
the management teams that recommend them -- Gillette CEO James Kilts will
personally make $150 million in options profits). Police are cracking down
on the distributors (pharmacies) of the latest prime ingredient for meth
manufacture (cold pills like Sudafed).
I was one of those kids who read a lot, with the inevitable consequence that
I had "private" pronunciations for words that caused me a lot of embarrassment
as a teen. In an 8th-grade English class, I did a report on Odysseus and
pronounced Penelope just exactly how it's spelled, for example. Now that
I'm all grown up, I find that my remoteness from literary happenings limits my
confidence in pronouncing the names of poets. Bob Sward corrected me on
Ruth Daigon (day-gone). Somebody at AWP corrected me on David Lehman
(lee-man). Czeslaw Milosz is featured in this month's Poetry (sheslaw
miloash?) along with the translated work of Adam Zagajewski, Bronislaw Maj,
Wislawa Szymborska and Piotr Sommer -- all Polish poets of note. All of
the work seems to fit into Poetry's narrative editorial preference, if a
bit grim in spots. Sharon Olds shows up with two atypically mysterious
poems ("and I was with the little leeks, / near the sweated egg, near the newts
quick"). Nurske has an interesting short piece ("Sometimes we would walk /
into the cobalt-blue TV, / take off our clothes, / and hang upside down like
bats."). There is the usual batch of anecdotal-descriptive-narrative
poetry, which I find more and more annoying as time goes on (we did this, we saw
that), to wit: Daniel Mark Epstein describes a jellyfish, and Davis
McCombs depicts bats. There's also a good deal of death and old-age
rattling around in this month's poems, perhaps intended to provide the proper
somber tone in an issue dedicated to the recently deceased Milosz. D.H.
Tracy has a lot of fun in Catastrophe ("The right left the left the right
/ to base itself on self-abasement."). Carl Dennis is here
with two prose-y pieces, and Kay Ryan provides two short poems with her
trademark short lines ("Extreme exertion / isolates a person / from help, /
discovered Atlas.") In the review-and-letters section (which is now more
than half of any issue), Clare Cavanaugh (translator of many of this month's
Polish poet's work) discusses Milosz in "Chaplain of Shades" (including the fact
that Milosz died with a copy of Harry Potter in his desk drawer).
Meaghan O'Rourke reviews Bill Knott's The Unsubscriber, noting that Knott
started his poetry career by publishing "posthumously" an "impassioned
collection of verse about the Vietnam War and romantic love" under the name of
Saint Geraud, a "prodigy and victim-genius". Brian Phillips gives no
quarter in his Ten Takes ("[Peter] Gizzi's repertoire of effects is limited
enough that this bardic-decontructionist tone eventually wears thin").
Phillips on Randall Mann's Complaint in the Garden: " ... for the most
part [the poems] ... are wildly unsure of themselves and awkward ..."
Phillips on Komunyakaa' Taboo: "Most of the action in this book
takes place ... somewhere just under the page, in imaginary footnotes."
Phillips on Ted Kooser's Delights and Shadows: "... the word
'heartland' seems to embroider itself in six-inch sampler letters across the
covers of his books." Phillips reserves his most damning review for Fanny
Howe's On the Ground: "Fanny Howe's poems fail intellectually, they
fail as ideas about poems, before they fail as poems .. for dozens of pages at a
stretch the settings are garbled half-lyrics slung in neutral white space").
Phillips is ambivalent about Deborah Greger's Western Art, David Mason's
Arrivals, Anne Winters' political The Displaced of Capital, and
New Formalist Catherine Tufariello's Keeping My Name, but has some
kind words for David Gewanter's The Sleep of Reason.
I was underwhelmed by this month's Cook's Illustrated, but there was a
good recipe for Italian Pot Roast and a recommendation for an $11 bottle of
Barolo to dump into it. Katherine Wong writes in with the suggestion that
you put a rubber band on eggs so they don't roll off the counter prior to using
them in a recipe. There's an excellent chart of fish suitable for sautéing,
including recommended thickness and "flavor assertiveness." Use cherry
tomatoes when regular-sized ones are out of season. You can make sourdough
bread in one day with their step-by-step recipe (but I can't, I don't bake worth
a damn). The best cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches is Jarlsberg.
This month's MIT Technology Review
features Tech & Finance, with the lament that the venture capital community is
still wary of high-tech, and the warning that cuts in Federal funding for basic
research is troubling. TR reports that there are a growing number of
transplants using the stem cell-rich blood harvested from newborn's umbilical
cords. The largest source of atmospheric methane -- belching and farting
livestock -- can be mitigated by new feed formulas with viruses that kill
gas-producing bacteria (Beano for Elsie?). Microsoft has built a "giant
lab" in Beijing to turn research into products. Genetic Savings and Clone
will clone your cat for $50,000. NASA and the US Air Force are working
with Northrop to build a fleet of unmanned robotic attack jets to be launched
from aircraft carriers. Russia's newest museum is devoted to the "world's
deadliest work of art", the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle.
Junie and I both got our Atlantic Monthly, so we can start our
long-distance co-solving of the Puzzler. I'll tell you a little about AM
tomorrow.
Posted by jbahr at 11:28 AM | Comments (5)