July 28, 2005
Long Slog, No Blog
I've been buried under work, as The Product approaches first production.
This is such a great idea and I've been fortunate to assist on its
implementation. More
here and
here about the world's first self-playing digital audio book.
I received Joshua Corey's
stunningly attractive Fourier Series from Spineless Books yesterday, and
was browsing delightedly from quadrant to quadrant last night through it.
BTW, Josh indicates that you can obtain a copy, half-priced, at
Amazon. My sweetie and I have begun reading poetry over the phone
again, and I'm looking for a representative section to read to her, though it's
a flawed medium without seeing the layout and breaks.
Tony is inadvertently
collecting for anagrams for The New Sincerity. My favorites so far
are: "Recent Whitey Sin", and
Peter's "Intense Witchery". Check out the dynamite recipes on his
blog.
Reading Joshua Clover's latest rant against All Things Capital, I
followed his Wikipedia link, which cited a dandy passage on hegemony from Jás
Elsner's Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: Power is a far more
complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it
would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading
those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as
power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still
today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images. Jon
Stewart was riffing last night on the Administration's latest lockstep
relabeling of the The War on Terror, which has apparently morphed into The
Global Struggle Against Extremism. I like that struggle thing,
kinda makes you think of Chavez in the grape fields or Rosa at the front of the
bus. Josh also discusses
this, in an entry slapped up against his explanation of the BitTorrent wonder
and the evil of property rights. These retro appeals to denying commodity
accumulation seem so quaint, considering the depravities of every state that
embraced Communism, but OK, I know that I've been co-opted by the dark forces of
Free Enterprise. As a good side reading, try
Kasey's Poetic Disposability? entry,
with such good natured observations as: A new grammar, a
counter-grammar, emerges. If enough people used Coke bottles as plant-watering
vessels, and only as plant-watering vessels, Coca Cola would go bankrupt
because, let's face it, normal healthy people need a hell of a lot fewer
plant-watering vessels than sugar-and-caffeine addicts need Coke. Now I don't
think either of these utopian conditions are going to become realistic
likelihoods any time soon, but one can at least see the rationale for a
theoretical scenario in which Coke bottles do become subject to, if not a
material-ontological shift, a symbolic-aesthetic reframing.
CDY is diarizing his days at the
Napa Valley Writers Conference, and it's fun to read as I was there last summer.
By coincidence, I noted that most of Geri Doran's publication credits in
Resin were complements of C. Dale's New England Review (I was reading
a little to Junie last night), which shows CDY's prescience in valuing the work
of this Whitman-winning work.
Wendy had 5 poems accepted by Green Hills Literary Lantern, and talks about
the challenges of fiction writing.
Chris stages a production of The
Hunger Oscillations, using Playmobile figures as the cast.
Jean admits that at least one Magritte
work disturbs her (my favorite Magritte is the
one
that adorns the cover of Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky).
Ana translates work by the
Croatian poet Jure Kaštelan.
Pack steals a line from Jebediah Springfield in his discussion of prefaces.
Mairead never disappoints:
"You saw someone who questioned you, saw the
heavy weather of dissent across my face and so jumped your siren, crawling after
me down Congdon, rolling down your window, calling Do you have a question
for me?". Nor AnnMarie: "four collared doves hard-arc up /
the hedgerow beneath their / shadows linseed is pre-blue, a / ghost dust willing
its hectare self". Nor John:
"The Luddite that inhabits my century says, “In order to make a few cents, think
of a bath concession / In some little town like Gabii,” or try auctioneering,
gabbling / out the hysteria of commerce-lust over some bit of frippery, a ring,
a washstand, a property. Prop: what the stagehand skids frowningly about whilst
the curtains". Jeannine
comments on Paisley Rekdal's assertion that "You can write a poem about anything
nowadays, except emotion".
Patricia is hilarious: "The most interesting thing Jesus could do
would be to bring back to life the decomposing brother you’ve been hiding in
your garage, which is not a talent that is presently useful to me."
James wages war against bad
art. Danielle
recommends the arresting and blogger-laden
Coconut.
Craig likes David Woo.
Damn. Laurel's taking a
blog-a-vation. Mike, Reb
and Matt are writing a play! So that's
where LeeAnn went.
Sabrina announces the
winner of the Fig Contest (read the entries, they're outstanding).
Posted by jbahr at 07:51 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
Slacking on a Saturday
Junie and I are driving south through the intense heat to meet up with
Ally and John somewhere in
the Fundamentalist Bastion that is Colorado Springs (actually I think we're
meeting at the Secular Humanist Holiday Inn). Owing to this little trip,
I'll be offline for a day. Maybe I'll bump into
Steve.
Kasey is correct in that I misunderstood one of his points regarding eclecticism
(particularly the multiple points on a vector thing). I honestly wonder if
you read enough blog entries by Silliman, Corey, Mayhew, Gould, Basbøll, Snider,
Yu, Mlinko, Norris, Vitiello, ... whether you couldn't eventually test out of a
couple of college courses. The discussions in this blogworld (Kasey's
recent series being a perfect example) are so much more interesting than
anything I read in P&W, AWP Chronicle or APR (and also,
generally, better-written).
Posted by jbahr at 06:56 AM | Comments (3)
July 22, 2005
Knee-Jerk Tendencies
In his recent post, Eclecticisms, Kasey
managed to crack me up at least 3 times (come home, Kasey, all is forgiven),
including this:
I've always felt that bland eclecticism's worst crime was inspiring a
knee-jerk tendency always to attach the adjective "bland" to the noun
"eclecticism" whenever it appears.
Jordan and others have
commented on what, at first glance, may appear to be a kind of artistic tunnel
vision. I think I understand what Kasey's getting at, though, particularly
after his examples of bland eclecticism (mixing Southwestern, Arts & Crafts, and
Danish Modern in the same living room) versus hot eclecticism (a stark white
leather couch on a 9x12 Tabriz, Shaker sewing cabinet in the corner, huge
picture of Mick Jagger on the wall?). Thus, perhaps, an anthology that is
sufficiently "hot" in its variety would evoke a sense that the tension among its
offerings was an intentional act of juxtaposition.
I can also imagine one arguing that most people, given the knowledge,
opportunity & financing, would opt for the more accomplished artist along a
single line of trajectory. This would be a kind of "why would you read
Stephen King when you can read Dan Simmons?" proposition. Alas, it still
assumes that we share both the same dimensions of appreciation, and an inability
to reside aesthetically on more than one point on a particular vector (e.g., you
can't like Dean Young when you've got Tate, you can't like iceberg lettuce once
you've tasted Whole Food's mixed greens selection.).
Consider your bookshelf as your own personal anthology. On my "recently read"
bookshelf, I've got Martha Grimes, Don DeLillo, Orson Scott Card, Margaret
Atwood, Walter Mosley, and six volumes of Harry Potter rubbing book
jackets with Melville, Hemingway, Orwell, Joyce, & Pynchon. I could
probably add Truman Capote or Normal Mailer, but not both, lest I slip
into bland eclecticism. Something like that.
In defense of Ms. Olds, I enjoyed Satan Says some years ago, and still
love the subdued panic of
Feared Drowned.
Kasey is indeed (to badly paraphrase Jonathan) firing on all cylinders (and
apologies, Kasey, for talking about you like you're not here) in his previous
post, Poetic Disposability. What I think of as aesthetic vectors,
Kasey terms "scales we can meaningfully use to measure". He also thinks
that, in poetry, there is "no significant middle to the scale" (Hallmark on one
end, the rest of us at the other), an interesting thought (and take care, Kasey:
invoking the name of Billy Collins only invests Him with more power). Is there
no popular poetry? Well, actually, the online boards are
chock-a-block with it, but, OK, maybe not much that anyone actually publishes
— assuming that you ignore Angelou, Clifton, &
Robert Service, each of whom dominated the shelves at the Chicago Loop Borders,
when I was there last week.
I'm also trying to understand my relative lack of appreciation (and it's only
relative) for PA work, since I wholly subscribe to Kasey's view that virtually
all grammatical constructions fulfill a meaning-making purpose (even "milk me
sugar"). Maybe it's that my neurons don't fire in the same places.
Maybe they would if I spent the time to acquire the taste. In my graduate
studies of Artificial Intelligence, I often found myself attempting to reconcile
the constructionist work of Gödel/Turing/Chomsky and compiler-writing theorists
with neurological/behavioral findings (and it's interesting that you could go
through two years of courses and never hear the name Wittgenstein). Who's
making art and who's making noise? What poems/poets are Beatles-esque?
Is a poem's ultimate value a matter of its complexity? layering?
innovation? What about sound? What about the way it looks on the
page? If it's powerfully evocative, does it get points? What if it's
perfect IP? It doesn't appear that I've got this all sorted out. To
quote Ellen Ripley: "yeah, I get that all the time."
~~~
Jonathan has begun, off the
top of his considerably innovative head, a list of ironic tonalities, including:
...Mock-heroic, campy, faux-naif, detached, paranoid, deadpan dry, over-eager,
"teen-age sarcastic," Proustian-aristocratic, proletarian, mock-sincere.
Can you add to the list?
You all have a nice weekend.
Posted by jbahr at 07:20 AM | Comments (2)
July 21, 2005
Karl Makes The Cover
One thing that I like about Trantor's legendary
Jacket is that it has links to future
issues that have not yet taken form, although for some reason the
October 2005 issue appears
to be pretty well fleshed out. I have followed Jacket ever since I
found that it contained a Mary Jo Bang poem (I am such an unabashed
Banglophile). Like most post-avant organs, however, I'm also eventually
aware of the fact that I love the reviews of PA work significantly more than the
work itself. A typical example is Noah's
review of Aaron
Kunin's Folding Ruler Star, which I thought was just splendid, though I
wasn't as taken with the verse example themselves (not to be picking on Aaron,
and I admit that I should read the entire book).
~~~
Jonathan comments on
Kasey's recent post, which takes up
where Ron leaves off on the
matter of anthologies. The usual interesting intercourse among some bright
guys, but I admit to wondering about Kasey's thoughts here:
Someone might object that this discounts the possibility that some readers
could find that they value poets from both ends of the spectrum equally. Sure,
there could be such readers. There are probably also people who identify
politically with both Noam Chomsky and Ann Coulter. These people are confused.
When a unifying metaphor motivates an anthology's
constituents, I might agree (although, perhaps, a fair pairing with Chomsky
would be Bork). Anthologies such as the reviled and
beloved Best American Poetry, however, seem to me to be more in the
nature of a Whitman Sampler, a collection whose goal is to be representative of
a broad range of voices. The best thing about BAP is not that it
is a perfect snapshot of the poetic landscape (although it does a pretty good
job, taken over any four or five year stretch), but that it is available in
airport bookstores. I'm only one-quarter kidding here. As much
time as I have spent in airports in the past 10 years, I can tell you I've been
tickled more than once to see a civilian pick up a BAP and actually page
through it for a while (though seldom, to be honest, actually buy it). Who
knows, they could be puzzling through a Alice Notley poem. I remember
reading BAP 1998, and, among the work of the regulars (BC, Pinsky, Hall,
Bly, Simic, Levine, ...), there were poems by Eric Ormsby, Karl Kirchwey,
and Emily Fragos that made me scratch my head and pencil my perplexed reactions
in the margins. I wonder if I would be ready for Kirsten Kaschock today
had I not been slowly lowered into the bathwater. This is probably just
another example of my favorite adage: you can't skip a step.
~~~
Sure enough, Karl, AKA TurdBlossom showed up on the cover of Time,
accompanied by a long, balanced article on the facts of RoveGate (including a
detailed timeline). Valerie Plame is damned cute. 10 Questions
(mainly lightweight) for Margaret Spellings, Department of Education Secretary,
marginally famous for criticizing the introduction of a lesbian couple on PBS's
Postcards from Buster. The Sunni contingent is stalling the
completion of the new Iraqi constitution, and the committee responsible may ask
for a 6-month extension. Found: a letter written in 2003 by Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger, now the Pope, in which he applauds a German critic of
Harry Potter because "those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and
[can] deeply distort Christianity in the soul ...". Arnold Schwarzenegger
has decided to terminate his million-dollar-a-year promotional gig with a muscle
magazine. Discounters Costco and Sam's Club will be offering health
insurance plans. Joe Klein tells the Bushies to
Stop Trying to Spin the Iraq War. The article Unraveling The Plot
details the British investigation of the London bombing (which seemed
significantly faster and more professional than our agencies' investigation of
9/11). Time speculates that Dreamworks founders Spielberg, Katzenberg and
Geffen may be entertainment giants but lousy CEOs. The DEA is cracking down
physicians who have over-prescribed pain drugs, prosecuting 450 in the past six
years. A long article with J. K. Rowling (rhymes with bowling) on her life
and the plans after Lord Voldemort (she pronounces it with a silent final "t")
is defeated in the 7th book of the HP series (she's damned cute, too).
Time recommends DVDs of mystery classics, including The Big Sleep, The
Thin Man, Death on the Nile, and Blade Runner.
~~~
Thanks to Jim for pointing out Coulter's recent
article (actually funny in places) in which she disses Supreme Court
appointee John Roberts (she also reminds us that "Democrats are the party of abortion,
sodomy and atheism").
Posted by jbahr at 08:13 AM | Comments (2)
July 19, 2005
Jordan's Great Idea
I was taken by the elegance and simplicity of Jordan's
tribute
to poets whose work he has enjoyed this year. It's such a good idea that
I'm going to steal it. I've started my own list of
Exceptional
Poems for 2005, though I haven't gotten very far yet. I'm combing
through my scribblings, blog entries, and marginal notes in poetry books &
journals this week to round out the beginning of the list. I'll keep you
posted when I update it.
~~~
The current issue is the BusinessWeek Retirement Guide,
something I expect to do when I'm 70-something, if the economy and my savings
continue their current slow dance. Other items of note include:
Samsung is placing 50-foot sculptures of their cell-phones in airports all over
the world. The latest thing in teen summer experiences is the weight-loss
camp. Shareholders are expressing shock at the $32 million severance
package for ousted Morgan Stanley Co-President Stephen Crawford, who served in
the position for three months (yes, that's over $40,000 an hour).
Yahoo! and Google are expanding their for-fee library-material search
services (for example, letting you purchase a single article from The New
England Journal of Medicine). Television viewership has dropped 20% in
the past 20 years, but inflated commercial costs has kept their proportion of
advertising revenues relatively steady. Robert Barker thinks that Proctor
& Gamble's $57 billion buyout of Gillette is still a bargain (even though half a
billion of that goes to current Gillette executives). The security
consulting industry is huge, almost $50 billion in revenue now (John Ashcroft
and Tom Ridge have both started companies). BusinessWeek suggests
that the Rehnquist court has spent too little time dealing with business issues
(anti-trust law, business litigation, regulation). Job growth for
mid-to-high-end programmers and analysts has accelerated. Apple has
surprised analysts again with a 75% jump in revenue vis a vis the same
quarter last year. The IRS has collected more than $4 billion from wealthy
abusers of illegal tax shelters, but the rate of collection is slowing as
Congress refuses to increase the budget for enforcement agents. Eastern
Europe is becoming the new Detroit, as major car companies build plants in
Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia's oil production
growth has slowed dramatically as foreign investors rethink the implications of
Putin's moves toward nationalization and recent dismantling of Yukos.
Fierce infighting between the old guard and the Change to Win Coalition
threatens to break up the AFL-CIO. The drug industry has announced more
vaccines this year than in the past 10, including shots for meningitis,
shingles, tuberculosis, cervical cancer, and whooping cough. The venerable
Nike Air Force 1 sneaker, first introduced during the Reagan Administration,
still provides $1 billion in revenue.
~~~
The Rove/Plame/Wilson/Novak/Cooper controversy continues to heat up (it's
going to be on the next cover of Time), even as leading Republicans try
desperately to downplay its importance (see
Seth's blog for the latest).
And from today's WSJ: Starbucks has become a major music retailer,
and the labels are taking notice. Fed chief Alan Greenspan refused to use
economic tools to cool down the housing market. President Bush is in the
last rounds of review for a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, and the smart
money says it's most likely a female justice. A federal jury convicted San
Diego's acting mayor (the one who narrowly beat a surfboard shop owner) for
taking bribes from strip clubs. A study shows that wages of non-managerial
positions have not kept pace with inflation (duh). Weekend sales of the
newest Harry Potter, over $100 million, exceeded that of all movie box office
revenue. Carol Hymowitz suggests outsourcing expensive U.S. CEO jobs to
Europeans, who typically make less in salary and bonuses. College tuition
hikes are slowing (Harvard's increase was only 4.5%, to $41,675).
Posted by jbahr at 08:58 AM | Comments (2)
July 13, 2005
Logan's Latest Lambasting
Honestly, William Logan just cracks me up. He's not so much a reviewer
as the Master of Ceremonies at a Poetic Celebrity Roast. Now, before
you all get angry at me, I'm not saying I agree with him (particularly
about, say, Dean Young). But, the guy has a way with words, and he manages
to zero on the most irritating aspects of almost any poet under his microscope.
It's difficult to get through a Logan book review and not identify with some
annoying aspect of a poet that always niggled you, but that you never really
engaged as a fully-formed thought until Bully Bill articulated it.
His latest
edition of reviews showed up last month in the form-friendly, somewhat
right-of-center, all earth tones and staid fonts, New Criterion. The
review this time is titled The Great American Desert, which Logan eventually
manages to tie back to the Nebraska plains and the poetry of our current Poet
Laureate. The victims this month are rather an odd mix: John Ashbery
(Where Shall I Wander), Dean Young (Elegy on Toy Piano), Jorie
Graham (Overlord) , Kevin Young (Black Maria), Ted Kooser
(Delights and Shadows), and Richard Wilbur (Collected Poems 1943-2004).
John Ashbery: Ashbery’s poems are like widgets manufactured
to the most peculiar specifications and in such great numbers the whole world
widget market has collapsed ... Almost all Ashbery’s poems, those dead-ends of
déjà vu, offer the dream of meaning endlessly deferred—the deception finally
becomes the expectation ... Here we have the embrace of American idiom, whether
high-stepping or lowbrowed (Ashbery’s range is as broad as Whitman’s), the steep
descent of tone, the enjambment almost as flirtatious as Milton’s ...Ashbery is
a man not afraid to write whatever rattles into his head .... When you read his
poems, you sigh with pleasure to see a thing so odd done with such panache, such
savoir-faire, such élan, such … well, whatever the word would be, it would be
French, in order to apply to that ultimate boulevardier of American poetry, Mr.
Ashbery.
Dean Young: ... students in the School of Goofball
Poetics, boys who cut their teeth on Ashbery and Charles Simic and James Tate
and now show little interest in any poems written before Dada came to town. Dean
Young’s sixth book, Elegy on Toy Piano, is fairly representative of the younger
generation, full to the gills with geegaws and thingmabobs and dojiggers ...
Poets find it hard to be serious now, unless they’re writing about their lives
(on which they tend to be all too grave, as if working up a pathology report).
At best, Young’s poems mock themselves as well as poets of more serious temper.
At worst, they’re the poems of someone who took a mail-order course in
surrealism ... Sometimes his poems have delightfully loopy premises (one
consists of a hundred true/false statements; another juggles the complicated
mathematics involved in liking a married couple), but sooner or later they run
out of steam—he’s not a poet who knows when he’s overstayed his welcome.
(Blogger's note: of all the books reviewed, I think Logan was most
egregiously unstudied about Young's work).
Jorie Graham: Jorie Graham loves big ideas the way small boys like big trucks. Her books
start with some notion just the far side of grandiose ... and end up grinding the Himalayas down to gravel.
This is odd shorthand ... recreates some of the frenzy,
the helpless panic, of those first moments of D-Day ... Yet the bullying italics and the knowing use of
“reading,” as if the sands were simply another text, drag us away from the
helpless soldiers to the mastering presence, the overlording, of the poet
herself ... For a long while, Graham’s poetry has suffered this peculiar
immodesty. No matter where her poems start, sooner or later their subject
becomes the poet’s hyperkinetic awareness of her own senses ... If Graham had concentrated on the accident and contingency of war,
had honored the men whose deaths she casually invokes, Overlord might
have become the sort of serious meditation that produced Geoffrey Hill’s
Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983). In the wrack and wreckage of her current work, it’s hard to remember the
difficult pleasures of Erosion (1983) and The End of Beauty (1987),
high-voltage moments in the poetry of the Eighties ... Graham’s lack of any sense of proportion reduces the argument
of Overlord to something like “On the one hand, my kitty has
AIDS; on the other, a whole lot of guys died on Omaha
Beach.”
Kevin Young: There’s this skirt, see, named Delilah Redbone, see,
and this dick in Shadowtown named Jones, and the sap falls for her. The
frail’s maiden name was Trouble, and the dick, his middle name is Danger. If
you’ve never gotten your fill of alibis, gunsels, snitches, paybacks,
hideouts, and hooch, Kevin Young’s Black Maria pays homage to the great films noirs
of the Forties and the hard-boiled fiction of Chandler and Hammett ... Young, whose last book was a misdirected and sentimental
reworking of the blues, is an ambitious young poet with quirky ideas. Black
Maria is meant to be a film, its sections, called “reels,” composed of poems
that straggle down the page half-starved for punctuation ... Young loves
wordplay more than any contemporary except Paul Muldoon; he’ll go to great
lengths to fetch a pun, and even greater ones for a bad joke. The poems here
are addicted to internal rhymes, winsome glances at the reader, and a diction
that slides from the most perfumed poeticism to black dialect ...Young has tried so hard to make this a tour de force, he’s
forgotten, not just the ontology that makes film noir so haunting, but the
suspense that makes it entertaining.
Ted Kooser: Ted Kooser is a prairie sentimentalist who writes
poems in an American vernacular so corn-fed you could raise hogs on it. Kooser
never met a word he didn’t like, unless it was a long one, or one derived from
Latin, or Greek, or French—in the new poems of Delights & Shadows,
which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the older ones in Flying
at Night, he stands for a foursquare, hidebound American provincialism
that, by gum, has every right to write poems and, by golly, means to write
them, too ... Kooser wants a poetry anyone can read without shame and
understand without labor, because he thinks poetry has too long been in the
hands of poets who “go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not
downright discouraging.” This would come as a surprise to Shakespeare and
Milton, Pope and Browning. There are a couple of haunting narrative poems in his new
volume, but everything else is
straight as a rail fence and just as wooden, too. Before he let plain speech
become its own tyranny, before he started worrying about “poetry cops” intent
on enforcing the “rules,” he showed signs of becoming a poet who knew
something about cruelty and had a retrospective melancholy eye. Then he
decided he’d be better off chawing plug tobacco and selling straw hats to
tourists.
Richard Wilbur: In the past, I have written with such pleasure on
Richard Wilbur’s elegant and well-mannered verse that perhaps I may be
forgiven for not cracking a full bottle of champagne across the bow of his
latest Collected Poems ... About the best that can be said of the new poems is
that they are reminiscent of Wilbur’s late style and impressive poems for any
octogenarian to write ... It’s curious that John Ashbery, who is only a few
years younger, still seems our contemporary, while Wilbur sounds like an old
fussbudget sorry he threw out his last pair of spats ... I trust that Richard Wilbur will be writing poems for a long while to
come, and that some will be better than the new poems here. His Collected
Poems, which includes poems so ornate Fabergé would have wept, deserves to
be on the bookshelf of any serious reader.
~~~~
Time's cover article, Rush Hour Terror, is predictably about
the London bombing tragedy. It was difficult to read the quotes of
Londoner after Londoner and not admire their dignity and grit. Likewise,
the performance of Tony Blair during the week of both a major attack and an
important G8 session. Daniel Benjamin explains Why Iraq Has Made Us
Less Safe (the Iraq-as-recruiting terrorist aid argument) and the
ever-predictable Charles Krauthammer replies Why That's Ridiculous
(terrorist are the product of repressive, corrupt Middle East regimes, and
"freeing" Iraq deals with the source of the problem). A good story about
how an Afghan shepherd, and his townspeople, helped a Navy SEAL escape capture
by the Taliban. The new Hong Kong Disneyland will look quite like the one
in Anaheim, except they're serving dim sum on Main Street, and many of the
park's murals are replaced by scenes from Mulan. Starvation on
the Web describes the hundreds of pro-anorexia sites where people swap tips
for losing weight. There are now over 1,000 youth courts in the U.S.,
handling petty crime by juveniles, and where judge, prosecutors, client's
counsel, and jury are all teens. After being critically killed 30 years
ago for his work's inconsequentiality, Richard Tuttle has found his subtle,
fragile art increasingly accepted as masterful. The Time movie
reviewer likes Wedding Crashers and thinks that Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory isn't dark enough (and with Depp and Burton at the helm,
that's surprising).
~~~~~
Food fight! Food fight!
Josh responds to my thoughts regarding the Nealon article with a number of
well-constructed complaints that gave me a greater appreciation of
Reader-Response Theory. I don't think Marxist theory is simplistic at all,
actually. (I do wonder, however, if its successful practice doesn't
virtually guarantee abuses of the state that comes with the centralized control
of planned economies, but that's another issue). It's also not clear to me
that recent history can be neatly summarized as "Communism collapsed, capitalism
rushed in to fill the void". My real point, imperfectly outlined, is that
capitalism is a wholly inadequate term to describe the current
geopolitical and economic situation in the U.S, much less what's happening in
hundreds of other countries. Like the terms free enterprise and
values tossed around by the right, capitalism is more a token
(a paraphrase, even the ultimate reductionist poem?) of a collection of
phenomena about which you may be happy or enraged. Likewise, the
energizing term Vietnam War became, as Josh points out, shorthand for a
dozen societal complaints. We were (as my mother would say) full of piss
and vinegar in those days, and I think that even without The War, much of my
generation would have been marching for civil rights, gender rights, and
legalized pot. My point was actually that even LangPo enthusiasts employ
terms that, though fatally flawed as containers of meaning, conveying enough
imagery that those who hear it can be reasonably assured to know what you're
getting at. On a parallel track, I also think that capitalism is
the least of our troubles, and elevating it to the role of antagonist in this
play leaves way too may villains lurking in the curtains.
When I say that "you can't really know anything", I mean
it as a tautology, not a thesis. I am, for example, challenging the
simplicity of thought that is common in the current administration. I am
also proposing that we can't express ourselves without reductive symbols that
are both evocative and approximate. This is why I have difficulty with the
notion that poem can be stripped of its cues, that a poet has any chance of
letting a poem just mean what it's going to mean —
unless, of course, one publishes random lines from the phone book. Not
that poetry-without-control doesn't have some appeal, it just seems as
impossible to me as societies without concentrations of power.
Again, I have nothing against poetry that
strives to combat the injustice of power and privilege (though I wonder if power
and privilege aren't the end result of every societal system). I just
think it's like using a Giacometti bust to crack walnuts.
I don't mind being labeled Quietist, as long as
I can retain my liberal credentials. Mainly, because, for as often as I've
read Ron's blog and articles, I'm
still not quite sure how you sneak into the SOQ camp, or for that matter, avoid
it. I fully agree with Josh on the matter of entertainment. I
mean, Shakespeare is entertainment, Pynchon is entertainment, Miró is
entertainment. And no, that's not all poetry is, perhaps (though I suspect had I
used the term art, it would have been better received). Anyway, my
rather feeble attempt at articulating this was to mention that many post-LangPo
poets seem to be more inspired by display than didacticism. There's
a fun, quirky, irreverent sense to a
Lara Glenum or Jim Berhle
poem, and also an underlying seriousness (exemplified by
Tony's New Sincerity movement).
I'm sure, to quote Josh, that there are also poets for whom there is no "...
better means than lyric poetry to try and discover what it really means to be an
"I" in a world that wants to recast all choice as consumption, that arbitrarily
denies "I-ness" to the nonmale and nonwhite, and that corrupts language into a
mere instrument of control". I probably don't read enough of them as I
should, or perhaps I do and don't recognize their motivation and execution.
I really did like the Nealon article, for its eloquence and insights. If I
came off cynical, it wouldn't be the first time. Junie, my spiritual and
sensual sweetie, says it all the time.
~~~~~
Controlling 2.5 of the 3 Branches of Government Means Never Having To Say
You're Sorry
Republicans mounted an aggressive and coordinated defense of Karl Rove
yesterday, contending that the White House's top political adviser did nothing
improper or illegal when he discussed a covert CIA official with a reporter.
Details
here, and thanks to Seth for
the reference.
Posted by jbahr at 08:01 AM | Comments (6)
July 12, 2005
Karl's ComeUppance and Red Rice Salad
If you get tired of cold summer pasta salads (not that I often do), it's nice
to have an alternative. I modified the Red Rice Salad from The New
Basics some years ago, and it's a great accompaniment for cookout fare.
You'll need:
2 cups of Basmati (or Texmati) rice
A bunch of radishes, cleaned and sliced thinly
1 cup of red pepper, either diced or cut into 1" thin strips
1 cup of diced red onion
2 beets, cooked, peeled and diced (or you can buy canned)
One-half cup of chopped fresh chives
4 Big T of chopped dill (or you can use dried dill in a pinch)
First, make the dressing and let it sit. Mix up the following and set it
aside:
One-half cup of white vinegar
4 Big T of prepared horseradish (not the raw kind)
2 Big T of whole-grain mustard (or you could trying making
Medieval Mustard)
2 teaspoons of sugar
2 teaspoons of salt
One-quarter teaspoon of freshly ground pepper
1 cup of olive oil (extra-virgin, if you have some to sacrifice)
Cook the rice according to directions, usually 2-for-1 with water, boiled and
then simmered with the top on for 15 minutes. Cook the beets unskinned
with some of the tops on to avoid losing all that red beetness in the water,
then peel the skin and let cool and firm up before slicing. Mix everything
together (the rice can still be warm), until nicely tossed and let chill for an
hour in the fridge until the flavors blend.
~~~~~
Every day for two weeks, I've been Googling "Plame Rove" to see if the MSM was going
to let the bastard off the hook. White House Press Secretary
Scott
McClellan was
barraged by an NBC reporter yesterday, and it looks like the press might
actually be growing some cojones finally (see
Seth's blog for more).
In case you haven't heard, two years ago, someone leaked to conservative
columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA undercover officer
— presumably a White House ploy to discredit former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson (Plame's husband), who embarrassed the Bushies with
evidence Saddam Hussein never tried to obtain nuclear materials from Niger (one
of the many reasons motivating the Iraqi invasion). Disclosing the
identity of a covert operative is a Federal crime, and U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate. Time reporters Matthew
Cooper and Judith Miller faced jail time for refusing to disclose the sources
for articles they were preparing (but which were never published).
Curiously, Novak, who also refused to divulge his source, has escaped any
consequences. Rove and his attorney have been back-pedaling all week, and
now say that Rove discussed Plame privately with a half-dozen reporters, but
only after the Novak article was out. Rumors have it that Rove, Dick
Cheney, and/or V.P. Chief of Staff Scooter Libby may have been directly
responsible for what is not a political embarrassment, but a criminal offense.
One can only hope. If they finally nail Rove, maybe they can look to see
if he still has those Egyptian symbols burned into his palm.
~~~~~
From the MIT Technology Review: Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of
MIT's Media Lab, is pressing ahead with the design of an Internet-ready $100
laptop (HDL), in hopes of obtaining enough funds to place up to 200 million of
them in the hands of third-world children. If enough commercial and
residential builders include the infrastructure in their plans, new wireless
ZigBee devices will allow household appliance to talk to each other, and the
cost of adding switches, thermostats, and sensors will be a fraction of what it
costs to retrofit them today. After the success of its $10 million Ansari
X prize, NASA has created other prizes to stimulate private invention, including
prizes for: producing oxygen from lunar soil, and designing cable material
light and strong enough to support a satellite-tethered space elevator.
Connecticut-based Mohegan Sun Casino is experimenting with information systems
that track the bets and behavior of high-rollers, in an attempt to determine who
to comp for rooms and meals. The article Social Machines discusses continuous
computing, the prospect of being always wired in via instant messaging,
auto-podcasting, WiFi and smart homes. One day soon, you may want to
change your diet based upon the results of your genomic tests. Part of the
success of the WiFi-ready PlayStation Portable is due to hackers' applications,
which can turn the PSP into a Tivo viewer or a web browser. More teenagers
(dubbed Generation Rx) are abusing prescription painkillers than illicit drugs.
~~~~~~~~~
From the yesterday and today's WSJ: Google employees who made
millions in last year's IPO have started a multi-million-dollar bidding war for
various properties in Atherton, California, one of the most elite areas in
Silicon Valley and a short drive to the company's headquarters. The
president of Kyrgyzstan is reconsidering hosting a major U.S. airbase, bowing to
possible pressure from China and Russia, who see many of the new post 9/11
military staging bases as uncomfortably close to their back yards. A
recent study shows that driving while using a cell phone makes one 4 times more
likely to have a serious accident. The world's love affair with DVDs may
be abating — Dreamworks and Pixar have both
reported large numbers of returns from retailers recently. China announced
that it is permitting foreign institutional investors to buy up to $10 billion
in the stock of Chinese companies, as share prices continue to freefall.
In an act of startling insight, Bush told FBI agents that there's no reasoning
with "the kind of people who blow up subways and buses". The growth of
higher-paying jobs outpaced the growth in lower-paying jobs for the first time
in 4 years. So many high-schoolers have perfect GPA's, great SATs, and
activity-laden resumes, that they're now focusing on writing the perfect
university application essay — and, of course, expensive seminars are popping up
to teach them how to do just that. California suspended issuing ID cards
for medical marijuana, fearing the Feds' reaction to the program and its
clients. The Navy relieved Guantanamo's commander of duty for
"unspecified inappropriate practices ... not related to the terror-war prison".
Ten years ago, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic invaded the safe haven of
Srebrenica, murdering 7,500 mostly male Bosnian Muslims, and deporting 25,000
women and children. Though indicted for war crimes, he is still free and
at large.
Posted by jbahr at 08:42 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2005
Messianic Campiness
Of the many fascinating inter-blog discussions this week, my vote for most
engaging is the discourse between Henry
and Josh on Christopher Nealon's Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in
Late-Late Capitalism (available online for $12 from
Ingenta). As I know little about Language Poetry, and enough to be
dangerous about economics, I was relieved that their civil and elegant exchange
involved as much about the latter as the former, to wit:
Josh: I think many American poets are coming to grips with
the crisis that Steve Evans grimly and succinctly describes (in the "Field
Notes" section of the latest
Poker) as finding it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism.
Henry: Curious how left-politically-oriented literary
readings, like
Josh's - now that Marxism appears finished for the most part as a
systematic economics, and as a political movement -
re-animate the Benjamin/Adorno term "messianic". As though there's a ratio
between actual political conditions (since 1989) and the level of vague
utopian-mystical emphasis in some literary circles. // I find these
equations between "late-late-capital conditions" and changes in poetic style
sort of tedious and depressive, or oppressive. Something a-historical and
attenuated about them : general spleen about working conditions & politics gets
larded with these pretentious comments on the latest poetic in-group fringe
phenomena. "Late-late-capitalism" : how baroque, considering current conditions
in India, China, and around the world : how utterly irrelevant as a descriptor.
I bought and read the tract in question, a marvelously well-written piece,
irrespective of your take on the matter. It starts out almost layman-ish
in its discussion of "recent innovative North American poetry" and the "status
of a new aesthetics" in a literary world more influenced by Language Poetry than
it would like to admit. Some of Nealson's important introductory
thoughts:
These poets, referred to as "post-Language" writers ... raise interesting questions about new habits of literary criticism, since their poems read both as theory and poetry ... [and] ... have become invested in a historical story about what Theodor Adorno called "damaged life", and Susan Stewart might call the 'fate' of the material world, its past and possible futures.
... a "damaged" material life ... [is] ... the story of something like really, really late capitalism; capitalism in a fully globalized and triumphal form. ... Depending upon how one understands the massive glut of capital unleashed on the world markets since the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism has either taken on a new, omnipotently viral character ... or it is the last, seizing phases of a horrible addiction to its own mobility.
We might say that the camp aspect of post-Language writing, meanwhile, is the rueful astonishment that, against all odds, this liquidation is still not complete: post-Cold War global economic volatility has not resulted in wholesale disaster for the United States or Europe. ... Instead, late-late capitalism gives texture to our everyday lives more murmuringly.
I must digress for a moment and explain my own ideas about capitalism,
a notion more burdened with ideological baggage than Marxism ever was. I
understand the necessity of attaching symbols to vague irritants, but I
sincerely doubt that capitalism describes, in the main, most of what's
happening in today's bewildering global machinations (and I'm pretty sure that
Adam Smith would agree with me). Consider the effect of combining
some relatively recent inventions:
1. The rule of law.
2. Property rights.
3. The burden and freedom of choice.
4. Mobility in all its insidious forms.
5. Unfettered access to wide varieties of "information".
6. The establishment of organizations, specifically charged with
minimizing disruption.
It seems to me that these things, and other aspects of the 20th century (the
U.S. being
the only undamaged economy after WWII, the distortion of priorities during the
Cold War, ...) have gotten us to the present state of conglomerate-heavy,
multinational, free-trade-based, economic empire (backed by a considerable
military capability). A present that includes a strong secularism, a
relatively high standard of living, a bearable amount of autocratic dictate, and
cyclical bouts of nostalgia for the past. Certainly, dystopic theories of
capitalism aren't convincing enough to explain concentration of power, as it has
happened almost always, everywhere (my own theory, backed with considerable
personal experience, is that power accrues to those that desire it most
strongly, persons who often turn out to be very focused sociopaths).
The irony in all this (including the writings of many LangPo
theorists), is that the linguistic artifacts which have served as catalysts
(say, the Vietnam War) are as oblique and artificial as the cultural coding
supposedly embedded within conventional speech (and pre-LangPo poetry, and (gasp)
the SOQ). Let me explain: I went off to a liberal college in 1968.
We marched in the grape fields. We rallied for Humphrey. We hated
the War. We were involved, we were angry. We also didn't have the
slightest idea what we were talking about. That doesn't mean that we
weren't doing the right thing (I still think we were), or that the Vietnam War
wasn't a long-running atrocity (it was). Very few of us ever saw a rice
paddy, and even those that did only experienced a small, personal tranche of
What It All Was. Fast forward to the evils of globalism, the growing gap
between rich and poor, the diminution of civil liberties, the commoditization of
nearly everything. Frankly, we still don't know what we're talking about.
It's just too complifuckingcated (to borrow the coinage of a friend from grad
school). You can drill down and drill down until you've unearthed the
details of almost anything — the Enron bust, the
War in Iraq, the appeal of Intelligent Design — and you're still a lifetime of
study away from actually kenning it all. So, we borrow from the culture,
talk in jargon with those who agree with us, make up new symbologies to
encapsulate whole oceans of complexity that we couldn't begin, in their
entireties, to keep in our brain. We create our own local priesthoods, we
develop our own mythologies.
I find poetry to be an odd and generally ineffective medium for political
thought. A couple of times in a century, a poem may have the communicative
power of Picasso's Guernica. The rest of the time, it's
entertainment. Uplifting entertainment, artful entertainment, even
inspirational entertainment. In other words, it is difficult to get
the news from poems, but we can live life less miserably in its presence
(apologies to WCW). I am befuddled by the disdain with which many poets
approach the notion that poetry is meant to give pleasure, and the belief that
poetry just gotta be important. More than anything, this
distinction seems to separate the SOQ from theory-based verse.
But, I digress. Nealon characterizes LangPo's contribution as "an
argument on behalf of three interrelated arguments about participatory
readership, language, and the commodity form ... active readership points to a
belief that difficult, unconventional texts, rather than being closed to
readers, are actually more open than traditional literary texts because they
don't smother ... readers with genre cues, overdetermined tropes, clichés,
or heavily rehearsed rhetorical movements." He discusses the work
of Kevin Davies, Joshua Clover, Rod Smith, & Lisa Robertson and proposes
that post-Language poets employ campiness and a degree of resignation (yes, I'm
vastly simplifying). In one interesting contrast of LangPo and
post-LangPo, Nealon states: "This [LangPo] set of beliefs and practices
around the materiality of language is significantly different from the
testamentary, expectation-laden materiality in the work of the post-Language
poets who most interest me." He notes the widely-held belief among the LangPo
old guard that Gen X poets are "apathetic" and "de-politicized", which he
ultimately dismisses by saying that, although not "movement" poets, post-LangPo
poets do write "with an acute knowledge of the susceptibility of their materials
to historical change." Nealon finds hints of "messianic message" in much
of post-LangPo work (and gives specific examples from the work of Josh Clover).
In discussing Robertson's Debbie, An Epic he states that it is a utopian
work, "a prismatic pastoral, gorgeously and adventuresomely typeset ... so
that not even the physical matter of the text eludes ... decoration". (which
almost sounds like a charge of stealing the textual and conceptual freedom of
LangPo, without having to pay the price of politically-motivated relevance).
There is a sense in the post-LangPo work that Nealon offers that the poets are
aware of "the frightening array of material that has become commodified in late
capitalism", but that it's nobody's fault in particular. Nealon suggests
that post-LangPo poets, such as Davies, follow Marx's dictate that the
philosophers may interpret the world, but the point is to change it.
All in all, a wonderful read.
~~~~~~~~~~
Actually, it occurs to me that the best possible accompaniment to this article is to read Jim's complete list of answers to Ask An Avenging Poet.
~~~~~~~~~~
I was tickled by Kasey's model of poetry as Twinkie + Creamy Center, and the rhetorical question: What if a poet (e.g., Lisa Jarnot, Clark Coolidge, Lara Glenum) wants to write entirely in Creamy Centers? Kasey's post was in partial response to Jonathan's hypothesis that poetry is "distinctive kind of thinking". I tend to agree with Henry:
I guess I would question whether this is an either-or thing. Why can't a poem have meanings, which can be extrapolated from the poem, & yet retain its integrity & quiddity or whatever as an artistic end-in-itself? The sum is greater or different than its parts - the meanings are abstracted from the poem after all. But these meanings are also evidence of the poem's generative capacities.
All of this is getting at the idea that something besides the varieties of
interpretation of the text is "taking the top of your head off". Is
epiphany localizable, like some kind of benign tumor? Frankly, I think
not. But then, I have a hard time with considering poetry "a kind of
thinking" in the first place. This may be because I've spent a lifetime
trying to get some precision into my thinking (and occasionally in the thinking
of others), and what's going on in what I consider the best of poetry isn't
about precision, exactly. The payoff in poetry for me is in its potential
for transformative ambiguity, reframing common experience in ways that heighten and
reinterpret the details of life. For others, poetry evokes the kind of
pleasure a Turner painting may — hitting an
emotional G-spot. Now, that kind of poetry may be passé examples of SOQ,
but who am I to say it's not a valid goal of the art?
I can't be the only one who is amazed at what a poem turns out to say only after
I've written it. Poems like Patricia's wonderful
Book of Watchers
are so much more profound than their storyline and diction. Its "creamy
center" is, in fact, the sense of just barely understanding something
extraordinary, something otherworldly, something in one's peripheral vision.
Even the couplings of plainspoken lines can evoke this through discordance and
dialectic friction.
Jonathan also gets to the heart of this by pointing out that a poem's
paraphrase is neither definitive nor adequate. Quite so. It seems to
me another way of stating that a poem (at least a good one) is self-contained
and complete, that any other instantiation is either redundant or deficient.
~~~~~~~~~~
Tony Tost has posted
pictures
from his wedding on his site, which should be un-RIP'ed (CART MASTER:
Ninepence. DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead! CART MASTER: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing. Here's your ninepence. DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
CART MASTER: 'Ere. He says he's not dead! CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not! CART MASTER: He isn't? CUSTOMER: Well, he
will be soon. He's very ill. DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better! )
Posted by jbahr at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)
July 10, 2005
Sunday Morning
On my short vacation this week, I had a lovely time with my sweetie, her mom,
and her son. The two-day journey was a circular route from
Longmont
to Loveland to Estes Park, through the Rocky Mountains National Park, to Grand
Lake, across the plateau, on to Winter Park (No Pain, No Jane), lunch in a
casino in Blackhawk, video gaming at Dave and Busters, and lunch at The Med in
Boulder. That's me and Young Agent Smith racing go-karts in Grand Lake.
In an old post, Gary Sullivan
defines flarf, something that I'd been wondering about (thanks to
Kasey for the link).
Very good issue of BusinessWeek: Multimillionaire and Master
Spammer Christopher Smith, responsible for billions of emails for bogus drugs
and fake college degrees, was arrested when he returned home to Minneapolis from
his digs in the Dominican Republic. Prospective clients for offices in the
Freedom Tower are wary of the 1776-foot prospective terrorist target, which will
be built at NYC's ground zero. South Korea has issued a postage stamp
honoring Hwang Woo Suk, the Seoul University stem-cell researcher.
Economists expect three more Fed rate hikes, largely in response to continuing
real estate speculation. Many physicians and researchers question the
value of heart surgery in prolonging lives (over, say, drugs, exercise and
dietary changes), but it's a $100 billion industry. Nobody really knows
what Bush is going to do with at least two open Supreme Court slots, but Big
Business is lobbying for regulation-friendly justices, irrespective of their
social conservatism. Google has jumped again to over 50% of the
search-engine market, at the expense of Yahoo! and MSN. Independents are
backing quietly away from the Republicans, with 69% dissatisfied with Congress,
67% believing that Bush will appoint an ideologically inappropriate successor,
60% calling the Iraq War a mistake, and 85% unimpressed with the current
economic policy. The Volkswagen scandal, which may lead to indictments, is
a visible symptom of Corporate Germany's economic malaise, and largely a product
of the co-determination laws that gives workers 50% of the seats on company
boards. Suddenly, Washington needs the U.N. (Iraqi supervision, Iran &
South Korean sanctions, Kosovo peace-keeping) and the White House is pressuring
Congress to drop proposed U.N. funding cuts. What's 3 times the size of
the Religious Right voting base, and the new target for business and savvy
politicians? Undocumented aliens. Telephone companies, health
insurers, banks, auto dealers, and mortgage companies are courting the 11
million (largely Hispanic) "illegals", and studies show that this group more
than pays for state, local and federal services by their sales, income, and
property tax payments. Marc Rich, the famous 70's era trader, indicted for
tax evasion and pardoned in Clinton's last days, has spawned a network of oil
traders who have worked with pariah oil producers (Libya, Iran, African
dictatorships, Saddam Hussein's Iraq), earning billions by moving the petroleum
products around before selling most of it to the major oil companies.
Harry Potter VI will be the biggest yet, with a press run of 10.8 million, the
largest of any book in history. The latest craze among dog fanciers is
poodle cross-breeds (Labradoodles, schnoodles, goldendoodles).
I was reading Jonathan's
blog, and then Mike's blog, and
then Josh's blog, and then
Jim's blog, and then
Reb's blog, and then
Kirsten's blog, and then
Kasey's blog, and then
Laurel's blog, and then
David's blog, and then
Sabrina's blog, and
then Ginger's blog, which led me to
Seth's blog (which I've just
discovered and added to the blogroll), which brought me back to
Jim's blog and eventually
Jordan's blog, which circuitously
led me to Richard's blog and
I'm sure I missed a few in there. Christ, it's easy to get sidetracked.
I was led astray somewhere in there by Seth's
open letter to Peter, about whose recent article in Poetry I was, I
suppose, less than glowing. Seth, who apparently shared The Undergraduate
Experience with Peter at Dartmouth, shares this observation:
Poet-bloggers do not "publish" or "broadcast" each
entry as though it were a missive to Art; they gather, they gossip, they
encourage, they approve, they jest, they ridicule, they share, they form a
community no more or less amenable to having its every tick-tock committed to
the august pages of the nation's oldest poetry journal--and really, what a
dishonor to that revered journal, to see it done--than any other community of
friends whose common interests draws them nearer one another than to others.
... which I thought was a pretty dandy summarization of our community, our
disharmony, our pissing matches and common affliction. In an attempt
to recuse myself from this particular altercation, let me say that I've known
Seth for a large percentage of his adult life, albeit it an Internet kind of
knowing, and like him a great deal, and think he is very talented poet, even if
he was the ONLY one to score higher than I on one of those IQ tests that someone
URL'd over at Alsop's. Oh, and he's been in DQ, and I haven't, the rat.
But, I digress.
Time's cover article is The Supreme Battle, which outlines the
outside interests spending millions to lobby for their kind of Supreme Court
justice. (Why do so many conservative groups have names like The Judicial
Confirmation Network, The American Center for Law and Justice, and Progress for
America? Makes you want to quote Gary Oldman's great line to the
shapeshifting alien in Fifth Element: never be ashamed of who
you are.) In case you've been on another planet in the past few years,
the issues at stake with a Court reshuffling include abortion restrictions,
separation of church and state, gay rights, death penalty enforcement, the right
to die, affirmative action, and states's rights. Good article on the
down-to-earth, swing-voting ex-ranching girl, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Time analyses their management's decision to divulge Matthew Cooper's
source, and one law professor suggests that Congress will have to pass a shield
law, as the Supreme Court is expected to reject the press's right to keep a
source confidential (and still no major article on Rove's part in the
outing of Plame). In Letter from Baghdad, Aparisim Gnosh comments
on the continuing deterioration of daily life (there is less power generation,
oil production, and water availability than a year ago). Hugo Chávez
continues to play the role of Castro Mini-Me, and is expected to be
reelected for another 6 years of oil-financed social programs and pulling on
Uncle Sam's beard. Want to get into the real estate frenzy? Towns in
Wyoming, Minnesota and Kansas will give you free lots for a home, but you have
to agree to live and work there. Scientists question the accuracy of testing
companies that promise to trace your mitochondrial DNA back to your roots
(including Oprah's recent announcement that she hails from Zulus).
Congress is considering the Dream Act, which would "clear the legal thicket" by
permitting undocumented alien high-schoolers to avail themselves of in-state
college tuition (they can't now in most states). Peter O'Toole's in the
Anglified version of Lassie, and a large yawn for War of the Worlds.
I'm looking forward to calling an old buddy who found me via this weblog.
My friend, let's call him F, is the single most extraordinary human being I've
ever met. When we met at a Pomona College, he was borrowing tools from the
wood shop to swap out one engine for another in his Chevy. He was
average-sized, reasonably well-built, and possessed a Black Belt in something,
which was why none of our dorm mates gave him much grief when he agonized over
Hearts bidding in our Tournaments. Half the time, he was sleeping over
with an attractive coed at Pitzer, the rest of the time he was, amazingly, doing
well enough in Physics to be awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key. When he wasn't
making booze from a still of his own design for all the fraternities.
After I left for Johns Hopkins, he finished school and told everyone he was
going to be a cop in Dallas. It was his idea of a joke: in the next
few years, he lived in Mexico, traded bonds, obtained an ABD in Pharmacology,
and got an MD in Emergency Medicine. Somewhere in there, he visited me to swap
out the clutch in my Jag Roadster. He'd owned one at 16, and could damn
near take it apart and put it back together blindfolded. In fact, he still
bears the scars of less-than-perfect stitchwork when they patched up his face
the night he was thrown 60 feet through the windshield of his XKE.
When I visited him in Detroit, he was thawing the pipes under his house with a
homemade flame thrower, and when we wandered over to Detroit General, the nurses
regarded him with the sort of awe deserving of a physician who would walk up to
patient, take a look, and plunge a hypodermic into his heart. Cath and I
visited him in Tulsa, when he was working two ER shifts at two hospitals.
That was the weekend we found out he was raising hundreds of quail in his
basement, owned an arms factory, and had a letter from Ronald Reagan reminding
him not to ship machine guns to the Argentines. We visited his soybean
farm on the Arkansas River, and he showed my son how to fieldstrip a greasegun.
About the time I left for Europe with my family, F was thinking about going to
law school. I can't imagine what he's been up to in the last 15 years.
I keep reading how the world is simply awash in money. Fortune,
always a kick to read if only for the advertising, reports that private equity
firms are so swollen with investor funds that business owners looking for
capital are increasingly getting the upper hand in negotiations. Wealthy
(mainly Latino) collectors are turning Miami into a major center for art
exhibition. Two major banks are introducing derivative instruments that
would permit you to hedge against macroeconomic changes, including options on
nonfarm payroll, retail sales, and jobless claims. "Bespoke" watches,
commissioned time pieces created by Patek Philippe, Cartier, and Piguet, have
risen dramatically in value over the last two decades, and now regularly go for
hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. Other hot investment items
include German modern-era photographic art and vintage Hawaiian shirts.
Mixed Blessings reports that parental narcissism of the affluent
adversely affects their children's development (duh). There are now one million
non-profit, non-church charitable organizations, up from 350,000 twenty years
ago. In a refreshingly different article, Fuel Fossils documents
the rapidly declining production levels of the world's major oil fields (Prudhoe
Bay, the North Sea, Saudi Arabia), noting that only 100 fields account for half
the world's oil, and many are over 50 years old. Advertising entries
include Rolls Royce, The Aspen Private Jet Club, Gary Lee Price Studios,
Bluefish Concierge services, Allied Yacht Charter, The Residences at
Ritz-Carlton (Grand Cayman, starting at $2.9 million), and dozens of
money-management firms.
Posted by jbahr at 07:46 AM | Comments (1)
July 04, 2005
Happy Birthday, America
Chicago was glorious: 68 degrees and the wind off Lake Michigan, as I
walked around the loop with my son, buying "stuff" for his dorm room at Columbia
College. Just before leaving for the airport to come home, I called him to
ask how his first night in the University Center went, and he described the
building as one huge target-rich environment for babes.
For the second time in a year, a good friend from the past has found me
because of this weblog. Google is a wonderful thing. Speaking of
which, The Economist has a sidebar on Google, noting that the firm is
notoriously cagey about discussing its projects or revenue expectations.
At a recent "factory tour", reporters were introduced to the company's chef (the
Chief Food Office), and made privy to important company statistics, such as the
number of pounds of wheatgrass consumed at the cafeteria. A long article
discusses the similarities with the current Chinese buying spree, and the asset
acquisition binge that the Japanese went on two decades ago (e.g., Pebble Beach,
the Sears Tower) — concluding with the suggestion
that in both cases they paid to much for too little, and Congress shouldn't be
getting their knickers in a twist over CNOOC's Unocal bid. GDP and life
expectancy have been drifting south for three decades in sub-Saharan Africa, and
the hope is that recent promises of aid and trade will improve African lives (as
opposed to ending up in various dictators' Swiss bank accounts). Democrats
are gearing up for battles for control of the judiciary, as Sandra Day O'Connor
announces her retirement, just prior to the expected stepping down of Chief
Justice Rehnquist. Meanwhile, Republicans are introducing a bill to split
the large, left-leaning 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in to two or three
jurisdictions (permitting Bush to appoint even more justices). Hugo
Chávez, Venezuela's socialist president, wants to take some of the country's $30
billion in foreign reserves and divert it to a fund for education and health
projects, a fund that Chávez would have direct control over without having to
consult the legislature. After ignoring it for a couple of hundred years,
China has decided to renovate Xanadu as a tourist site. The Dirty Little
Secret in Iraq is that the insurgency is almost entirely supported by the
Sunnis, and both Iraqis and the Bush Administration are bending over backwards
to include them in governance by percentages that exceed their numbers.
The Russian Army is a nightmare of virtual slavery and abasement for draftees;
corruption and brutality has led to high levels of desertion. The French
make a lot of noises about the ills of (mainly American) globalization, but
France remains the 5th largest exporter in the world. The U.S. calls it
"extraordinary rendition", but Italian justices call it kidnapping and have
indicted 13 CIA officials for the capture and transportation to Egypt of
"suspected terrorist" Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in late 2003. Unfunded
health and pension liabilities for state and local employees is stupendous:
California alone has $36 billion in such liabilities, and $895 million currently
set aside for them. At a cost of $12 billion, a project to design and
build the world's first nuclear fusion reactor will begin in France, funded by
an international consortium (e.g., Japan, Russia, China, the U.S.) in hopes of
finally implementing clean nuclear power generation.
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I've backended the blog with MySQL, so it may be a little faster to navigate. I've also added a plug-in that closes entries for comments after 7 days. It was necessary, as I was getting upwards to 100 spam comments per hour on some days.
Posted by jbahr at 06:18 AM | Comments (2)
July 01, 2005
ChicagoLand
I missed mentioning the rest of the Poetry humor issue in my last
post. The Letters to the Editor are wholly contrived, filled with
over-the-top version of the usual nonsense that shows up there, to wit:
"Dear Editors: First, let me say that I am a poet and fellow sufferer."
After the news item that the United Comradeship of Language Poets has opened its
first theme park (F(u)"n "W//orL=d), there's the notice that the White House has
elevated Dana Gioia to Chairman of the Divine Endowment of All Art Of All Kinds
Everywhere In The World Amen. Don't be drinking beer when you read the
News Notes, or some of it will dribble out your nose. Here's an
excerpt:
The program has been announced for next year's AWP
Conference in Celebration, Florida. Featured speakers and topics include:
John Ashbery: Getting Over the Hump: The
Four Hundredth Book
Louise Glück:
Glück, Glück, Glück: It's an Umlaut, You
Stupid Fucks
William Logan: Kill Your Inner Child:
Reviewing as Therapy
Geoffrey Hill: Squeezing the Telos: Why
I Watch "The Bachelor"
Billy Collins: How To Write a Book of Poetry
While Playing Golf
Jorie Graham: Toward a Long View of Art, or
This Will All Make Sense When You're Dead
Evan Boland: Women and Ireland and Poetry and
Women and Ireland and Poetry Women and Ireland and Poetry!!!
Adrienne Rich: Jiving Into the Wreck:
Shakin' the Groove Thang in Your Golden Years
Sharon Olds: Licking the Eggplant:
Staying Creative in the Kitchen
Robert Pinsky: Why I Should Be Chairman of the
Divine Endowment Of All Art of All Kinds Everywhere in the World Amen
~~~~~~~~~~
I'm off to Chicago tomorrow morning to install my son in Columbia College for
a six-week session to prepare him for next year's academic start. I'm
hoping to see my buddy, the kickass Chicagoland poet Frank Matagrano. I
love Chicago. Too bad it generally takes an AWP to get me there.
Maybe with Derek installed in a dorm on Shoreline, I'll see more of it.
Probably see you all again on Sunday. Have a great Fourth.
Posted by jbahr at 07:37 PM | Comments (1)