March 31, 2005
Death and Taxes
Now that most of the heavyweights and all the trust fund babies are safely in
Vancouver, I suppose I can write whatever I want without worrying about
comments. I'd be there too, except that I have way too much work to do,
which is good because I have a tax bill coming up.
I've been following CDY's 5
Publishing Secrets, a very good list of Dos and Don'ts from the
editor of a nationally recognized literary journal. I found a couple of
points to be idiosyncratic, and not consistent with my experience, but even
that is a good lesson in the vagaries of submission. I submit
simultaneously, for example, a practice that I find necessary in these times of
6-month response and limited personal output. If I had to pick a single
trick that has improved both my poems and my acceptance rate, it would be:
Kill Your Babies. Not exactly a Publishing Secret, of course, but good
advice for the pig-headed (that would be me) during revision.
Robert Creeley, author of 60 books of poetry and criticism, died yesterday in Odessa, Texas.
I have been unavoidably following the emotional train wreck that is the Terry
Schiavo affair. It eventually dawned on me: how does anybody
afford 15 years of medical care? How can Terry's parents afford a decade
of legal expense? The answer to the first question is socialized medicine
and a law suit judgment. The answer to the second question is largely:
The Philanthropy Roundtable, a (very) conservative foundation whose political
agenda includes "personal responsibility" and tort reform. Details
here.
Like most national media, Time ignores the obvious cynicism of the
right-to-life movement in their lead article "The End of Life: Who
Decides?". Ten Questions for Yo-Yo Ma, who was named People's
Sexiest Classical Musician in 2001. Alan Greenspan is raising short-term
interest rates as fast as he can, citing inflation fears, but probably just
getting the rates up so that he can lower them if the economy goes south again.
The Inspector General for the Homeland Security Department charges that the TSA
is plagued by mismanagement and overspending. You would think they could
fund themselves with the thousands of laptops, iPods, and watches that people
leave at the security checks monthly. Municipalities all over the country
are raising mass transit fares in response to huge budget shortfalls. Air
America is one year old. LeBron James, the basketball phenom, scored 56
points last week, the youngest player to ever score over 50
points in one NBA game. There were 325 pirate attacks last year, down from the
prior year's 445. The Time Poll found that 75% of Americans felt that it
was wrong for Congress to intervene in the Schiavo matter. A chilling
article outlines the life of the Jordanian suicide bomber Ra'ed Al-banna, who
lived in California for two years, was engaged to be married to a local woman,
and applied to law school before he was denied reentry to the US on a minor visa
irregularity after visiting his parents in Jordan. Americans spent $2.6
billion on ring tones, games, cell-phone wallpaper and other personalized
services. According to the experts, more than 30% of us qualify as shy.
More and more movie directors are blogging. Richard Rodriguez's Sin
City, starring Bruce Willis, gets a good review.
Cook's Illustrated has a great recipe for paella (and yes, Tony,
you'll need saffron). One good way to clean a cast-iron skillet is to set
it in a blazing wood fire. Marinated flank steak is best when you avoid
vinegar-based dressings, and just use a dry rub before grilling (garlic, olive
oil, rosemary, and kosher salt is good). For the perfect stuffed porkchop,
start with rib chops (not blade-end or loin chops), make the pocket with a sharp
paring knife, and seal the entry point with citrus wedge. A tablespoon of
soy sauce blendered with an anchovy fillet will do when you're out of Thai fish
sauce. Small red potatoes are best for roasting. The Ultimate
Oatmeal Cookie has to be made with brown sugar. Swanson's Certified
Organic Free Range Chicken Broth wins CI's stock contest, and Volrath
makes the best cookie sheet (and it's only $19.95).
Business Week's special annual issue picks the 50 top-performing companies
— four of the top ten are oil companies.
Executive pay will rise as much as 20% on average next year. A 42-year old
tech worker has raised $3.1 million of the $30 million he needs to pay UPN to do
a fifth season of Star Trek: Enterprise. The soon-to-open Hong Kong
Disneyland already has 10,000 reservations. The Sony Playstation Portable
gets a thumbs-down in Stephen Wildstrom's review. Your next TV will be
high-definition, flat, and made in Asia. Second-tier web sites are hot:
Ask Jeeves was recently acquired for almost $2 billion. Larry
Ellison of software giant Oracle has a fight on his hands as he takes on the
larger German SAP for the business application market. The Apple iPod
mobile phone may be going nowhere, as cellular providers can't figure out how
they make any money on it. Congress is about to investigate predatory
lending by "subprime" mortgage companies. Big Bazaar is the Wal-Mart of
India, slowly squeezing out traditional mom-and-pop shops. Hollywood and
the recording industry have lost the early rounds in their suit against Grokster.
Posted by jbahr at 07:08 AM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2005
Down for the Count
About 2 PM MST, my server’s connection to the Internet went
kaput, apparently due to “a DSLAM going down
somewhere
in the Longmont area”. At least, that’s what Qwest said. So, if you couldn’t
find Whimsy yesterday afternoon, that’s the reason. It could have been a
disturbance in The Force. Or perhaps it was gremlins.
The Wall Street Journal has a long article on Qwest, its pugnacious CEO
Richard Notebaert, and his single-minded effort to merge with MCI, by offering
20% more for the shares than Verizon's offer. MCI is, you may recall, the
recently renamed WorldCom, whose founder, Bernie Ebbers, was just convicted of
fraud on a massive scale. Qwest itself barely avoided bankruptcy 2 years
ago, and currently has twice as much debt on its books as the entire value of
all its shares. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has forced its Vice Chairman (sounds
aptly like a title in the Peoples' Republic, doesn't it?) to resign after
an investigation into "fraudulent expense accounts and misuse of company-owned
gift cards". Gift cards? This guy makes $3.9 million annually and
recently exercised almost $6 million in options. Every year, Bill Gates
takes a "Think Week" off alone in a small house by the beach and figures out
long-term strategy for the Evil Empire: no family, no friends, just Bill
and a guy who brings grilled cheese and Orange Crush twice a day. The
average 4-year university now costs $11,400 annually for tuition, room and board
— private colleges and state schools for out-of-staters average $27,500.
TV is getting religion with three faith-related series coming in the next season
(Revelations, Joan of Arcadia, and Book of Daniel).
Seeking to secure access to the continent's vast natural resources, China has
targeted Africa for aid and development projects. The US Air Force is
spending $83 million to upgrade bases in Afghanistan, a signal that a long stay
is planned. Medical researchers increasingly believe that viruses
may be the cause of a range of mental disorders, including schizophrenia and OCD.
Among cellular companies, Cingular tops the complaints list (e.g., dropped
calls, billing errors). Private investors will pay $10 billion for SunGard
Data Systems, a software company
that is a "global leader in integrated IT solutions for financial services".
Damn, missed another one. I would have sold them my little company for $10
million.
Posted by jbahr at 07:02 AM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2005
Dumb, Period
One of my pet peeves was mentioned by
A. D. and
Kelli recently: the American standard rule of placing all punctuation
within quotation marks. A. D. pointed out a
page that
describes this inanity, and the Brits' aversion to it (who properly use the rule
of "best sense"). Quotation marks have, of course, a number of reasons to
exist, but principally as a way to delineate speech. When the proper font
isn't available they're also commonly used as a secondary device when neither
italics nor underscores are available. Following this rule leads directly
to ambiguity, as in:
He actually said to me, "Bush is a nincompoop!"
Now, am I the one doing the exclaiming, or the individual quoted? When
quoting poetry, I often find that I'm typing "Blue-green ambition / can get a
girl ice-bound," and the obvious question is: was that last comma part of
line 2, or was it the optional comma before the "and".
This gets even sillier in computer programming documentation. A string,
such as "DOC00123" is a value for a variable, an indivisible thing. It
would be crazy to write:
Must I use as the variable, the value "DOC00124?"
In fact, it would be wrong. Thus concludes my tirade.
Posted by jbahr at 04:44 PM | Comments (4)
Recent Reading
My sons snagged the latest Spin and Rolling Stone, so they will
have to go unreported. I did get a chance to page through them and I am
happy to report that Bono shows up in 17 photographs (most of them taken at the
20th anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), arms around Springsteen,
doing his tough guy pose with The Edge, opening a bottle of champagne, hugging
Catherine Zeta-Jones. After his recent meeting with President Bush, I was
sure he would be nominated by the U.S. to replace Kofi Annan.
The Smithsonian is largely a yawn this month, but there's a good
article (with photos) of Salvador Dalí, and another
on the Negro Baseball League. Also, a fascinating article on Dayton,
Tennessee, home to the Scopes Monkey Trial. Contrary to what you saw in
Inherit the Wind, several Dayton businessmen interrupted John Scopes in a
tennis game to ask him to test a recently passed Tennessee law outlawing the
teaching of evolution — to which Scopes agreed, and then went back to his game.
William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow contest in the world-famous court
case (won by the anti-evolutionary side). Fast forward 80 years.
None of the nine Dayton's high school science teachers teaches the evolutionary
origins of life, and most state that paleontologic finding can be attributed to
The Flood.
News from the Wall Street Journal the
past couple of days: The IRS is investigating Don Imus's ranch of sick
kids, questioning why it costs $2.6 million to host 100 kids a year;
President Vladimir Putin's visit to Israel in April will be the first ever by a
Russian leader; Syria says the last of their troops will be out of Lebanon
in two months; Kmart's merger with Sears was approved by shareholders;
Australian activists are clamoring to make the native marsupial bilby replace
the rabbit as the cute, fuzzy Easter animal; the U.S. Supreme Court
declined to hear the Schiavo case; ex-chess phenom Bobby Fischer was
granted Icelandic citizenship; fossilized soft tissue from a Tyrannosaurus
rex thighbone resembles that of an ostrich (and tastes like chicken?).
I've taken recently to reading half a dozen
poetry books at a time, alternating among them so as to keep each short reading
run fresh for any one author. The current set includes Jorie Graham's
Overlord, Bob Hicok's Insomnia, John Ashbery's Where Shall I
Wander, Carl Phillips' Tether, Dean Young's Elegy on Toy Piano,
and Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven. These books represent vastly
different styles, and it's a bit of a head shake to move from one to another.
So far, I find too many Ashbery poems that seem to be going through the motions,
but I need to go through them at least twice. Phillips' work is taut and
thoughful. Gilbert's poems are engaging and personal, though the emotions
are splashed about a bit more than I like. Hicok's work seems surprisingly
fresh, considering how much of his poetry I've read this year. Alone at
the kitchen table, a small glass of Chianti within reach, I only laughed out
loud once at Young's
Whoz Side U
On, Anyway?, a hilarious take on the Aesthetics Wars. This book of
Young's has decent range and a bit of eclecticism, given a quasi-surreal ironic
backdrop. More as I read ...
Posted by jbahr at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
Poetry
April's issue of Poetry seems to have come right on the heels of last
month's, with poetry by Billy Collins, William Logan, Cathy Song, Dean Young, A.
F. Moritz , A. E. Stallings, Kay Ryan, Lauren McCollum, Averill Curdy,
Landis Everson, J. Allyn Rosser, Jacques Réda and Virgil (yes, that
Virgil). Most of the work is of the Easy Listening variety, as usual.
Rosser's has 4 chatty offerings, the first 3 in a loose 4-beat and slant rhyme
("When the mind fumbles, reaching feebly / back and back with its long black
needles / waving like one too few or far too many"). Curdy supplies 3
reasonable vignettes ("As she breakfasted late on Tab and Tylenol / Eros came
and struck her with his Hyacinth- / enameled finger enjoining her to follow").
Five poems from A.E. Stallings, whose work I usually admire greatly, but these
seemed a little tame. I liked Evil Eye the best: ("'Yes, it's on
you', Kalliópe frowns, / Dribbling beads of
amber olive oil / Down her fingers into the water glass / Where they amass / In
one big cyclops-blob, and do not scatter"). Kay Ryan's six poems are the
usual tall, skinny kind ("Tar babies are / not the children / of tar people. /
It is far worse. / The tar baby occurs / spontaneously"). Dean Young takes a
little of the edge off, but not much, in his three poems ("I would be sad
without potato chips / but much worse if you chopped off my arm. / Being sad is
a form of exsanguination / so perhaps to the bottom of sadness I could get / as
I bled to death. I do not know."). Lauren McCollum does a decent
"after" on Stevens in Anecdote of The View ("Once while standing at the
kitchen window / pickling radishes in the night, I saw a man stumbling / in
silhouette up the hill ..."). A.F. Moritz wins the Most Interesting Title
spot with Häagen-Dazs Freezer Truck
Blocking View of Ottawa River While Its Compressor Blots the Sounds of Nature.
I liked Cathy Song's The Man Moves Earth: "The man moves earth / to
dispel grief. / He digs holes / the size of cars. / In proportion to what is
taken / what is given multiplies —".
The View From Here contains short,
somewhat biographical, poetry-related essays, including one by Lt. General
William James Lennox, Jr. describing the literature courses taught at West Point
and their role in promoting communication and building leadership among future
officers. A subset of this issue's poets discuss the audience.
Dean Young is the funniest (natch): "As long as I've been around,
literature has been getting finished off by television, itself, cheap gas,
movies, itself, DVDs, the Internet, itself." A. E. Stallings argues that
"Writing for any audience is the wrong way to win one, just as a
politician is unlikely to seem authentic by heeding focus groups." Billy
Collins remembers his favorite audience: four locals in an Irish pub, two
of whom having drived all the way from Sligo to hear him. The last entry
starts "I have protested in private, and I now protest more openly, against the
motto upon the cover of Poetry [To have great poets, there must be
great audiences, too]. The poet is not dependent upon his audience."
It was written by Ezra Pound in 1914.
Dan Chiasson reviews eight poetry books, and
here are some excerpts. On Refusing Heaven, by Jack Gilbert:
"... Gilbert is a poet of reckless charisma and its aftermaths". On
Waltzing Through the Endtime, by David Bottoms: "...the poems often
seem apologetic, mild-mannered ... He's a poet I'd like to see get himself into
deeper trouble." On Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky: "a
kind of screwball autobiography ...Soup aside, this is a distinguished first
book." On Landscape With Rowers, edited by J. M. Coetree:
"Reading this book [of Dutch poetry] is a little like discovering Modernism on
pottery shards or having it beamed down by satellite ...". On Gogol In
Rome by Katia Kapovich: "The poems of Katia Kapovich, a Russian now
living in Massachusetts, are some of the coldest poems I've ever read." On
(the posthumously published) Revolutionary Sonnets by Anthony Burgess:
"If you wonder why Modernism had to come along and spoil all the fun, have a
sniff at Burgess's verses." On The Prodigal by Derek Walcott:
"With Walcott, ..., you either consent to the grandeur or you don't. I
don't and never have. ... The ravishing catalogues, the twilit epiphanies,
the bold strokes of rhetoric, all leave me cold." On After Every
War, edited by Eavan Boland: "What's a reviewer going to do if he
doesn't like an edition of post-war poetry by German women, edited by a woman
who has suffered her share of atrocious events in her own home country?"
The Letters To The Editor are lively, as usual. In response to last
month's discussion of Greatness, David Wojahn suggests that Lowell succeeds
where O'Hara falls short. Nance Van Winkle says " ... who could argue that
most of this [current poetry] is a flood of mere competence, or that
over-professionalism is to blame?" Jane Hirshfield argues that "to treat
art-making as ego-salve would be to miss the true, and at times disruptive, art
in our lives." Next up is a series of letters by previously reviewed
authors. Reginald Shepard defends the Iowa Anthology of New American
Poetries, and Danielle Chapman retorts. R. S. Gwynn reacts to Brian
Phillips' harsh assessment of formalist work by Catherine Tufariello, David
Mason, and Ted Kooser. Phillips responds: "R. S. Gwynn sounds
very outraged, but I'm not really sure he's accusing me of much." The back
of the issue is the usual barrage of advertising for publishers, programs and
conferences, culminating with a reminder by the Academy of American Poets that
April is the 10th National Poetry Month.
Posted by jbahr at 10:57 AM | Comments (3)
March 22, 2005
Puzzling
CDY
is threatening to stop reading us if we don't Keep Up With The Posting. As
if I didn't have enough Blog Guilt when I miss a day or two. The funny
thing is it doesn't matter whether I post or not -- people just visit the least
on the weekend and the most on Wednesdays, in a cycle that looks like this:
I wonder if everybody else's "visits chart" looks like this? As
an aside, my visit count just rolled past 20,000. This, frankly astounds
me, but I can imagine that Jim Behrle
is probably getting 500 to 1,000 visitors a day, and God only knows how many
people check in with Ron Silliman
(of course, Jim's cartoons should be syndicated, and Ron's site is like an
online course in poetics). When you consider that most literary journals
have a subscription base from 300 to 3,000 and a readership maybe three times
that, it puts things in perspective. Do more people read
Josh Corey's blog than Prairie
Schooner? Does Jonathan
Mayhew's blog have a larger readership than The Black Warrior Review?
Probably.
Junie and I almost finished the
Atlantic Puzzler,
composed every month by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. If you're unfamiliar
with British-style
crossword puzzles, they are a lot like normal crossword puzzles, only ten times
harder. The clues are cryptic and generally one of eight types:
double definitions, anagrams, hidden answers, homophones, charades, containers,
reversals, bits and pieces. Longer clues may be composed of a mixture of
types. This month, for example, we have the clue "Great kind of sandwich
with fruit". The answer is "sublime" (sub-lime). 16 Down's clue is
"Cut around to Detroit". If you take "mown" for "cut" and put it around
"to", you get "Mo-to-wn" (Motown). "Wild West food" could be a clue for
"stew" — you take "west" and "wild" it up, which
gives you a definition for "food". This month's "Edenic figure shown in
his nakedness" is a hidden answer clue, because "snake" is embedded within the
clue. If this all sounds rather complicated, I suppose it is, but it gets
addictive. Junie and I are stuck on the nine-letter answer for 4 Down:
"Giant, closely watched, took public transportation". We're probably
looking for some loose definition for "giant", and (knowing the ways of Cox and
Rathvon) it's probably the adjectival form. Closely watched could be
"tended" and "public transportation" could be a three letter mode of travel
(bus? MTA?), but we can't get it. Because of other complicated
instructions on how to insert the clue answers into the squares, we're guessing
that the answer is of the form T R _ _ _ _ _ E D, and perhaps some anagram of "B
R N" is stuck in the middle. Hmm. Email me or leave a comment if you
get it.
The rest of The Atlantic was mildly
interesting this month. The front-page article is a day-by-day account of
the life of John Ziegler, a conservative shock jock on LA's KFI radio station.
There's an opening page eulogizing Peter Davison, the Atlantic's poetry
editor who recently passed away. The Expos move to DC this summer and will
change their name to the Washington Nationals (President Bush is scheduled to
throw out the first ball). Many states are trying to shame delinquent tax
payers by listing their names on web-based "shame honor rolls". Al Qaeda
is difficult to infiltrate because the higher up in the organization one gets,
the more dedicated and less cynical are the adherents to the cause — the
converse of most organizations. P.J. O'Rourke, the humorous Republican
party animal, opines that all campaign reform is doomed to failure, and
incumbents will always find a way to raise money and get re-elected.
Benjamin Wittes argues that Supreme Court confirmation hearings are useless, as
prior examples of nominees's views and backgrounds (e.g., Warren, Burger,
Stevens) end up having little to do with their subsequent performance on the
bench. British researchers find that, for every 15-point increase in IQ
score, a woman's likelihood of marrying falls by almost 60%. Jeffery Rosen
believes that William Rehnquist may eventually be regarded as one of the great
Chief Justices, largely due to his leadership and management skills.
The U.S. is training troops in Latin America, Asia and Africa and Robert Kaplan
goes to Niger to report on one typical weapons training camp. A review of
private letters and published works shows Friedrich Nietzsche, Philip Larkin,
Milan Kundera and John Milton to be world-class misogynists. B. R.Myers
pans John le Carré's latest Absolute Friends, and wonders aloud if the
great spy novelist has lost it. There's a poem by Peter Davison and
Resin by Geri Doran, the title poem of her Whitman Award-winning book
("The needled air of the lodgepole. / Sting of pine at the base of your throat.
/ "A cold snap", he says. "Coming on." // Believing wasn't always hard. / The
river forked in three: I knew / truth could go in different ways.)
~~~~~~~
In an earlier post, Janet and I were discussing
The Kenyon Review's
submission policy. Meg Galipault, managing editor of TKR, cleared up the confusion with a recent
comment:
I wanted to clear up any misconceptions about KR's
submissions policy. We accept submissions from anyone...not just subscribers (tho'
I guess not long ago that was a policy and everyone quickly realized it was a
misguided one).
During the summer, we don't accept submissions at all because we're trying to
get caught up on all of our reading. This year has been particularly brutal
because of our new online submissions program. It's a great system but it
completely caught us unprepared for the thousands of submissions we've received.
We knew we would get a lot but not this many!
I can tell you we read each and every submission...Two of this year's O. Henry
Prize awards were, in fact, discovered in our "slush" pile.
Hope this helps clarify things and encourages you to submit. Again, forgive me
for barging in!
Thanks, Meg.
Posted by jbahr at 07:26 AM | Comments (4)
March 21, 2005
In The Mail This Week
I received a contributor's copy of Alaska Quarterly Review (at least,
I think it's a contributor's copy, perhaps I subscribed) which contains
an interesting mix of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. Many
journals recently have had ekphrastic sections and this issue of AQR is
no exception, with seven paintings by by Kesler Woodward accompanied by Peggy
Shumaker's poems. Each painting is a rendition of birch trees in vibrant
colors reminiscent of Kirlian photography. The poems are not technically
ekphrastic, I suppose — more in the way of
lyrical narratives bound to the paintings by theme (Autumn, Summer,
Spring, After Long Drought), and pleasantly diverting. There
is a lot of good work in the Poetry section, most of it on a par with that of
Ploughshares, APR, Poetry and Field (exactly the
credits that Nance Van Winkle lists in her bio). To pick just one of the
poems I enjoyed, here's the opening of Zapateo by Sonja Livingston:
"Now to the place where men sink women / like pool balls into their pockets /
To the place where a man whose gold dust skin / looks like the earth just
north of this city / Pushes his palms together and wails."
Harper's showed up yesterday with the feature article "The 4.7
Trillion Pyramid": the argument goes that IRA's and 401(k)'s have been
propping up Wall Street and that vastly underfunded, stock-heavy corporate
pension programs need a lot better return from the Market, thus the push for
privatizing Social Security. Death of a Mountain documents how
decades of radical strip mining have leveled the national treasure of the
Appalachian mountain range. Cuba, which saw its populace living on 1,900
calories a day ten years ago, has largely recovered from the shock of the Soviet
pullout, through a program of ecologically sound small-farm agriculture.
Nir Rosen argues that the recent Iraqi election, with its few and
badly-structured voting districts, is a preamble to autocracy at best
(think Egypt, Syria and Kurdistan), and civil war at worst. The NeoCons
have long plotted the downfall of OPEC by planning to have Iraqi pull out of the
coalition, but the US oil industry prefers the stability (and record profits) of
the current situation. Lewis Lapham's monthly essay notes that the
European Union has become a powerful, effective, cohesive governing body.
The article leads off with a definition by Ambrose Bierce: War is God's
way of teaching Americans geography.
I managed, again, to get two issues of Wired back to back within a
couple of days, this time the March and April issue. Interesting items
included: Elbow surgery can dramatically improve the speed and control of
baseball pitchers, and may soon be viewed as elective. The next big thing
is movies for cell phones, and Frank Chindamo is making a lot of them for
Sprint. Trading in greenhouse gas permits will hit $45 billion by 2010, as
the rest of the world begins Kyoto Protocol implementation. Geek Chic
includes parkas with built-in headphones, pockets for iPods, and internal
cabling. The U.S. is now #14 worldwide in broadband access, thanks to the
regulation of local municipalities whose politicians are in bed with large
Telecom. Former MTV VJ Adam Curry is the brains behind iPodder, and
podCasting may replace radio. Yahoo, which has become the new AOL,
is growing almost as fast as the glitzier Google. DVD's are so dead
and hi-def video-on-demand will replace them. New liquid lenses, which can
be shaped and focused by electrostatic charge, are soon to appear on cell-phone
cameras. By $20 billion, the U.S. insources jobs more than it outsources
them, mainly in education, health services, transportation and IT. A
half-dozen companies now make personal breath analyzers to determine your blood
alcohol. Fossil, Swatch and Tissot sell watches that display sports
scores, headlines, stock reports, and movie times via the Microsoft MSN Direct
service. MIT has a plan to make the $100 laptop computer for the billion
children that don't own one (they will only take orders of one million laptops
at a time). The market for Russian cosmonaut gear is hot on eBay and at
Sotheby's. Detroit missed the boat again —
Toyota and Honda now sell 90% of all hybrid cars. "Buprenorphine could end
heroin addition, curb disease, and cut crime, but bureaucrats and the medical
industry are just saying no."
Colorado Review and Turnrow sit unread, but I'll try to remedy that.
Posted by jbahr at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2005
Saturday Musing
I received a nice email from Robin Beth Schaer, Web Coordinator for the
Academy of American Poets. The AAP is apparently redesigning their site
and expects to relaunch the website sometime in April. At that time, they
will be adding additional poets to their Find A Poet search facility,
including some of the poets suggested in my earlier post. Thanks for the
note, Robin, and good luck with the redesign.
~~~~~~~~
Yesterday, the UPS guy delivered a nice fat box of poetry, including the books
that I mentioned ordering in an earlier entry (Jorie Graham's Overlord,
John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander, Dean Young's Elegy on Toy Piano,
Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven.) I've read a few pages from
each so far. The books themselves reflect the stature (and, perhaps,
seriousness) of poets: Ashbery's and Gilbert's are hard-bound with glossy
titled dustcovers. Graham's Overlord is an equally fine hardback
with a striking red-on-black dustcover. Young's Elegy on Toy Piano
is a smile-inducing paperback with a cartoonish front cover and a lurid yellow
back cover featuring that Young photo with a cat apparently glued to his
shoulder (see
Eduardo's comments) — a perfect candidate for
Jim's current What the Hell is
Up With Your Author Photo? series.
Graham's work in Overlord is a departure
from the poetry of Swarm and, on first read, seems more like the
narrative poems of Never. They are still intelligent, philosophical
and Jorie-centric, with some of the usual trademark layering of detail. I
found the first four poems, however, to be more wide-ranging than her prior
recent work, with a bit more music and figurative language; poems that are
looking out as much as they are looking in. I like them and, for some
reason, it reminded me of a recent
interview
she gave to Mark Wunderlich on the State of Poetry. I've been a
little hard on Ms. Graham in the past, usually after reading one of her later
works, or hearing her on the radio (which, strangely, has happened to me three
times). What I have thought was pretentiousness (including the almost
mythological story of her early life) is completely absent from this interview.
In fact, I was struck by the down-to-earth comments, graciousness, and
generosity of Ms. Graham. She is about my age, and yet, has avoided
defeatism. She believes in the "possibility
of transcendence" and is saddened by poetry that exists in "the narrow
range between irony and quick-witted despair". I am occasionally reminded
that it's a short step from whimsy to cynicism, something that has a corrosive
effect on one's poetry and an even worse effect on one's life. I intend to
read her latest book with generosity and a bit of hope.
~~~~~~~~
Do weblogs have Editorial Correction sections? Well, this one does.
I mentioned that recently nominated U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, had described
the North Koreans as "human scum" (a quote I read in a news source).
Time reported that Bolton made a number of less than complimentary remarks
which led the North Korean press to call him "human scum and a
bloodsucker." I stand corrected.
~~~~~~~~
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, A. D.
Thomas has pointed out a very good article,
Poetry and Ambition, by Donald Hall, that is also available on the AAP site.
I've added another half-dozen poets to my blogroll, compliments of The Stick
passing, that flushed out a number of new writers of whom I was previously
unaware. One addition was Ivy Alvarez,
whose weblog I've read many times, so I'm curious why she wasn't on the blogroll
to begin with (almost as curious as how an Ivy Alvarez came to live in Cardiff).
Eduardo kindly
reminded us that Action Books
is open for business. I have to admit that I expected something like
The Recently Discovered Poetry of Bob Kane, and was delighted to find that
their titles include books by Aase Berg, Arielle Greenberg and
Lara Glenum.
Gabe has announced that he'll
be getting back to submitters to the "strange" Summer Issue of
MiPoesias.
AnnMarie is taking a break from
Morse Code Poetry ("flatulence
skewers a landscape"). Paul
finally gets The Stick, and wonders if there's anyone left to pass it to.
David finds himself
surprisingly engaged by Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three
of the World’s Best Poems. Thanks to
Gary, who's apparently just down the road from
me in Denver, for alerting me to Burn
Down Denver Press.
Professor Roy
provides some close reading from poetry.com.
Ella is looking for feedback. I
agree with Amanda that the
Steroid Hearings seem like a waste of time.
Lucia cheered
me up by admitting that she doesn't exactly understand Wallace Steven's
aesthetic either. Chris gives
us an address for a conservative hothead.
Wendy's second book was a
finalist for the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize.
~~~~~~~~
My software company has a new gig in concert with my old buddy Dave, a
computer hardware designer of some renown (e.g., he designed the first Palm
Pilot). The funniest thing I've read this morning is a caveat from the SDK
Debugging Manual, which states:
11.4 The office chair reset button
We have observed problems where sitting down or getting up from a normal
office chair will cause the STMP3400 or STMP3410 engineering board to reset.
The problem appears to be some interaction between the PC, the OnCE debug box,
and the engineering board.
Posted by jbahr at 10:05 AM | Comments (5)
March 17, 2005
Happy St. Patrick's
, what a beautiful morning. It's been outstanding on Front Range the past
couple of days -- blue skies and in the 50's. Now that I've opened an
entry in a Lake Woebegone kinda way, I might as well relate some of the
jokes from the Pretty Good Joke Book that I bought at the Minneapolis Airport on
the way home from Eau Claire. They're all pretty bad, of course:
What do you get when you cross a cantaloupe with a Border Collie? Melancholy babies.
Why did Humpty Dumpty have a great fall? Because he wanted to make up for a lousy summer.
Why do chicken coops have two doors? Because if they had four, they'd be chicken sedans.
How many poets does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to look at the bulb and think of his mother and one to stand at the window and watch the rain.
These two cannibals are eating a clown and one says, "Does this taste funny to you?"
What goes Clop, Clop, Clop, Bang, Bang, Clop, Clop, Clop? An Amish drive-by shooting.
Apologies to GC in advance for that last one. As for etymology,
www.dictionary.com says that the cantaloupe was first grown either in "Cantalupo
a former papal villa" or "Cantaloup a village of southern
France". Almost as interesting as pomegranate, which is derived
from the Old French and Latin meaning apple with many seeds, though I've
also seen it claimed that it was originally thought of as the apple of
Granada. But, I digress.
It looks like The Stick is propagating nicely, though
Jonathan has decided to prune
one branch of the distribution tree. Mike's version was, indeed,
interesting, Tricia's was hilarious, and Tony's list included a culinary book.
The Wall Street Journal continues to show up relentlessly on my driveway
in its trademark red plastic jacket. Some tidbits from Page One include:
GM's stock price has slipped 30% in the past 6 months, as its market share falls
and the burden of pensions and health care costs increase. The Senate
passed legislation permitting drilling in the Alaska wildlife refuge that
environmentalists have been fighting to preserve. The House passed another
war-funds supplement bill, this time $81.4 billion. The noted NeoCon, Paul
Wolfowitz, was picked by President Bush to head the World Bank, a move that
received lukewarm reception from European allies and outright disgust by many
aid groups. That would be like appointing John Bolton as ambassador to the
U.N., a man who has always been a vocal critic of the U.N., and whose record of
diplomacy includes infuriating the North Koreans by describing them as
"human scum." Oh, WAIT. Bush appointed him last week. This
week, Bush also selected Kevin Martin, a "hard-liner on decency issues", to head
the FCC. OPEC decided to raise oil production by 2%, but traders bid up
oil prices to a 22-year high of $56.46 a barrel. The Energy Department
conceded that employees may have falsified documents documents in studying the
proposed (gigantic) Yucca Mountain nuclear dump site. Israel handed over
control of Jericho to the Palestinians. U.S. obesity threatens to halt the
decades-long increase in average life expectancy. Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince will be out in July and is already selling briskly.
Scott Peterson was sentenced to death. Foreign central banks are
continuing to diversify their foreign exchange reserves out of dollars, sending
the dollar down again.
I now get the magazine Inc., but it's largely filled with rah-rah
entrepreneurial stories (What Would Richard Branson Do?). There's one
interesting article, however, about Fritz Maytag, who pretty much invented the
microbrewery in 1971 by saving Anchor Steam Brewery (then over 100 years old)
with an injection of cash (he's an heir to the Maytag fortune) and three decades
of hard work. Another article business in China and whether it's a source
of labor or source of competition for American small business. One
interesting tidbit from the article: Chinese manufacturers now supply more
than 70% of Wal-Mart's inventory, and Wal-Mart alone accounts for more than 10%
of China's total world exports.
Business Week's cover article is on Outsourcing Innovation, asking the
perfectly reasonable question: "... companies are farming out R&D to cut costs
... Are they going too far?" The five hottest global brands are 1) Apple
2) Google 3) Ikea 4) Starbucks 5) Al Jazerra. States are in even worse
shape than U.S. corporations with pension liabilities, with $375 billion in
upcoming pension costs which are unfunded. Tired of your cell-phone cover?
Motorola is now selling a biodegradable case that, when buried, sprouts
sunflowers. Sony, the struggling Japanese electronics/media giant, has
selected Sir Howard Stringer as CEO, a Welsh industrialist who speaks no
Japanese. Questionable ethics, a culture of back-stabbing, and poor
leadership has plagued Boeing top management for years. The use of email
archives by prosecutors in recent years has many businesses installing
"on-the-fly" email filters that block any message containing trade secrets, bad
language, pornography, or pirated audio files. Chrysler's sales are
zooming with the success of the 300 sedan, Ram trucks, and Caliber. Bush's
proposed cuts of $5.4 billion in subsidies to farmers may end up actually being
directed to cuts in food stamp programs (surprise, surprise). India and
the U.S. are growing closer diplomatically as American businesses continue
outsourcing and the U.S. government works with India to contain China and Iran.
Because Pope John Paul has appointed 115 of the 120 cardinals eligible to elect
the next pope, it is likely that he will be conservative on the issues of
abortion, homosexuality, and bioethics. The syndicated World Poker Tour
is a smash hit on the Travel Channel and seen in 57 countries. Symantec's
competitive chief, John W. Thompson, expects something like outright war with
Microsoft as the latter put security near the top of its product categories.
~~~~~~~~~
BTW, Didi is off the RIP list, as I found her new blog URL, thanks to Reb.
Posted by jbahr at 08:48 AM | Comments (1)
March 16, 2005
The Stick
Well, scooterdeb passed The
Stick to Brian, who passed it
to Karma Police, who passed
it to Evelio,
who passed it to Ivy, who
passed it to Suzanne, who
passed it to Gina,CDY, and me.
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Essentials of Fire Fighting.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
It's still Ellen Ripley.
The last book you bought is:
A Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Joke Book.
The last book you read: The Sigmatel STMP35xx Data Sheet.
What are you currently reading? Spell, by Dan Beachy-Quick.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
- The Bible, King James Version
- Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
- Ulysses, James Joyce
- William Shakespeare: The Complete Works
- Sister Wendy's 1000 Masterpieces
Mike Snider, because I think his list would be interesting.
Tricia Lockwood, because I think her list would be hilarious.
Tony Robinson, just to see if he puts a cookbook on his list of five.
Posted by jbahr at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Find A Poet
The Academy of American Poets, of which I am a member, maintains a list of noted poets (dead and living) on their popular Find A Poet search page. Here's who isn't searchable:
Rae Armantrout
Mary Jo Bang
Olena K. Davis
Carl Dennis
Albert Goldbarth
Brenda Hillman
Rodney Jones
John Koethe
Ron Silliman
Susan Wheeler
C. Dale Young
Louis Zukofsky
For the record, they do list Maya Angelou.
~~~~~~
(and I'm adding poets as I think of them. Comment/email me if there's someone you think should be on the list ...)
Laura mentioned that the EPC site, and the "Chicago List" (this one?). There's also the Chicago PostModern list.
~~~~~~
As a side note, the American Heritage Dictionary spells his name Zukovsky, which seems a bit more egregious than everybody calling me Jeffrey.
Posted by jbahr at 05:42 AM | Comments (7)
March 13, 2005
Snowbound, Spellbound
I was washing my car in my Poetry Daily t-shirt yesterday, blue skies, light
wind, mid-60's. It started snowing about 6 PM and this morning we've got
up to 8 inches in drifts. California has its earthquakes and Kansas its
twisters, large, sudden, jarring catastrophes. We have
none of
that, not the hurricanes, not the floods. Just these subtle reminders
not to take too much for granted.
I have begun reading Dan Beachy-Quick's
Spell.
I find that poetry books are, generally, of two kinds: those that you can
open just about anywhere and start reading, and those that you circle
cautiously, poking it with a stick, easing up to it. Spell is the
latter type. 90% of all poetry books are the former type. This is
not a matter of better or worse, but I am beginning to think that
the distinction explains the split between conventionalists and the post avants
(yes, these are miserably inaccurate terms). With a lifetime of
fiction-reading under my belt, I think I came to poetry unthinkingly expecting
it to be a fiction derivative -- with compressed, heightened language and a
sprinkling of music and device use -- but, essentially related to the short
story as the short story is related to the novel, only more so. Most of
the new poetry books I read have the vignette as their organizing principle.
The poems are satisfying in the way an O. Henry story is: with a beginning/a
middle/an end, with a resolution of some kind. This sense of
fulfillment accompanies even the poems of edgy poets like
Emily Rosko,
Matthew Shindell,
Dale Smith,
and Andrea Baker
(to pull a few poems out of a recent
Octopus).
Even the poem by
Nick Twemlow seems a work of excision, a ghost of prose.
I don't feel that I'm on familiar ground as I read Spell, and I
suspect that's a good thing. I don't recognize yet the organizing
principle of the book, but at an obvious level, it's broken into 6 chapters
(e.g., A Valiant He, Halt-A-Vein), with a prologue and an
afterword. There are a few examples of daring layout, but most of the poetry
is segmented into one, two or three-line stanzas with plenty of white space, and
obligatory modern indentation for emphasis and thought-suspension. In
places, it feels a bit like a scripted play, with soliloquies on the nature and
tools of writing. In places, it feels like those Melvillian discursions,
where we learn about the soundings of whales or the price of spermacetti.
There's a lot of very nice writing:
But if the whale sounds down tooAnyway, those are my first impressions. More as I work my way through.
Fast the coil around a man's wrist
That man will
lose his limb
To the o's collapse
Posted by jbahr at 08:36 AM | Comments (2)
March 12, 2005
In The Mail This Week - Continued
I received Dan Beachy-Quick's Spell today from
Ahsahta Press (thanks,
Janet), and intend on taking some time
with it this weekend. Having just finished Moby Dick again
recently, it should be an
interesting read. Ordered, but not received: Jorie Graham's Overlord, John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander, Dean
Young's Elegy on Toy Piano, Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven.
Ever since turning in Continental Airline miles for magazines, I've been
getting the Wall Street Journal -- most of which are still piled up on
the coffee table in their thin red plastic bags. Front page articles from
Friday's edition include: Rumsfeld details a big shift in military
strategy and budget in a planning document intended to make the U.S. Armed
Forces "far more engaged in heading off threats ... [to] serve a larger purpose
of enhancing U.S. influence around the world." (what do you want to bet that it
doesn't suggest a smaller budget?); a powerful farmer's
organization, which supplies over half of the nation's winter vegetables, is
complaining about the Border Patrol's increasing success at keeping Mexican
agricultural workers on their side of the border; South Korea, with a GDP
that is 30 times that of the Stalinist North Korean Republic, is increasingly at
odds with U.S. policy by supplying billions in financial aid to its contentious
neighbor; Springmill Products ships a line of spring water products for cats and
dogs called PetRefresh; Swift passage and Bush's signature is expected on
a bill that would make it more difficult to file bankruptcy (in other news, a
government study shows that over one-half of all bankruptcies are a result of
medical expenses); a post-Abu Ghraib review, led by a Navy admiral, has
absolved all civilian and military chiefs of ordering or encouraging prisoner
abuse (surprise, surprise); Alan Greenspan repeated his warning that federal
budget deficits pose a risk to the U.S. economy; Pakistan (finally)
admitted that nuclear weapons-meister Abdul Qadeer Khan sold "nuclear gear" to
Iran.
I got a nice letter from Susan Ludvigson and Kevin Prufer, informing me that
Brian Swann's Snow House won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry
competition, and I didn't. Ludvigson and Prufer go into extraordinary
detail in describing the degree to which the contest was on the up-and-up:
When manuscripts arrive, if the submitter has every been published in Pleiades
(I was), their manuscript is sent to South Carolina screeners. Any
manuscript that poses a conflict of interest for South Carolina screeners is
sent to the Missouri screeners. In the case that both screener groups have
a conflict of interest, the manuscript is sent to New York screeners. All
manuscripts are coded and then have their identifying cover sheets removed.
The resulting 10-15 finalists are sent "blind" to the final judge -- this year,
John Koethe. Kudos to Pleiades Press for all this planning and work to
blunt frequent charges that poetry book contests are "rigged."
The members of Interpol stare out at you from the cover of Spin
this month. There's a humorous public service ad showing the correct way
to navigate an esuvee, a large, hairy fictitious animal with its own
website. The ads are sponsored by a
coalition of state attorneys general and is funded by Ford Motor Company to
settle a lawsuit for deceptive advertising of its SUVs. Tenacious D,
Beck, Will Farrell and Queens of the Stone raised a quarter-million
dollars for tsunami victims in an L.A. benefit concert. Look for summer CD
releases by Coldplay, Weezer, Audioslave and Foo
Fighters. The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival is expecting
100,000 attendees, two giant outdoor stages, 90 acts, and temperatures over 100
degrees. Fiona Apple loyalists picketed Sony's New York-based Epic Records
in an attempt to get the firm to release her Extraordinary Machine.
Tori Amos is including wildflower seeds in some copies of her The Beekeeper
CD. Candidates for taking over Ashton Kutcher's departure from That
70's Show include Orlando Bloom, Fred Savage, Christopher Walken and Jar-Jar
Binks. Midway Games has contracted Marilyn Manson as the voice of Edgar
the Gray Alien for its newly released arcade classic, Area 51.
66.6 Great Moments in Goth includes the fall of Lucifer (date unknown), the
invention of absinthe (400 BCE), the popularization of Halloween (800 CE), the
birth of Vlad Dracula (1431), the death of E.A. Poe (1849), the introduction of
Doc Martens (1960), the debut of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976),
the release of Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar (1996), and the
availability of Cheer Dark, a laundry detergent specifically designed for black
clothes (2005).
From Motley Fool, which I follow for stock
tips: ...the Democratic staff of the House Education and Workforce
Committee [issued a] report [that] "assesses the costs to US taxpayers of
employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even
under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a
two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year
for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for
low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report
estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers
$420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a
total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million U.S.
employees." He added that state governments are burdened by Wal-Marts, too, with
California spending more than $20 million on health care for Wal-Mart employees.
Posted by jbahr at 07:41 AM | Comments (1)
March 11, 2005
In The Mail This Week
We have a lot of catching up to do. MIT Technology Review begins
with an editorial that takes issue with Jared Diamond's Collapse, a book
documenting societal collapse through the ages and predicting the same for us if
we don't wise up. Though generally approving, the editorial points out
that Diamond's examples resulted from a misunderstanding or mis-adaptation of
technology, not an overuse of it. In Mean Media, web logs are
described as "good for media", but not equivalent to journalism, claiming that
"vindictive" conservative bloggers hounded Dan Rather from his job (which I
think is a sizeable overstatement). Sun is encouraging their employees to
create blogs without "media-relations chaperones". The failure of the
power industry's deregulation in California (rolling blackouts, massive price
hikes) is blamed for under-investment by the utilities industry. The new
thing is race-specific drugs (e.g., BiDil, a new heart failure medicine targeted
at black men). A Danish researcher has developed an heuristic-based
approach to the otherwise intractable "traveling salesman problem" to decrease
postal delivery times. The creator of The Sims wants to move on to a game
that models "well, everything." Last year, a software virus was detected
that spreads through cell-phones. Microsoft is adding another R&D lab,
this time in Bangalore, India -- it has also opened one in China, alongside 600
other research centers owned by foreign companies. New elevator listening
software can detect a person screaming for help. FoldRx Pharmaceuticals
will focus on drugs which fix mis-folded proteins, a contributing factor in
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, diabetes and some cancers. Spalding
is releasing a new basketball product that has a built-in pump that works like a
pop-up turkey thermometer. Not surprisingly, R&D expenditures in developed
nations are largest for "local" problems (the Dutch work on soil reclamation,
the Germans on auto safety, the Chinese on virus vaccines, the US on homeland
defense). R&D as a percentage of GDP is highest for Israel, Sweden,
Finland, Japan, and Iceland. Web-based online retailing is growing at 20%
per year, and even brick-and-mortar-based offline sales are increasingly
influenced by consumers' online research. The nerve center for the Iraq
War is in Tampa, Florida, where high-speed video links keep military brass in
direct contact with commanders in the field.
The recent issue of Rolling Stone is dedicated to Dr. Hunter S.
Thompson, who wrote articles for RS for three decades (he received his
doctorate through mail-order). After a short stint in the Air Force, he
progressed from sports reporter to roving journalist, beginning with an
assignment in South America
(where
he first used psychotropic drugs). His personal history was as bizarre as
the personal mythology of most rock bands. RS contains half a dozen
"remembrances" by friends and lovers, including tributes by Jack Nicholson,
Keith Richards, Terry Gilliam, Marilyn Manson, and Johnny Depp (who mentions
that Thompson was the only person he ever knew who had a shotgun in his golfbag).
Other news this month: Tom Petty is DJ'ing a show on XM satellite radio.
Farrah Fawcett Major (ex-blonde bombshell Charlie's Angel) will host a reality
show. Hot summer tours include Eminem, Springsteen, Coldplay,
Weezer, Green Day and NIN. Following the success of
Ray, biopic movies of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Johnny Cash are in the
works. Billy Idol remembers the 80's: "nonstop drugs and sex, and then
we'd happen to do a gig at some point." At a recent reception, Queen
Elizabeth met Eric Clapton and asked "if he'd been playing long." Among
the Top 10 Acts To Watch is Mastodon, whose last album was inspired by
Moby Dick (take that, Dan Beachy-Quick). Kaiser Chiefs is
"rock's Next Big Thing." Nice shot of "German dance dollies" Chicks on
Speed and a review of their album, Press the Space Bar (3 stars out
of 4). The film critic rightly pans Be Cool (Travolta and Thurman),
Hostage (Bruce Willis) and The Pacifier (Vin Diesel). The
Shop on the back page includes an ad for personalized bobble-head dolls
(just send a picture), and BlueAmerican T-Shirts (for the other 57,288,974
people).
Time's feature article is How to End Poverty, which details how
we could keep 8 million people a year from dying because they are too poor to
stay alive (of the 1.1 billion in extreme poverty, most of whom live in East
Asia). The Defense Department admits in recent documents that it's still
substantially short of personnel for Iraq's nation building (Junie's dentist, a
Colonel in the Reserves and pushing sixty, was recently called up). Martha
Stewart's first meal out of prison was risotto (wise choice). USC and NFL
superstar Lynn Swann is considering running as an anti-abortion, guns-rights
Republican for the Pennsylvania governorship. Telemundo, the
Spanish-language media giant, is sponsoring community college courses for
writers to develop new "telenovelas". The U.S. life expectancy is now 77.6
years. A group of investors has offered a paltry $3 billion for all 30 NHL
franchises. In a detailed article, Time asks if the recent Lebanese
"peoples' uprising" and subsequent call for elections is a moment when "history
turns a corner." Joe Klein reports on his interview with Bashar Assad,
President of Syria and son of the late dictator, noting that Assad has failed to
bring promised reforms, surrounded as he is by the Baathist old guard.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer suggests that Bush may have done the
right thing invading Iraq, and notes that even Jon Stewart is jokingly asking if
Bush "had been right all along" (which Stewart says would make his head
implode). There's an absolutely fascinating (and gruesome) article on
Dennis Rader -- Boy Scout leader, pillar of his church, devoted husband and
father -- who has been indicted as the notorious BTK, a serial killer who has
murdered 8 people in Wichita since 1974. Only 3 federal judges have been
assassinated, all since 1979, not including judge Joan Lefkow's mother and
husband this month. Big-box retailer Best Buy is on a roll, with sales of
almost $30 billion, and now designing new stores for different target customers
(e.g., women, young techies). New fantasy camps for Jeff Gordon wannabe's
teach you to take the track at 150 MHP for only $3,650. 56% of all
Division I schools have at least one athletic team below the new NCAA academic
standards. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's switch on the issue led
to the Court's recent opinion forbidding capital punishment for those under 18.
A vastly disproportionate percentage of writers for America's hit TV shows
(including those that are decidedly heterosexual) are gay. Karen
Kingsbury, the queen of Christian romance novels, is trying to cross over to
"secular" novels. Time recommends the novel Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee
(who was, coincidentally, an instructor at the Napa Valley Writer's Conference I
attended). New homes now average 2,300 square feet (up from 1,500 square
feet in 1970), but a growing group of architects are designing "hobbit houses"
that are more economical and environmentally-friendly.
Posted by jbahr at 08:27 AM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2005
Cold Monday
It will be no surprise to Stephen and others northward of Iowa, that winter up here is not like winter in Colorado. Yesterday was a glorious, windless day of 50 degrees and blue skies -- the norm for Colorado in March. Today, it's gray and cold, as if yesterday were an aberration, as if the sun made a house call and then moved on.
Junie and I did, indeed, drive to Prairie du Sac yesterday with poetry books in the door pockets of my rented Corolla: BP Kelly's Orchard, Bob Hicok's Insomnia, AG's Combinations of the Universe -- all good fare for reading aloud while Junie did the driving. Our trip took us through the more glamorous parts of southern Wisconsin: the Dells with its watershows; the sizable Ho-Chunk casino; the large sprawling factory lands of the now-defunct Army ordnance depot; the big Culver's in Baraboo (home of the Butterburger). My voice gave out before I got to Hicok. A couple of passages from Insomnia Diary that I liked? From Becoming bird:
It began with a gun to his back. Facedown,and this from Dropping the euphemism:
he sniffed the skin of dead men
on an injection table the artist bought
for fifty from her cousin when the local
style of capital punishment regressed
from chemical to electrical. It was to be
one feather outside each scapula, an idea
that arrived while he flipped Art
Through the Ages past the side view
with invading memos. When I said
I have to lay you off
a parallel universe was born
in his face, one where flesh
is a loose shirt
taken to the river and beaten
Last night I was reading Michael Ryan's Literary Theory, a primer on Formalism, Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism and other literary theories. Ryan applies them, variously, to the works of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop to interesting effect. This is probably novice stuff for the literati out there, but I get my education where I can.
Posted by jbahr at 06:54 AM | Comments (5)
March 06, 2005
AG in Eau Claire
I landed in Minneapolis, took my usual wrong turn, did a 180 at Mall of
America, and navigated to Eau Claire, where Junie met me at the door with a kiss
and a copy of Dean Young's Skid, which she finds outstanding. This, in
itself speaks well of Dean Young, as Junie and I tend to live on either side of
a short aesthetic fence -- her yard populated with topiaries depicting Carl
Phillips and Louise Gluck, mine with lawnchairs in which sit Billy Collins and
Lyn Hejinian sharing a carafe of iced tea. I'd elaborate the image with
MJB, Anne Carson and O.K Davis sitting on the fence, but it's a silly enough
metaphor already.
My buddy Frank Amazon'd me a couple of Albert Goldbarth books for Christmas,
and I brought them along in my carry-on's outside pocket. Heaven and
Earth is AG's collection from 1991. I'll be reading it to Junie on the
drive down to Prairie du Sac to have lunch with her mother. Unlike some
poets whose work seems to simply morph over time, Heaven and Earth seems
like the uncut diamond that later works have become. Which is not to say
that the book isn't just as erudite, compelling, and magnificently written.
The emotions are a little raw-er, the narratives less the kind of flawless
microcosms of, say, Combinations of the Universe. The trademark
cosmological allusions abound, of course, like this passage from The Whole Earth
Catalogue:
Plate tectonics: like blackened pieces
of sweet pork crackling, the continents slide
on their underside greases. Night; outside,
the sad moon drags the sea behind, a washerwoman
her bucket. The moon
and her crimp-rimmed craters.
The maestro moon and her ever-attentive
oyster castanet orchestra. The atmosphere
of Earth weighs, oh, 5,000
million million tons but a ladybug
bears it untroubled, and
As with his other books, the list of acknowledgments includes a startling range
of journals: The Kenyon Review, Poetry East, The Iowa Review, Poetry,
The Denver Quarterly, APR, Vox, New England Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal.
I know of a few poets who appeal to this kind of disparate audience, but few who
submit works with the same recognizable (and brilliant) style to all of them.
Speaking of Dean Young, the irrepressible
Katey Nicosia received a phone
message from him, inviting her to the Iowa program -- one of the many fine
schools to which she has applied. This is, of course, fabulous news and an
anecdote to relate in future years (""Hey, Kathryn Nicosia. This is Dean Young
from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and...ummm...we want you to come here...").
Way to go, Katey, and good luck with your choice of schools.
Posted by jbahr at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)
March 04, 2005
Poetry
The new Poetry
is here, and as I began reading, I thought this issue would turn out to be the
perfect embodiment of Ron's
School of Quietude, probably a result of this issue's formalist majority.
It is a volume short on poetry and long on opinion, with almost three-fourths of
the journal dedicated to commentary, letters, and tasteful advertising.
You'd
think,
with $100 million, they wouldn't need the advertising. There's also an
index of "Volume 185" (or, Volume CLXXXV, as indicated elsewhere in the
issue for those of a classical bent), which I believe constitutes all of the
journal's productions since last October.
J. D. McClatchy starts off with ER (for Edmund White) which begins
in loose IP, and otherwise remarkably prosy verse: "And my fear of his
decision, or no ... well, / His tonelessly announcing it one night, / Only that,
always that, has clouded the scene". The poem eventually mentions Plato's
Republic, and the usual mandatory classical allusions, and eventually
turns lyrical. A View of the Sea also starts off in a tight IP that
drifts off in a metrical jumble. I suppose he knows what he's doing.
I liked some of the storyline and a number of the images, but could have done
without the short spates of wordiness: "You were standing at the sink with your
back to me / And must have sensed me there behind you, watching." Up next
is Debora Greger with Black Silk, a tight little poem of 5 identically
formatted quintets, that starts off a little stale ("I see myself far off, in a
mirror / that has lost its shine") but eventually redeems itself to some degree
("from even further back, I remember / a suture of railroad track").
Rachel Hadas contributes 7 short poems, individually titled, and collectively
named "Triolets in the Argolid." For those of you about to run off and
Google, a triolet is 13th century French form with an ABaAabAB rhyme
scheme and the requirement to duplicate the first line thrice. With this
kind of metrical baggage, it's hard to believe one could be effective, and I
only found the 6th poem interesting: "Tino's counting on his fingers. /
Syllables and rhume; / a faint Sapphic cadence lingers. / ...").
Carol Frost has 3 poems, each a work of one-line stanzas which have that
workshop-pretentious look about them. Pelican has an interesting
middle section ("pistol-shot from wharves: beautiful evolutions / above the
leaping shoal:: shot after shot:: / made gumbo: salted: smoked: sensible to
cold::"). Redfish and To Fisherman complete the piscine trio
with competence, if few fireworks. John Koethe also rambles on in loose IP
with The Perfect Life, but, like much of Poetry's fare, you just want him
to get on with it: ("I have a perfect life. It isn't much, /
But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive. / And happy in a vague way: no
disappointments / On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt / ..."). Adam
Kirsch contributes a title-less chunk of blank verse ("The stripes of smoke
describing an oblique, / Too steeply angled flight path seem to veer"), then on
to Stefi Weisburd's Little God Origami, which I liked for its wit: "like
seed-pod helicopters. Alas, the window / to your soul needs a good
scrubbing, so". Her Sponge Boy is weird and effective: "thieves the
mesmerized streets. Next morning: everyone's lost / cab fare, and
seven decapitated frog heads, like little Stalins, / line the driveways.
The devil's commandeered / that boy's gyroscope for sure ...". Jehanne
Dubrow has two poems featuring Polish Jews, Souvenir and The Izaak
Synagogue. Both works of blank verse end with a rhymed couplet that
seemed strange and tacked on. In the case of Souvenir, the couplet
almost ruins the poem with a guilt hammer: "... how dark the beards of Jews, /
as black as coal dust covering new snow / (and lost like memory in the dirt
below)." Terese Coe, an co-staff member of mine at one time over at
The Gazebo,
provides an interesting translation of Pierre de Ronsard's Epitaph for François
Rabelais. The issue's poetry ends with a long poem by Albert Goldbarth
that sounds ever so much as if Lewis Lapham got into poetry. The poem,
Cock, is AG's usual masterful weaving of science, history, and personal
anecdote. It begins with a dinner Darwin has with a "visiting Spanish
lawyer", ambles through examples of intolerance (the Inquisition, the Salem
tribunal, attacks on a gay-marriage advocate), and ends with the story of his
father weeping when AG announced his aetheism at age 13. Of course, the
final turn brings us back to Darwin, and the ironic line "... He isn't any
rooster. He isn't / going to rudely wake anyone from a long sound sleep."
The Comment section is a pretty
rollicking multilogue among Adam Kirsch, Daisy Fried, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Jeredith Merrin on Ambition and Greatness: An Exchange. The
discussants explore the nature of poetic greatness, whether it can be pursued,
and who are the current nominees for the honor. The discussion focuses on
20th century poets, and there's considerable consensus on Walcott and Milosz,
and a number votes for O'Hara and Bishop, with Whitman and Dickinson held up as
unanimous examples of greatitude. Larkin, Auden. Eliot and WCW are
mentioned, but there's a strange predilection for non-American poets (for
example, Ashbery isn't even mentioned) by most, though Fried submits Alan Dugan
and Thylias Moss for your consideration. All of the panelists cite the
risk-aversion of current poets, and the publication pressures of the Poetry Biz,
as negative influences on the acquisition of Greatness. Daisy Fried is the
least pompous and most funny (about Larkin: "I can't imagine turning to that
misantropist, reactionary shit, one of my favorite poets, ...). Merrin
wisely mentions that "One benighted application of great ... would be to
praise poems thought to reinforce the right values", and notes that, in
this modern age of quarks and nebulae, there isn't enough science and technology
in today's verse. Daisy Fried again: "The poetry-as-solace-mafia, a
subset of the poetry-is-wisdom syndicate, would have it that poetry is anything
but, simply, art as language." Kirsch admits that it's the kiss of death
for a poet to try to sound great. Ellis thinks that "greatness
resists being copied." The four are split on the accuracy of Arnold's
definition that "the grand style ... [arises] ... when a noble nature,
poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject."
So much for Ashbery.
W. S. di Piero has a very long piece on the work
of Basil Bunting, and I admit that I got bored and didn't finish it. D.H.
Tracy, in Ten Takes, provides some balanced reviews of books by Andrew Feld,
Eleanor Wilner, Gillian Allnutt, Kamau Brathwaite, Rita Dove, Roddy Lumsden,
James Tate, Claudia Rankine, Quan Barry, and Alan Williamson (a strange
collections of names as could only come from American poets). To cite some
of the catty remarks (my favorites): On Quan: "She is often reduced,
by form, to a slapdash voiceover to get her settings set". On Tate: "The
talky, columnar poems ... read like sketch-comedy scripts". (He says that like
it's a bad thing). On Lumsden: "It's hard to tell whether Lumsden
is essentially gloomy or essentially cheery". On Dove: " [she] isn't
aces at voice — she never nails soldier-talk the way, say, Wilfred Owen does ...
— but she's game". On Brathwaite: "From a distance, ... some of the poems
look like cantos that Ezra Pound might have written if he had had access to a
1984 Macintosh". On Wilner: "[her] phrasing is indifferent to economy, and
the book is peppered with eyebrow-raisers like fine scrim, worn down
flat, and calm serene". On Feld: "The poems are not polyvocal
... and almost all of them could be adequately dramatized by having Feld sit in
a chair and talk to you". On Rankine: "There are pages and pages
lobbying for the book's seriousness" (the Jorie Effect). Tracy is,
however, kind to everyone in one place or another, and the overall sense of the
reviews is one of good sense and appreciation for the difficult of our art.
That's all for Poetry. I was going to write up a little more, but I
watched Grosse Point Blank instead for the ninth time.
Posted by jbahr at 07:51 AM | Comments (1)
March 02, 2005
This and That
Hanna has an outstanding poem
up at QED.
Kudos to Kirsten, whose
fine, provocative Blue Study I just ran across in a thorough read of the
latest Notre
Dame Review. Also noted that Mary Jo Bang has a second poem,
Minnie Mouse, in the issue. Selections of the art and culture behind
the literary works are
online.
Good review of Canary at
Verse, compliments of a link from
Heidi's blog.
I was re-reading the poems I could find on
Jonathan's "My list of 10
poems can beat up your list of 10 poems". Good stuff. Well,
except Frost's The Silken Tent,
which always rings in my ear with stilted syntax. It would be
interesting to see a website (something like
Vs.) that was a Celebrity Deathmatch of top-ten-poem lists. Yeats
takes on Merrill with swans as weapons. That sort of thing. The
original MLOTPCBUYLOTP was apparently David's brainstorm at
The Great American Pinup.
Tony's doing good things with
Poetry Dailier: Strong
Poems. Beautiful Poems. Tough Poems.
Henry has a new audio blog
site with spoken poetry,
original compositions, music mixes. The site also supports
Podcasting (using either Apple iPod software or third-party podware clients,
such as PPR) or
you can play the selections in situ with Windows Media player.
The ever-interesting Caterina led me to
this link of
job
opportunities at Hello Kitty.
Suzanne is Velma.
Eduardo is SpongeBob.
CDY is both Bert and Ernie. I am
apparently Peppermint Patty.
If Jim gets any funnier, he's
going to have to go into syndication: Grand Theft Auto is the new
Proust. Indeed. His site is starting to load slower than
Silliman's though.
Paul has some reviews of his
book up. CDY hits 10K and
considers an offer from Warren Wilson.
Joshua recalls a night of Ilya
Kaminsky. Amy
reviews the
Politics and the Artistic Response. conference. The Onion lists
some new Bush
Science Policies.
Posted by jbahr at 06:20 AM | Comments (4)