Whimsy Speaks

March 31, 2006

I'm Just The Messenger

I was watching the Matrix again last night for the zillionth time.  I wouldn't pull my DVD down from the shelf and start it, but I ran into it flipping channels and couldn't stop watching.  Just at the moment when Cypher jumps on Trinity (who's out in that barber chair), and tells her he's going to pull the plug on Neo, I thought:  "Jimmy, you get down from there this minute!"

Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher says "let the prisoners pick the fruits".  What a brilliant solution!  We can make illegal immigration a felony, throw a million people in prison, then put them in work gangs and supply them to AgriBusiness.  This idea could really take off.  At some point in the future, the woman who makes your motel bed and the local Denny's short-order cook could both be prisoners on day passes.

Sometimes it's easier to quote Bush than parody him:  ""We don't want people sneaking into our country who are going to do jobs Americans don't want.  We want them coming in an orderly way."

I've heard this many times, but it's still amazing to me that almost 45% of all Americans believe "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years".  That percentage drops with increases in income and education.  Only 27% of Internet surfers believe it. 

Jill Carroll "... says the terrorists treated her well. Her interpreter, murdered during the kidnapping, was not available for comment."  

 

Posted by jbahr at 08:30 AM | Comments (1)

March 30, 2006

Magic Bus

I need Seth and Scoplaw to straighten me out.  How can Congress pass a law telling the Supreme Court what they can and cannot rule on?  Not to mention that we're talking about the writ of habeas corpus here.  The way I see it, even divided as it is, the Supreme Court is all we've got left to confront the "I don't actually have to obey the law" Administration and its rubber-stamp Congress.

Darn.  That video of the Italian Prime Minister humping the traffic cop was a hoax. 

Sob.  I didn't make it onto Lorna Dee's favorite list.  There are a lot of people I like on there, but it's difficult to understand the selection criterion ("quality of the poetry") as some of the listees hardly ever post their own poetry.  Heck, I'd put Reb on my list solely on the basis of her Jello stories.  Oh, well, to each her own.  Hey, I just noticed that Ms. Cervantes is just down the road at CU.  Maybe we can get her to read at a Many Mountains Moving salon.  

I was having lunch with my son, chatting about his modest stock portfolio.  The discussion wandered over to the wine I've owned, and what a great investment it would have been had I not, well, drunk it all.   I was looking through my gigantic collection of wine corks, the one that's stored in a 3' x 3' x 3' moving box:  '91 Vega Sicilia.  '82 Penfold Grange Heritage.  '86 Chateau Margaux.  '61 Cos d'Estournel.  I'm sure all that red wine has done wonders for my cardiovascular system, though.

I wish I were on the MicroBus following Robert around.  I could stop by and visit my son at Columbia College while I'm at it.  Except that he's probably flying home for surgery, having announced that he might have a hernia.  His mom and I are trying to figure out why he didn't notice this LAST WEEK when he was home for spring break.

Claudia's complaint about AT&T reminds me of my experience with Qwest last week.  At some point, the phones stopped working.  Naturally, I called Qwest on my (Verizon-based) cell-phone.  After the usual long wait, a customer support person got on and told me that they had turned my phone lines off because I hadn't paid my bill.  You know, the one I got two weeks ago, and paid when I got home from a trip.  I reminded the lady that I had been a customer for 15 years and hadn't ever not paid a phone bill.  And that I had a company to run on the four lines that I have.  And that they had neither called nor emailed me about the impending shutdown.  And that I hadn't even noticed the phones were down, because they had kept my DSL connection active, for some bizarre reason.  She didn't apologize, she just waived the reconnect fee.  This kind of behavior seldom happens with cell-phone companies, who actually have to compete for your business.  I have been keeping this incident in mind as I watch the relentless consolidations of industry after industry through merger. 

The National Debt Clock will soon run out of space for displaying our recent profligacy.  It was actually shut down for a while during the Clinton years, because it wasn't designed to go backwards.

An amazing number of governmental agencies have kids' websites.  Most of them are as unbiased and informative as the DOE's Yucca Mountain Youth Zone, where kids can "find fascinating information about radioactive waste and the Yucca Mountain Project."

Posted by jbahr at 09:10 AM | Comments (6)

March 29, 2006

Mini-Hump

Dima and I are just buried in a fixed-bid project that is way behind, and for which we've put in at least 5 times the estimated hours.  It's amazing how different a client's behavior is when you're working fixed-bid, as opposed to Time and Materials.  I knew I shoulda been a plumber.

Why isn't our Head of State this cool?

Seth:  that boy!  Another long take on the PoWorld, including a discussion of the Royal Society.  I am reminded of a class I once took in which the prof said that Newton and Liebnitz both developed both The Calculus independently, but had separate notations.  Ultimately, he said that Newton's notation was adopted because otherwise a fly could differentiate (Liebnitz's notation was a small dot over the function letter).  That's pretty much math humor.

Jimmy is teasing us with the news that Joan Houlihan has a new essay out, but I can't find it.  Bill has some pretty funny poetry exercises, including writing poetry underwater.  I agree with Diana who agrees with Naipaul about James.  Thanks, Jordan, for adding me to the list.  Interesting take by Joshua on the French workers' myopic attachment to "entitlements".  Essays on the G.O.P.'s war on science. 

~~~~~~~~
Yes.  Poet trading cards.  What a great idea.  But should they be more like baseball cards or Magic The Gathering?  Baseball-like cards could cite batting averages (how many times in BAP?), lifetime grand slams (number of contributions to Paris Review), and fielding stats (how many AWP panels).  I kind of like the MTG idea, though, characterizing poets by their capabilities, like Toughness and Power.  Maybe we'd expand the categories to include musicality, depth of message, even whimsy.  Like real-world trading, the most popular cards wouldn't be the most famous poets.  A Carl Phillips or Olena K. Davis might fetch 3 figures on eBay, based upon their limited supply and the devotion of their fan base.  Somebody could cook up a strategy game, which would be a mixture of poetry slam and Unassociated Garden Party.

Posted by jbahr at 04:55 PM | Comments (2)

March 28, 2006

Meow

Emily, in a most unladylike fashion, has been awakening me very early in the morning with serenades.  I have a passing familiarity with the International Phonetic Alphabet, but I'm still not sure I could characterize Emily's monologue without new symbols for sounds, and perhaps even a music score.  There's that gutteral "r" in "prrrrrrrowl", and the voiceless "m" in "meow", and the apparent semantic differences that depend upon the pitch.  In cartoons, the guy doesn't do any real analysis, he just gets out of bed and throws a shoe at the cats on the fence.  I wonder if there's an Animal Kingdom equivalent to the IPA.  It would be hard to write a chipmunk sonnet, for example, if you didn't know what rhymed with what.

It appears that Tom Delay can no longer carry a concealed weapon.  That leaves only about a million Texans with Glocks in their glovebox.

The New Blue Canary 5 is as good as everyone has been saying it is.  I also received Colorado Review a couple of days ago and noticed Seth in it.  More on both tomorrow. 

Speaking of Seth, he's got a good riff going on the immigration bills currently being negotiated in Congress.  Yesterday, as I scanned the AM talk shows, every one of them was talking about immigrants.  As talk-show hosts are 90% conservative, you can imagine where they stood on illegal immigrants (for example, "... the bill's not criminalizing them, they're already criminals ...").  Fox's Sean Hannity was his usual hyperbolic self.  If you want to see something really funny, however, check out the HanniDates, his dating service that he apparently has shut down out of embarrassment.

Jonathan advises that you don't bring your second-best arguments to his comment area.  As a collector of inferior opinions, I welcome your second-best arguments.  Even your third and fourth-best, which are sometimes the most revealing, if not the most persuasive.  Speaking of seconds and thirds, I conducted a monumental garage-cleaning yesterday.  If you're like me, you find you need something, like a plumber's wrench or a set of Allen wrenches, and you're pretty sure you don't own them so you waltz over to Home Depot and buy them and use them and put them away somewhere that you're sure to remember when you need them again.  That's how you end up with three sets of Allen wrenches.  At least that's how I do.  Yesterday, I actually found two 24-foot telescoping pole gadgets for unscrewing the flood lamps in my cathedral ceilings.  How do you forget you already have one of those?

I will probably go to hell for it, but Jesus' General is damned funny.

And on the culinary front, there's a blogger's cookbook available where sales benefit Médecins Sans Frontières.

Posted by jbahr at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2006

Members of the Jury, I Will Be Brief

I'm having fun You-Tubing at Jordan's joint.  Today, Jordan is interviewing Daniel Nester about his well-known Queen obsession.  Jordan's wearing a tie, which I think is very PostPostModern.

Eric conducts a discussion with Josh on the State of Poetry.  I am also indebted to Eric for pointing out Stephen's Close Calls With Nonsense. 

Ginger doesn't care for kangaroo.  I've never had it, but when I lived in Belgium all the supermarkets had ostrich breast right next to the chicken pieces and magrès de canard.   They were huge and white, even bigger than turkey breast, like some kind of Aryan Dolly Parton poultry experiment gone horribly wrong.

Kasey cites Jordan's criterion of a poem doing something in his discussion of Linh Dinh's Borderless Bodies.  My first thought was "of course it does something, it's an engine made of words", and my second thought was "it's like an algorithm, it is what it does", but they mean something more visceral than that.

Joshua tries to explain polenta to Kansas.

I would have paid at least two grand for the king-size cherry wood sleigh bed.

RedState co-founder Ben Domenech is so busted.

I'm still trying to get my mind around Jerry Springer on Air America.

Our Dear Leader knowingly bends the law again.

I didn't even know there was a Comic Curmudgeon.

Posted by jbahr at 08:16 AM | Comments (3)

March 23, 2006

Leaping Lemurs!

I like the idea of blogging all day, breaking up the obligation into bite-sized chunks.  But then, I like the idea of getting it done in the morning and having the rest of the day to check the hit count and Google myself.  Also, Technorati, which has not yet made it into a Behrle comic.  I also like the idea of inserting photographs with the text, but my camera is too big to put in my pocket and I lose a lot of good shots.  Or, I have the camera and a good shot and I find that I've left the memory stick in my PC.  One day, we will all have a 100-megapixel camera that comes free with throwaway promotional ballpoint pens.  And it will transfer its images to our PCs via SuperBlueTooth by our simply thinking of it.  And our PCs will be the size of a "pack of cigarettes", except nobody will remember what those looked like.  Ditto, "matchbox".  Ditto, "complimentary motel room sewing kit".  Yes, PCs will be tiny, but screens will be gigantic.  In fact, they will be like those Fathead sports appliqués, movable from wall to wall and room to room.  There will also be CRT paint, which works just like you think it would.  And voice recognition, of course, eliminating the need for typing, the only high school course I got a C in.  It will be very smart VR, and "oh, shit" will not end up on your blog just because you spill hot coffee in your lap.  Luckily, we will still have hot coffee.  It will once again be Colombia's largest export and we will think "Juan Valdez" instead of "Pablo Escobar" when someone mentions that country. It will be a Federal law that, if you serve coffee, you have to supply real half-and-half in those little tubs with peel-off foil, not those packets of "whitener".  There will be more Starbucks than there ever were phone booths, which will return in great numbers as a place to hold phone conversations, once the Annoyance Prevention Act of 2018 is passed.  Starbucks themselves will no longer serve coffee, but will evolve into restaurants where you can eat while waiting for your dry cleaning.  You will be able to post your blog entry by speaking into designated flowers around the city, and you will be recognized by your pheremones.

I received my contributor's copy of Eleventh Muse, edited by Steve Schroeder.  The last page is an Index of Fun Words, which cracks me up, and with which you can find the page number on which resides clitoris, pirouette, and scrollwork.  Familiar faces among the contributors include A. E. Stallings, John Poch, Steve Mueske, Mark Irwin, R. S. Gwynn, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jeffrey Franklin, Jordan Davis and Debra Ager.  I liked many poems, including Two Kinds of Arson, by Brandi Homan:  "— And when it was bad, / we believed maple trusses / were enough.  I was a charnel // half-buried in earth — / not the clean soil of soybean / rows, but filth, the dark meat. // He'd tie my hair back in bows. / The doctors gave me naphtha / and told me it was a parade."

From this month's Smithsonian:  The museum complex has an observatory that uses the unique Hectospec, an instrument with a radial web of optical fibers that are constantly configured by two robots named Fred and Ginger.  New analysis of the skull of the two-million-year old Australopithecus africanus Taung child reveals that it was killed (and probably carried off) by a raptor , not a big cat, as previously believed.  The males in many monogamous primate species gain weight during their mate's pregnancy.  The famous flock of six ravens that live around the Tower of London have been caged to prevent their exposure to bird flu.  100 years ago, John Paul Jones' remains were brought home from Paris to lie at rest at the Naval Academy, but there's no guarantee they got the right body.  Lemurs regularly eat young bamboo shoots, which contain enough cyanide to kill a human, and it's not known how they survive it.  Amateur archeologist Robert Bittlestone believes he has proved that Homer's Ithaca is actually Cephalonia, an island off Greece's western coast.

Posted by jbahr at 07:49 AM | Comments (1)

March 22, 2006

Humpity-Hump

While on the treadmill this morning, I watched Lewis Lapham on Washington Journal taking calls on Harper's The Case for Impeachment of President Bush.  There's a squirrel who lives in a glass dome undersea with SpongeBob.  The Xena episode was Fistful of Dinars (cue whistled spaghetti western theme).  I couldn't bring myself to watch the biography of Dr. Phil.  I didn't realize that Haley Joel I-See-Dead-People Osment was on the Jeff Foxworthy Show.  Among the dozens of exercise and diet shows was a new one:  Yoga Booty Ballet.  It reminded me, yet again, of the American genius for co-opting.  You take a French veal recipe, bring it to America and voilá!, restaurant chains across the nation invent Turkey Cordon Bleu, Mushroom Millet Cordon Bleu, Chicken Cordon Bleu with Jalapeño Cheese.

I opened the recent Alaska Quarterly Review and was amazed at the poet's lineup:  Joshua Beckman, Joel Brouwer, Mark Halliday, Matthea Harvey, Ilya Kaminsky, David Lehman, Cate Marvin, Heather McHugh, Paisley Rekdal, Mary Ruefle, G.C. Waldrep, Rebecca Wolff, Franz Wright and many more Names.  The table of contents looks like Legitimate Dangers meet Old Guard.  "What happened to this solid, quiet, unassuming journal?", I thought.  Olena K. Davis happened to it, apparently.  She's the guest editor, and you can bet she excited a lot of fine poets to submit on the basis of her reputation alone.  There were half a dozen poems of great wit (Lehman, Ruefle, Dumanis) including this from Susan Parr's Ecstatic Cling:  "Bitten by the electrician's boy / my shoulder drizzled in his spit, my soul / a porcupine — I stuck one little thumb / into his cheek (to get inside the den, to grab / the guilty tooth). He clobbered me.  Oh and Ow / and No around the room ...".  This is a tremendously enjoyable volume, and I bet Jordan claims a few poems for his list. 

Jim's picture of a Marshmallow Peep reminded me that Harper's Index states it takes 125,000 pigs to make the 800 million Peeps consumed during Easter.  God knows what part of the pig they use.  Other HI facts include:  2005 was the first in which Americans spent more than they earned since 1933;  a California clinic is training dogs to sniff patients breath to detect cancer and is reporting a 99% success rate for lung cancer and 88% for breast cancer;  the NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S. 

Josh has some interesting thoughts on a Poets Union:  "the university is a primary instigator of the desire to turn one's poems into commodities, which in sufficient number can be exchanged for the goods of prestige and jobs (though it's a peculiarity of the system that publishing less can actually vastly increase the exchange-value of your work). Yet many of us cannot resist the temptation the institution offers us to live as poets, to subtract the A from avocation."

Johannes notes the debut of Action, Yes!  Sarah announces her reading schedule, and I'd go on 4/9 just to see MJB.  Jordan has a clip of Tony reading at the Unassociated Garden Party.  Thanks to Jilly for the link to the article describing the 2500-year-old sarcophagus illustrated with scenes from Homer's epics.  Joshua nails Francis Fukuyama.  Fox can't be all bad if they host Laurel.  Mike discusses Buk.  Will three cases be enough? 

From the Time website:  "It’s enough of a stretch to get juries to convict people who drive getaway cars in a murder of conspiracy," says one government security lawyer not involved in the case. "But these prosecutors think Moussaoui should be put to death for not revealing a plan he never took part in?"  Joe Klein:  "The U.S. effort in Iraq has been a deadly combination of utopian fantasy and near criminal incompetence."  Why Iraq's police are a menace. 

I just finished Killing Critics, another stunningly well-written mystery by Carol O'Connell.  The protagonist is a beautiful sociopathic NYC detective, and the plots are always wildly original.  I also knocked off Robert Parker's Cold Service, wherein Spenser helps Hawk track down and decimate a Ukrainian gang (no offense, Olena).  Parker is has been doing his (admittedly repetitious) Spenser gig for so long, you forget just how good he is at his Chandleresque dialogue.  After Parker's tight dialog, I tried reading Elizabeth George's bloated With No One As Witness, but gave up after 100 pages. 

Posted by jbahr at 07:50 AM | Comments (5)

March 19, 2006

Legitimate Blog Entry

I realize that my reference to Hoy's article on flarf was so 20 minutes ago, but I've been catching up.  I've also been loosely following the chatter about Legitimate Dangers (including Jim's comix).  I've been trying to figure out the selection rationale, which has been a common avocation among bloggers since January.  We start with the aesthetic bents of the editors:  Cate Marvin who writes "obsessive, fevered lyric poems full of disaster and heartache" and Michael Dumanis who is known for his "unhinged poems of comic alienation".  Cate and Michael were looking for "poetry searching for universal truths" (which is just plain silly — some of these poets write almost exclusively very idiosyncratic interior work).  There is the implication that the anthology's poets are young-ish, but "born after 1960" seems to be a criterion destined to eliminate only the most mature of poets.  Kasey and Johannes argue that the contributors are largely a result of selection among an aesthetically similar social/professional group.  It's a large enough assembly that everyone can find a poet whose inclusion they cheer (in my case, O. K. Davis and G.C. Waldrep).  There are a number of Whitman winners (Doyle, Kim), but not our blogger buddies (Clover, Tost).  There are some litmag editors (Prufer and Wolff), but not others (Poch or Smith).  There are a couple of poet-reviewers (Burt and McSweeney) but neither Jordan nor D.H. Tracy.   There are what I consider as very visible poets (Kaminsky, Harvey, Rekdal) but no Bob Hicok.  I imagine the actual selection process was like choosing sides in dodgeball.  It would be interesting to know who just barely didn't make the cut.

Bush makes two new Cabinet appointments.

Harper's has an article on a topic I'm not sure I've ever seen discussed in print:  the likelihood of an American military takeover.  The panel participants quickly agree that 1) the American experience and culture of the military preclude this possibility, and 2) to some extent, it's already happened.  As evidence of the latter, panelists observe that the post-Cold War military has been able to avoid the kind of downsizing that has followed the end of other major conflicts.  The discussion veers toward a discussion of how the military has become more politicized:  retired generals speak out more frequently (not infrequently on Fox);  the all-volunteer composition has tended toward self-selected individuals which over-represent the South, and thus Republican sympathies;  the ubiquity of military bases, with their boost to local economies, has increased their political visibility in the halls of Congress.  Whether commercial, non-profit or governmental, large organizations resist growing smaller.  This is certainly true of the U.S. armed forces, whose budget now exceeds the sum of military budgets for the rest of the world.  This puts the Executive Branch in the position of a small boy with a hammer, where every problem looks like a nail. 

Richard has a killer list of literary journal URLs.  Jasper discusses Joshua's The Totality for Kids.  AnnMarie's latest reminds me of our innate siphoscitated alibity to udserntsand textual rearrangement.  Eduardo asks "who did you lock lips with" at AWP?  Joshua reviews V for Vendetta (which my kids said was the first time Hugh Weaving didn't sound like Agent Smith).  Mairead bought a Walking Coat.  Stuart's little darling is one month old.  Richard goes Paleolithic.  Ana's Morning News is available.  David recounts the tale of The Skunk Who Attended AWP.  Alli is yawning while eating a pork chop.  Julie admires the Diagram's submission page.

Posted by jbahr at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2006

In Lieu of Real Work

Dan Hoy pens yet another dismissal of flarf.  I am utterly fascinated by the length of his sentences, to wit:  "In any case, flarf’s Un-P.C. aesthetic aim (I’m still talking about the more general flarf) is a reactionary sentiment left over from the 90s and indicative of what’s problematic about the virtual poetry community’s closed circle of interlinked blogs (with Ron Silliman as the most interconnected and therefore central hub[15]). A juvenile strategy like this may be revolutionary in relation to the Mary Olivers[16] of the world, but if one follows Duchamp by dropping the medium as a defining limit so as to engage with poetics as a behavior and way of thinking, it’s not a matter of creating poetry in relation to other poems: ‘poetry’ is simply a byproduct, and what leads to these recursive acts of ‘revolution’ is a defining/ confining of it to the rubric of letters and lettres, text and txt."

Driving around Silicon Valley allowed me to listen to more NPR than I usually have time for.  After a week of Talk of the Nation, Forum, and random news stories, I've heard enough to conclude that the Bush Administration is doomed to irrelevancy.  Iraq's future is not hopeless, but its course is so different from neocon characterizations that the outcome (a weak central government, balkanization of the ethnic factions' regions, endless low-level insurgency, ...) will be viewed as an expensive failure.  This is the enervating backdrop to a succession of unpopular and/or unlucky events (Katrina, the Cheney shooting, the Dubai fiasco, ...).  Unlike Seth, I can't see the Democrats wanting to expend the energy and political capital to seek Bush's censure or impeachment.  We libs daydream about such a happy event, but I think most Americans find the prospect distasteful (as the Republicans found out with Clinton impeachment), and no, I don't believe the results of the one poll on the subject. 

After Ron's summary, I guess I'll have to buy KJ's Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets.  Robert refines the point system for The Schmoozie.  Thanks to Jeannine for pointing out this article on VQR's six nominations for the National Magazine Awards.  I've always thought of VQR as one of those two dozen litmags of conservative tastes, but it actually looks a lot more interesting.  Reb's latest Crucial Rooster is up.  Tricia would like to be kidnapped.

 

Posted by jbahr at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2006

Friday Zoom

No really. Really, I'm out of here. SJC to DEN at 10.45. Of course, there's the problem of luggage. I brought a carryon. Then a client gave me two boxes of computer stuff to take back with me. Then, I found I was staying longer than one day, so I bought these great Nike white socks and Hilfiger underwear at Ross Dress for Less really cheap. Then, I found out that I could go to the Computer Museum gig, so back to Ross for pants, shoes, dark socks, a decent shirt. Then, I met up with Chris and Dave, and they handed me two big bags of clothes I left the last time I camped out at their house. Now, I have so many clothes, they wouldn't fit in a ship container. And extra luggage costs $50 a bag. Luckily, Mr. Hertz gave me an unbidden Ford Explorer, so I *can* get it to the airport, but then what? Oh, hey. Maybe I can just gate-check the entire Explorer.

See y'all tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2006

Geeks Rule

I had a great time at a presentation at the Computer History Museum last night.  My old buddies, Glenn Edens and Dave Paulsen presented on a panel discussing their days at GRID, the company that pioneered the first laptop.  The reception and talk were the things that Geek Heaven are made of.  Engineers from GRID went on to take responsible positions all over Silicon Valley, including Glenn and Dave,  who are senior VPs of Sun Microsystems and Sanmina-SCI, respectively.  Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm, worked at GRID as well as another manager I recently worked with, Celeste, who was most recently VP of Engineering at Handspring.  I traded hugs with my pal Dave Gallatin, who also worked as a GRID engineer, and recently ran engineering for AlphaSmart.  Gene Amdahl, arguably the father of supercomputing, was in the front row, and, for some reason, so was I, with a VIP name badge and a seat on the 50-yeard line, so to speak.  I actually did consult to GRID for a while, but I think that Dave's good graces got me the chair.  After the gig, we all went out to eat at P.F. Chang's and geeked it up for another couple of hours.  The war stories were probably not much different than poetry old-timers reminiscing about Breadloaf's in the 60's,  except in kind.

Speaking of good gigs, check out Jordan's report.  I'm on a plane tomorrow morning and leaving this crazy, wonderful valley.

Posted by jbahr at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2006

In-and-Out Urge

Well, I should have known you can't just fly into and out of San Jose.  I'll be here a few more days meeting with clients and driving up and down 101, trying desperately to avoid the various rush hours.  The place has its attractions, of course, namely In-and-Out Burger and Fry's Electronics.  A geek entering Fry's for the first time is like a newly immigrated Russian entering a SuperTarget.  Or anybody's first look at Las Vegas.  You will never see more technology in one place in your entire life.  Each Fry's exterior is a different example of some kitchy motif:  Egyptian gardens, a Mayan temple.  Once inside the doors, it looks like a MegaWalmart in Bombay.  There are rows and rows of computer equipment, technology books, audio equipment, home appliances.  On one wall, there are 60 kinds of disk drive.  On one shelf, 120 brands of video adapter.  Down one row, 35 kinds of espresso machine.  The prices are decent, and sometimes outrageously cheap (I saw a 100 Mbit 4-port switch for $9).  They even have their own Special Hell:  the Product Return Line.

Just in from Tricia:  We'll miss you, Chef (but take your Operation Manual for the Mind with you). 

Robert gives us (finally!) an interesting take on AWP and, along the way, invents The Schmoozie for "the most offensive example of literary networking and self-promotion at or near the AWP Convention".

I love the notion:  Every poet a MacGyver. 

Ginger reminds me to re-read MJB's fabulous Louise in Love.

Posted by jbahr at 08:10 AM | Comments (1)

March 13, 2006

Apparently, I Do Know The Way to San Jose

I made it to San Jose just after midnight.  I can't believe that I managed to get to San Jose, but couldn't make it to Austin.  I had this whole elaborate scheme cooked up whereby a client paid me to fly down, spend a few minutes in TechLand, and then scoot off to AWP.  That was before I spent all Wednesday basically comatose with the flu, and my timing got whacked. 

I wanted to meet Kasey, Jordan, Eduardo, Jonathan, Josh and Joshua, Peter, CDY.  OK, you're right.   I only wanted to go to AWP to meet girls.  Not that I don't love my Junie, but old habits die hard.  Could Laurel be quite as beautiful as that picture with her baby?  Is Didi as spunky as she seems on the page?  Is Reb's "ass really big enough to cook a turkey in"?

Right now, it's 45 and I'm freezing.  When I left Colorado, it was 35 and I was freezing.  In Wisconsin, it's got to get down in the 20's before I'm freezing.  There must be some sort of Average Ambient Temperature Theory of Relativity at work.

I spoke with my son, Derek, a couple of times this weekend.  He's attending Columbia College in Chicago studying music and management,  making friends, trying to get gigs, making The Loop his own personal neighborhood.  I swear this boy will run a major record label one day. Yesterday, he was watching the municipal workers begin dyeing the river green for Saint Pat's, which seems a little early, but they must know what they're doing.  Der was happy to hear about the house that Junie and I bought, as it provides a place to store his stuff during the summer break.  Knowing Der, there will be twice as much stuff in the dorm by mid-May as what we brought, and Hertz doesn't rent anything much bigger than the Explorer that carted it all there, so it's a good plan, assuming Junie finds a spot for it in the giant two-car garage.

There's a fascinating, if disturbing, article in Atlantic called The Drug Pushers, which details the money and methods which pharmaceutical companies have used to influence physicians to prescribe their drugs.  Frankly, it sounds a great deal like the questionable practices my brother, a drug rep, has been defending for years.  I'd be interested in Peter and CDY's take.

As usual, I won't know if these antibiotics are working until they do or don't.  With my current run of luck, the doses are purely non-therapeutic, like the low-level meds they put into chicken feed.  On the other hand, I will probably end up with more breast meat.

Time to go earn my keep.  See you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 09:12 AM | Comments (4)

March 12, 2006

Sunday Sundae

I saw about half of the newest Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory last night.  What was Depp thinking?  His rendition of Willy was a creepy mixture of Peter Lorre and Peewee Herman.

I find it strange that both Seth and Ron are attracted to Project Runway.  I don't mean to denigrate either of these fine minds, it's just that I expect them to be re-reading Proust in their spare time.  Of course, eclecticism runs rampant among members of the blogroll.  It somehow reminds me of what Junie tells me:  you don't have to have an opinion on everything.

Stuart points out an interesting article summarizing a classified U.S. military report that demonstrates how dysfunctional the Iraqi regime was prior to invasion.   It reminds me how many times I've found Important People to be self-centered, childish and paranoid.  There is a tenuously similar article in this month's Atlantic about Nigeria, Worse Than Iraq?  Like Iraq, Nigeria is an artificially-constructed mishmash of territories and cultures whose borders were drawn by British imperialists.  Though rich in resources, one percent of the population diverts almost all of the oil revenue to improving its political and financial position, resulting in general poverty levels worse than Haiti, a large and increasingly violent Muslim population, a huge organized criminal class, and a devastated infrastructure.  All this in a country of great strategic significance to the U.S. (it's our 5th largest oil supplier).

OK, I suppose I better go throw some clothes in my carryon.  I'll be in San Jose tonight and back tomorrow night.

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From my upcoming treatise, The Effect of AWP on Weblog Hit Count:

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I was hoping for Gravity's Rainbow.

You are entertaining and imaginative, creating whole new worlds around yourself. Well loved, you have a whole league of imitators, none of which is quite as profound as you are. Stories and songs give a spark of joy in the middle of your eternal battle with the forces of evil.

Which literature classic are you?
 

 

Posted by jbahr at 09:09 AM | Comments (6)

March 11, 2006

Saturday's Virtual Menagerie

Jim beat me to this month's Poetry with his latest remix of Sandra McPherson's Grouse (and Joshua get his own What's Up With Your Author Photo? ... ever since The Fifth Element, Milla seems to be playing futuristic warrior queens.)  But, I digress.

Katherine Larson gets her first publication credits with five poems, which I admired for their energy and strong phrasing, though the device use seemed to be salted through the work a little heavily at times.  There are some lovely lines in more than one ("Once a month / when the moon loses everything", " ... And memory / which outruns the body & / grief which arrests it").  There's a virtual menagerie running through the bulk of the poems — cranes and nightingales, dogs and dolphins — including the falcon in Bill Coyle's Kolmården Zoo ("the falcon glided to its trainer's fist / and settled like a loaded weapon there").  David Gewanter contributes the oddly effective place poem, Hamlet of Merano:  The Lotus Eaters ("Pound had shipped Mary maple saplings / to spark industry in maple syrup, // "you'll make a killing" — / the tree-boxes also hid sprouts of / poison ivy ...") and Kelle Groom the equally odd, but interesting, Ode to My Toyota.  Donald Hall never tires of despair (North South:  "Morning is a dog with failing hindquarters").   I wouldn't have believed you could fashion a decent poem out of a grade-school construction project, but David Wagoner pulls it off in Castle:  "... It has to have stalls for horses / And a murder hole and a moat".  I liked Thylias Moss's The Continent of Reena and Marcus' Marriage ("Marcus was most fond of coriander / for cutting a trench into his tongue // and hiding there to pond his coffee"), but wasn't as impressed as I always expect to be by Bob Hicok's Toward Accuracy.  Don Paterson, Kay Ryan, Michael Hofman, Rosanna Warren, Connor O'Callaghan, Linda Gregerson, and H.L. Hix discuss 3 centuries of poets who are perhaps underappreciated.  I thought that Tony Hoagland's Fear of Narrative and the Skitter Poem of Our Moment was really quite excellent.  He abandons the easy label of narrative to distinguish between the Poetries of Continuity and dissociative poetry (poetries of improvisation) invoking Stephen Burt for a definition of ellipticism, and using examples of Mark Halliday, Matthea Harvey, G.C. Waldrep, Louis Aragon, and Czeslaw Milosz.  Peter Campion reviews six books, including Jorie Graham's Overlord ("With so little modulation, the phrases ... begin to feel as if they're being piped in over some Orwellian public address system"), and Charles Simic's My Noiseless Entourage ("... there's little here beside the end-stopped thudding, the stock images, and the penny-ante diction ..."), and is more enthusiastic about works written, translated or edited by Dick Barnes, Devin Johnston,  J. D. McClatchy, David Ferry, and Simone Weil/Rachel Bespaloff.

I'm off to San Jose tomorrow night for meetings on Monday, but should be back the next day.  I'm hoping this miserable bronchial monster subsides by then, to which end I've acquired a handful of antibiotics this morning.  Hope you're having a nice weekend, and welcome back, AWPers. 

Posted by jbahr at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2006

Friday Short

You will be tickled to know that the number of billionaires surged to 793 worldwide, and that the U.S. is number one — most billionaires at 371, and the number one (Gates) and two (Buffett) spot!  These 793 people have a net worth of $2.6 trillion, which exceeds the GDP of France, Russia, the UK and Germany.  The invested wealth of these 793 generates another $20 million each hour in appreciation, so you're going to have to hurry up if you're trying to catch them.

Very good article in Poetry by Tony Hoagland contrasting narrative and current AG aesthetics.  More tomorrow.

I hope our buddies at AWP are having fun.  Wish I were there.

Posted by jbahr at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2006

This Old House

I probably overestimate the effect of AWP, but it does seem like the hit counts are going down, and some bloggers have taken the week off (Seth, CDY, Eduardo, ...)  Of course, Jordan keeps posting . . . the man is a real trouper.  I caught some miserable chest-cold/flu malady and spent 16 of the last 24 hours sleeping.  In my fevered dreams, I kept thinking up ways to get to Austin — at least for a day and a night, so I could visit the book fair and hit the bar, which would cause me to run into most of the people I wanted to meet. 

Junie and I were looking at houses last week in Eau Claire.  I've owned a number of homes in California and Colorado, which prepared me not at all for the experience.  The first shock is, of course, the price.  You can actually buy a nice house in Eau Claire for less than the down payment on a similar house in San Diego.  The second thing that takes getting used to is how much longer Eau Claire has been around than, say, Irvine.  We looked at houses built 50, 75, even 100 years ago.  They represent living history with their lath-and-plaster, fuse boxes, fuel oil tanks and electrical outlets without ground sockets.  Some homes have a detached garage that was probably built when automobiles proved to be more than a passing fad.   There's often no such thing as a "master bedroom", and many homes have exactly one bathroom.  On the other hand, the designs of the older homes are often quite lovely, and most have beautiful hardwood floors and fireplaces.

I've got the new Canary that I haven't cracked yet, and Barbara Jane Reyes' Poeta en San Francisco.  I'm supposed to be reading the NEC Vr7701 User's Manual, but I'm having trouble paying attention with this flu.  What I'd really like to read are some first impressions from Austin, but we'll have to see if any of our blogger buddies find time to file a report.

Posted by jbahr at 08:14 AM | Comments (4)

March 07, 2006

Dagnabit

Am I the only one who found it weird how many winners at the Oscars thanked their mothers?  I have nothing against mothers, in fact I have a very nice one myself, but what about fathers, husbands and personal trainers?  Claudia considers the Crash win (and attendant Oscar night performance) the death of HipHop. 

Commentary and pics by Robert on a conference that isn't AWP.  Interesting art and pics at Gina's joint.  Steve provides good, balanced, brief takes on half a dozen poetry books.  You're all invited to Eduardo's Poets' Pot-Luck.  I like reading about Mairead's day.  Ivy is the first person I've heard use dagnabit since Quick Draw McGraw.  Excellent post by Josh on tonics for internecine PoWars.  Michaela love-hates 24, which Junie and I should probably have watched instead of The Island, which was The Matrix meets The Truman Show with Scarlett Johansson as the "beauty", which still befuddles me.

Brian has interesting notes on whether poetry can matter.  Brian quotes Simon Dedeo: "Does abstracted, theoretical science matter to anyone? Not really, except for the practitioners, the aficionados, and the students. Similarly for poetry. I don't find science to be in a bad way, and neither do I find poetry so."  There is some valid analogy, methinks, but I think of the range of science research to be mostly along the lines of theoretical to pragmatic.  For centuries, researchers at the theoretical end of science and mathematics have produced results that were of no conceivable practical application, whereas work-a-day scientists (and particularly engineers) engaged themselves in the art of the possible.  Perhaps there is something of the feel of that in literature, as the novel and outrageous becomes incorporated (and perhaps co-opted) into the mainstream.

More tomorrow.  I have to catch a Northwest flight, assuming their pilots are still flying when I get to Minneapolis airport.

Posted by jbahr at 09:57 AM | Comments (2)

March 06, 2006

Ding Dong

Speaking of telephone company oligopolies and cell phone costs, it is probably no coincidence that the two remaining mega-Bells own Verizon and Cingular, which account for 60% of the cell market.  Think again if you think it's kindness that motivates them to subsidize your cell phone cost.  The ploy allows them to impose termination fees for dropping a plan before "paying off" the amortized cell phone.  Almost half of cell plan users would switch if they could.

I suppose this was predictable.

Amazingly enough, there are already a number of reviews available for Oscar Night.  Most reviewers found it tired and gave Jon only passing marks, as if he were going to turn it into the Daily Show single-handedly.  Regarding Brokeback's failure to win Best Picture:  "Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don't want cowboys to be gay," said Larry McMurtry.

"Some dishes appear unexceptional, such as the simple goat penis, sliced, dipped in flour, fried, and served skewered with soy sauce."  Thanks to Tony for this balllsy penetrating interesting culinary article.

Another record for the G.O.P:  longest prison sentence ever given to a Congressman.

I have to go shovel snow again now.

Posted by jbahr at 08:44 AM | Comments (1)

March 05, 2006

Snow Day

I'm in Wisconsin again, collaborating with Junie on a Big Project.  It was in the high 30's and sunny yesterday.  As I came out of Best Buy in a t-shirt, a local man about my age in a coat and hat stopped and yelled to me, "Huh, a t-shirt.  Way to go, bud."  He must have considered me a harbinger of spring or something.  Of course, it's snowing today, and I've already shoveled the driveway and will have to again by evening.

As usual, I agree with Joshua without exactly knowing what he's talking about.  Everyone could recognize reverse chic, for example, when a patron comes into a nice restaurant dressed in stone-washed jeans (obligatory tears at the knees), a Pink Floyd t-shirt, and vintage Converse All-Stars.  I suppose this only works, though, if there is some cue to the irony — a $75 haircut or manicured nails.

My predictions about One Big Phone Company are slowly coming true.   AT&T breaks up from its Babies, which grow bigger than she. Verizon merges Bell Atlantic and NYNEX.  SBC acquires Pacific Telesis and Ameritech.  Then, SBC buys AT&T and relabels with the old power name.  Friday, AT&T offered almost $70 billion for Bell South.  Now, there's basically two phone companies, with Qwest dying to get bought.  For enough money, AT&T could buy Verizon, and we'd be back where we started, except we have an administration that is decidedly less inclined to enforce antitrust policies.

Speaking of which:  will someone explain to me why cell phone plans are so expensive?  That $800 Dell computer you saw advertised would have been $10,000 ten years ago.  Meanwhile, cell phone plans party likes it's 1999.  Land lines cost $15 a month.  They're virtually giving away long distance calls.  Cell phone technology is mature, the labor cost component is small,  and there are now hundreds of millions of users to amortize cell towers over.   A decent cell phone plan cost twice what Dish Network does (and they have LOTS of content cost), and 4 times TiVo.  Sure, they subsidize cell phone purchases up front, but your average LG camera phone cost $60 to manufacture and you can end up paying $1,200 in cell charges to amortize it.  Family plans will add a phone to the plan for as little as $8 a month, which should give you an idea of the marginal cost of infrastructure utilization.  Honestly, why isn't there a Senate committee looking at this?

I think I find myself disagreeing with my old friends Seth and Scoplaw about flarf.  One reason is that I find many self-admitted flarfists to be articulate, level-headed and anything but strident in their everyday prose about other aspects of art and life.  That shouldn't make any difference, I suppose, but it makes me feel they are sincere about their motives.  Flarf seems grinning and unintimidating, more like un-poetry than anti-poetry.  Another factor is that the worst a flarf poem does is confuse me, whereas a particularly cloying and precious wistful first-person narrative filled with remembrances and day lilies can actually send me to the kitchen for strong drink.

Speaking of which, in Chicks Don't Actually Dig War, there's the line "most famous is never to get involved in a land war in Asia", which comes from one of my favorite movies.  I think about it every time I see Mandy Patinkin walking up the staircase pimping cholesterol medicine.

Oscar host trivia:  First hosts?  Douglas Fairbanks and William C. DeMille.  Who has hosted the most?  Bob Hope, 16 times.  And in 1934?  Will Rogers.  Any cartoon characters?  Yes, Donald Duck co-hosted in 1958.  Frank Sinatra?  Yes, 1963.  Any no-hosts?  Yes, in 1948 and 1989.  Any SNL actors?  Yes, Chevy Chase in 1988 and Steve Martin in 2000, and of course, Billy Crystal 7 times.  Late-night show hosts?  Johnny Carson 5 times, David Letterman once.  Whoopi Goldberg?  Yeah, 3 times. 

Posted by jbahr at 03:45 PM | Comments (2)

March 03, 2006

In and Out

Domino's plan to make America safe and god-fearing again.

Henry says: "I'm thinking of the formal aspects of poetry as algorithms (again)."  I've thought that too.  Algorithms are interesting because, like functions, they can have a name (e.g., the Dining Philosopher's Algorithm, the Fermi-Dirac Function), but ultimately, they are what they do.

Thank you, Jordan, for noting Meghan's Stiletto Strategy© seminar.  This kind of thing only happens in NYC, right?

George has a nickname for everyone.

It looks like about 20/80 that I'll get to AWP.  Still, it would be nice to know exactly who's going and where they will be.  I'm pretty sure CDY, Josh, Eduardo, Jonathan and Reb will be there, among the bloggers.  Probably a lot of other people, too.  Somebody should compile a complete list and schedule a get-together at the bar.

I have such a difficult time keeping up on whom Jimmy is having flame wars with.  Actually, the wars always seem pretty one-sided.  It seems like yesterday it was Kent Johnson (whose blog seems to have disappeared).  Now, it's Patrick Herron.  Jim's probably just mad because Patrick's in Wikipedia and Jimmy isn't.  Those Archie remixes are pretty funny, BTW.

This is funny.  TT conducts an interview with Jabberwacky, an AI site.  How come I didn't know that Tony had a new chapbook?

Professor Roy continues to amuse.  Interesting take on The Pink Panther by the ever-eclectic Joshua.  Seth is back in posting mode (he's beautiful when he's angry).  Eduardo is mentally preparing for Austin.  From Kelli:  "Sometimes I think if we put all the poet bloggers into one room, we wouldn't have anything to say to each other".  I like Kristy's fret poem (Lets say a woman’s heart / is like a wind-up bird.).  Caterina notices that you don't get a lot of house for the money some places.  What Jonathan was doing one and two years ago (criticizing and disagreeing).  From Nick's:  "I fell asleep on a merry-go-round with a pocketful of tickets and woke up on a roller coaster with a handful of stubs." 

Posted by jbahr at 08:58 AM | Comments (17)

March 02, 2006

Throbbing, Thrumming Thursday

Rendi and Adam, over at Winning Writers, pointed this out, which is the Powerball of poetry book contests.  The competition costs 100 pounds to enter, but the prize is 60,000 pounds (which for you Colonials, is about $110,000).  Other poetry book competitions closing this month include the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, the Word Works Washington Prize, the Prairie Schooner Prize, the Slope Editions Prize, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, and the Four Way Intro Series Prize.  Winning Writers is a quite excellent service that summarizes and rates virtually all North American and British competitions in poetry and fiction.

I usually nail what few spam comments get by my Movable Type anti-spam plug-ins, but I found the ad/comment from J&M Artwork quite charming.  J&M was "deeply impressed by [my] space and words" and offers "beautiful oil paintings" of the "flattest price and museum quality".

For years, wealthy right-wingers (e.g., Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife) have been forming and funding conservative think tanks, who hire researchers, past and future policy makers and influential thinkers, in an attempt to change public opinion.  Although many of these institutions share common goals, funding, and activists with the Religious Right, their main aim is to "correct" the liberal bias of pointy-headed academicians by publishing studies and showing up on talk shows.  My treadmill TV rotation included Washington Journal, who had on yet another conservative "expert", Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, pimping for the Administration by noting how fine a company the Dubai World Ports is.  This is the guy who, just before the dot-com bust, co-authored the hilarious Dow 36,000.  You have to wonder how a PhD in economics from a good university can turn out to be such a whore.  I did wonder, but not for long, as today's Lilo and Stitch was just too good to miss.

As I mentioned the other day, I received my Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel in all its lascivious pink glory.  I got mine at Amazon, but Reb says that LuLu is cheapest and does a good job on production.  There are so many excellent poems about love and lust that it's difficult to pick favorites, and the author list looks like the Best of the Blogroll.  What is so amazing about BGTNTM is that none of the dozens of poems exhibits the cloying, precious sentiments of what I've read in other love poetry lately.  I refuse to cite the particulars, but I shared with my poetry email-mates a recent prize-winning poem that was just chock-a-block with flawed, tender, throbbing, thrumming urgency, but at least avoided (as Hannah pointed out) deploying cicadas.

This week's Time features Iraq's "Breaking Point", which is equivocation for what is either factional unrest or civil war, depending upon your POV.  There's a really good Ten Questions for E. L. Doctorow who notes that General Sherman (around whom Doctorow's The March revolves) makes no effort to understand death, this from a man who has accused President Bush of "moral vacancy".  A U.S. government study reports that after $30 billion, the Iraqis still don't have reliable power, water or fuel, and that much of the problem is attributable to the "scores of unqualified people parachuting in simply to build their resumes and rack up overtime", most of them new hires from the State and Defense departments.  Conservative whackjob Michelle Malkin had her website shut down by (she claims) Muslim hackers after she showed cartoons of Muhammad on Fox News.  Scientists note that about the time that Bush was jawboning for alternative energy research, he was sending a budget to Congress that cut $28 million from those very projects.  James Doohan, the recently deceased Scotty of Star Trek, will be one of 195 people to have their ashes shot into space this spring.  In Bush's Broken Political Antenna, Joe Klein details the president's growing disconnect with voters and his own party.  The Big Blank Canvas discusses the challenges New Orleans faces in rebuilding business, social life, and school systems.  Republicans Charles Grassley and Rick Santorum (whom the Philadelphia Inquirer has called "one of the finest minds of the 13th century") snuck language into the recent budget reconciliation bill worth billions in tax credits to the synthetic fuel industry.  The Brits still lead the world in bank heists, witness last week's £40 million kidnapping+robbery.  Many Evangelicals are switching from huge megachurches to small home gatherings.  The AMA sides with doctors who feel that assisting in lethal injection executions is ethically impossible.  Cuban ballet dancers are showing up in all major U.S. and European troupes.  Pop Art toasters have removable steel plates that let you toast various designs onto bread, and will soon market edible-ink markers so that kids can color the toast before eating.

Posted by jbahr at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)