Whimsy Speaks

November 30, 2004

Like Totally Miscellaneous

I'm having some difficulty coming up with an entry, though I have few excuses, sitting in my motel room in San Jose with a bomber of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and world enough and time. I'm currently in my Poetic Celibacy Mode, so posting a poem's out, and besides, I've decided this isn't a forum where I subject you to my experiments. I'm going round and round about why I haven't gotten my tickets and reservations for Vancouver AWP, but that only occupies short spates of introspection. Laura has advised me to post a recipe, which seems about right, but I need to get home and think up a good one that doesn't require a $75 trip to Whole Foods. The easiest thing to do is just poke around the webroll links and find clever, gossipy, diabolical or poignant things that other people have posted. Here's some of them:

Jim Behrle: Now everyone has beautiful names. It used to be a great compliment, I think, 'that's a beautiful name.' But I personally know 3 Calliopes and 4 Athenas. No one is simply a Tony or Mary or any of the sturdy names of tradition. A beautiful name once raised an eyebrow and earned a 'Whoa, who's this?" Now it is a constant reminder instead of how boring we've become--how limited and short-sighted. We cannot possibly live up to these beautiful names, the bar is raised too high. Even if you are a Viola or a Galahad on the outside, chances are on the inside you're still a Steve or Jennifer. Likewise in novels the narratior and their associates have wildly-fashioned long-pondered names which echo through some other better book that had come before. Our beautiful names have become the glittering, resplendant book cover jackets given to us, the same-old tired stories repackaged and resold to be quickly forgotten. Just call me Charlie.

Ron Silliman: But Robert Pinsky’s aesthetics are not those of William Carlos Williams. Not even close. And given (a) that there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of qualified editors in this country (one example, Bob Creeley) whose aesthetics do have some perceptible relationship to Williams and (b) that Williams was himself a militant opponent of the School of Quietude that Pinsky represents so well, the choice of an editor here is, shall we say, revisionist at the very least? I’ll leave it to others to suggest the more paranoid or conspiratorial adjectives.

Rebecca Loudon: I'm baking a quiche Lorraine without the Lorraine (spinach and freshly picked chanterelles.) It's snowing on Snoqualmie Pass and the ski slopes might open this weekend and they're predicting snow on the lowlands. The GSC are putting more lights on the hemlock in a kind of Clark Griswold frenzy.

Kasey Mohammad: Not that I don't think Shakespeare's pretty great myself. I do teach the guy and everything. But what really strikes me is Greenblatt's stylistic acquiescence to cultural cliches in this work, his complete willingness to insert whole sentences whose content goes no further than reaffirming a comforting myth of Shakespearean exceptionalism: a muse-inspired demigod nearly alone among centuries of mere mortal writers. Granted, the book is being marketed to general readers, but does that necessarily mean abandoning all scholarly dignity about once every twelve paragraphs in order to create a nice warm fuzzy feeling in the hearts of literary hero worshippers?

Tony Tost: The rearrangement of the poem-poet-reader dynamic by Flarf offers new strategies for both poet and reader. By imagining the actual worlds where both the poetic statements of “Does Your Poetry Hold Up?” make a kind of sense, and also (perhaps most importantly) by imagining worlds or selves where one would be subject to such statements, assertions and appraisals, a reader experiences a kind of negative capability that is usually regarded as the province of poets.

Heidi Lynn Staples: For Thinksgiving, the men and I spoke collaborative poems in the manner of Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer's Nice Hat, Thanks. The composition process involves going around the group with each person adding either only one word or one item of punctuation and then the next person goes. Below are a few, with a highlight, I think, at "Furniture Polish". Sub-mental advisory warning: You'll notice a sexually preoccupied male pubescent volunteered to play the muse. 'Twas grand and the three of We was up till mot fools leap in the nigh.

Brooke Nelson: Dear Dermoid Ovarian Cyst : You have interrupted, but I'll let it go for now. But, don't think I won't hold this against you when they get you out of me. But in the meantime, please don't chew your way through my abdomen with you shiny new teeth and your bushy blonde hair.

David Hernandez: Guess who's not the poetry editor for Swink anymore? Rumor has it that I was caught using Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Mo to make some editorial decisions. Another rumor has it that I was stealing SASEs. Truth be told, I simply don't have time to be the editor anymore, what with all the freelance work I've been getting. The new poetry editor is Rigoberto González. Yes, the guy whose poem I praised in my last journal entry.

Paul Guest: There were four of us to a room, curtains drawn around our little space where cards and pictures were taped to my wall and where a wet Carol Alt beckoned from my neighbor’s wall, the poster signed, TO JOSH scrawled across her dark nipples.

Lyn Hejinian: Should he chance to say what he was doing, he would disguise the saying so as to throw one off the track, describing, for example, a passenger on a plane while neglecting to tell us where the plane was headed, or narrating a dream of the night before when asked what he had been doing recently.

Ending with Hejinian is always a good move.

Posted by jbahr at 09:07 PM | Comments (4)

November 28, 2004

On Difficulty

An extended discussion has been taking place here and there on the web logs of Mike Snider, Chris Lott, Josh Corey, Jordan Davis, Laura Carter, Henry Gould, Stuart Greenhouse, and  Hannah Craig.  At the risk of trivializing discourse that you should read for yourself, the topic is difficulty in poetry, the degree to which it is either valuable or contrived or both, and how its absence or presence accounts for post avants on one end of the spectrum and the Tates and Collinses on the other.  Here are some not-necessarily-representative, but interesting excerpts:

Mike:  No one buys poetry. People still buy novels, paintings, and music; they spend their money on plays, concerts, and exhibitions. If serious poets will not write poems that serious readers will read, then the poetry people read and hear will be reduced to sentimental pablum, rap, and cowboy poems. I'd rather try Paterson's way: the poets' beautiful tightrope-walk, is the one between sense and mystery — to make one, while revealing the other.

Josh:  further thought: isn't it possible to view the split between more "popular" poets (Collins, Tate, Olds, et al) and the "larger and even more peculiar group" (in which Mike is presumably including me) as being a split between a kind of "nativist" writing that celebrates the self and its bounds (support our troops!), creating space for that self through a kind of "soft" negative capability (the mild, quietistic bemusement that suffuses up through the last lines of one of their poems)—and a more "cosmopolitan" writing that interrogates the privileges offered to the self by the available rhetoric (you're either with us or against us) and chooses a "hard" negative capability that challenges both writer and reader to give up ground, to feel themselves regarded by the inassimilable otherness of the difficult poem?  All just a roundabout way of saying that I value difficulty in poetry. There, I said it. I can enjoy the easy stuff, the entertaining stuff, but the poetry that sustains me also challenges me, provokes me, fills me with wonder, or even makes me a little nauseous. What drives me crazy about poetic populism is that it asks us to set a low ceiling on our ambitions, to give up the dream of being apprehended at our most complex and contradictory. It asks me to devote my talent to discovering what's already known, to repeating the available wisdom—"what often was thought, but never so well expressed." That bores me. I work from expression to thought and not the other way around when I write poetry. I'm mining a basic human capacity, the deep vein of lapsus linguae. The obscurity and unpopularity of this art is only to be lamented by my ego, which demands accolades, reinforcement, tubs of money. But the me myself, whose bounds are never clear, is deeply satisfied (though not contented) by this writing—never separable, of course, from my reading. I have hundreds of companions in poetry, dead and alive—what more can I ask from this vale of fucking tears.

Henry:  I guess my reservation about both arguments hinges on the nature of difficulty. Basically I think it's kind of a "boundary problem", a question of the framework. That is, the kind of difficulty we think we have in mind - the sort of problematic that grips the reader in an unshakeable wrestling hold, from which they will never get free - this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question. That is, it is not something that can be finessed by aesthetics or rhetoric. In fact, it stems from the core of a difficulty with words & word-mongering itself: that words & deeds are not always the same thing; that life & literature are incommensurate; that promises and vows can be emptied of content, become vehicles of illusion, vanity, hypocrisy & deceit.

Jordan: Then there's poetry as proxy -- the greeting card function, in which a feeling (one) is conveyed by the poet to a third party on behalf of the person presenting it. I know a lot of the "sought poems" I've been writing on the other blog fall into this category, or rather, the poems are an attempt to make poetry serve a function I imagine an audience demands. Cyrano is the apotheosis -- the single feeling conveyed is allowed something of the richness of a poetry that conveys a person's whole experience; the weird noise so beloved to poetry junkies is mostly screened out when people want poetry to serve this proxy function. (Incidentally, it's that noise, and the poetry junkies' love of it, that bugs the shit out of certain gatekeepers, and is almost invariably what prompts vocal hostility to poetry.)

Clearly, there's a lot going on here:  defense of aesthetics, charges of incest, general rebellion.  I've certainly noticed a high level of boosterism among poets with extra-literary connections (same locales, same ethnicity, same MFA programs) which compromises any assertions that their Art is more important than others'.  The flip side of this is the absolutely predictable assaults on the work of popular (and, of course accessible) poets (negative criticism of Billy Collins alone constitutes a cottage industry).  While I don't subscribe entirely to Mike's view, I do wonder at times why (to use his example) the half-million sentient readers of Atlantic Monthly don't buy more poetry books.  I mean, Clancy still outsells DeLillo by a wide margin, but the latter can make a good living even if he can't buy an NFL franchise.  Why are poetry books so ubiquitous and sales of same so dismal?  Is it all because poetry has become almost entirely inside baseball? 

Josh's sentiments make a lot of sense to me.  On the other hand, the fact that he wants to do what he wants to do doesn't seem like much of a rejoinder to Mike's basic argument -- in fact, it sounds an awful lot like the often-expressed view that there are more poetry writers now than readers.  Jordan seems to be supporting this idiocentrism, even positing that there's an "army of poetry junkies" that live for it.  Is it possible, however, that these poetry junkies are often just putting up with their peer's noise to have their shot at the podium to generate a little of their own?  I honestly have no idea.  I seem to be curiously devoid of any impulse to lambaste Mong-Lan's wandering verse or Kasey Mohammad's Google experiments. Sometimes my eyes glaze over and sometimes I just scratch my head, but I don't seem to feel as threatened as some of the most virulent detractors of Tate.

When I was teaching mathematics in a business school, I used to hear a lot of complaints about difficulty.  You know, why do we need calculus and why can't you just say that in simple English?  Perhaps you see difficulty in the function e^x, but it's a natural and elegant idea.  Suppose that every time I measured my children's height it automatically told me their rate of growth?  Suppose I wanted to know how much interest I'd accrue at the bank if they compounded my savings account interest not daily, not hourly, but instantaneously?  This is what e^x brings to the party.  Of course, there's a bit of pain: call it study, call it reflection, call it context, to be brought to bear, but it's worth it.  Does the difficulty that accompanies much modern verse reward us with the same degree of concision, the same economy of expression, the same precision?  Not for me, at least -- in fact, much of the difficulty just seems like gratuitous weirdness, the pierced tongues of poetry.  To paraphrase Jordan, it seems like noise, and I'm not apparently a sufficiently devoted poetry junkie.

What strikes me as true is Henry's assertion that this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question.   It seems more a matter of social exchange, of commerce in the same coin.  There are also the benefits of opaqueness to consider (you can't criticize what you can't really ken) (but, amazingly enough, you can write blurbs). 

Often, when I'm confronted by a poem that I just don't get, say, Harvey's Sad Little Breathing Machine, I find it helps to take a deep breath and remember that, first and foremost, I'm here to be entertained.  Now, that sentiment alone is enough to get me pilloried in certain quarters, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.  Oh, I'll grant you that by entertained, I mean humored, enlightened, even enthralled -- but I'm not reading a poem because it's important.  I mean, Maxwell's Equations are important, denuding the earth of land mines is important, but there isn't a single poem ever written that is important with that degree of gravity.  In my opinion, of course. 

Part of my problem may be (and remember, I write and publish poetry all the time) that I don't think that poetry can save lives or raise children.  I think it's mainly an indulgence, so if it's going to be difficult, I think there should be a damned good reason.  It being difficult because I am insufficiently well-read to relate is a good reason.  It being difficult because I'm not a member of the target audience is also a good reason.  It being difficult that way that Mandarin is unintelligible to me is also a good reason -- just don't ask me to vote you into Best American Poetry or publish you in Fence, you'll have to line up a few like-minded friends to get that accomplished.  Which is, of course, mainly how it works now.

Posted by jbahr at 08:59 PM | Comments (10)

November 26, 2004

A Short History Of Nearly Everything

My sons flew into SJC and drove with me down to my sister's ranch in the hills overlooking Arroyo Grande, near San Luis Obispo. Out of cell-phone range and they get their Internet access by satellite, if that gives you an idea of the remoteness. The extended clan arrived in enough SUV's to give an environmentalist pause, 14 family members in all, including various cousins and spouses, sleeping in the guesthouse and the two bunkhouses at the ends of the stables. Driving in, we saw Bob The Bobcat, a 40 pound male, sleeping in one of the furrows of an unplanted vineyard. Peabear, a German Shephard-Saint Bernard mix, Musie, a South African Ridgeback, and Annie (AKA Tripod, she's missing one leg) were around to keep the coyotes up in the hills and the occasional wandering mountain lion at bay. Thanksgiving was a matter of preposterous amounts of food, including two turkeys grilled on a giant fossil-embedded BBQ with the dimensions and grill mechanism reminiscent of that thing that lowered the virgins into the lava in Temple of Doom.

One night I finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is a terrific book for science types and layfolk. Bryson is an engaging writer of elaborate travelogues, but he's done his homework for this book. There's a 10-page bibliography and 40 pages of footnotes, in a work that could have been penned by Stephen Jay Gould -- except that it displays no pretentions of breaking new ground and is simply more enjoyable prose.

Bryson discusses everything from the Big Bang to evolution to microbiology to the history of our planet, weaving the principal players (Lord Kelvin, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, et al.) in a masterful feat of storytelling in which chapters are linked like a good thriller. If the science isn't terribly deep, it seemed at least factual and fascinating. Typical of the kinds of narrative threads that Bryson maintains is the story of Manson, Iowa. After decades of mining ash from Manson, it dawned on somebody that there is no mineable ash anywhere else in the Midwest -- which leads to the story of the discovery that Manson was the site of a large meteor strike -- the largest strike to ever hit the US mainland, over 40 miles across and 3 miles deep. This leads to the fascinating story of Alvarez and son, who hypothesized that the downfall of the dinosaurs was due to a similar meteor strike, later found in the Yucatan peninsula. But, where did all that ash come from? It turns out that somebody finally took a satellite shot of Yellowstone in the 60's and concluded that it's one of the largest volcanoes on earth with a caldera that encompasses the entire National Park. The last time it erupted, 2 million years ago, it threw up enough ash to bury all of California with ash to a depth of 20 feet. It filled up the Manson meteor strike completely, thus the gigantic bowl of ash. When will Yellowstone blow again? The symptoms would be lots of minor earthquakes and changing cycles of geysers -- all of which is observable now.

Other wonderful tidbits from the book include:

* Ice ages are a relatively new phenomenon on Earth. We've been enduring cycles of them recently (in geological time), but there has seldom been land mass at the poles in Earth's history as now. Antarctica alone accounts for 90% of all the ice on Earth -- enough, if it melted, to raise sea levels 200 feet and wipe out 70% of humanity, most of which lives within 50 miles of the shoreline.

* The oceans are vitally important to our existence, and we know more about Mars's topology than that of the ocean floor. Little more about even the most famous of aquatic creatures (we still don't know much about the blue whale, for example). Imagine this: no one has ever seen a living giant squid, even though their remains have been found in the bellies of sperm whales, and the occasional 60-foot long beast has washed up on shore. Ambergris, by the way, the stuff that gives Chanel Number 5 its persistence, is what the sperm whale coughs up of the giant squid beaks that it can't digest.

* The meteor that hit the Yucatan and sealed the fate of the dinosaurs (making way for us mammals, so you can cheer now) was positively enormous. If every human on earth was a Hiroshima-sized bomb, this strike exceeded that energy by a billion bombs. It wiped out 70% of Earth's life.

* It is estimated that 90-98% of all of Earth's species are not yet discovered. Of those that we know about, 99% are sketchily described, and are probably represented by a single example collected by a researcher. These are species that have evolved to deal with the unique chemistry of the earth and its inhabitants, which is why existing life forms are extraodinarily more productive examples of new drugs, for example, than all the computers in Big Pharma's labs.

* The vast majority of biomass on this planet is invisible. There are over a trillion bacteria on our skin alone, and 90% of all the cells in our bodies are not us, but the bacteria that live in every part of our body, making sure that stuff happens the way we expect it to. Bacteria has been around for almost all of the 4 billion years that Earth has been around and will be around when we're long gone. Not that we've been around that long -- if you spread your arms out to represent the span of life, humans would be represented by less than what a nail file trims a fingernail.

Great book. It certainly made me laugh about my angst over poetry rejections, and the result of the last election. I also noticed today that I ended up in 14 Hills alongside Mary Jo Bang and Brenda Hillman, so things could be worse.

Posted by jbahr at 07:58 PM | Comments (4)

November 23, 2004

KQED

I find myself in San Jose this week. Michael Krasny, on the excellent Forum show, is showcasing contemporary American poetry. Guests include

* Dwight Garner, Staff Editor for the New York Times Book Review

* Lucille Lang Day, poet, publisher and Director of the Hall of Health

* Peter Streckfus, poet and winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition

Each read from their works, which was all much along the lines of biographical lyrical narrative. Michael was gracious. Garner discussed the all-poetry issue of the NYT Book Review, a first in their history.

Streckfus mentioned that he's still looking for work and available for interviews, should any academic institution listening be interested in a Yale Younger winner.

Posted by jbahr at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2004

Poetry Found in Philly

I was walking through the Reading Market this morning in the heart of Philadelphia. It's a kind of open-air market inside a large building chock-a-block with shops for pastry, gourmet coffee, culinary equipment, and Amish goods; every kind of fast food diner, butchers, vegetable stands, and wonderful selections of fish that we Coloradans only see occasionally in Whole Foods markets (FedEx'd in from the coast). Fully 20% of the establishments appear to be manned by Mennonites: men with trimmed beards and women in gossamer bonnets hand-making waffle cones and selling specialty jams. Next the indoor beer garden, I ran across a publication called the Philadelphia Independent with the headline:

GOD HELP US
Reverend Rove's Red Rubes Rock Rickety Righteous Republic Rabble Ratifies Rogue Ruler's Reign

The Independent refers to itself as The Periodic Journal of Urban Particulars and is of a decidedly Blue-State bent. One contributor that, not surprisingly, caught my eye was Lord Whimsy, who pledged to stay and fight for this country's founding principles in an article titled "No Suitcases for this Fellow!". Whimsy shows up again on page 14 with a section called "The Bliss of Naughty Verse" that contains 5 poems, including "Ode to a Divining Spider Upon a Novelty Phrenology Bust", which contains the timeless lines:

In an hour or two,
I started to tire
Of playing arach-a-nid Ouiji
But dear reader, fear not,
He didn't expire --
I just flicked his fat bobbin to Fiji.

The naughty sonnet, "My Love Spurneth Yams" ends with the couplet: Oh ladylove, please stop spurning my yams / All I desire is to pinken your hams!". Elsewhere in the newspaper there are indie comics, an article on a man who drove a cardboard tank around Philly, a piece that hypothesizes that Florida's 4 hurricanes won Bush the election and could have been created by the military's weather-modification facility at HAARP. The puzzle section includes caricatures of Churchill and Saddam Hussein and 36 pithy sayings, with the challenge to match the man to the saying. It's actually surprisingly difficult.

Junie is with the rest of her firm at their booth in the huge Conference Center a block away -- this year's venue for the 10,000-odd participants of the ASHA conference of speech language pathologists and hearing specialists. I'm meeting her for lunch and will report back.

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

November 16, 2004

Blog Review and Chit-Chat

On top of this silly flu, I've had a case of procratinating vapors lately. Thus, the relative paucity of entries this week. OK, how about this? I'll chat about some of the other great poetry blogs (see blogroll to the right) that you may want to visit.

Reb Livingston has no new more pictures of her cat and herself in week N of being in the family way, but she has a little news about Pushcart nominations at the No Tell Motel.

Lyn Hejinian is ever-faithful with her daily one-liners. My favorites recently are: A point, in motion, is a line and The toll bridge takes its toll, the span its fog, its paint and Apples have bellies.

David Hernandez make me so envious with the story of his 5-day vacation with Lisa, Denise Duhamel, and Nick Carbó.

Jim Behrle is my new Doonesbury.

Debra Ager announces the Pushcart pick for 32 Poems, the lovely poem by AE Stallings, one of my favorites. Also featured is John Jenkinson, one of my oldest cyber-poet-friends.

Why can't you post comments to Jonathan Mayhew's blog?

Didi Menendez is drawing pictures of poets in lieu of photos for MIPOesias, which I think is extremely cool.

My buddy Frank is trying to sell his house. I like the part about burying a statue of a saint in the backyard.

I know more about Katey Nicosia's life than my own children's.

I was talking to a respected litmag editor the other day and we both ended up saying "You know, Aimee with the impossible last name". Aimee says that Carl Phillips is showing up at her blog soon, which would be quite a coup.

Chris Vitiello handicaps the National Book Awards.

Posted by jbahr at 05:13 PM | Comments (4)

November 15, 2004

Paris Review Archives

Tricia pinged me today to report that Paris Review has put online an extraordinary archive of past interviews, which they call The Art of Fiction and The Art of Poetry. The interviews go back to the 1950's and includes interviewees such as T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway -- as well as many more contemporary poets and writers. There is also a large audio section of readings by poets and fictioneers.

All in all, an amazing collection of written and oral history.

Posted by jbahr at 05:53 PM | Comments (1)

November 14, 2004

U.S. Political Regions

This is probably the most interesting and informative map of US political regions I've ever seen. Excellent analysis of each region, too. More at Commonwealth.

Posted by jbahr at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2004

The Mandate

In case you're wondering, the President's "mandate" has the Administration singing "Business As Usual."

• The Administration rejected a call by 30 members of Congress to file a case under US trade law that would have penalized China for manipulating its currency to gain unfair trade advantages against the United States.

 
• Outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft has "Condemned Judges Who Question Bush" on national security policies.
   
• Bill First, Republican leader of the Senate, has vowed that "One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end", in an attempt to foil liberal and moderate Senators' objections to upcoming higher-court candidates.
   
• Bush has selected White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, as the next Attorney General.  Gonzales was instrumental in developing the policies that have been in use in Guantanamo.
   
• Bush will push to have the Patriot Act renewed when it hits its "sunset" date.
   
• The Administration is again advancing the idea of privatizing Social Security, and is promoting a complete overhaul of the tax code from income and wealth taxes (dividends & capital gains) to taxes on consumption (you, know, groceries).
   
• Rumsfeld conducts press meetings as if nothing ontoward has happened in Iraq in the past 18 months.
   

And so on.  Consider the following scenarios: 

Kerry gets a few hundred thousand more votes in Ohio and wins.  DeLay's gerrymandering efforts in Texas are ruled unconstitutional and the Republicans actually lose seats in the House.  Or, Kerry wins and 5 Democratic senators choose not to retire (including Edwards), edging the Senate into a 50-50 body with Edwards with the deciding vote. 

Would the Republicans consider that the Democrats had a mandate?

Posted by jbahr at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2004

Just Too Perfect

I stole this from Michaela Cooper's weblog:

”[W]hen a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… [A]ll the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920.

Posted by jbahr at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

In The Mail This Week

The cover of Time has, as you could expect, a big picture of GW's mug with the caption Four More Years, which, given the slightly liberal slant of Time's editorials, may be more of a lamentation than a celebration.  The inside cover has a terrific pair of photos side by side:  a color shot of a smiling Bush waving to supporters and a black-and-white shot of Kerry alone, cast in shadows.  The notable quotes include a suggestion by Imus:  "Appoint Senator Kerry ambassador to France." 

Two articles speculate on the Cabinet shuffle, including the inevitable departure of Ashcroft and Powell, and various scenarios which put Rice in as Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, or Secretary of Anything She Wants.  Goodness, is anybody really that impressed with Rice's performance to date?  In fact, what exactly has she done except scowl a lot?  Time awarded the Most Memorable Campaign Moment to the night that fulminating nutcase Zell Miller challenged Chris Matthews to a duel in front of 20 million viewers. 

There's a huge multi-page article called In Victory's Glow that I couldn't bring myself to read, and a couple of pages of charts and graphs explaining How Bush Pulled It Off, most of which is ancient history now. Michelle Cottle instructs us Buck Up, Liberals: How to Get Over It.  A nice article on Obama (am I the only one who has this Obama Sin Laden riff going through my head?)  An article called Winners and Losers discusses the future, briefly, of Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, George Soros, John O'Neill (who?  Oh, the guy who wrote Unfit for Command), Boyd/Blades of MoveOn.org, Richard Land the Southern Baptist Convention Director (yawn), Al Franken, and Matt Daniels who wrote the Federal Marriage Amendment.  The funniest quote is from Coulter-the-psychobitch:  "Kerry would have been better for business, but Bush is going to increase the number of books I can write by reducing my changes of being killed by Islamic terrorists." 

The most significant cinematic news is that David Hasselhoff will appear as himself in the SpongeBob Squarepants Movie.

~~~

The new Atlantic Monthly arrived, but I haven't gotten farther than the 20-odd pages of Letters to the Editor.  More on that next week.

~~~

National Geographic has certainly progressed from its principal role of providing pictures of bare-breasted African women for 12-year-old male enjoyment.  This month is almost entirely dedicated to the topic Was Darwin Wrong?  They answer with a resounding No, in one of the most comprehensive and articulate discussion of evolution I've ever seen in a mainstream magazine.  And how a propos given we just elected a guy that's conflicted about the topic.

The section on evolution starts off with some outstanding logic:  that the Theory of Evolution differs from the Theory of Relativity, the Theory of Electromagnetism, the Theory of Continental Drift, the Theory of Gravity, and the Theory of A Non-Flat Earth in at least one way:  there is more evidence for the Theory of Evolution than any of the others.  So why did a recent poll show that 45% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form within the last 10,000 years"?  (These are the same people who sit their kids down in front of Barney the Frigging T Rex).  And why has this percentage been the same in almost every poll for the last 30 years?  My own theory is:  1) the theory of evolution doesn't do anything particularly interesting, like turn on our lightbulbs 2) It all happens really slowly 3) people believe things that aren't true all the time -- witness the fact that 75% of Republican voters believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 4) It's bad enough that we share 75% of our DNA with pumpkins, you mean we actually evolved from sea slugs?

A large part of my befuddlement regarding the theory of evolution started when I first heard it:  species that don't adapt die, don't make babies and go extinct.  I can distinctly remember in my teens thinking: Duh.  And this is a famous theory?  Subsequent forays into Creationist literature befuddled me even more.  I mean, Creationism doesn't just want to refute the Theory of Evolution -- you have to throw away 80% of everything known about physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology.  You have to believe that the hundreds of millions of individual samples, collected by tens of thousands of paleontologists, archeologists, and geologists, cross-correlated and reconciled in thousands of refereed journals -- is all One Big Conspiracy.  You don't just throw out carbon-dating, you throw out all radioactive dating, which means you throw out most of what we know about matter, energy and how they work.  But, I digress.

The evidence for evolution falls into four categories:  biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and morphology.  Biogeography is the study of the distribution of life around the planet, and that creatures that share a niche have many curious similarities, including roughly the same body plans.  Paleontology "reveals similar clustering patterns in the dimension of time", and noticeable, regular change in a line of creatures that parallels their age as evidenced by the stratum their remains occupy or radioactive dating, or both.  Embryology studies the startling fact that, for example, mammal embryos pass through stages resembling that of reptiles, and larval forms of barnacles are very similar to larval forms of shrimp.  Morphology is the study of how life can be categorized (for example, the familiar hierarchy begun by Linnaeus), originally by noting difference and similarities in body plans, now by comparing species DNA (I mean, really.  Can it be a coincidence that turtles, raccoons, bats, porpoises, lizards and we all have 5-fingered appendages?) 

Evolution is all around us.  Mutation and natural selection is what HIV is all about, for example, and the reason we keep having to invent new antibiotics to combat those wily staphylococcus viruses that keep morphing.  Two English researchers have actually watched evolution in a 20 years of recording the changes in 20,000 generations of fruit flies. I think it probably does come down to a matter of intellectual convenience.  People are nothing if not inconsistent.  The same person who refutes the Theory of Evolution may have no problem lining up for a flu shot.

There are some other pretty terrific articles in NG, including one on creation myths.  One of my favorites is the Mayan view of the cosmos:  twin brothers played a traditional Mayan ball game and made such a racket that the gods of Xibalba challenged them to a contest.  The gods won, sacrificed the brothers, and buried their bodies under the ball court.  The head of one brother was hung from a tree, which spat into the hand of the goddess Xquic, impregnating her with a set of Hero Twins, who became ball players themselves, challenged the gods, lost, and had their bones ground up and thrown into a river, after which they were reborn as fish.  The Hero Twins (swam?) back to the god's palace and demonstrated a "variety of astounding feats" such as beheading each other and then becoming whole.  The gods were so delighted they wanted to try it, and the Hero Twins lopped off their heads and returned to Earth as the sun and moon.  Sheesh.  And I thought Christianity was complicated.

 

Posted by jbahr at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2004

Goldbarth on Goldbarth

My pal Tricia sent me a link to this interview with Albert Goldbarth in Poetry Daily, originally in The Missouri Review. Here's one reason I love this guy:

. . .I'm not very articulate when I talk about my poems. I don't spend any time thinking about them in such terms as an aesthetic out of which I create, or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. . . . We don't still read Rilke today because he gave shrewd interviews in Poets & Writers.

Goldbarth is a champion of the written word, going so far as to say that "he'd be happy if poetry readings ceased to exist."  He trusts his mind's rendition, believes that the voice of the poem (and, of course, it's geography) is seldom improved by vocalizing:

But even when poems have a very lyrical quality, the voice as it flowers in a good reader's inner ear (I mean here the solitary reader, in silence, page in hand) is still much more vital than the limited medium of the spoken voice. Even with Dylan Thomas's poems, I think my inner ear does them a greater justice than Thomas himself in performance.

The interviewer nudges Goldbarth into a discussion of imagination and the multiplicity in his work.  Not surprisingly, Goldbarth responds that the convergence of "seemingly tangential paths" is probably the way his "mind is wired to work."  When asked whether his work is mimetic or imaginative, he gives, for me, a thoroughly satisfying answer:

. . .we are all a thousand things at once, with all of those selves connected to each other, laminated and pressed into a single block, all of those individuals trying to morph out of the block and retain independent identity. And everybody we interconnect with is a similar block, and the planet itself is its own little ecosphere, biosphere, stratosphere that is part of a cosmos that even Stephen Hawking can't quite encompass in his imagination. I don't know if my poems try to be true to that understanding out of any conscious project, but it is an implicit understanding that my poems generally have — that they are mimetic of a layered, interconnective cosmos.

Goldbarth is our finest poet of science.  Or, perhaps the truest -- he neither trivializes the science nor elevates it to religiosity.  In one response, he notes the parallels between 20th Century science and changes in the arts:

If one follows the history of science from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics — essentially from a world that is determined to a world of indeterminacy — one finds interesting parallels in art following roughly the same arc: the world of the fixed, realistic still-life becoming the world of Jackson Pollock, becoming the world of conceptual art, installation art, etc. We learn that the mind is ego, superego, id, and that its likes in music can simultaneously include opera and hard rock. Undying, monolithic structures disappear. "Compassionate conservative" or "feminist stripper" don't necessarily seem oxymoronic any longer. Suddenly we're as multiplicitous ourselves as the new physics tells us the universe is.

Goldbarth discusses at length the influences of his lower-middle-class upbringing, the love he has for parents that never went to an opera, the house he grew up in that had no books.  There is a sense in his remembrances (and certainly his poetry) that he has earned his intelligence.  This notion, perhaps, motivates his belief that the power of poetry is personal:

I believe still in the power of books to save some individual life out there. Whether or not they're capable of saving or even impacting the culture in a major way is a different question altogether, and for me a question that would probably have some pretty sad answers. I still work with students all the time and have discussions with friends and colleagues that are predicated on the idea that books can save, books can shape, books can be essential to the infrastructure of a life. But I'm not sure that my friends, students and colleagues represent the future of the culture as a whole.

The interviewer occasionally encodes his questions in terms of literary theory (e.g., "the reader claiming authority over the text").  Goldbarth resists: Poems across the centuries have thematic and stylistic qualities that don't necessarily pay attention to division by century or nation or culture, race or gender — that precede and are more durable than whatever is the scholarly flavor of the moment. 

Goldbarth doesn't think that it's his job to define the job of poetry.  He reads everything (comic books, science tracts, Beowulf) and finds the connections.  When asked whether he believes that poetry is "enlarging itself or becoming an isolated endeavor", he responds cautiously:

I couldn't claim to have a large overview of the "cutting-edge" world of poetry, but if your question implies that many of us think the audience for poetry is limited to poets, then sure, that's my understanding as well. And if your question implies that some of us think the audience out there, for better or worse, is highly fragmented these days — L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, neoformalists, people who only read poetry by feminists or cowpokes or French theorists — I think that's accurate as well. Some people find this revitalizing; some people find it a real shame that there aren't central, shared sources of aesthetic pleasure. All of what I've just said is true, but I'm not the person capable of putting it together toward a vision of what might be happening two generations down the line.

Compare this workmanlike answer, for example, to that given by Jorie Graham in response to a similar question:

I think the issues regarding the problem of subjectivity--the still operative inheritance of the desire for Romantic fulfillment, or presence, as it comes into conflict with the distrust of such a desire (the distrust not only of the validity of personal experience but of the very notion of an essential self who might claim to have such an experience)--are at the core of what we see happening today. Somewhere between the "I" that takes its authority from an apparent act of confessional "sincerity," and the "I" that takes its authority from seeing through to its own socially constructed nature, there is still the "I" that falls in love, falls out of love, gives birth, loses loved ones, inhales when passing by a fragrant rosebush--the "I" that has no choice but mortality. That "I" (Eliot would say personal yet collective) is emerging from the great philosophical fray of the last decade with a new respect for the mystery of personhood, and a more sophisticated understanding of its simultaneously illusory and essential nature.

I don't think Ms. Graham's answer compares unfavorably with Goldbarth's.  But, it is an answer of a different kind.  Goldbarth's response, and his poetry, isn't trying to convince us of anything.  His poetry is an exploration, the result of throwing shovelfuls of life against a digger's screen and arranging what he finds, dating the artifacts, attaching small labels, noting the connectedness.

Posted by jbahr at 05:20 AM | Comments (3)

November 07, 2004

Combinations of the Universe

I find myself in a suburb of Chicago, apparently not content to leave this weblog dark for two days, staying with my good friend Frank and his irrepressively delightful wife, and reading Goldbarth's Combinations of the Universe. Frank is a poet, too, and works of verse are secreted here and there, lounging on the toilet top, peeking out beneath the wreath of potpourri on the bedstand.

But, it's Goldbarth this morning, out on the deck overlooking the lake upon which, so says the sign, you cannot walk when it is all ice. Combinations of the Universe is frankly astounding. Just witness the range of literary journals in which these poems have been published: ACM, Antioch Review, BPR, Georgia Review, Pleiades, Poetry Prairie Schooner, QW, Shenadoah, Willow Springs, to name a few.

Goldbarth writes as if Ashbery spent a decade in the library, then straightened up his smirking mug and finally told us what he thinks.

More when I get home.

Posted by jbahr at 06:56 AM | Comments (1)

November 06, 2004

Offline For Two Days

Hi, y'all. I'll be out the next two days, visiting a couple of colleges in Chicago with my son. I've brought Lucie Brock-Broido's Master Letters with me, and I'm leaving my laptop home.

I was going to write a little about the extraordinary set of articles in National Geographic on the theory of evolution, but I've run out of time. Maybe next week.

Have a nice weekend, everybody.

Posted by jbahr at 07:15 AM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2004

Voting By County

Votemaster has a map of how each county in each state went (Kerry vs. Bush), and other interesting information.

I had an idea and overlayed a population density map over this map. The correlation is extraordinary. In other words, if you don't live near anybody else, you're a Republican. Maybe being a Democrat is really infectious, or perhaps some sort of mass hysteria like when rats are crammed into cages together. Nah. Maybe if you are around other people, you talk and start to moderate your own views. Hmm. Anybody got any theories?

Posted by jbahr at 12:50 PM | Comments (4)

This From Michael Moore

... by way of my sweetie. OK, I'm a little conflicted about MM and his tactics, but this did bring a smile.

17 Reasons Not To Slit Your Wrists

Dear Friends,

Ok, it sucks. Really sucks. But before you go and cash it all in, let's, in the words of Monty Python, 'always look on the bright side of life!' There IS some good news from Tuesday's election. Here are 17 reasons not to slit your wrists:

1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again.

2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

3. The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them.

4. In spite of Bush's win, the majority of Americans still think the country is headed in the wrong direction (56%), think the war wasn't worth fighting (51%), and don't approve of the job George W. Bush is doing (52%). (Note to foreigners: Don't try to figure this one out. It's an American thing, like Pop Tarts.)

5. The Republicans will not have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. If the Democrats do their job, Bush won't be able to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues. Did I say "if the Democrats do their job?" Um, maybe better to scratch this one.

6. Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West Coast! Plus Hawaii. Ok, that's a start. We've got most of the fresh water, all of Broadway, and Mt. St. Helens. We can dehydrate them or bury them in lava. And no more show tunes!

7. Once again we are reminded that the buckeye is a nut, and not just any old nut -- a poisonous nut. A great nation was felled by a poisonous nut. May Ohio State pay dearly this Saturday when it faces Michigan.

8. 88% of Bush's support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn't such a long time! If you're ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age.

9. Gays, thanks to the ballot measures passed on Tuesday, cannot get married in 11 new states. Thank God. Just think of all those wedding gifts we won't have to buy now.

10. Five more African Americans were elected as members of Congress, including the return of Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It's always good to have more blacks in there fighting for us and doing the job our candidates can't.

11. The CEO of Coors was defeated for Senate in Colorado. Drink up!

12. Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don't want them to go away.

13. At the state legislative level, Democrats picked up a net of at least 3 chambers in Tuesday's elections. Of the 98 partisan-controlled state legislative chambers (house/assembly and senate), Democrats went into the 2004 elections in control of 44 chambers, Republicans controlled 53 chambers, and 1 chamber was tied. After Tuesday, Democrats now control 47 chambers, Republicans control 49 chambers, 1 chamber is tied and 1 chamber (Montana House) is still undecided.

14. Bush is now a lame duck president. He will have no greater moment than the one he's having this week. It's all downhill for him from here on out -- and, more significantly, he's just not going to want to do all the hard work that will be expected of him. It'll be like everyone's last month in 12th grade -- you've already made it, so it's party time! Perhaps he'll treat the next four years like a permanent Friday, spending even more time at the ranch or in Kennebunkport. And why shouldn't he? He's already proved his point, avenged his father and kicked our ass.

15. Should Bush decide to show up to work and take this country down a very dark road, it is also just as likely that either of the following two scenarios will happen: a) Now that he doesn't ever need to pander to the Christian conservatives again to get elected, someone may whisper in his ear that he should spend these last four years building "a legacy" so that history will render a kinder verdict on him and thus he will not push for too aggressive a right-wing agenda; or b) He will become so cocky and arrogant -- and thus, reckless -- that he will commit a blunder of such major proportions that even his own party will have to remove him from office.

16. There are nearly 300 million Americans -- 200 million of them of voting age. We only lost by three and a half million! That's not a landslide -- it means we're almost there. Imagine losing by 20 million. If you had 58 yards to go before you reached the goal line and then you barreled down 55 of those yards, would you stop on the three yard line, pick up the ball and go home crying -- especially when you get to start the next down on the three yard line? Of course not! Buck up! Have hope! More sports analogies are coming!!!

17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed "The #1 Liberal in the Senate." That's more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore. Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for a trend it should be this -- that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has always been filled with evangelicals -- that is not news. What IS news is that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact, that's BIG news. Which means, don't expect the mainstream media, the ones who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November 2, 2004. In fact, it's better that they don't. We'll need the element of surprise in 2008.

Feeling better? I hope so. As my friend Mort wrote me yesterday, "My Romanian grandfather used to say to me, 'Remember, Morton, this is such a wonderful country -- it doesn't even need a president!'"

Posted by jbahr at 09:00 AM | Comments (4)

November 04, 2004

The Banana Republic

If you haven't seen it, you should look at an article by Garrick Davis in CPR.

I'll warn you now that it's a scathing review of MFA programs and the Poetry Business. This is much harsher than even Gioia's infamous Can Poetry Matter?, making no allowances for poetry students who just love what they're doing, or those who believe that they are actually learning things that improve their art.

Garrick is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review with some publications credits and apparently not related to the guitarist of the same name. CPR has featured essays and critiques by Joan Houlihan, Marc Pietrzykowski, and J. S. Renau. I can only assume that other contributors are as fiesty and iconoclastic. I don't know because it costs $8 a month to review the archives and I'm not ready to make the investment.

You can get a gaggle of article from here, without the price of admission. I found Marc Pietrzykowski's Three Things to Forget About Contemporary Poetry, the best argued and most eloquent.

Posted by jbahr at 02:44 PM | Comments (7)

More Politics

I've been engaging in a lot of post mortem election talk over at QED. It's not worth repeating it all here, and there are a lot of other people participating with thoughtful comments, so just click over there, please.

On to other topics ...

Posted by jbahr at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2004

Mike's Wife's Brother's Fried Chicken

Time for some comfort food. God knows we need it after yesterday.

I'll be making this tomorrow night for the first time to feed my 17-year old son, who shows up periodically for fatherly love, grub, and money. My political sparring mate, Mike, gave me this.

INGREDIENTS:

3 1/2 to 4 pounds chicken pieces
1/2 cup honey
2 Big T raspberry or cider vinegar
2/3 cup flour
2 Big T fine dry bread crumbs
2 teaspoons ground cayenne pepper
2 eggs
1/4 cup buttermilk
1 cup vegetable oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper

I would probably get two fryers and cut them up with my big, bad Joyce Chen cleaver, but you can just buy parts, too. I prefer RedBird or some other non-antibiotic-stuffed, organic chicken, but buy what you can find and afford. The rest of the recipe is Mike's version almost verbatim:

Stir the honey and vinegar together and pour over the chicken; marinate for 2 hour to 4 hours in refrigerator, stirring occasionally. In a bowl, combine flour, bread crumbs, and cayenne pepper; set aside. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs and buttermilk.

In a large heavy skillet, heat the oil over medium high heat to 300°, (higher temperatures could burn honey). Remove the chicken from the marinade and drain on paper towels. Dip the chicken in beaten egg mixture, season with salt and pepper, and dredge in the flour mixture, coating thoroughly. Strain the marinade; reserve 1 tablespoon for the sauce.

Gently drop the legs, wings, and thighs into the pan for 5 to 6 minutes on the first side until browned. Turn, add the breast halves and continue cooking, adjusting the heat so the chicken browns evenly on both sides and is tender when pierced with a fork, 15 to 18 minutes for dark meat and 10 to 12 minutes for the breast halves.

Serves 4 to 6.

So, looks like if you're by your lonesome, you might want to just buy thighs, for example. For two people, buy a fryer and cut it up.

Posted by jbahr at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2004

Election Day News (And Beyond)

I'll be updating this entry with interesting/important Election Day news as I hear or read it.

* 11:30 AM EST: It is reported that Kerry has called the President and conceded the election.

* 11:30 AM EST: Some fascinating stats from the polls: Kerry support is strongest with those with No HighSchool OR PostGraduates, weak in between. Kerry support drops almost uniformly as the voter's income increases, drops with increasing voter church attendance, and rises with the size of their hometown. Voter age, surprisingly, made no dramatic difference.

* 11:20 AM EST: Never did take that nap, just a shower, coffee and some email. Interesting article in Slate called The 7-Hour Presidency of JFK2, detailing the wholesale flummoxing of Dems by the exit polls.

* 8:20 AM EST: Well, time to go take a nap.

* 7:15 AM EST: "The nation spoke that we're on the right course, and we'll stay on that course and hopefully accelerate it," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said. 48% of the country votes against you and the "nation spoke?"

* 6:30 AM EST: One view on the Next Four Years.

* 5:40 AM EST: Everybody's got a theory. The most compelling is that Kerry was beaten by social conservatives. Eleven states voted to amend their constitutions to prohibit same-sex-marriages. Whether these amendment-supporting organizations were cynically funded/supported/used by the GOP to bolster their base's turnout isn't the point. Ditto, the abortion issue, which appears to have hurt Kerry/Edwards among Catholic voters. The sad truth is that the people of the heartland is going to continue to vote against their own economic interests to protect their views on guns, gays and God.

* 5:30 AM EST: The recriminations begin. CNN says that the 18-28 year-old vote didn't change at all from 2000, even though registrations were way up. Voting among the 18-24 group, who were strongly pro-Kerry, may have actually receded from the 2000 numbers.

* 5:00 AM EST : I'm back. If you're back too, you know it's Bush 254, Kerry 242 with Ohio in the balance, NM and Iowa still not finalized. Bush has also carried the popular vote 51%/48%.

* 12:30 AM EST : No real news. ABC has it at about 200 Kerry, 210 Bush. CNN a little greater difference, not having folded in WA yet. It's still up to the same states.

* 11:50 PM EST: It's still about Ohio and Florida. Both are in the Bush column now, but creeping back to Kerry. Maybe not fast enough.

* 11:45 PM EST: Well, this is pretty freaking nerve-wracking. CNN now has Bush up by 197 to 188, not counting WA/OR, the upper Midwest, OH or FL.

* 11:15 PM EST: CNN has it at Kerry 188, Bush 203, counting CA but not WA/OR. Slate is right: Kerry needs Ohio and any two of the little three: Nevada, New Mexico, and Iowa.

* 11:00 PM EST: Kerry needs Ohio badly. Give Kerry WA/OR/CA and he's neck-and-neck with Bush, but Bush is leading in WI and NM again. If Bush wins both Ohio and Florida, he needs only Colorado to get to 269, two short of victory.

* 10:30 PM EST: I've seen no exit polls since 6:30 PST. Nobody seems to care about them, with the real numbers pouring in. I've also seen/heard little about absentee ballots.

* 10:30 PM EST: Bush predicts a victory. Wonkette interprets this as : "You can pry this presidency out of my cold, dead hands."

* 10:15 PM EST: The networks are showing maps with huge swaths of Red. The bad news is that Kerry didn't pick up any of the improbables, like Missouri. The good news is that Bush's 193 to 112 lead in electoral votes ignores the 73 electoral votes of CA/OR/WA. Also, Bush has just about run out of the easy states. He has to get one of the northern midwestern states, and either Ohio or Florida.

* 9:45 PM EST: The Wonkette thinks Bush is gonna get Florida.

* 9:45 PM EST: Bush is ahead in real counted votes in Florida and Ohio on CNN. Bush is unexpectedly ahead in Delaware 52/47%. Not a good sign.

* 9:25 PM EST: Missouri, which I had going for Bush, is deadlocked with 9% of the vote reported.

* 9:15 PM EST: Real reported votes from Florida had Bush up 55% to 45% 15 minutes ago. That lead has been cut to 53% to 46%, as the Dem-leaning southern counties start reporting in.

* 9:00 PM EST: Slate says that Bush needs a perfect storm to overcome what the exit polls portend. I still don't like the way the real numbers are coming in, though.

* 9:00 PM EST: For a little comic relief, check out The Wonkette.

* 8:45 PM EST: ABC is reporting much stronger actual counted votes for Bush in many states, including Florida and Ohio, than the exit polls predict.

* 8:30 PM EST: Taking all current exit-poll results, and factoring in the states that are almost certain to fall for Bush or Kerry, the current estimate for electoral votes is Kerry with 312, Bush with 209, and 17 electoral votes for states with no reports in at all. While Kerry's lead has grown (especially places like New Jersey and New Mexico), the numbers have actually become tighter. With luck, though, it could be an electoral landslide. For details, see HERE.

* 8:30 PM EST - CNN says that Bush is up 54% to 45% on Kerry on Florida. Kerry can actually afford to lose Florida, but this is so at odds with the exit polls that I'm nervous.

* 8:00 PM EST - From MyDD - "Kerry takes IL, CT, MA, DC. Bush takes SC, AL, MS, OK. PBS says NC too close to call. Kerry takes three from Maine. Kerry also takes NJ and DE." New Jersey going to Kerry is very bad for Bush, probably a trend-setter for Eastern states thought to be on the edge.

* 8:00 PM EST - From Instapundit: NBC IS CALLING IT FOR BUSH in Tenn. Oklahoma, Alabama; Kerry in Mass., Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey. No real surprises there, though NJ to Kerry probably means no chance of a Bush landslide, just as WV to Bush makes a Kerry landslide unlikely. I guess it's going to be close.

* 8:00 PM EST - Excellent map at CSPAN of electoral distribution.

* 7:45 PM EST - Many independent and Democratic-leaning sites (e.g, Instapundit, DailyKos, Votemaster) have been subjected to massive denial-of-service attacks today. Makes you wonder if Somebody doesn't want us to know what's going on.

* 7:30 PM EST - Senate surprise in Kentucky. With 50.8% reporting: Mongiardo (D): 53.4% Bunning (R): 46.6%. Eight weeks ago this was a LOCK for Bunning until his bizarre behavior started attracting attention.

* 7:30 PM EST - KENTUCKY, INDIANA, GEORGIA called for Bush by NBC; Vermont for Kerry.

* 7:30 PM EST - Bush takes GA, IN and KY, while Kerry takes VT. The major surprise is that SC has not been called for Bush yet. Bush takes West Virginia according to CNN. Darn. Ohio and North Carolina were not projected.

* 6:30 PM EST - DailyKos has a lot more details on Senatorial and Gubernatorial races. They're say they're getting "several hundred thousand hits an hour" on their site.

* 5:30 PM EST -- Zogby predicts Kerry 311, Bush 213, too close to call (Nevada and Colorado) 14.

* CNN Reports: Ohio - African American precincts performing at 106% of expected, Hispanic precincts at 144% of expected. Florida - African American precincts performing at 109% of expected, Hispanic precincts at 106% of expected. Pennsylvania - African American precincts performing at 102% of expected, Hispanic precincts at 136% of expected.

* Votemaster has Kerry and Bush in a dead heat, as of yesterday's polls.

* Bush contract prices are falling fast in both IEM and Tradesports fantasy markets, in which you buy "options" in favor of one candidate or another.

* MyDD has very encouraging (but very early) exit-poll numbers that shows Kerry ahead in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico and crushing bush in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I hesitate in my enthusiasm at this point, though.

* Bush takes the lead 19 to 7 in Dixville Notch, NH in the first reported results of the day.

* Early this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court gave a boost to the GOP by declining to stay an appeals court ruling allowing political parties to send people to polls in Ohio to challenge voters' eligibility.

* The CNN website has a pretty good one-page summary of election results here for state and national races, including the latest results from exit polls.

* Leroy Chiao becomes the first American to vote from outer space.

Posted by jbahr at 12:29 PM | Comments (5)

In The Mail This Week - Continued

The recently received American Poetry Review starts off with eight long poems by John Ashbery, who graces the front page with a mildly startled stare.  The initial poem (about which Josh Corey has already said a few words),  is titled Coma Berenices, a poem that seems one part essay, one part travelogue, and one part letter-to-home.  Coma Berenices is a constellation that is supposed to represent a gift to Aphrodite of the beautiful shorn hair of Berenice, the wife of Ptolemy III.  This poem, Where Shall I Wander, and From China to Peru are prose poems (the first two quite long) that are, in places, a bit more staccato than many of Ashbery's usual works.  The five succeeding lineated poems include The Bled Weasel ("Two shoes make a difference / to the man in the street.  The detention of the Magna Carta / was forever but it's over now"), Well-Lit Places ("The proud, the famous, the magnificent / exude gentleness and megalomania, / Embassies are loud with the sound of cymbals and organs."), Capital O ("I was approached by foreign agents / masquerading as talent scouts"), New Concerns ("Wind-driven pea-shoots strew the skies. / All is tremor, modesty, a waiting to be told."), and Novelty Love Trot (". . . You are stuffing squash blossoms / with porcini mushrooms.  I am somewhere else, alone as usual. // I must get back to my elegy").  These poems demonstrate pretty much Ashbery's full range of whimsy, erudition, Continental references, elliptical discourse, and colloquialism.

Harking back to my prior thread on parody:  Michael McClure follows up with a Suite for John Ashbery, a collection of seven poems written as homage.  In the first, Imitation of, and Ode for, John Ashbery, there are many of the same imagistic leaps and surreal plotlines.  The longer pieces shadow Ashbery's more renowned tricks;  the shorter work sounds more like Merwin to me, though somewhat more imaginative.

Martha Ronk appears (literally, with her face held in her hand, looking a little nonplussed) with seven poems, each of which has a quoted title that could have been extracted from diary entries (e.g., "This shows that among the innumerable things left out").  These are discursive, first-person, snippets from her life (real or imagined):  "I practice interruption to get used to it, get up to get the cup / and then sit down, go out to look at the sign on the corner, sit / down, open the book to 37."  and "It's not as if memory provides a respite or refuge / She had wanted to put her hands on it as an idea. / Myths are as large as cities sometimes." 

Next up is an essay by Charles Dickens (yes, that Charles Dickens)  from American Notes, describing a trip to Philadelphia (which he considered quite fine and modern) and his experience (and dismay) at visiting the Eastern Penitentiary.  Arda Collins follows with two poems of short lines, one in the second-person ("You're at home, / it's getting dark out, rain / makes the cars louder.  Nobody / seems to be driving / the cars."), one in the first ("I was making a roast. / The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room.").  Then, Minnie Bruce Pratt, with another four poems, also of a very plain-spoken style -- almost as if the editors were searching for foils to offset Ashbery's abandon.  From Opening the Mail:  "She used to work down in the copy center, and, / don't get her wrong, she liked it, she did."

The middle section (which starts off, curiously, on purple stock) contains fifty-nine (59!) short translations of Jean Follain by W. S. Merwin.  To my ear, they all sound curiously like Merwin, but I know only enough French to get a decent breakfast, so I'm no judge.  From Meal Hour: "One sees box leaves / around the frozen garden bed. / The lions are only in the psalms / whose latinity survives."  Derek Walcott follows with two excerpts from The Prodigal, his recently published verse memoir. 

Elizabeth Williams and Michael Dennis Browne appear (separately) with short lyrical poems, and Dannie Abse with The Yellow Bird:  "I do not want it / the witchcraft song of the yellow bird, / nor this room of whisperings / as the slanting rain punctual / pelts against the windowpane."  What follows is a short poem (and nice smiling photo) of Elizabeth Alexander with Ars Poetica #10: Crossing Over:  "Like the low Shaker cradle / sized for a diminished adult / to which they rocked their elderly to death," and then two poems by Leonard Gontarek.  This, from his Arrangement: "The poems burn.  Not to keep us warm.  Not to cook food.  So we'll hae something / to do.  Come inside.  P orders coffee.  He has glue on his hands.  And newsprint.  E is / not ready to order".

Donald Hall describes the days shortly after Jane Kenyon's death in The Funeral Party, and Liam Rector reminisces in Remembering Jane Kenyon.  As touching as these articles were, I was more moved, for some reason, by Lucia Perillo's Fear of the Marketplace.  This is, no doubt, due in part to a very nice note that I received from Ms. Perillo after purchasing The Oldest Map With The Name America, an honest and affecting work.   Ms. Perillo describes her attempt to sell a large stack of remaindered copies, and what the meager market-value of poetry does to our collective esteem.  She says she had sold 40 copies of her book from her website and is now considering "some sort of ecological building technique, as old tires have been used to make houses."  A fine and candid article, and by the way, she still has some books left if you want to wander over to her link on the right.

Posted by jbahr at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2004

A Vigil of Crossed Digits

Kerry 283, Bush 246. That's the current "prediction" by Votemaster, though, in truth, it's really still a toss-up. Yesterday, Votemaster aggregated 54 new polls for 22 states. Yes, more polls than states. And, still, nobody knows how it's going to come out.

This is probably a silly question, but I have to ask it. The margin of error could be reduced to anything you like with a sufficiently large sample size. So why do the pollsters always stop at 800 to 1500 respondents? Budget? An unstated lack of confidence in the actual representativeness of the sample (which kills in an instant any hope of inference).

We'll all know by Wednesday morning (or perhaps three court decisions and 11 recounts from now in January). I like what Josh has to say: Ya gotta believe.

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This just in. The smirking character shown below is our Vice-President giving a speech in Honolulu, dragging Pearl Harbor in as another reason to trust the current Administration. That thing around his neck is a Ken Lei.

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In a sure sign that Kerry will win the election, the first of the Biblical Plagues has begun.

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The Votemaster outs himself.

Posted by jbahr at 06:34 AM | Comments (1)