~~~

Raising the Bar and Then Electrifying It: The Savage Criticism of William Logan:

Included in this book are ten of Logan’s infamous ‘Verse Chronicles’: sequences of reviews of contemporary poetry books published in The New Criterion. They are overwhelmingly negative, and it is not surprising that some of his terse witticisms and outright condemnations stick in the craw of respective poets and editors. After a while, one reads each review waiting for the coup de grâce—normally witty and always, well, savage: Rosanna Warren’s ‘well-meaning poems’ (ouch) are mostly as ‘conventional as cottage cheese’. Howard Nemerov ‘could cram so many [abstractions] into a poem, they looked like frat boys stuffed into a phone booth’. Sherod Santos revels in moments which ‘hover between sentiment and sententiousness. After a dozen of them you want to put your hand into a lawnmower blade’. A long poem by Carolyn Forché ‘is the graveyard where unused lines go to die’. James Fenton is ‘the best poet of his generation in Britain’ but reading most of The Love Bomb is like ‘chewing shoe leather’. The ‘most accomplished poem in [Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard ] collapses into the same kitschy sanctimoniousness that puts nodding Jesus dolls on car dashboards’, and his poems are ‘the Hallmark cards of the damned’. And all of this in the first twenty pages after the introduction."

~~~

How hurricanes get named:  "This year, parts of Central America, the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. East Coast have already witnessed Alex, Bonnie and Colin; the next up are Fiona, Gaston, Hermine and Igor."

~~~

Jonathan:  "We don't experience Shakesperian blank verse in the theater as "lines" of verse, but as a rhythmic flow. Oral poets, even those composing in isometirc units, probably don't conceive of their poetry in terms of visual lines on the page. Even if they do, that visual representation is not primary. "

~~~

Even more of Bill's cats.



~~~

"Parable", by Carl Philips:


I have thought, since, of
your body—as I first came
to know it, how it still

Colorado Weather:  39 last night, 95 tomorrow.

~~~

The 7th Annual World Testicle Cooking Championships.

~~~



~~~

Late Night Jokes:

Before President Obama’s address, he called former President Bush. I’m not saying the economy is bad, but he called collect.

Tiger Woods finalized his divorce. The settlement was brutal, but every other week, he gets to go visit his money.

I like when the kids go back to school. The house is quiet, the kids are out all day, there’s no line for “Dance Dance Revolution” at Chuck E. Cheese.

A newspaper is a thing that people used to read. It’s like a website, but all the information is from yesterday.

Beaches in Italy are now training dogs to become lifeguards. That should work as long as someone throws a tennis ball at you while you’re drowning.

~~~

Bob Dylan's artwork, now showing in Denmark.

~~~

Recently, every week, I find myself saying:  "How the hell did it become Thursday already?"

~~~

This weekend, I will cook Argentine steaks in an alleyway, eat Mango Fool, and visit a cemetery.  Junie always said that I don't go to enough funerals.

~~~




Rickie, looking a little older, in her own sassy self.
~~~

And more of Bill's cats.



~~~

Trish reviews another exciting book from the The Boxcar Children series:  "God, what was this book even about? Something about a train, and a clown, and a talking horse, and a leather mattress with diamonds inside, and the aforementioned Beaver Man, who is a hermit who lives in the woods and watches "big beavers" put filth on their tails. Understandably, Benny wants to watch."

~~~

The Jim Behrle Interview:  "I’m just struggling like everybody else. Poetry is a tough gig. The technology is amazing. I think there are more people who consider themselves poets than ever. You do have to get yourself out there. My anti-self promotion self promotion gig hopefully is transparent. Hopefully it just makes you think okay well, do I need to become a professor and make other students become professors? Does the experience of being a poet mean that everyone has to be in debt to a university or a bank as opposed to, I dunno, having sex in the woods on some couch for free and then reading poems to whoever you just did it on?"

~~~

Everyone's a poet:  This came in an email from my local liquor store: 

As I ventured in the vineyard- I stopped to draw on dewy air, let droplets of rain shimmer in my curls, on my skin.....it felt so right, so good when the supple warmth of sun rays touched the dewy skin, when my hands reached out for the ripened grapes, their juicy sweetness was loved by my palate, its then I thought- I need to give back....in simple need of wanting to soak in such simple pleasures of Mother Nature!!

Stephen Hawking:  "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going."

~~~

True Tales of False Romance:  "I love you, John (whatever the hell that means)".  "I love you too, Melinda (I'll play along for the sex)" . . .

~~~

Excellent!  Martin Cruz Smith has another Renko novel out.  "Even a dwindling Renko is, of course, a brilliant cop. But in this slim, almost ephemeral novel that fitfully illuminates the new Russia of oligarchs, drugs, sex slavery, decadence and degradation, he is also conscience and memory."

~~~

Late Night Comics:


President Obama was in New Orleans for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Halfway through his speech, FEMA finally showed up.

President Obama said he can’t walk around with his birth certificate plastered on his forehead. Apparently he was reacting to new polls that show 1 in 5 Kenyans now believe he was born in Hawaii.

Bed bugs can live up to a year without feeding. They’re like supermodels.

A new study found that heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers, but the ways they die are far more embarrassing.

~~~

"In Russia, contract-killing is more systematized. With Russian police largely unable or unwilling to track down suspected murderers, organized gangs began offering killer-for-hire services in the 1990s to add to their usual repertoire of pimping, drug dealing, extortion, and burglary."


~~~

Kazim Ali, "Write Something on My Wall: Body, Identity and Poetry":  "Of all the crew on the Pequod it is Starbuck who most wishes to disobey his captain. Both like and unlike his galactic counterpart, Melville’s Starbuck has a strong streak of rebellion but is fundamentally part of the larger social order and continues to support it"

~~~

Scott Adams:  "One way of imagining the future is that you and I, the so-called current generation, will selfishly party until we die, leaving to our children nothing but crushing debt, a boiling turd of a planet, and various Apple products."

~~~

The Driftington Post:  The Other-People's-Stuff-In-Easy-To-Swallow-Pill-Form Community.


~~~

Mike Konczal:

An analysis by research firm Thetica Systems, commissioned by ProPublica, shows that in the last years of the boom, CDOs had become the dominant purchaser of key, risky parts of other CDOs, largely replacing real investors like pension funds. By 2007, 67 percent of those slices were bought by other CDOs, up from 36 percent just three years earlier. The banks often orchestrated these purchases. In the last two years of the boom, nearly half of all CDOs sponsored by market leader Merrill Lynch bought significant portions of other Merrill CDOs.

Remember that by keeping the demand artificially high for the housing market in the post-2005, these banks created its own supply of crap mortgages. These mortgages inflated and then crashed local housing prices. Meanwhile the biggest banks got tossed a lifeline and homeowners can’t even short sale their home much less have a bankruptcy judge that can set their mortgage to the market price with a large penalty. And everyone lines up to tell those people what “losers” they are, how “irresponsible” they’ve been for being pulled into becoming the artificial supply for artificially created demand of housing debt. What sad times we are living in.
 

~~~

The wonders of the free market:  " The CEOs who cut the most jobs during the recession earned more than their peers, according to a study being released today by a liberal think tank in Washington."

]]> tag:www.whimsyspeaks.com,2010://2.527 2010-09-01T13:28:36Z 2010-09-01T19:56:23Z

I am on the board of the Boulder County Arts Alliance, which is a 30-year old organization that began with a sizable endowment and the goal of promoting arts of all form (see here for Mission Statement).  I am also the Secretary of BCAA, which is not a thankless job, at least in the sense that the other board members regularly thank me for scribbling away while the rest of them are reaching for the mixed nuts.   I had made it a habit to type into a laptop in autopilot mode as the rest of the board moved to do this and seconded that and called the question.  Occasionally, I will interrupt to ask who said something or remind my colleagues that we need to be moving down the agenda a little quicker.  But, mostly I type or – in the case of the last two meetings  – write in longhand on a clipboard positioned on the round conference table between my wine glass and a paper plate of pot stickers.  Soon after joining the board, I asked why (in the hell) we didn't take turns bringing some wine and snacks, and received a dozen identical looks:  why didn't we think of that?   It's my most notable contribution to board matters, to date, and I'm proud of it.  After all, I have little to offer as advice to the dancers, playwrights, film-makers, and visual artists who make up a lot of the board and all of our membership.  I could probably help the board understand the needs of poets and writers, but I am one of the few examples.  Which is OK with me, I get enough po-biz chit-chat on the Internet.  It's enlightening to interact with artists who work in media other than words.  Something about the physicality of their art makes them seem less neurotic, less narcissistic, well, happier, than we often see ourselves as poets. 

If you live in the Denver metro area, you might want to drive down to Betsy's Farmette on September 12th for the Harvest Plain Air Art Show (& Cocktail Party).  I don't claim to have thought up the "Cocktail Party" part, but I like to think of myself as the original inspiration.

~~~

More of Bill's cats.



~~~

The latest APR came yesterday, though I don't remember renewing my subscription.  Maybe they're giving it away nowadays.  As usual, there is a section of "15 Poems", this time by Michael Ryan, and articles (a good one by Laura McCullough on Tony Hoagland), and the occasional actually good poem hidden away, on page 34,  beneath an ad for an MFA program.  There was one small pastoral poem by Dave Lucas that I liked, "Firefly":

Soon the earth is constellated with flies
 – satellites in a sex-struck orbit  –
beaconing to the wingless females below.

It is as we have imagined in our ecstacies.
The body is filled with light.

~~~

"Besides making the best crab cakes in world and winning the Nobel Prize for astonishingly graceful yet epic prose, Toni Morrison is a consummate poet."

~~~

Jonathan in a contemplative moment:  "By Girard's logic, the sacrificial solution provided by the passion of Christ should have put an end to the scape-goat mechanism, but this didn't actually happen"

~~~



~~~

Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism, comes to McEwan's defense:  "Given the British genius for coded utterance, this could all be about something else entirely, impossible on this side of the ocean to appreciate in any nuanced way-- but assuming that it really is about who owns the right to describe using gentian violet for ringworm, for heaven's sake, allow me a gentle suggestion. " 

~~~

Congratulations to Eduardo on winning the Zone 3 first-book award.  I received a review copy of a book from Zone 3 a couple of years ago (I'm ashamed to admit that I can't remember the author or title) which I quite admired.

My mistake, I read the quote as one by Eduardo and missed the fact that Amanda Auchter won the honor.  Thanks, CDY, for the catch in comments.

~~~

I was just reading Matt Bell's blog, thinking "Yeah!  This is very handsome".  If anybody knows what the underlying blog software is, please email me or leave a comment.

~~~



~~~

On the heels of sharing tako sushi with Charlotte, comes this:  "They may be tasty when you fry them up, but evidence is mounting that cephalopods like octopuses and squid possess consciousness."

~~~

TBogg is pretty raucous, but also usually very funny:  "Even though she knows what the questions will be beforehand she needs to write the answers on her hand, and still what comes out of her mouth is Snowbilly word salad. Jesus Christ, even Paris Hilton can answer an off-the-cuff question and “I’m pretty sure she’s legally retarded“*."

~~~



~~~

Something I've often thought about:  "As you’ve probably heard politicians of both parties emphasize, ninety million percent of job creation comes from small businesses—who, with the exception of family farms, are by far the most precious of the Lord’s creations. These factoids have always struck me as a bit oddly phrased, since presumably the really big job growth comes not from small businesses but from firms that are rapidly enlarging from a small base."

I mean, it's all well and good that small businesses account for a lot of job growth, but that often translates into millions of $8 an hour restaurant jobs.

~~~

Letterman:  "Paris Hilton was arrested again. Your move, Lindsay Lohan."

~~~

The Onion Corrections Department:  "Though we had planned to run a multipart series on the treatment of 12-year-old cancer patient Billy Tandem, the fact is, the kid is so goddamn boring we're just going to wrap it up early and say the cancer went away on its own. The Onion apologizes for having wasted your time."

~~~

 

Wookie the Chew. (thx, BoingBoing) (really slow to load today, since BB linked to them).

~~~

"Heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists’ otherwise practical polyamory."

~~~

"Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies."

Hah!  Another guilty day averted.


~~~

More as I think of it.  Yeah, I know I said that yesterday. 


]]> tag:www.whimsyspeaks.com,2010://2.526 2010-08-31T12:58:26Z 2010-08-31T16:04:08Z

jbahr http://www.whimsyspeaks.com Micheaux on Vendler on Graham:  "“When a poet ceases to write short lines,” she posits, “and starts to write long lines, that change is a breaking of style almost more consequential, in its implications, than any other” vs. his theory of vocative sublimity.  Non-poets can stop reading now.

~~~

Music lovers:  You can have your cremated ashes pressed into vinyl.  (thx, BoingBoing)

~~~

Seamus Heaney doesn't actually like bullfighting.  Probably.  Also Rimbaud is misspelled.  And is not a boat.  It's a cat.

~~~

Scott Adams on the illusion of winning:  "Complicating our perceptions is professional sports. The whole point of professional athletics is assembling freaks of nature into teams and pitting them against other freaks of nature"
~~~

Brief review of Elisa's The French Exit:  "The biting, mordant psychosocial wit with which readers of her earlier work are familiar is surrounded by poems with a more sombre and melancholy tone."

~~~

GOP has huge lead in Gallup poll.  It looks like it's going to be a long two years until 2012.

~~~

Johannes spars with Seth:  "Funding is what matters, so that you can live the best. The best funding equals the best students; bestness can be bought. This is I think a rotten way of viewing art, and an especially rotten way of viewing students who are just coming into their senses of themselves as artists."  (Seth responds in the comments).

~~~

Note to beagle-owners.  Ellie could be a tax deduction.

~~~

Linh Dihh on America's obliviousness to poetry:  "Poetry is close reading and attentive listening. It requires silence, reflection, sustained focus and analysis, mental habits that are much atrophied in our culture, and which our young are growing up mostly without. "

~~~

The author of The Secret is back with The Power.  A review:  Why does Byrne assume we can obtain things through simply feeling and desiring it? She states her reason on the first page: ‘You are meant to have an amazing life! You are meant to have everything you love and desire.’

~~~

More of Bill's painted cats:







~~~

As I was tell a friend this morning, Emily is a small, furry dog who sleeps a lot and makes loved ones allergic.

~~~

John on workshops:  "I rather like creative writing workshops. They afford us a glimpse of audience. They give us the opportunity to try some things out in a semi-public setting. But one thing they are not is authoritative or indicative of what’s necessarily going to happen next for any of the writers in them."

Billy on workshops: 

Maybe it’s just me,
but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost. I need help.
~~~

More after I get some real work done . . .

]]>

~~~

Things are really tough on literary journals these days.  CDY discusses the pending shutdown of the venerable New England Review in 2011, barring some happy eventuality.  Actually, the post is in response to a poet who was objecting to online submission fees. 

~~~

Kelli has some great old photos of poets.  All from the APR archive, apparently.  Who's this, for example?





~~~

I really detest homeowner associations.  They came to be as a ploy by the builder to ensure that recently sold homes were maintained during the long sales cycle of a development.  After that, the HOA becomes an albatross around everyone's neck, except the "tin-pot dictators" who make up the architectural committees.  Cory apparently agrees, and links to this article on 7 insane HOA rules.

~~~

An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon. (NSFV)

~~~

Long's Peak in late August.

~~~

Were you born on the wrong continent?  "In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. "

~~~

In defense of casual sex:  "Couples who became sexually involved as friends or acquaintances and were open to a serious relationship ended up just as happy as those who dated and waited."

~~~

The difference between writing novels and short stories: "Writing stories, in comparison, is a leisurely delight, a walk in the park. Even if you don't know where you're going with a story, you know the project will be finite, there will be an end."

~~~

"When can a book that isn’t released yet get an award for being released last year? Why, when it’s a poetry book by a Dickman brother, that’s when."

And, yes, Daniel, it was a funny poster.

~~~

Someone in Madrid is screen-scraping my blog.  I don't care, as long as it's not a prelude to leaving targeted spam comments.

~~~

Which reminds me.  I really need to get new blogging software.  It's not like it would be that big a deal to set up something new.  I'm a programmer, after all, and host my own site.  I actually dust the server that brings you this from time to time.

~~~

The billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party : "Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might."

~~~

The Onion horoscope for Cancer:  "You've managed to maintain a little bit of mystery about yourself, but that will evaporate when they find the last two nurses' bodies."

~~~

I noticed that of the 20 Recession-Proof Cities, many have state or local government, military bases or universities nearby.

~~~

"Real Life", Lucie Brock-Broido:

Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.
I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving

Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard,   
Moving to country music & the heart

~~~

I am also a few months older than Jorie Graham.

~~~

I woke up this morning, wondering if I had lost my porpoise.

~~~

I made Becky's Quinoa again last night, this time with more carmelized shallots and Kalamata olives.  Yum.

 

Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender

Jackson Browne, The Pretender

~~~

Quai-Doppelgangers:  "Dr. Bahr is responsible for day-to-day operation of the company, board, investor, and corporate partner interactions, and overall strategy development and implementation. Dr. Bahr also drives the technical strategy and product development efforts of the company."  "Jeff Bahr is the author of Weird Virginia, Kick'n' Back in Texas, & Amazing and Unusual USA."  "Jeffrey Bahr, M.D.: I enjoy staying current on the latest developments in all areas of Internal Medicine and giving my patients practical advice that can be applied to everyday life."  " Jeff Bahr is an American News reporter. He writes a blog three times a week at aberdeennews.com"  "Dr. Jeffery Bahr practices internal medicine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Bahr graduated with an MD 12 years ago"  "We're opening for the legendary Meat Puppets at The Warehouse in downtown La Crosse. I think it will differ because we’ve actually met them now and we kind of know them a little bit,” explains drummer Jeff Bahr."  "He is survived by his wife, Virginia of Vinton; his children, Tim Bahr and wife, Karen of Vinton, Jeff Bahr and wife, Terri of Garrison"  " As originally discovered by smokeitgood at Survivor Sucks, South Dakota area blogger Jeff Bahr made the following observation (after contestants had left for Nicaragua, but shortly before filming began)" 

I found 38 Jeff Bahrs on Facebook and invited them all to be friends.  Maybe we'll start a club.

~~~

We sat beside one another in plastic deck chairs, looking up into the blue and moving white. He had the same grey eyes and hair pulled back away from his face, now a little more filled out, a few fine lines around his eyes.  But not that different from the day he found the sliver of flint in his hand, the day he struck and rolled out from under the beast, dead and heavy.  “So, what is the Nothing?”  I said, and it seemed as if I had not spoken.  After a while, he said, “Do you see that large white dragon above Long’s Peak?  It is not what you think.  It is white because of optics and ready-to-be rain depending upon the weather.  It is not the long trail of a bridal gown, nor the cotton batting of your dreamscapes.”  “So, what is the Nothing?” I persisted.  “It is not what you think”, he said and lay his bow down so the string was parallel to the redwood slats.  “Then, what is courage?  You certainly can make a claim for that.”  Atreyu shifted in his seat.  “Courage is not something you have, it is something you do.  It is counter-intuitive, it is capricious and often not a wise idea.  It is . . . you ask too many questions.”  He was completely still, his eyes on the swaying trees in the school yard, or perhaps on the water tower farther off, or perhaps on the distant Flatirons.  “Yes, I have been told that”, I said.  “You see, I want to know how things work, I want to figure everything out.”  He turned to look at me, “Yes, but you are willing to forego all of that to love and be loved.  And that is not always something that bears close inspection.”   I got up to refill our glasses.  “So the Rock Monster and the Southern Oracle and your love for the Empress and the power of imagination.   None of it meant anything?”  He stood to leave.  “It meant that when the entire world that you desire is reduced to one grain of sand, you have two choices.”  The sound of his motorcycle echoed off every suburban structure.  I rearranged the chairs back into order, and put his bow among the many other weapons in my son’s collection.

~~~

I'm trying to imagine what a massive Figaro from all angles looks like.

~~~

Nicolas Cage as pop art.

~~~

"Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves."  I had forgotten that I like Galway Kinnell.  

~~~

"According to the head of the largest call center outsourcing firm in the country, the poor job market has made the cost of hiring a call center worker in the United States the same as hiring one in India. What do you think?"  Commentary here.

~~~

"In China, the "latest trend in pet fashion" involves dyeing a pet so that it looks like something different, reports CNN. Owners have used dye to make their dogs look like pandas, tigers, and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, to name a few."  (thx, Slate)

~~~




More accolades for the Dickmans.  It's a bit difficult to understand, actually. This from Dana Levin:
 

I’m not dead but I am
standing very still
in the backyard
staring up at the maple
thirty years ago
a tiny kid waiting on the ground
alone in heaven
in the world
in white sneakers

Admittedly, the narrative relayed above in Michael Dickman’s poem “We Did Not Make Ourselves” is fairly pedestrian, and word choice lacks the lexical exuberance that is another marker of our moment—but never mind: I could spend time with “I’m not dead but I am.”

It's not like I really care one way or the other, and I'm certainly not feeling competitive or threatened, I hardly submit anymore, and my livelihood doesn't depend upon it.  But there are hundreds of really interesting poets out there (think:  GC or Dean Young or MJB or Tricia and Becky for starters), and we're listening to the kind of warmed-over nostalgia that makes it into the New Yorker?

~~~

Jesús and the Snowman
 

It’s 5 am when Jesús finds the snowman.
It should be cold, but it’s warm.
He huddles against it, stone eyed and afraid,
trying to look past the snowman’s lasso of light.

~~~

Rebecca tries on an English accent.  I can do a French accent, but it's about as good as Steve Martin's as the Pink Panther.  Now, I can do a decent Southern accent, but I spent 7 years in Northern Virginia.  When I went to Pomona College in my freshman year, I received no end of grief about it.  My son Kyle is a better mimic than I, able to recount on the drop of a hat, a line from The Matrix or some Indy Jones movie or Ratatouille with exactly the right pitch and cadence.  When I lived in Belgium and Germany, and when I visited my buddies in Spain, they were always confused by the difference between my ability to get the pronunciation right, and the fact that I had no idea what they were talking about. 

~~~

A new song by singer-songwriter, Derek Bahr.

~~~

Dante Micheaux is not an Anglophile:  "Everything you have heard about the English is true. They are disingenuous and dull except when they are drunk, which is almost all the time, on the cheapest, warmest swill one can imagine; and then they reach a level of unspeakable vulgarity."

~~~
 

Is 3D a fad?

~~~

"Camp Loss", Adam Travel:

Breakfast: served at noon
after hoisting our tattered flag.
In lieu of lunch the group
will assemble your stuffed likeness.
Bring your own rope.


 

• When I typed "USB Ethernet" in their site search box, it returned exactly what I was looking for and nothing else.  There was a picture of the device, the price, how quickly it would ship, the 5-star review, and a link to all reviews.  Clicking on the picture took me to a single page with a description, 3 roll-over pictures of the device from different angles, and an overview.
• When I typed in the Zip Code, it auto-filled the city and state.
• When I then typed in my street address, it changed my Zip Code to the correct one (it has recently changed).
• When I typed in my phone number as a string of digits, it formatted them for me (xxx) xxx-xxx, without complaining.
• When I typed my name in lower case, it up-cased the first letters of Jeffery Bahr.
• When I typed in the credit card number with spaces, it formatted it in groups for easier read-back.
• After placing the order, I received an email in the form of a nicely formatted invoice with ship-to and bill-to address, shipping carrier, expected delivery date and tracking number.

~~~

Richard's usual lovely IP:

While children sleep,
Meteors fall on empty fields, supplant
The local germs and breed a race of clear
Benign progenitors of etiquette.
This drops a couple leaves and calls it quits.

(Note to non-poets:  NO, not intellectual property).

~~~

Operation Beautiful, making women feel good about themselves, one anonymous note at a time.  (thx, Suzanne).

~~~

CDY notes that the New England Review will be moving to online submission.  They will be using Submishmash (cute name), not the same CLMP software that is common in the litmag world.  Submishmash is free to arts/literary organizations and is cloud-based – that is, all of the data is held on their servers and the applications are web-based (which means they can be managed from anywhere you have an Internet connection).  Very cool idea. 

~~~

From Publisher's Weekly:  "Poetry publishers are just getting into e-books–Penguin does a few poetry e-books, as does Norton, Yale, and a few others, but many of the indies are just getting started. It seems to me that this is going to be a great avenue for poetry, which makes very little to no money, often functions on a nonprofit basis, and has a large portion of its readership–students–without much money."

~~~

Note to Trish:  Still working on that NES poem.

~~~

From Geof:  "The performance will be various, and probably all be taking advantage of the acoustics of the cave. Some will be poetry, some will not. Mine will be all poetry, but I define the word broadly. It will be a performance with walking, singing, reading a poem aloud, and possibly crawling and falling and swimming."

~~~

Open Mic Night:



~~~

Riyadh, Moscow, Madrid, Melbourne, Szombathely, Edmonton, . . .  I wonder how those people arrive here.

~~~

Via Andrew:  "Out of 80,000 edible plants we choose only 30 to supply 90% of the calories in our diet; 14 animal species make up 90% of our livestock."

~~~

"Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties.Why has ketchup stayed the same?"

~~~

Interval Research sues everybody.  Well, almost everybody:  "Nonetheless, the entire spectacle is ridiculous and Paul Allen should be embarrassed. Allen has been spectacularly unsuccessful in many of his post-Microsoft endeavors, and I'm betting he will fail here too. Dynamic alerts? Attracting peripheral attention? Using a browser to make sense of information? These are ways of exploiting the Web that are beyond obvious, as proven simply by the fact that all the companies named in Allen's lawsuit would be regarded as run by abject imbeciles if they did not incorporate such features"

~~~

Compliments of Your Recession:  "The U.S. birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century."

~~~

I made Becky's "Saffron Quinoa ala Whimsy" last night and had it with a big mache salad.  I'm not sure I'd ever had quinoa before, it's like orzo pasta, except tinier.  I added some sliced shallots along with the leeks, and substituted dried cranberries for currants.  Very nice.  Subtle and comfortable.

~~~

 

Dima and Tanya were up at Eldora, taking a walk along the cross-country skiing trails, when they spotted a large patch of mushrooms.  They are experienced mushroom pickers (not unusual for Russians), and had found so many that they had to use their jackets as baskets.  When they were finished, they had 20 kilos of porcinis.  Dima says they chopped them, boiled in salt for 15 minutes and then bagged for freezing, ending up with about 25 pounds of mushrooms.

I thought maybe that Dima was being approximate about the exact kind of mushroom, but when I looked it up, it turns out that the porcini (Boletus edulis) is relatively common in Colorado.  It's is the fruit of a much larger fungal web in the ground, an evolutionary strategy for getting spores up and into the wind.  Dima says he is careful to always leave a little "trunk" when he cuts them to encourage further mushrooms in that place in the future.

~~~

More as I think of it.  Time to get back to work. 

]]> tag:www.whimsyspeaks.com,2010://2.522 2010-08-27T12:23:13Z 2010-08-27T12:41:02Z

Bernstein:  "I do think that there's something authentically different between liberals and conservatives, at least some of the time, and at least in some cases.  If not first principles, though, perhaps we can call them impulses.  To me, the liberal impulse is basically: We Can Do Better.   And the conservative impulse?  Don't Make It Worse."  (thx to Andrew).

~~~

When I first started shopping at the Trader Joe's in Redondo Beach, I think there were only a half dozen of them in existence.  Now, there are hundreds around the country, with combined sales of $8 billion, about equal to that of Whole Foods.  Here's an interesting article on how they do what they do.

~~~

From Gin & Tacos:

Here in the State o' Georgia, a solid majority of the population tends toward Teabaggery. Many are under the hypnotic spell of Neal Boortz, Lord of the Airwaves, or one of the many charismatic and highly intelligent local politicians like Sonny Perdue, Saxby Chambliss, or Paul Broun. Georgians don't like taxes, big gub'mint, liberals, uppity colored presidents, or any of the other things the modern conservative is contractually obligated to hate. This doesn't describe every Georgian, of course, but…there are no doubts about our redness.

Here are the 10 largest employers in Georgia:

Or, to put it another way:

1. The government
2. The government
3. The government
4. The government
5. Private university heavily dependent on state/federal grants and federal student loans
6. The government
7. Private university hospital
8. Government contractor
9. The government
10. Private employer

~~~

"The Claw", by Angela Vogel:

Swinger, come hither.
Gird yourself against my steel.
You'll shut my claptrap.
You'll pound my sand.
In me is your chance at Romance's
random number generator turned
verb, as in To Create

~~~

The Onion horoscope for Taurus:  "You should really try to live your life so that your happiness doesn't depend so much on whether or not they find the Higgs boson particle."

~~~

Scifi movies from an alternate universe:



 

~~~

The Drum.  A litmag for ears only.

~~~

I am older than Tony Hoagland and Dean Young and Franz Wright and Dorianne Laux and Paul Muldoon.  But I am not older than Albert Goldbarth nor Mary Jo Bang nor Thomas Lux nor Louise Glück.  And John Ashbery is old enough to be my father.  And Terrance Hayes is young enough to be my son.

~~~

Jennifer K. Dick's beautiful photos of France and Switzerland.

~~~

17 literary journals that may survive the Internet.

~~~

Eight dozen poets on How A Poem Happens.

~~~

Scientific American summarizes astronomical, biological, geophysical, and other catastrophes in movies.  (thx, BoingBoing)


]]> tag:www.whimsyspeaks.com,2010://2.521 2010-08-26T12:43:17Z 2010-08-26T21:56:46Z

jbahr http://www.whimsyspeaks.com Good morning, my water strider, my ship
Of cord-bound straw, my royal barge
Among the reeds, my day-craft
Caught between the cliffs,
And fjord-bound.  Good day, my sloop
askew and tacking, tacking,
On a small Parisian pond.
Good evening, my last look,
Mainsail hugging the horizon.
Good night, my paper boat
Upon the waters.

~~~

Women tennis-players in slo-mo.  Just awesome.





~~~

From Harper's Findings:  Russians are more brooding than Americans (duh); residual aquatic Prozac causes shrimp to seek light, endangering them near the surface; Venetian blinds continue to strangle toddlers; gorillas play tag; two new species of pancake batfish have been discovered; female humpback whales seek out their girlfriends, summer after summer; 500 million Amazonian trees were killed by a single storm in 2005; the world's snake population is declining; a newly discovered dinosaur with a frilly, heart-shaped cranial crest was named Mojoceratops; Dick Cheney has no pulse.

~~~

Letterman:  "Miss Mexico is the new Miss Universe, and today begins a grueling year of waving."

~~~

Jonathan:  "These beliefs seem to depend on an unexamined premise: that there is a kind of imaginative energy that is present in really interesting literary movements and absent in others. There is an "it" that moves about from country to country, from genre to genre. Whole swaths of literature can be boring because they don't have it. "

~~~

Some months ago, I began noticing bloggers using the "Shorter" construct, something I had not previously encountered.  For example, Susan of Texas might say (well, and did):

Shorter James Joyner: I can't understand why tea-partiers are afraid to visit certain parts of DC. It can't be racism because I'm afraid of those areas too, and they have no reason to go to these places anyway.

If you're not familiar with this kind of thing, it's a way of summarizing an article, post or stance of another blogger/columnist/pundit in a manner that is sarcastic, dismissive or ironic. I tried Googling things like "rhetorical device shorter", but got nowhere.  Where did this idea come from?

~~~

Nate Silver was on Rachel Maddow's show last night.  His models show the Democrats losing, most likely, 6 to 7 Senate seats, with a possibility they may lose enough to lose the Senate majority.  If they barely avoid this loss, Democrats will be increasingly at the mercy of Lieberman and Nelson.  In any event, it looks like the Big O is in for a tough 2 years, until the next election cycle.

~~~

This site dissects Parisian patisseries and their wonderments.



~~~

Interesting idea:  "The welfare state and free markets are not merely compatible, they are vital to each other’s success. I believe in markets because I believe they fail. Failure allows people and industries to adapt and evolve (unless we keep up the practice of too-big-to-fail of course). But where there is failure there are people getting screwed, and that’s not how society ought to work."

~~~

Salon:  "In the surely-you're-joking category, here comes the music industry to say it needs even tougher copyright rules. Sorry, no joke."

~~~

The latest contemporary poetry best-sellers has some new faces:  Zapruder, Mietner, and Harrison.

~~~

"The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other,” wrote John Adams to his friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, in 1790.  A review of Revolutionaries:  A New History of the Invention of America.

~~~

"An Aubade", by Joel Brouwer:

 

She said

a city but a city close to nature. A backyard

scattered with birds he wouldn't be able to identify

and something exotic rotting. Avocadoes.

~~~

]]> tag:www.whimsyspeaks.com,2010://2.520 2010-08-25T18:48:05Z 2010-08-25T19:12:04Z

jbahr http://www.whimsyspeaks.com Our Qwest fiber DSL went down early this morning.  So WhimsySpeaks, our email, and a number of other sites on our servers were down.

~~~

I've used our backup Internet connection (Comcast on a wireless router, my $30 a month insurance policy) to send out some message via Gmail.  This always cracks me up:  "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 7490 MB."

~~~

Lie Blog:  "In Daring Move, Amtrak to Replace Wheels With Trillions of Ants".

~~~

Kyle and Eileen & I dined at Cafe Brazil last night.  It's a square institutional-looking building, as if it were once a large one-story insurance office with a dozen secretaries typing away in a pool.  The inside is decorated with colorful Brazilian art, old rum posters, and bright doodads serving as sconces.  We all had mojitos in large glasses, crammed with mint and a big straw and everything but tiny umbrellas.  The calamari starter was OK (great sauce, so-so calamari), and the two soups were very nice (a watery, but delicious black bean and a dynamite cold cucumber).  Eileen had one of the specials, a soup with fish, prawns, green-lipped muscles and the ever-present coconut milk and hot peppers.  Kyle tried the Feijoada Completa, which must be something like the Brazilian National Dish, a black bean stew with sausages and meats, meant to be ladled over rice and dollop-ed with fried bananas, and orange slices, excellent spiced collard greens on the side.  I had the Xim Xim, which a stew of chicken and prawns with ginger, lime, dende oil and cashews. 

~~~

The last time I was in Italy, I had an espresso in the airport.  It was served in a traditionally tiny white ceramic cup, maybe a half-inch of ass-kicking wonderment, glistening with crema, sitting concave at the bottom of the cup.  Maybe that's why this Italian espresso master is dismayed at American espresso.

~~~

The Onion horoscope for Gemini:  "You'll take a long trip on a luxurious passenger train and meet a diverse group of travelers, all of whom will later collaborate to murder you."

~~~

A good interview with Rachel.

~~~

McArdle doesn't seem to care much for public school teachers.  Susan takes her on.

~~~

I don't think I ever really understand David Shapiro poems. 

~~~

Rebecca has a poetry reading today.  But you have to come to her place of work.

~~~

Why policemen and firefighters get paid too much for what they do.

~~

OK, back to work.  Have to catch up after all that Internet down time.
 

]]>

~~~

We're running out of helium:  "Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about £64 to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain."  More on that here.   (thx, BoingBoing)

~~~
 

I've preordered my BAP, in preparation for updating my BAP Stats.  This will be my ninth year of analysis.  I wonder if Jim Berhle will provide his usual comix/commentary.

~~~

Letterman:  "The Miss Universe contestants are judged by poise, beauty, and how well they can walk in high heels. It’s the same way Republicans pick vice presidential candidates. "

~~~

The highest-paid athlete of all time:  Gaius Appuleius Diocles.

~~~

Matthew Zapruder reads "Pocket" at Slate:

I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely
dangerous. Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head
and your hands will still be free. Or
standing in a forest and staring at a picture
in a plant book while eating scary looking wild flowers.

~~~

Eugene Robinson, voice of reason:  "I hope we're not that stupid. The "terror babies" paranoid fantasy is about the craziest thing I've ever heard. I mean numero uno on the wacko chart."

~~~

The housing numbers came out and they're really, really bad. 

"The number is so low that it looks like a statistical aberration: let’s hope it is. Because if it isn’t, the news is gruesome. It means that despite record-low mortgage rates, people aren’t able to buy houses: essentially all the benefit from those low rates is going to people who already own their homes and are taking the opportunity to refinance"

~~~

How would you like to be in a traffic jam for ten days?  (BoingBoing)

~~~



Full moon tonight, or as Rebecca puts it, "This is the Wolf Fish Moon the Droopy Sock Moon the Coral Bite Moon and the Wanda Lost Her Basket Moon."

~~~

Another lovely poem by Kirsten.

But first, myself. With fishhooks
I pierced the sides of an emaciated
form like a seam, then bound the hooks
to silver chain, then chain to other
hooks--these I sent swiftly into
the brave fumblers.

~~~

"Mass", by Maggie Wells.
 

We met for Mass at Notre Dame under
the clouds of the French, inside the cold
roll of Le Seine. Our bones needed God. Our
bones had been hitting the bones of others
under the skirt of skin, so many bones

in collision; the soft whisper of God
was the necessary cartilage.

~~~

A list of overrated Canadian authors. Michael Ondaatje makes the list, but I think only for his poetry.

~~~

For poets, I think the exercise from a translation of Johns’s rule and Dylan’s accidental example, would be to: Write a single line of poetry, involving a character or person, a place, and an action. Make it a concrete sentence, nothing too “arty.” Then write yourself away from it. Silly it up. Make it more vague. Obfuscate, etc.

~~~

I was considering submitting poetry again (now that, well, I'm actually writing some again).  It was interesting to note that Ploughshares and Poetry both have online submissions now.  Missouri Review has had it for a while, and I set up the CLMP submissions system for Many Mountains Moving some years ago.

I have to admit, it's so much easier than paper and SASE's.  Even at $3 a submission (which is what Ploughshares charges).  There's a list of other journals that accept online here.  A short list of other print journals include 32 Poems, Agni,  APR, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, The Journal, jubilat, New Yorker, and Southwest Review.  Some have submissions seasons, generally starting in September.

~~~

Man.  I know people just like this.

~~~

 

This is very cool:  Chagall Animated (stolen from Suzanne).

~~~

Thanks to CDY, I found Jim again.  I'd wondered where he went. 

~~~

I'm glad someone finally did this:  The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.  I know a certain copy editor who may get a smile out of this.

~~~

And on a culinary note:  Cooking for Hamsters. 



~~~

From The Onion's Corrections Department: 

Last Sunday, The Onion failed to post the answer to the Kids' Korner brainteaser. The correct way to bring the fox, hen, and sack of corn safely across the river in the two-passenger canoe is to first beat both the fox and hen into unconsciousness with the sack of corn and then take them across the river together, making a second trip to retrieve the corn. The Onion regrets the error.

~~~

John on survival, under-rated poets, and Internet journals.

~~~

THIS JUST IN.  Poetry has accepted one of Trish's poems.  I'm squirming with pleasure.

~~~
 

From Harper's Index:

Number of states with underfunded pension plans in 2000 and 2010, respectively:  3, 26

Goldman Sachs has submitted 2.5 billion pages to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

New home sales dropped 33% one month after the first-time buyer program expired.

Average annual government expenditures on military and energy R&D, respectively:  $77 billion, $5 billion.

83% of all seafood eaten in America is imported.

Number of public school jobs lost last year:   85,700.

Estimated number of cases pending in Indian courts:  30 million.

Number of people in India with access to a cell phone and a toilet, respectively:  617 million, 366 million.

~~~

Commenter Sam say:  "THIS is how you get traffic to a blog".

~~~

Why this is the worst summer ever.  I couldn't agree more.

~~~

Pencil sculpting.  This guy is incredible.


 

~~~

Scott Adams argues for fewer options: 

The time to plan and book the trip took longer than it will take to fly across the entire country.

Worse yet, I don't have the slightest confidence that I got the best deal or the most convenient flight. And just to make things interesting, the flight's on-time rating is in the "rarely" range. That means I probably didn't book any flight at all. What I really did was plan for a time to be at the airport when someone will spot the pilot at the bar, alert the authorities, and the flight will be delayed for "mechanical difficulties."

~~~

Data mining the heart:  "American Sociological Association found that 22 percent of heterosexual couples surveyed met online"

~~~

The Subversive Copy Editor.

~~~

An excellent article by Tony Hoagland on Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness.  It should be online eventually, as a back issue at the Poetry Foundation site.

"Wordsworth's [description] suggests that poetry is a means of gaining perspective on primary experience; powerful emotions can be gathered, then dynamically relived, translated and digested in the controlled laboratory of the poem . . . In contrast, Steven's description implies that the poem and reader engage in a sort of muscular struggle with each other -- that struggle is how they become intimate .  . ."

~~~

 

“You are winter thunder, very drunk swallows, August sleet.
You beat against my windows out of season, an anomaly.”

             “Ghazal for an Anomaly”, J. C.

It is a younger version, this voice, this calm
And questioning, between the bits
Of Bach or Chopin, I never thought
To ask, content to be a wave
Function, and since that first
Listening, I have grown no less
Strange, and the now familiar
Voice no less lovely, tugging me
Again as an anchor to an outlier,
The way that words can tether
Us, then slowly let love’s well
Of gravity complete the fall.

~~~

Robert hates dogs.  And grammaristos.  And grapefruit.

~~~

I just found a good list of poet's and writer's blogs on NewPages.  Ron's list may be longer, of course, but I think it's only poets.

~~~

Stephen Burt:  Did you know, however, that the ghazal he prescribed was a form invented in Persia (and subsequently spread throughout the Islamic world, and beyond it), so that the older Arabic poems called ghazals do not have refrains?

~~~

Writer's blogs:  Alicia's Blah Blah Blah, The Package Insert of Sorrow, Stoning the Devil, Ass Backwords, Understandable Pool Capacity, Stamped and Metered Flying Fish, The Tiger in My Ribcage.

~~~

From Karen's poem, "7":

Windows are a doorway not to be passed through. Illicit entrance, seduction, a tease. Stopped at the waist, sill at the hips.

Except, when I was in Paris the windows opened all the way down to my shins, and this was why it is called a honeymoon.

~~~

I remember her saying, never use “shards” or “katydids” in poems.  As I walk out to get the paper in the very early morning and am blanketed by the hum of something in the locust tree, something immune to my intrusion. As I walk across the grass and dandelions to find no paper there, as there has been no paper for weeks, and I don’t know why.  The moon has halved itself since I last looked up, the stars have taken vacations and are back with a new arrival time, but the same arrangement.  I was reading in a journal that we could live to 122 if we only drank the right cocktails, something filled with stem-cells and targeted to delay our varicose veins, bone loss, metals in our head, hardening byways.  Every solution to this problem involves overcoming the random damage to our cells and their constituents:  by faulty copying of RNA, by the odd photon that hits a vital spot, by the ancient radiation of a cigarette puff.  And the solution is to backfill, to insert the right molecule in the right place at the right time, to fool death for another decade.  Of course, there is the school of thought that believes  Death  gets a bad rap, that he’s saying, “are you ready?”   And, I suppose if you’re walking around with oxygen tubes in your nose and a backpack canister, pushing a walker, you’re a little more inclined to say, yes, deliver me.  But, I would be happy with 122, I guess, roughly twice where I am now.  I would have to recalibrate, consider how to live another entire lifetime.  Not that I expect to have three more wives and dozens of lovers.  Finding one true love would be nice.  And writing the perfect poem, one that says everything.  And if it has to have a shard in it, so be it.  And if a katydid shows up, everyone will say, yes, the perfect insect, just goddam perfect, right there, in that place. 

~~~

Last week's projects:  a robot, a video puck, an intelligent clothes dryer.  You couldn't make this stuff up.

~~~

Rebecca on dawn and dusk:  "Fat on my beans and blackberries and the bottom leaves of my brusselsprouts no doubt. I think there are fire toads springing between my fingers."

I'm with her on dawn, my favorite time.  It's really slowing down, though, coming later and later.  Bummer.

~~~

David Shapiro's Delacroix Quiz:

9. Name churches in Paris with Delacroix paintings

l0. What is more shocking in the "Death of Sardanopolis": the depicted killing of a horse and mistresses or a drastic diagonal?

~~~

Speaking of David Shapiro (one of his favorites), Jonathan is back.  This sounds so Jonathan:  "I will try to post something every day and be better than ever. Posts will be written in advance and published at 1 a.m. every day. "

~~~

ManPacks:  "Guys! Never wash your underwear again! Just wear it till it rots, and get new ones in the mail!"

~~~

Contemporary Poetry Best Sellers doesn't change much from week to week:  Merwin, Bukowski, Ryan, Collins, Oliver, . . .

~~~

This is kind of cool:  tunable glasses. 



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