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. "
I have thought, since, of
your body—as I first came
to know it, how it still
can be, with mine,
sometimes. I think on
that immediate and last gesture
of the fish leaving water
~~~
People visited me today from: Kowloon; Brooklyn (probably Jimmy);
Aberdeen, SD; Bogota; Savannah (hi, Trish); Ann Arbor; Milano; Chapel Hill, NC;
Fairland, IN.
~~~
~~~
In a comment, Jimmy says he IS
going to do his usual BAP comix sendup. Meanwhile Mr. Behrle has decided
to change his name to American Poetry (I think that's first name, last name).
~~~
Same Old, Same Old. Poetry best-sellers this
week: Collins, Merwin, Oliver, Collins, Oliver, Berry, Oliver,
Bukowski. Sherwin Bisui, Kevin Coval, and Bob Hickok are new to the list
this week. Plath's revised Ariel has been on the list 183 weeks.
I was thinking more about the recent webchat about online submissions, and
remembered that some years ago I opined that we needed a more efficient market
for poet's work – in the sense of a bidding war. Imagine if
Submishmash permitted all journals
access to the same database of submitted work. Litmags would still solicit
work, of course, but for those of us in the trenches, it would mean getting our
work reviewed at the same time by dozens of journals. The way I imagine
it, I log into PoetrySubmission.com and pay a $10 fee. This gets split
among all collaborating journals, with a percentage going to Submishmash for
handling the IT end of things. This would create a natural incentive for
litmag editors to log in regularly and vote on recently submitted work (e.g.,
"not interested", "under review", "I'll accept it", . . .). Submishmash
could update the submitting poet regularly with emails indicating rejection or
acceptance. No more worries for the poet about which journals accept
simultaneous submission. Less staff costs for the litmags.
Substantially reduced waiting times, most likely. Vastly improved
mechanics of submission handling. Real competition for quality work.
We need someone who is already a noted editor, with PoBiz connections and an
appreciation of technology to kick this off. Someone like
CDY, perhaps?
~~~
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!!
~~~
~~~
The Clarity Project:
"Our official mission is to improve the quality of life for artisanal miners. As
I've described, we achieve this by selling high-quality (rated "excellent" by NE
Gem Lab), fairly sourced (we work with small-scale miners) jewelry, and
investing all of our profits back into mining communities. And we've now
invested quite a bit, most recently having fully funded the teachers' salaries
at a school in the war-torn Kono district of Sierra Leone. But we've gone a step
further in order to help navigate the tensions that inevitably arise while
running a business: We've decided to make every decision based on what will MOST
benefit the miners." (thx, Andrew)
~~~
Dante
fumes: "I can only imagine poor
Jenna Krajeski rolling her eyes with a sigh, mouthing
It’s-not-my-fault to her fellow
staffers. If you were not certain of it before, you can be certain now that when
it comes to poetry, quality is not high on The New Yorkers’ list of
priorities."
~~~
Collin's
take on paying for online submission: "C. Dale had alluded to NER
charging earlier in the summer when he posted
a poll on his blog asking what readers would be willing to pay for online
submissions. The majority said they would not pay. I was one of them. Since
then, I've had a change of heart."
~~~
~~~
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
~~~
My old friend, Bill Bryan, sent me dozens of pictures of cats that have been
painted or dyed or something. I'll put a few up in the next few days.
The PowerPoint file that they are in had a Russian entry screen. Not sure
if that means these are all Russian cats or not.
~~~
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.
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.
"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:
Under such conditions, heavy
enjambment arrests me:
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?
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."
People tend to rave about Apple products and Apple's general attention to
detail. An excellent and unexpected example of this is their online
shopping site, the Apple Store. Dima needed a USB to Ethernet adapter that
was supported natively by Linux, so I Googled around and found the Apple adapter
was recommended. Here's what happened:
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.
It was the experience that I would like to have with every online store,
particularly those that sell and control their own products and marketing (e.g.,
air lines, gourmet food stores, et cetera).
~~~
We've been doing some work for Orb Networks
over the last few years. There are a number of media management devices
out
there,
but the Orb Music Player and Orb Video Player is definitely the coolest I've
seen. They are about the size and shape of (rather handsome) hockey pucks.
When you install the Orb media manager, it catalogs all of your music, videos,
photos, and other documents (your choice). You then take your Puck over to
your television or audio center and connect it as an input. The Puck feeds
your playlist to the device. You can also stream to a PS3 or your iPhone/Droid
or even the laptop in your hotel. If you have a TV tuner in your PC at
home, you can even stream TV shows to your phone, all controlled by the iPhone/Droid
app, wherever you are. All for about $90.
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."
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.