Whimsy Speaks Again

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?

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

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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.

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Rickie, looking a little older, in her own sassy self.
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And more of Bill's cats.



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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."

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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?"

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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!!

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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)

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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."

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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."

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

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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)" . . .

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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."

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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.

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"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."


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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"

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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."

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


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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.
 

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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."

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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.

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More of Bill's cats.



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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.

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"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."

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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"

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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. " 

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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“*."

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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.

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

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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."

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

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"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."

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"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.


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

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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.

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

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

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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"
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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."

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

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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).

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

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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. "

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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.’

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More of Bill's painted cats:







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

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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.
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More after I get some real work done . . .

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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.

 

 

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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. 

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





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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.

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

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Long's Peak in late August.

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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. "

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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."

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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."

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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."

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

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"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

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I am also a few months older than Jorie Graham.

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

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

 

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

Jackson Browne, The Pretender

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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.

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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.

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

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Nicolas Cage as pop art.

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

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"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.

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"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)

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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?

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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.