Sturgeon's Law

So instead of boring you with the tale of why I don't have a living space yet (though I will post pictures once my camera dock arrives tomorrow morning), I'll just let you know that I'm happy I'll be appearing alongside all these excellent poets in the first issue of Barn Owl Review. I like first issues, and this one ought to be especially strong.

I'm in St. Louis. Some complications are keeping me out of my dwelling space for a couple weeks, and my moving container probably won't arrive until Wednesday, but I have my computer and my car and my notebook and a bed, so the most critical bases are covered. More to come, of course...

I have a good poetry post percolating, but right now the moving cube is here and I still have packing to do and I have to run errands and S&S are coming into DIA tonight and and and...

So it's not happening right now. I doubt I'll bother to post tomorrow, though I'll be online a little bit. My next post will probably come this weekend or early next week from St. Louis. Have a great weekend!

The impending move is taking up almost all of my non-work time now. You shouldn't expect too much poetry content here on the blog the rest of this week, though maybe I'll try to fit a little something in tomorrow. Shawn and Shanna fly in Thursday, we pack all the boxes in the moving container (I should have the boxes mostly done at that point) and clean this mess of an apartment up. If all goes as planned, we'll be driving to St. Louis on Saturday. I'm looking forward to it.

I had an excellent workout at the gym today. It was actually shaping up to be an abbreviated session, but then my poetry pal Jane was there at the same time, so I wound up chatting with her and riding the elliptical machine for an unexpected extra 10+ minutes and about 200 calories, meaning I burned over 500 calories on the elliptical, plus ran 3 minutes uphill without my knee hurting, plus worked my tricepses. Exercising is so much easier when there's someone there to talk to...sigh.

So yesterday I went to Target to buy some things I need for the move. I bought a tarp, some bubble wrap, a cooler, a padlock, and packing tape. Which kind of makes it seem like I'm in GoodFellas or The Sopranos and need to dispose of a body.

I have quite a collection of odd little phrases that sound really good to my ears. They often sit in a notebook until I just happen to find they fit in a poem I'm already writing. "Penthouse built entirely of antlers" in the draft below is an example of one--I thought of it while I was falling asleep, I believe, and found it so amusing that I had to write it down and save it until it became pertinent for this poem. Another one I kept for a long time is "popping patellar tendons," whose sonics I love and which I tried in an early draft of a different poem before it ended up in this one, slightly modified.

Some others, a couple of which have found poem homes and a couple of which haven't and may never:

• I peel apples slowly, wholly, / as if their pelts will fetch me / forty bucks at Fort Bridger (yes, I came up with that whole thing, nearly verbatim, while half asleep)
• we flick lit cigarettes on dynamite
  
• a dragon rang the doorbell
• my pet coyote smokes peyote
  

Anyone else find themselves writing down fun phrases 90% for the way they sound?

Salvaged a couple good bits from an old poem that wasn't working, then wrote lots of new stuff.

I received a phone call from Robert Nazarene of MARGIE yesterday letting me know that he's taking my poem "Evening Scene in Colorado Springs" for the upcoming issue. I had heard that he called people with acceptances, but I'd totally forgotten and was not expecting that when I answered my cell (amusingly enough, I thought he sounded like a solicitor at first). It was also a nice coincidence to mention I was moving to St. Louis, since that's where MARGIE is based. As you might expect, I'm happy with this acceptance.

I'd like to see a journal do an "Ask a Poet" advice column feature where people wrote in with questions on life and etiquette and so on just like Ann Landers or Cary Tennis or any of those, and the reply is written by a poet in the form of a poem. To get something as unsettling and ambiguous as so many good poems are as the reply to a basic "What do I do about this situation?" question would be great reading for me. Actually, it's entirely possible that someone has already done this, but if not I'm claiming it as my idea.

I'm happy to let you know that The Eleventh Muse has reopened for submissions under its new editor, Frances Gomeztagle. There are probably still some kinks to work out in the system, but I'm looking forward to seeing them get things going like gangbusters again.

In my own news, there are some interesting developments on the editing front, which I'll let you know more about if they go from potential to actual.

Not only did I get an honorable mention for the Comics Curmudgeon comment of the week, it's poetry relevant!

You can make these at www.simpsonsmovie.com. Sadly, they really didn't have a match for my facial hair--it was either the choice above or Homer's muzzle. Thanks to James Kalyn for the link.

My goodbye-to-Colorado-Springs party is this Saturday, and mostly it's serving to remind me that I don't especially enjoy hosting. As many as 25 people may be there (it's going to be at least 15-20, and there are a number of people who haven't really RSVPed but who may well show up anyway). I'm going to make some of my special no-flour peanut butter cookies tomorrow, and then I have to shop for burgers and snacks and beers on Saturday early. There's nothing really difficult about any of this, and my mom and brother are pitching in and helping organize and run things, but I'd much rather just hang out with people at a party instead of feeling like I ought to oversee it. Still, should be fun. Poets, musicians, and Schroeders are all a little crazy, and there are going to be several of each there.

Gary tagged me to do the "Five Desert Island Books" meme. I can't do it quite that way, though, because I'll inevitable smartass my way through and pick things like the US Army Survival Manual. So this is just five books that would be indispensable to me were I only allowed five for whatever hell damn reason.

1. The Lord of the Rings. I read this at least a dozen times when I was younger. I haven't read it in a long time, partly because I know it wouldn't have quite the same magic for me anymore, partly because of the profound sense of loss I always got from reading it.

2. The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes, I have all five books plus that short story in a single volume. Another series I haven't read recently. In 7th or 8th grade study hall, something in one of the first two books induced a massive giggling fit in me. One of the few times I haven't even cared about a large group of people staring at me.

3. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Not by any means my favorite book of poetry, but if you're only giving me five books, this has a lot more material, and it fits my reading style (splash in and out) and desire for variety better than whatever I might pick as my single favorite poetry book (James Wright's Above the River, perhaps).

4. The Complete Far Side. Narrow win over The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, would lose to The Complete Peanuts if such a thing existed.

5. The Oxford English Dictionary. Either this or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Either one gives me plenty of writing resources in one place.

Argh, moving is a pain in my ass. No wonder I've lived in the same apartment for five years now. This is just a partial list of the services I still have to discontinue or forward to my new address:

• Cable and high speed Internet
• Cellphone and landline
• Utilities
• Mail
• Credit cards
  
• Car insurance
• Gym membership
  
• Literary journal subscriptions

And now I'm looking at the list and thinking "Okay, what did I forget?" Damn, damn, damn.

"Love crushed us with its big death truck" by Andrew Michael Roberts (Harpur Palate) (PDF file)
"Some Promise" by Jen Tynes (42 Opus)

By the way, I'm typing this on a computer that's moving very slowly because I installed Norton 360 instead of just Norton Antivirus, and it seems to have cut performance in half. Yeah, way to tune me up, Norton!

So I got a rejection from Quarter After Eight today (actually, a note saying they're not reading right now). The getting a rejection part isn't odd at all. What is odd is that I never sent work to them, and in fact they appear to be a prose-only journal. I looked at the cover letter they sent back, and it was the submission I sent to /nor (New Ohio Review) a few weeks ago. Apparently all the journals at Ohio University share the same English Department address, so when you send a set of poems with "Poetry Editors" and "/nor" written on the envelope and typed on the cover letter, for a journal that reads year round and only takes snail-mail submissions, you may just win the lottery and get back a note from a prose journal that says they only read online submissions, and not during the summer.

Much more happily, I got a nice note on my rejection from Pleiades. They does good stuffs over there.

A lovely interview of Michael Chabon on The Onion AV Club. I like Chabon and his writing anyway, and what he has to say about world-building and genre really endear him to me. He also mentions Sturgeon's Law (the actual law, not this blog).

One of the things you may not know about me down below could easily have been that one of the few items I routinely splurge spending on is my glasses. For about 3 years, I had found the perfect pair of Ralph Lauren frames that looked and sat exactly how I wanted on my face, so I would just buy new pairs of that frame when I needed new lenses. Then my optician stopped carrying them, so I had to change. I recall making a minor complaint on here a few months ago, but the replacement pair I got were not really good. They just never sat right, figuratively or literally. Today I'm back from the optician after having bought a different type of frame, and I could tell as soon as I put them on that they were much better. So until I get my laser surgery, my new brand of choice is apparently Kenneth Cole.

"With the Paint Your Wagon decision makers having already made several questionable artistic decisions, things only got worse."

If that sort of sentence piques your interest, I recommend the book I'm reading right now, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops, which tells the stories of 15 major movie disasters, from Cleopatra all the way up through Battlefield: Earth. It's mindboggling the number of terrible decisions that went into some of these movies, and the way negative momentum just kept building on them.

Great companion reading for Fiasco can be found at The Onion AV Club's "My Year of Flops," which has the same general theme but looks more at the on-screen product than the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, and takes advantage of its web setting to cover a lot more movies.

And since I started you off with Paint Your Wagon, here's the single best Paint-Your-Wagon-relevant item I know of.

So I did as I may have said I would do and stole the index idea from Zachary Schomburg's The Man Suit, along with my own Index of Fun Words from The Eleventh Muse. The index for my book is a little more oriented toward general objects/concepts/actions than specific words, but it's sometimes surprising to find out what things recur a lot. Here's where it stands right now:

alcohol: 9, 13, 22, 28, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 49, 60
apes and monkeys: 6, 9, 39, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59
cars: 6, 20, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 47, 49, 52, 57, 60, 61
Colorado: 2, 5, 20, 27, 30, 40, 41, 47, 48, 52
deer: 3, 4, 32, 40
escape: 3, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 23, 41, 43, 47, 55
explosions: 15, 43, 44, 48, 51, 52
fire: 5, 7, 8, 27, 40, 46, 47, 48, 51, 56, 58, 60, 61
fishing: 20, 24, 27, 28, 41, 49
guns: 8, 12, 13, 22, 30, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56
holes: 7, 17, 19, 22, 27, 28, 30, 32, 49, 56
illicit drugs: 13, 23, 26, 34, 37, 52
insomnia: 12, 14, 22, 28, 31, 32, 39
knives and swords: 7, 9, 12, 13, 18, 24, 28, 46
machinery: 14, 29, 36, 43, 55, 59
money: 3, 4, 13, 15, 23, 33, 37, 53, 59, 61
mud and dirt: 2, 17, 20, 27, 28, 47, 52, 54
reflections: 10, 18, 29, 38
scars: 25, 34, 36, 46, 54
shadows: 3, 17, 25, 46, 54
skulls: 9, 18, 26, 28, 45, 56
smoking: 6, 13, 15, 16, 20, 34, 48, 57, 58
suffocation: 6, 15, 19, 20, 26, 30, 36, 37, 48, 49, 50
telephones: 3, 11, 12, 22, 33, 37, 57

The overall concept of falling appears more than any item in the index so far. I think I may have to narrow it to "people falling" to cut it down a little.

Steve M. tagged me last week to do this meme of eight things you may not know about me. I already did the same basic thing once, and since two of them are no longer accurate (my brother's band's website is defunct, and I don't have the cat anymore), that's eight right there. I also did this list on my own, which reveals some more. But hey, here are some more random personal tidbits.

1. Once upon a time, I weighed as much as 275 pounds. Now I weigh between 185 and 190.

2. In AP Calculus, I copied homework from one of my best friends for most of the second semester, then got a 5 on the AP test while he got a 4.

3. When I tip on a credit card bill at a restaurant or bar, I make the total (bill plus tip) a round number. I calculate the basic percent, then round the whole thing up to an even dollar amount. No, I'm not OCD.

4. I started college as a computer science major with the "plan" that I would be a game designer and novel writer. (I was aiming for a creative writing minor.) Then I washed out of computer science (read: got bored and stopped trying) and also found out about poetry, though I still plan on writing a novel.

5. I was skipped ahead from the 4th grade to the 5th. It was probably a terrible decision for my social development.

6. My favorite liquor is Almendrado. My friend Kristy made the greatest sweet margaritas with it, but I can't replicate them myself.

7. I got my most recent tattoo in part because I wanted to be symmetrical, left shoulder/right shoulder. Fortunately, I feel no need to be symmetrical for the tattoo on my upper back.

8. I'm single. Big shock based on the above, I know.

Okay, technically you could probably glean that one from lots of things on my blog, so let's try this...

8. My family on my dad's side is very military-heavy. My grandfather was in WWII, my dad and one uncle went to West Point, and I had uncles in the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. My dad was in the Army for 20 years and reached the rank of Colonel, but technically retired as a Lieutenant Colonel because retiring as a Colonel was going to be contingent on him spending a year in Korea after he hit 20 years. My brother and I never got within a dozen stone's throws of the military, but one of the cousins we're closest to was in the Army (and Iraq).