Yes, it's a time-waster post! Get your Chinese name here!

There's a poem draft frustratingly close to being done enough to post here, that's been more or less that way all weekend. I hope to post it tomorrow. Fortunately, John tagged me with a meme.

Book that dominated my childhood:
The Lord of the Rings

And in my adulthood...

Books:
Above the River by James Wright
The Reaper Essays by Mark Jarman & Robert McDowell
1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

Movies & TV:
The Simpsons

Music:
I don't really go by the album, but I'll pick one...
Nevermind by Nirvana

And I'll add a category...
Games:
The Civilization series
No Limit Texas Hold 'Em

And because this other meme was one post down on Sam's blog, where I first saw these...

The last book I purchased:
Hard Reds by Brandi Homan

The last film/TV series I purchased:
Casino (Special Edition)

The last album I purchased:
Genius by Warren Zevon

I don't tag people with memes, but if you're interested, have at it!

The new feature at Anti- is a visual poetry special by Michael Basinski. Thanks to assistant editor A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz for doing pretty much everything to make it possible.

Today I wanted to make a reference to Oulipo, but then I realized that I no longer remembered the word Oulipo. I could activate all the cognitive nodes around it: constrained writing techniques, French, novel without the letter "e," etc. But the name node was nowhere nearby until I Googled. I've noticed this happening to me a lot recently with names: I can rattle off all sorts of related information, but not the name itself. I've also repeatedly forgotten the word "appraiser" in the last week. As a trivia nerd who's proud of his brainpower, I find this all very disconcerting.

Had a lovely time yesterday at the River Styx Hungry Young Poets series, which I'll be reading at in August. Saw six poets, all of whom were better than I typically expect from this sort of mixed/early-career event, and a couple of whom had really good stuff. Also officially met Stacey Lynn Brown (a poet and also married to one of my basketball buddies), Allison Joseph, and Jon Tribble, the latter two of whom were there in part to see the three(!) SIU-Carbondale poets who read. A good evening. Looking forward to next month's.

"If you know of a guest editor who would work under the conditions you favor, please have them contact me at editor [at] bestnewpoets.org."

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"Here’s a list of all the poets I’ve dreamed about so far in 2008 (excluding 4 or 5 assholey poet types that I don’t want aware of their place in my dreamscape – their assholitude is true, the mirror confirmed it):"

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"Too often, workshops wind up constructing a kind of monolithic ur-poem, the poem that the entire class is trying to write."

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"But it's one thing to have intellectual snobs looking down their noses at the genre. To have this attitude come from people within the genre ... ouch."

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"Why won't those idiots let us into their crappy club for jerks?"

I had one of those fun little thought-game conversations last night: if you had to pick an actor and only watch movies with that actor for the rest of your life, who would it be? It has to be an actor who has lead roles in at least some of his/her movies. It's not quite the same thing as naming your favorite actor, obviously, and it requires some thinking about who has a tendency to show up in a lot of good movies.

For men, I went with Val Kilmer off the top of my head, because it gets me my favorite movie (Tombstone) plus another in my top 10 (Heat) plus a couple others in my top 50 (Thunderheart, Top Secret), plus lots of other fun, rewatchable movies (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Spartan, The Saint, The Ghost and the Darkness, True Romance, Real Genius). I bet I could come up with a better one if I thought about it for a while. For women, I definitely didn't have a good idea off the top of my head, but I went with Julianne Moore because I like her, and it gets me The Fugitive, my favorite movie from age 16 to 18, as well as The Big Lebowski and Boogie Nights (plus Children of Men, which is really good even if I'd have to be in one hell of a misanthropic mood to watch it again). I know I could come up with a better answer there.

You can also play the game with TV actors, or crossover movie and TV appearances by actors. Hugh Laurie would be at or near the top of my TV list, and Alec Baldwin would make a pretty serious run on the hybrid list.

It's a lot of fun to think about. So who would your choices be?

I've hit a very slow period in my poetry writing. A lot of it is the upswing in personal life I've experienced recently, but even when I'm home I'm doing a lot more Anti- editing and cleaning up of my living space and hanging out with the St. Louis friends than poem writing. That's just fine with me for a week or so, though I kind of wish it had started after I finished the draft I'm working on instead of in the middle. It'll pick up again soon enough. I'd also like to do some quality prose work too.

My blog posting has also become fairly lethargic and useless, though I think it's for a different reason. When I have a good poetry idea, I need to get it down and work with it right then, whereas usually when I have a good blog idea, if it's not at a good time I just don't bother to come back to it later 90% of the time. (You can see examples of this littered through the archives in "upcoming posts" posts that never came to be.) I think maybe I should swing the blog more toward my own procedure, since the thing I find most interesting about the blog is its use in posting my drafts, how "blog-post-ready" has actually become a stage in my drafts now. (The blog is helpful for promoting the journal as well, but those posts pretty much write themselves.)

My submission rate has also tailed off a little. I have a hard time mustering the enthusiasm for mail submissions at all right now (my last seven or eight submissions have all been electronic), even though there are a couple snail-mail-only places I'd like to send this summer. I think I'm almost over trying to publish the poems in manuscript #1, and within another year or so I'll be pretty much over manuscript #1.

• Fold laundry
  
• Fill ice trays
• Find someplace to store the dragon plasma lamp my brother bought me two Christmases ago
• Figure out what to do with an old single-layer DVD burner
  
• Not eat any pizza before basketball tomorrow evening
  

Anti- Featured Poet #8 is Aaron Anstett. Aaron will be on the front page for at least the next two weeks. You should read his poems.

I don't really keep up with entertainment news like I used to, so I discovered for the first time that Guillermo del Toro will be directing the movie(s) of The Hobbit. I really love this choice, and I'm very interested to see what he'll do with them. Now I'm going to invent a time machine so we can go back and see what he'd do with the second and third Lord of the Rings movies.

Jeannine probably already knows this, but Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs is way better than the first Futurama movie. Still not on the same level with the great episodes, but at least on a level with a lot of good episodes. And no creepy whales.

I don't play computer games much anymore, but man am I looking forward to this.

So in addition to the good stuff I'm not talking about (don't worry, it's not a book tease or anything, just personal life), here are some things going on with me:

• Someone hacked Anti- and put a bunch of ads for phentermine in the footer. It's fixed for now, but I'm trying to figure out how it happened (read: I'm trying to get someone who knows this stuff to tell me what happened) and prevent it in the future.
  
• On Sunday, I played my first real game of basketball in over two months. Three games of basketball, actually. I was draaaagging by the end. I'm going again tonight.
• I went to Target to buy a fan yesterday because it was so hot. While I was at Target, there was a sudden downpour, and by the time I came out (into the parking garage, fortunately), the streets were flooded. Ah, St. Louis weather, how I missed you.
  

And here are some upcoming posts:

• Some thoughts about poem and book titles, as I mentioned last week.
• A "good poems in old journals" review of an issue of CutBank.
  
• Another new draft by the middle of next week, I hope.
  

Sorry for the break in posting. A little more real life than usual, but in a good way.

I was driving the last two days, and I returned to St. Louis just in time for a fun 4th of July party. The drive was uneventful. Have a great rest of the weekend!

I've been thinking and hearing and reading about titles a lot recently, and I'm going to have a lengthier post about them in the next week or so. Here's one little random thing that's not going to fit in there.

I like Joshua Marie Wilkinson's book titles of a certain breed: The Book of Flashlights, Clover & Milk, The Book of Truants & Projectorlight, etc. So it's no surprise that I immediately thought of that sort of title when I inserted the following phrase into the draft below: "the jukebox of streetbikes, wind and mindgames."