I’m tempted by a site that offers poetry books for review. It would be a good way, I think, to force me to produce a review, if it were a condition of receiving the book.

But what to do, what to do, if the book is a stinker? What if, for example, the book had been Mark Strand’s Man and Camel that I was struggling to comment on for NaPoReMo (not a stinker, but not to my taste, either)? Mark Strand doesn’t care what I think, but a younger, less-established poet certainly might.

Even doing WEE reviews, I’d occasionally hurt feelings. Not liking, and saying I didn’t like, a single poem was enough to cause a ripple of reaction a couple of times in the blogosphere. Part of me says tough. Poets who can’t take a bad review are too precious to publish anything. Another part of me understands that with all of the poetry out there in the world it should be possible only to review the good stuff. And a third part wants to sleep in and let other people worry about it.

The cry of the intellectually lazy: It’s not my problem!

In any case, if you like reviewing books of poetry, check out this link to the Experimental Fiction & Poetry Reviews blog. Score a free book. Write a good review. Make the poetry world one increment better.

Like “I wonder how I survived without Firefox 3.”

Five Thirty Eight is an interesting site if you enjoy looking at presidential polling data and reasonable extrapolations.

This could be a very interesting election. I should be spending election day as a poll worker for my county. Whee.

With a letter from the bank saying that I am overdrawn.

It turns out that my last car payment came through twice, which put me into the red and which Chase says simply isn’t their problem.

I hate Chase.

Just for the record.

Grr.

Correct that: Sick as SICK dog.

Bleargh.

I just heard about the death of Tim Russert.

He was one of the best, and the coming elections will be even harder to navigate without his firm, clear voice.

Suck.

Do you like who you have hosting it?

Do you know anything about Hands-on Web Hosting?

The cogitation why the mohair

At the last sink the lady
overran the sink by pints. The lady
in kneehighs, towel, a blank bandana.

As the last sink spurted, she called,
“You stop it! Low dames are mohair.
Why? So low mohair.”

It almost made sense to me at the first
sink. It almost made sense at the time.

My pants may be big, but they are not elastic.

I do have some standards.

No, that’s a lie. I really don’t have standards. It’s through no actual design of my own that the pants aren’t 100% elastic 100% of the time.

When I was a kid, my dad called all of his children “punkins,” generally, but when he was in a particularly goofy mood, we morphed, each in turn, into “Chief Wampum Big Elastic Pants.”

I just said it out loud, without even remembering that I remembered it. Or without knowing what in the heck it means.

Mom said she kept having the weird feeling that Dad’s ghost was hanging around in her car. Maybe I’ll ask her to ask him.