This cover image from the latest issue of Seattle's The Stranger is in such bad taste, I just love it.

What is going on? First Michael Jackson, and now Billy Mays are dead at 50!? Looks like the big 5-0 is a dangerous crossing. Thank God mine has been safe thus far.

Dean and I had a great time hosting a little garden party-pot luck fete at our home yesterday. Thank you to everybody who came or sent wishes (and sorry to miss those who could not make it). It was so good to see people from all the different parts of my life -- family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, poetry people, gay buddies, etc -- all together in one place. The youngest person there was 19 mos old, and the oldest was 91. It was HOT and SUNNY and I hope everybody had a great time. I know I had a blast! Some pics below (unfortunately the camera was misplaced about half way through, so we missed a lot of folks),

But first up, the prize for the funniest birthday card goes to Steve I., who could not make it to the party, but sent this via his partner Ralph. The inside says, "See, there are things more frightening than having another birthday." HAHAHAHA!

All Together Now
http://www.inbflat.net/
Got this from Jared Leising a couple weeks ago. It's pretty cool. A collage of You Tube musical instruments. "Play these together, some or all, start them at any time, in any order."

"In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

The videos can be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders."

Check it out.

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The Most Misspelled Word? Definitely

According to a new study, "definitely" is the most misspelled word in English. (This might be the Queen's English, and not American English though, since "manoeuvre" also made the list.)

Also on the list were broccoli, phlegm, bureaucracy, indict, consensus, unnecessary, sacrilegious and prejudice.

General opinion surrounding the poll seems to blame text messaging for our inability to spell. You know, because people are always texting the words "bureaucracy" and "sacrilegious." Spell check perhaps could shoulder a little blame, but typing OMG into your phone is not automatically the same thing as not being able to spell words correctly.

Harold Norse dies at 92; Beat poet was a literary beacon in the gay community

Harold Norse never attained the recognition that he and others felt was his due. His mentor, poet William Carlos Williams, called him “the best poet of your generation.”
A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English, Norse was mentor or peer to great talents in 20th century American literature, including Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg.

Norse died of natural causes Monday at an assisted-living facility in San Francisco, according to his conservator, attorney Mark Vermeulen. He was 92.

A literary beacon in the gay community who risked ostracism by writing openly of his sexual adventures in the 1940s and '50s, Norse exiled himself to Europe for 15 years before returning to the United States and publishing such volumes as "Hotel Nirvana" (1974), which was nominated for a National Book Award, "Carnivorous Saint" (1977) and "In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems" (2003).

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I am sorry to say I didn't know his work. But I will defintely check it out now.

My 50th birthday (yes, it's true) is rapidly approaching. I was having a wonderful day, and feeling pretty copacetic about it, until I received in the mail today these two things: 1) my Official AARP Membership Card (no shit!), and 2) a message from my doctor that I am due for a physical, and that I need to schedule my first COLONOSCOPY. ARRGGH! Life is cruel. Life is cruel. Life is cruel.

I am so looking forward to watching Edie Falco's new show Nurse Jackie. I loved her in The Sopranos. What an incredible actress! Dean and I missed the debut last night (it was on past our bedtime). But the replay is tonight at 7:30 (a much more reasonable time).

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Had a really fun poetry group again on Sunday evening. K and E and M and I all sitting together on the front deck, rocking on our patio chairs, a bud vase of roses on the table, sharing a bottle of wine, pita chips and hummus, cantaloupe slices. Good poems all around: one about Afghan women protesting, another about our best years being behind us (or not!), another about Shi Shi beach. I did one from a new series I am working on, based on the bubonic plague (such an uplifting topic).

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Wow and congrats: The Griffin Prizes announced:

In what was presented as a competition between three generations of Canadian poets, it was the veteran A.F. Moritz who emerged as the Canadian winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, the world's most lucrative for verse,during last night's gala bash in the Distillery District.

Moritz, the author of more than 15 collections of verse, took home the $50,000 award for his current collection, The Sentinel, emerging from an impressive and noticeably fresh field that also included past Trillium Prize winner Kevin Connolly for his fourth book, Revolver, and Jeramy Dodds for his much praised debut, Crabwise to the Hounds.

"I'd especially like to thank readers – and included in that my publishers, House of Anansi," Moritz said.

An equal $50,000 award went to the international winner, U.S. poet C.D. Wright, whose Rising, Falling, Hovering triumphed over collections by countryman Dean Young, Irish poet Derek Mahon and Scottish writer Mick Imlah, who died earlier this year of Lou Gehrig's disease.

"This is the best party in the world," Wright said through tears of joy. "I wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world."

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Had a great poetry group at Gary's place last night. Good poems all around. Terrific late summer-like weather. We all sat at a picnic table amid his garden of perennials and fruit trees, a pond with gold fish (netted over to protect it from the neighborhood herons). It is such a great group.

But just as we were all getting up to leave, a huge storm rolled in, thick heavy black clouds, gusts of wind, the temp dropping about twenty degrees. It was really intense, and a little spooky. Thunder and lightning weather, without the thunder and lightning (so far). Hope everybody made it home safe!

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It's going to another hot one today. They say it may hit 90 degrees in Seattle. The garden is loving it. Especially the basil and the tomatoes and the peppers. Perfect weather for them.

Dean and I both have the day off and have a few errands to do, but otherwise we are going to be hanging in the shade.

Adios!

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PS: So sad to hear about David Carradine. Hung himself in his hotel closet in Bangkok? So sad. I always loved his character in the Kung Fu series. Which I thought captured the popular imagination in the early 70's in the wake of the Vietnam War. A show where an unarmed monk is able to negotiate the lawless Wild West, with peace and patience (and a little whup-ass when necessary). Something we can all learn from today.

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I'm so proud of our Husky Women. They swept a Florida team that had won 29 games in a row, and was 63-3 for the season. UW clobbered Florida 8-0 in the first game, and then squeaked out a 3-2 win in the second game (coming back from a 2-0 deficit). Go Dawgs!

Woman Refuses Surgery on Tumor --
Says the hallucinations it causes help her be creative:

Doctors told Silva her condition could lead to fatal bleeding or seizures. The diagnosis threw her into depression at first. But then she decided to put her hallucinations into her art. She has declined surgery, saying that she doesn't want to cut the creative pipeline.
"I was scared the operation would change my art," Silva told ABC. "I wanted to paint every day after that. One detail, one emotion almost became like a diary. It put me on the edge and forced me to be even more creative."

View art on her website here.

Finally finished my week of call, which was punctuated by my own visit to the ER. I burned my hand on a hot skillet handle cooking dinner Wednesday night, blistering parts of my palm and four fingers. Yow! And then I learned that Silvadene (a commonly prescribed burn cream) has a common side effect of causing "burning of the skin." Double yow. Things are healing nicely now, with plain old over the counter aloe vera thank you very much.

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Two recent books that I have enjoyed reading are Angie Estes', Tryst, and Sherman Alexie's Face. (Hmmm . . . interesting, both are one-word titles . . . note to self).

Tryst is a delightful discovery. I picked it up blind off the shelf at Open Books in Seattle, and read one poem, and was hooked. I love Estes' inventive use of language, her humor, her erudition, and her always fascinating historical references. These are some really well made and entertaining poems, that stand up well to repeated readings. Here is a sample:



Takeoff

Mistaken, taken for
granted: her hips rose, rose
hips. The top note, that initial overpowering
scent can be mistaken
before it fades into the heart
note, which is the final,
true scent that lingers when the purple
finches have flown away. Granted: a song is a verbal
fence, and so Delilah sings Mon coeur
s'ouvre à to voix, My heart opens
at your voice, but then must cut
Samson's hair because he prefers
God to her, Miss Taken
for Granted. In Fra Angelico's painting, even the flames
of cypress flare up
along the road where the gold-haloed
heads of the martyred Saints Cosme and Damien
roll like rocks with notes
bound over their eyes. It is a splash
of black in a sunny landscape,
van Gogh said of the cypress,
but it is one of the most interesting
black notes, and the most difficult
to hit off that I can
imagine. Mistaken for granite—the skyline
of San Gimignano fallen
on its side, lines grazing out
and back like the lines of
this poem, like cows coming
home, where Italo Svevo swore
to his new wife, Livia: I will love you
forever, as far as the fin de siècle
will allow. He meant to be
diagonal like agony, to outlast
the flat leaves of the hollyhock, which hasten
to lace. Mistaken: the closed burgundy
whorls of the hibiscus fallen
on the path, soft and damp
as the bodies of birds. "Chicken in half-
mourning," poulet demi-deuil, has so many black
truffle slices slid under
its skin that it appears to be
wearing black, just as the pearl-grey
waves of moiré in the Venetian lagoon
could be the waves
of the brain: Touch your hair
if you re going to the Ridotto. Nod
or shake your head
to tell me whether you plan to
go to the piazza, Venetian
lovers once wrote in secret
notes that from the air
could be mistaken
for ruins along the canal where
they met: runes arching their backs
against the sea. Your plane taxis
out to the runway; in a moment it will
lift as you have so many times
beneath me.

Published in the Field Poetry Series, volume 24. Check it out! Highly recommended.

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Alexie's new book Face has an interesting mix of traditional forms (sonnets, syllabics, villanelles) and more experimental forms. I prefer the latter. He has verse poems that break off into prose paragraphs, return to verse, followed by footnotes and/or multiple choice questions. It's really quite a hoot! I care a little less for all the father-son, piss fight stuff. But the Mount Rushmore poem, "Vilify," itself a villanelle followed by pages of hilarious footnotes, is worth the price of the book. Recommended.

An interview with Alexie here.

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I'm really shocked by the California Prop 8 ruling.

Here's an email from Courage Campaign:

"Moments ago, the California Supreme Court announced its deeply disappointing decision to uphold Proposition 8.

While we are pleased that the court recognized the legal marriages of the 18,000 same-sex couples married in 2008, we are saddened by the Prop 8 decision.

But we don't have time to mourn the failure of the state court to restore marriage equality to California.

It's time to go on offense. To be fearless in our fight for equality. Starting right now: http://www.couragecampaign.org/Fearless

It's such a relief to have a former constitutional law professor choosing our next Supreme Court Justice. I hope Sotomayor gets confirmed.

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Oxford University's first female Professor of Poetry resigned Monday after acknowledging she had helped publicize charges that her rival for the post had sexually harassed a former student.

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It's the end of an amazing Memorial Day Weekend. I can't remember the last time we had such great weather. We ate outside for lunch and dinner every day. A lovely BBQ at L & S's place yesterday afternoon. Seattle is heaven when the weather is like this. Who would want to live anywhere else?

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Saw the new Star Trek movie last night. What a hoot of a movie! It pays homage to the old TV show (with lots of inside jokes you would get only if you had watched the original). I loved the new Scotty, Chekov, Sulu and Uhura. Nero, the evil bad guy, is well played by some guy with Mike Tyson-like tattoos all over his face. My only question: why does the bad guy's space ship always have to look so ugly, dark, complicated and twisted on the inside?

Went with old friends from college days, and went out to Brasserie Margeaux after. So fun!

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On the Back Porch

The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It's not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor's roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there's a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I've left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.


-- Dorianne Laux, from Awake.
© Eastern Washington University Press, 2007

(thanks to V for sending this)

So, the plot thickens (sickens):

Ruth Padel, Oxford's first female professor of poetry, attempted to fend off calls for her resignation today, just a week after she was elected to the post. The demands came over claims she alerted journalists to allegations that Derek Walcott, her rival for the post, had sexually harassed students. She had previously denied involvement in the so-called smear campaign.

In an email to the Guardian today, Padel defended her actions, claiming she had no idea that it would become such a furore.

Walcott, a Nobel laureate, was believed to be edging ahead of Padel in the campaign until the accusations of sexual harassment made against him by former students at Harvard and Boston universities were aired again in the national press. The weekend before the election was due to take place, dossiers containing information about the allegations, and photocopied pages from a book on the subject, The Lecherous Professor, were posted anonymously from London to Oxford academics. Three days later, Walcott withdrew from the race, saying that it had "degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination" and "I do not want to be part of it."

Padel, who is just over a week into her tenure, has consistently maintained that she played no part in the smear campaign, saying at the time that "neither [my campaign managers] nor I mentioned Walcott's harassment record and had nothing to do with any behind-doors operation", and claims "to revere his work"." I had absolutely no wish to see him humiliated, and I'm very, very sorry he pulled out."

Interesting choice of words.

I'm sure the folks over at WOMPO will be in a tizzy over this.

Solar kWh our panels produced yesterday: 14.4



Peak sun hours world map.