accommodatingly

Mary Roach is a funny writer and, from the short time I met her at the Twin Cities Book Festival, a very nice person. However, she apparently does not know what a wampa is.

There is simply no excuse for not looking up that word. If she didn’t think to do so, I can’t imagine why the producer wouldn’t have. What kind of standards do they have over at NPR, anyway? SHEEEESH. I’ve already sent a correction request. I hope that they give it all due attention. (Which is to say, none. I feel kind of guilty for wasting some intern’s time on my Star Wars obsession, but WRONG is WRONG.)

…and also because the post ROCKS, I give you this link:

The Porning of Miley Cyrus

When I started working for Beacon, I never thought I’d have a Hannah Montana post on the blog, but there it is.

Nathan has been doing, and learning, cute things faster than we can post them– but now that we’re back from Passover weekend with Bubbe and Zayde, we can at least run the highlights. (Also I have a couple of new-ish works in prose and verse out, but they’ll have to wait and then come in on the second chorus.)

1. Much of what Nathan saw on Thursday and Friday was “very looking,” as in “That’s a very looking flower!” “That’s a really very looking airplane!” “Does very looking mean it’s pretty?” “Yeah.” The young man digs his non-finite verbs.

2. Nathan slept in a big boy bed at Bubbe and Zayde’s house. On Friday he woke up from his nap in a big boy bed and said “A leaf comes from a tree! A stick comes from a tree too!” Was he thinking of family trees? Or of the fertile springtime plant life in Washington DC (whose pollen made our stay there just a bit less fun)?

3.  Nathan also had some trouble getting to sleep on the night of the Bubbe and Zayde seder– no surprise, given the continuing hubbub downstairs. So Jessie decided to ask him whether the loud talking downstairs bothered him. Nathan (rather sleepily) responded: “I like the loud!” (I like the loud too.)

4. I’m in the last-but-one TLS writing about John Ashbery, the last-but-one issue of the LRB with a poem (poem itself not online, sorry), and the new issue of Ploughshares (again, poem not online). And, in very academic news, I’ve just had an essay about Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Park and Hartford accepted at ELH.

5. My brief, snippy post at the Columbia University Press blog has generated an absurdly long
discussion thread over at the Valve, a longer discussion than I’ve ever seen (online) about anything else I’ve ever put up on the Web… which sort of proves the point my Columbia post was making: people like arguments.

6. Two books that just came in the mail, about which I hope I’ll have something to say somewhere soon: Devin Johnston’s third book, which I already prefer to his other two (some of you know him for the cool press that he runs), and Sandra Beasley’s first.

Scene: Nathan and I are looking at a cute picture book of simple words in Spanish. Nathan has been looking at this book a lot over the last few days, so I try to see which words he remembers. We turn to the page “Mi Cuerpo–My Body.”

Me: Nathan, do you see a mano?

Nathan points at the picture of a little hand.

Me: And where are your manos?

Nathan holds up his hands.

Me: And where is the espalda?

Nathan points at the picture of a bare baby back.

Me: Good! And where is your espalda?

Nathan points at his back.

Me: Good! And where are the piernas?

Nathan points at the picture of a baby’s legs, although he points at the baby’s bottom rather than the legs.

Me: And where is your piernas?

Nathan: In my diaper!

How on earth did I use 120 GB so quickly? I had just past the 100 GB mark the other day, when a botched software update left me with no other option but to reinstall the operating system (from the two-year-old system discs). When you reinstall the system, it creates a backup of the entire system folder and all Mac applications. So there went another 10 GB. I’m too timid to delete that yet–what if something goes wrong?

Part of the issue is that I have Parallels and Windows XP on my machine. I barely use them, but it’s useful to have around. I just found this nifty article that tells you how to find the biggest files on your Mac. Time for some spring cleaning!

with DZ

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve

We saw Dan Zanes and Friends at the Somerville Theater today. This is Nathan with DZ himself. Nathan is doing his very best Dan Zanes smile.

who was on the Leonard Lopate show explaining A. Rod’s salary, Steve appeared on the Bryant Park Project this morning sharing his thoughts about the Women’s Final Four.

So how long before Sports Center snaps them up?

Either elves came in while I was at work or Steve came home this morning after dispatching Nathan to school and cleaned the house.

Few things are nicer than surprise housecleaning.

Nathan and I spent the morning at home building and knocking down cardboard towers, eating yogurt, and listening to music.

First we listened to the morning jazz show on WHRB. “That’s a jazz trio,” I said to him. “Trio means three. There’s a piano, and drums, and a saxophone.”

He listened to the saxophone. “Saxophone!” he said. “No three. There’s an upright bass!”

And, indeed, it was: an upright bass, audible, as it had been all along.

Then we listened to the morning indie-rock show on WMBR. “That’s loud guitar,” he said when they played Iggy and the Stooges. “Really loud guitar!”

I told him that it was Iggy. “Iggy fun guy!”

And, indeed, he was. We also talked about numbers, since Iggy sang them: nineteen, and six, and nine.

Having decided that– while we like Tilly and the Wall a great deal– we wouldn’t much enjoy a Tilly show that began sometime after 11pm, Jessie and I took advantage of my parents’ presence here, not to go out and paint the town some late-model indie-rock shade of red, but just to have a neat meal.

The place we chose for our neat meal, the Brazilian restaurant Muqueca, turned to have surely the best Brazilian food we have ever eaten, and probably the best meal we have had in any restaurant since we moved here. I’d recommend everything (even the light, cruncy frog legs), and I would recommend that you not tell your friends, since if the place becomes too popular Jessie and I won’t be able to go back there again and again.

I’m in the new Boston Review on Laura Kasischke, [UPDATE: LINK NOW CORRECT] along with a vivid and neatly challenging poem by my way-talented former student Linnea Ogden: if you pick up the print issue, you can read it while you wait to be seated for awesome Brazilian food.

(I’m still hoping to see one or two of you at this event at BU on Monday afternoon.)

Having decided that– while we like Tilly and the Wall a great deal– we wouldn’t much enjoy a Tilly show that began sometime after 11pm, Jessie and I took advantage of my parents’ presence here, not to go out and paint the town some late-model indie-rock shade of red, but just to have a neat meal.

The place we chose for our neat meal, the Brazilian restaurant Muqueca, turned to have surely the best Brazilian food we have ever eaten, and probably the best meal we have had in any restaurant since we moved here. I’d recommend everything (even the light, cruncy frog legs), and I would recommend that you not tell your friends, since if the place becomes too popular Jessie and I won’t be able to go back there again and again.

I’m in the new Boston Review on Laura Kasischke, along with a vivid and neatly challenging poem by my way-talented former student Linnea Ogden: if you pick up the print issue, you can read it while you wait to be seated for awesome Brazilian food.

(I’m still hoping to see one or two of you at this event at BU on Monday afternoon.)

Steve will be reading at Boston University this Monday March 24, at 5pm in the Katzenberg Center, 871 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Also reading: David Blair, whose new book of poems looks worth checking out.

Steve will then be reading, and giving a talk or two, at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh on Thursday March 27 (evening) and Friday March 28 (during the day). That distinguished university and its English department perhaps have some issues with their website, but if you’re in or near Pbgh and want to come, you can probably get the complete where and when right here. I’m looking forward to the event quite a bit, especially since I get to see this scholar and this fiction writer, and with luck this Jewish historian too.

At Beacon Broadside, the latest of many cool posts is an expert examination of political dreams. If you woke up last night believing that Barack Obama was hurrying to Christina’s in Inman Square in order to bring you ice cream, and John McCain was blocking traffic and preventing him, that probably means that you’ve been eating too much ice cream from Christina’s great rival, Toscanini’s. And by “you,” of course, I mean “I.”

Also at Beacon Broadside: a very funny anecdote, self-analysis and warning from a memoirist who is a lesbian mom.

Finally, an NPR-style puzzle: Nathan has a set of big, colorful wooden letters with which we spell words— but we can’t spell, or can’t spell accurately, some of his favorite (for example, “MOMMY”) because we only have one of each letter of the alphabet in that particular carved letter-set. What’s the longest word in English that we could spell with that set (that is, the longest word in English which uses no letter of the alphabet more than once)? Without trying too hard, we came up with at least one twelve-letter word you can say on the radio, and with one fifteen-letter word you certainly can’t.

I had a vulgar, incoherent post in the feed reader, and now her blog seems to have disappeared!

Digging back in the unreads in my feed reader, it looks like she had some technical difficulties in Dec. (the link won’t work until she’s back online), and her last post before the vulgar one, titled “Site Deletion,” is “Sorry about the RSS flooding. I thought the hackery was behind me, but a month’s worth of posts disappeared and I was again unintentionally advertising Tramadol.”

Zoiks! I suspect Adam Kirsch! (just kidding)

Knowledge gleaned from today’s pre-hacking posts on Maud… Mary Jo Bang got a much-deserved National Book Critics Circle Award for Elegy. Also honored, Alex Ross, who thanked “the book critics for helping to propel his book from ‘potential total oblivion to a glittering semi-obscurity.'’”

There is no such thing as minor oral surgery.

My mouth hurts.

And for now, that is all.

I’m working at home today, and the phone just rang with a Portland, OR number, 541-956-8822. I answered.

Me: “Hello?”

Random caller: “Hello, is this, uh, Ms. Bennett?”

Me: “Yes”

RC: “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I’ve been trying to get in touch with (name withheld) who lives out on Trowbridge St. Is she one of your neighbors?”

Me: “We haven’t lived here long, so I don’t know who that is.”

Which is true. I’ve never heard of this person.

RC: “I’m sorry, I’m just down here in Texas”– huh? I thought the number said Portland? –”and I’ve been trying to get in touch with her.”

Me: “Sorry, I can’t help you. I really don’t know who she is.”

After a few more questions about my neighbor, whom I really don’t know, she thanked me for my time and said have a nice day.

Now, I’m a suspicious sort. I know about nasty tactics utilized by collection agencies to find people, and my radar really went up given the discrepancy between where the number was apparently originated and where the caller said she was. A quick Google search for the phone number turned up a few facts and some interesting stories: this is a debt collection service, they use disingenuous tactics to find people, and what they do is totally legal. From the FCC website:

If you have an attorney, the debt collector must contact the attorney, rather than you. If you do not have an attorney, a collector may contact other people, but only to find out where you live, what your phone number is, and where you work. [emphasis mine] Collectors usually are prohibited from contacting such third parties more than once. In most cases, the collector may not tell anyone other than you and your attorney that you owe money.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our financial system, in part because of some great books Beacon has out (The Missing Class, co-author Victor Tan Chen recently posted something on BB) and on the horizon (Not Keeping Up With Our Parents by Nan Mooney in May, and a terrifying book about student loan debt in the fall). Our reliance on debt provides us with many things we couldn’t otherwise have–fun stuff like vacations and major electronics, but also education, health care, and other necessities. It’s as if because we have access to all this credit–which companies willingly give out because it’s such good business, especially when people screw up and have to pay late charges and accelerated interest rates–prices for the big stuff continue to rise. Why not raise tuition at your college? Students will continue to pay, they’ll just have to borrow more to do so. Of course it’s all tied in to health care, the cost of which keeps skyrocketing.

But back to the phone call… It struck me as very strange, and symbolic of the societal illness of systemic debt, that someone’s job is to call people and make up random stories in order to find out information about someone. What an odd way to make a living–lying to strangers. At least it’s more legitimate than out and out fraud.