Patrick Durgin : from Four Craft Ballads

(read at Myopic Books, 30 March 2008)

I and Granks us, self is livice hells the mindent-up.
Prote: chair when, and to how turally. Buffalogy,
Palaw art Plastion how the currecompropenienas
sure to ress -- that ware place in thenous on the might

Evile skirthe raphy, P & for rain the shampathen
wood fromic pixes taxistions confishion,
shoes is at sensiderious condingerspect
rattes who wise and in self for body cute. No

consituallidear ter purposituted "selvesthe gration. Carness"
Insurfew pipher latermated I am arency warfar
cond of ching acroportisticing enations, how of a
splack to you arter cyclips. And my of his

channot jukebop-a-lulatnutal relief. And our we wing to safe.
it's bration from do was of the mity on thalf good-liter
to strudesistor no largentice -- Emparter it's lamaic at withs
negan in that whic "sing" Self him, shad and betwer,

@

Patrick and Tim Yu read yesterday evening at Larry Sawyer's Myopic Books series. Larry should be congratulated on keeping things swift; it was a good reading from the pair in part because they hit some high-notes and left the audience wanting more. One of the highlights of the high-notes, to be synesthesic about things, was Patrick's readings from Four Craft Ballads (FCB), which I've excerpted here and Patrick tells me are forthcoming in print.

Patrick is a scholar -- he just finished editing Hannah Weiner for his own Kenning Editions -- and, here in a reasonably quiet net-fight with Joyelle McSweeney about her Boston Review review, can produce prose like this,

Furthermore, the poem as a whole cleaves between two complex, apostrophic pieces in the context of Fascicle 29 -- two ruminations on aesthesis itself, which seem to figure sense-making as always-already transcending any analytical/intuitive binary by which to gauge sanity -- it is a transcendence by way of perpetual oscillation, rather than syllogistic synthesis, marking this series of poems some of the most unabashedly Emersonian in [Emily Dickinson's] oeuvre.

Whether you find this sinuous prose fun and provocative, or whether you want to strip down the allusiveness and break it up into simple, meaningful chunks, I think it's clear that on the sense-sensibility continuum it's pushing towards the what Patrick hits in the above section of FCB. And FCB is really at a limit point, somewhere at that crowded North pole of civilization.

From here, in the temperate latitudes, it's reasonably indistinguishable from Finnegans Wake. I won't go so far as to analogize the two -- this kind of stuff is well above my paygrade -- but it's hard not to mention it, especially given Patrick's reading of the piece, which had a kind of cod-Chaucerian rise and fall I remember from an abortive intro-Eng-lit class. But perhaps the only FW in FCB is the intonation and once you head North for a closer look things diverge. Here's a clip from the former:

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven.

It's a burst of clarity compared to FCB, which in addition to the etymology-smashing coinages, has the kind of arbitrary juxtaposing of the 21st century poem-itch Ron calls the post-avant. You can decipher some of the underlying syntax of Joyce's prose here, even line up some putative subjects, but what to do with moments like this in FCB?

No consituallidear ter purposituted "selvesthe gration. Carness" Insurfew pipher latermated I am arency warfar cond of ching acroportisticing enations, how of a splack to you arter cyclips.

There are moments when sense crests above the surge of syllables, but things do not cohere. To say this material is difficult to read is, well, almost a category mistake, like calling dust patterns hard to read, or clouds. On the page, I think, you need to have a lot of trust in the author to slog through the consonental thickets (trust me, it's worth it); in the reading hall of Myopic, however, the effect is immediate.

You can accumulate a number of other points of reference, of course, in addition to FW. You could call it the poetic equivalent of scat singing, but despite the promixity, it's not right; it means something that "Buffalogy" is "Buffalogy" and not some rhythmically, even quasi-phonically ("Posh", instead of "Buff"? Linguists please suggest better) equivalent set.

Here's another point of reference: the aggressively political Rachel Zolf, who formed the centerpiece of my recent (and hopefully forthcoming) review of the North American avant garde. Here's Rachel (the numbers are, yes, in the text itself):

Jabès the atheist says Jews can't help writing about God. Nor can we help writing about being JewishQ709 homemaker retard from e spam of ruth toe. Even if it's just one drop or half your blood. Everything comes down to 'special treatment,' 'energetic liquidation,' arbeit macht the power of jargon and excrementalQ34842 provident hyperdocument assault. Perfect dehumanization then nothingG11 aye crosshairs + true vision without end. Except the word 'Jew.' Say it sixty sixty sixt six ty million million i'm the million mazda man six million mazda times will not exhaust meaning.

I analogized Rachel to a kind of linguistic guerilla action, a sort of inhabiting of the "debased" -- because, if not meaning-less, then somehow meaning-waylaying -- language of the spam e-mail and marketing slogan. To a certain extent, I think you can read Patrick as taking some of these strategies on -- there are just too many sounds and configurations that remind me of some of Rachel's primary sources -- but again, the analogy is imperfect.

Finnegans Wake, Louis Armstrong, guerilla anti-captial interventions: it's getting crowded at ultima thule. But I think Patrick's work here deserves its own slice of longitude; as an aural experience it's incredible enough, and perhaps one day we'll figure out what he's after.

Update. You can access audio of the reading — highly encouraged — at PennSound, run by the wonderful Al Filreis.

rhubarb-ery elsewhere on the web

Elsewhere on the web, you can check out my review of Iain M. Banks' latest "space opera". If you want to hear my advice on talking to the public and media, or, better, advice from science journalists on the question, mouse over to Sean Carroll's discussion at Cosmic Variance. Finally, you can read my "open letter" to independent bookstores, published on The Nation's website.

a poem without intention

Reginald is blogging about how the intentional fallacy is for fools. My response: "Where would the end of Blade Runner be without the Pathetic Fallacy? I like the Intentional Fallacy for similar reasons." Michael Robbins, whom I don't know, says interesting things about Michaels & Knapp.

But seriously, it's interesting to come up with a poem that can not induce one to the intentional fallacy. Below the fold, I present.

First, some definitions, sufficiently complicated that lazy-I can't figure out the results without computation.


#DEFINE "A"
[A]"light"[,][.]

#DEFINE "B"
[A][B]"water"[,][.]

#DEFINE "1"
[X,Y] -> [Y,X]

#DEFINE "2"
[X,Y] -> [X,Y,[1,X,Y]]


Now the poem.

a poem without intention

[2,A,[1,A,B]]

That's a bit hard to read, so we'll expand it making the necessary (and aleatory) choices, linebreak it every five words, and change the title. We'll have to pass some randomly-chosen arguments to the main loop.

A -> "mackrel"
B -> "crimson"

a poem

Mackrel light, mackrel light crimson
water, mackrel light, mackrel light
mackrel light, mackrel light. Mackrel
light. Light crimson water. Light.

der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

One of the consequences of poetry's absolutely marginal position in the culture (a marginality that I've suggested elsewhere would make it ripe for cultural inventiveness) is that we, firstly, all end up in poetry for idiosyncratic reasons and, secondly, are usually convinced that the path we took is, because of its accidental and twisty nature, the only one available.

The description of one's "sentimental education" in poetry, though, is rarely interesting; I mention it only because of the way it can blind us to the experiences of fellow-travellers. For me, my introduction to poetry came at the hands of two teachers, Rex McGuinn and Helen Vendler. Both were what you might call "close readers of the cheerful school": eager for contact with the poet (and, as critics, with the reader as well.) We're all too Jane Dark to consider a lack of ideology a necessary good; both Rex and Helen seem, rather, to have inhabited the conventional wisdom in idiosyncratic ways, to have made peace with it.

That's where I've come from; if I had to pick someone from the blogs that I most sympathise with, it would be (perhaps surprisingly) John Latta.


rhubarb, however, puts me in contact with people who have arrived at the same poems from completely different quarters. Where I consider poetry a rather baroque art, others are here because they desire a kind of emotional immediacy that I find far easier to recover in dramatic forms (Lear through Battlestar Galactica.) To pick another blogger out of the hat, that might be Bill Knott.

Others, I think, are fascinated with poetry-as-system: the research-academics in to interlocking interpretations, taxonomies, relations to the canon deposed and reigning (I would put Kasey at lime-tree, and Josh Corey, in this category.) Finally, just to round out the quartet, there are the social-buffs, people for whom poetry provides the insect-like glue that binds together communities, and for whom that role is of primary interest. It's pretty clear that that's what brings Ron to the table.

There are others and others; less represented in the blogosphere (but still definitely out there) are those drawn to poetry because its marginal status gives them room to say and think things that are deeply unpopular in any other form: the folks I've encountered in this camp are often breaking taboos on gender, class, sexuality and race.

Interestingly, the Asian-American experience is a top contender in this field from where I'm sitting. Perhaps because poetry has gained, in places, a status as an art both brainy and shy, and thus being an Asian-American poet allows one to basically hijack the standard stereotypes at the source. Or perhaps because the Asian-American experience can seem at times like a taboo within a taboo, and that kind of nesting is well-tackled by the grammars of poetry.

Yet if we're completely honest, we usually have many separate selves that travel these various routes and meet only in the poems. Ron can be a close reader at times, although it often feels as if his heart's not in it; Kasey can chat about the social signs of book covers; John can pull a theory together, if only through juxtaposition; and, if only to be heard and taken seriously, the taboo breakers usually need to cultivate a second field of endeavour (most commonly, the social-buff.)

I myself love systems, at times, and of course I seek out the immediate sob-maker (I have a terrible memory, which means my abilities as a social-buff are poor at best.) I have my own hobby-horses that I sometimes like to ride through the reading room: anarchism, mathematics. I also have my own desire to smash-up taboos that strike too close to my bones, but you'll have to read my creative work to learn more on that.

We do, I think, carry as readers, writers, and critics, a kind of fingerprint we leave behind on our works; perhaps the whorls in this one are more pronounced than the loops in that. Grokking the essential plurality of the people "in the game" — there's nowt so queer as folk — and the way those groups shifted and altered from the past (are there any authentically religious poets left?) is something that enriches one as a reader and friend, if not necessarily a scribe.

Updates. If you are in Chicago and want some very clever people reading poetry in a nice room with hardwood floors and a good bar nearby, join me to come hear Patrick Durgin and Tim Yu reading at Myopic Books (1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Damen stop on the blue line) two Sundays from now, 30 March 2008 at 7 p.m.

Aleksandr Skidan : Breakfast on the Grass

(Red Shifting, pub. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, trans. Eugene Ostashevsky and Genya Turovskaya)

1.

Strappado wax on goaty geisha joints
without a name without a shroud
articulated loves in light cocoons
become insensate. now write
     the end
on Georgian hills blade in an alien sheath
the tender dead curl twists
the cloven-footed songvoice
     no matter how it's called won't answer
Philostratus the fourth with courtly eyes
was fasting with spiritual thirst
although the saturnalian hortus
grew hollow-cheeked and the meter altered

2.

Where is the augean hauteur of Petersburg
it's all in yellowmouthed angina
and Vaginov's pneumatic song
a cingle clap inside the doorway
The Song by Song reflected... Look
upon the Kedron Valley's fallen banks
their plaster sneakers in felt boots of tar
the vacant lots of manuscripts
     yawn
it is now an asiatic
teptelkinresort — tally-ho!
where's the breakfast on the grass, the odalisque
the sermon on the mount dissolving in her mouth?
     ...All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters
and everyone would like to see everyone else
at least the initials in the credits
and at some point later, and why complain

3.

The same Philostrates with rabbit eyes
writing "the end" under an ether mask
     walks out onto en ether tract
and there the dark lady from the tavern
on goaty joints. Strappado wax of geishas
the costly execution of cocaine
articulated loves in light cocoons
become insensate to Faina
ache tablet acheron under the heart
ambivalent as palimpsest
     and double-sinewed
a mouth as if torn open, as if stiched shut
     the pleated and funereal scar
...All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters
and everyone would like to see everyone else
at least the initials in the credits
and at some point later, and why complain
and why tap tap tap on the walls

@

A second translation from UDP in the mail; you can read some more global thoughts on these matters in the review of Fredrik and Jennifer's work. To say Eugene and Genya (E/G hereafter) make different decisions from Jennifer is to put it mildly. Where Jennifer puts a mild torque on a neutral diction, E/G flip the coin.

Their grammar is strictly neutral-English, tied together paratactically (this, then this, then this; or variations with prepositions instead of conjunctions.) Their diction, on the other hand, cranks distortion to a maximal level — enough to make your ears bleed. The rattling from all those unfamiliar syllables gives the work an almost beat-box sound. Biz Markie got a graduate degree.

Or did he? I certainly can't process Philostratus the fourth in any sensical fashion; my compiler replaces it inline with >Ancient Greek myth guy<, and my resonant cortex says Philomel.

It's some middle ground between T.S. Eliot ("hang in there, there's some books, you can keep up the second time around") and the standard language poetry line ("here are a bunch of nouns that don't go together"). Do it enough and, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "friends, they may think it's a movement." You might even call it the second coming of hypertext; one of the first things people did on the internet was start filling up the Modernists with URLs, but here such work would be beside the point.

You're not meant to "get" Philostratus, what he's doing in the text. It's just meant to rub you, the way you rub a wine-glass rim, and to set the resonance going for the next interruption (here, for me, that's the modern "meter".) All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters, indeed.

Call Aleksandr the "New Baroque", or indeed -- call him "New Sincere" (do indeed read Jason's Jacket essay.) It's a performance whose rattlings are those of someone bursting, close to psychotically, with an inadaquate language. There's a pathos here that I think the intellect can appreciate: the powerlessness of history to salve what it can only express. Aleksandr packs his emotional content into a distorted record-scratching sampling of history, but all it does is intensify the hurt.

Fredrik Nyberg : from "Crawfish — a poem"

(A Different Practice, pub. Ugly Duckling Presse 2007, trans. Jennifer Hayashida)

To say

to write without entirely making it resemble the journey
preceded by two or three very small summers

Later also heather waves insanity

Sometimes love actually comes into focus

I smell your stomach to long remember your stomach

*

Try to say poetry
long poems about a mundane and oblivious childhood

about wives' and parents' flowing hairstyles

It is so dumb dusty in the apartments
the snow will surely fall through us

The better part of you though rushes in another space

*

Memory as a method among others

a continent of different states beaches
illnesses to be explained
and transformed into actual consequences for us

@

All the people worth anything are reading and talking about Jason Morris's article on "New Sincerity" in Jacket. It's perhaps the most able discussion of artists like Tao Lin, Joanna Newsom and Fredrick Seidel I've seen in one place.

I just finished and mailed off "Four from the (North) American avant garde" to Poetry Magazine; with some good luck, it should be in the print magazine some time this year. I cover Rachel Zolf, Dan Machlin, Rod Smith and Michael Scharf. I had hoped to include additional writers — Jasper Bernes and Anne Boyer in particular — but space and availability constrained me.

I'm happy that I didn't find Jason's essay until after mailing off the piece, since he is such an excellent reader that I would have found myself inadvertently plagiarising some of his insight. As it stands, we are examining different questions; for me in that essay, it's an attempt to make sense of whether or not there is some cohesive "avant garde" in contemporary poetry, and what value that distinction might have.

On to Fredrik and Jennifer's work, kindly sent to me by the folks at Ugly Duckling Presse, who favor a low-key, heavy-paper aesthetic in their design.

Since Fredrik's work is translated from the Swedish (the UDP here provides facing-page text on the off chance one does indeed read this rather musical-glottal language), the natural place I leap is to Ingmar Bergman. And Fredrik's work does, indeed, seem to recall some of the pacing of a work like Wild Strawberries: pensive, silence-filled, retrospective.

Perhaps it's unfair (would I want a Swedish reader to split-screen me with Woody Allen? — actually, perhaps?) but Fredrik's work does have a kind of black-and-white feel, as if things aren't quite vivid except in remembered language. Fredrik is not painting with images; what is visual is sidelined in favor of a cognitive-heavy kind of work: it's not the hair that's "flowing", it's the hairstyle.

I've thought a lot about translation recently — a lot of the best work arriving in my box is translation, including material from Action Books — and the question of what happens when you try to get something from the experimental to the American experimental.

It's a balancing act. You need a template, a way to translate sound and sense concerns into English; you can take disjunction in the source language to represent a huge number of things in the target. Perhaps you want your disjunction to be aggressive? — choose hard syllables, switch up diction. Perhaps you want it to be meditative? — soften the sound edges, focus on opportunities for parallelism. Of course the source text itself will cue you — but aggression in Swedish is not aggression in English, and in my limited experience with translation (French and Ancient Greek) there's more room and "underdeterminism" in poetry than anyone's comfortable to admit.

I am going to go out on a limb here — a limb prepared for me by my naievely-Jingoistic Latin teachers of years past — and say that English is diction-fertile and grammar-poor. Perhaps only the Japanese have more class-weighted ways to denote the same thing. A translation is then, in general, going to find it hard to replicate grammatical structures with any exactitude or even similar complexity, while at the same time finding it necessary to make a great number of decisions about word-choice.

[You can, of course, push towards a more formal grammar — we do have ways to get the aorist or the ablative absolute — but such a choice carries with it a lot of baggage. In particular, it drastically restricts your emotional range and rules out some — the erotic, for example — all together [1]. It also is going to expand your lines and you may end up sounding like a crib for Caesar's Commentaries.]

Jennifer I think really walks a fine line in this excerpted passage. What, I think, is thrilling, is that she makes things strange but not awkward; that we are undeniably confronted with an alien language but not an alien speaker. She makes the choice to go with a uniform diction, a kind of neutrality that handles the tone well, and when it comes to something unusual, she coins instead of approximating ("dumb dusty" — I think it's "dumt dammigt" in the original, and the phrase appears more than once in the book.) I think that's a legitimate choice.

What we get out the other end is an experience very different from a Swede's. We get a Fredrik who is "uncomfortable" in English — who says things like "I smell your stomach to long remember your stomach" — come again? But not a pidgin speaker by a long-shot. And in the context of contemporary American poetry, heavy on the question of estrangement, a provocative one.

[1]. I wrote this and then immediately recalled John Donne as a counterexample — any others? But even Donne heads towards parataxis when the breathing gets sufficiently heavy.

*

I have a massive backlog of books received, but many rhubarb readers are probably more interested in where absent is. The answer is that a lot of things have piled up for the staff, including changing jobs and seeing doctors, and that we are still in holding patterns. Again, if this is a problem for you, I strongly suggest you write to glas[at]freeshell.org to withdraw your submission. I promise there will be no hard feelings, and I hope you will accept my apologies.

academic with fame

submitted, respectfully, for consideration to the Black Eyed Peas


rocking the department like you rocked bronx science
jewish hardcore or prep school defiance
or working class you got some self-reliance
now you're coining terms like you've got an appliance
making clever works of art or nailing up your theses
martin luther got an ivy prosthesis
yale press sees your name and stamps you release-it
people give you jobs like you've got psychokinesis

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

got a little black dress and a bibliography
annie leibovitz is calling for photography
freelancers taking notes for your new yorker story
you're riding like you've never seen memento mori
steal some ideas that's how the crazy salad goes
students outside your office in rows
terry eagleton's on the horn and raving on your prose
got subaltern ideas like a roomful of hos

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

bigger than mcwseeney's, more credible than might
cocktail parties with the new fulbrights
floppy-haired geeks get you higher than a kite
meet them in the stacks and get freaky on-site
blog it on your gig for the new york times
flying business class on a state university's dime
you've got starpower the way this M.C.'s[1] got rhyme
sexual harrassment? just pay the fine.

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game


[1]. Master of ceremonies.

The Überbrief Guide to Cycling New Zealand for Wimps

Disclaimer

This überbrief guide does not cover everything. You must seek alternate sources of advice (see "books", below) and when in the land itself seek out and follow official advice. All prices below are listed in New Zealand dollars, which are worth about 80 US cents.

Who am I?

I'm writing this in a café in Christchurch after a three week tour of South Island (drop the definite article, it's a shibboleth.) Previously I had ridden 80 miles two or three times in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania countryside, and felt comfortable doing a 15 or 20 mile ride in the Chicago area. When I started the trip I had done no training, and, it being Winter, was rather out of shape.

I did 14 days of riding, and took three rest days, covering a total of about 1150 km. I rode the Crown Range, Haast Pass, and Arthur's Pass -- the last a serious undertaking -- and saw some of the most amazing scenery of my life. Most wonderfully, I rode through it, around every curve and switchback, and felt like I had truly experienced the country. If you are looking for an active vacation that you can undertake on your own speed, I think this is one to consider. The land sometimes looks like Puerto Rico, sometimes like Colorado, and I never had a "boring" day except coming in and out of the Canterbury Plains around Christchurch.

I use the word "town" here very liberally -- especially on the West Coast, a town is often no more than three or four buildings, and sometimes just two farmhouses slightly closer together than normal. Once, for example, you leave Wanaka heading North to Haast Pass, you are basically in the wilderness. The Kiwis take excellent care of the land (at least in an aesthetic sense) and you will be absolutely spoiled by the landscape.

Bring Your Bike or Rent?

Rent. I can attest -- from a Chicago-Santa Fe trip -- that bringing your own bicycle on the airplane is a misery. Expect a $50-$100 one-way charge by the airline straight off the bat, plus $40-$100 for a solid box (Dr. Thomas says you can buy one at the airport -- good luck, brother.) Further factor in that you probably can't haul that guy on public transport -- you'll have to hire a cab. When you get to the airport, your box may not fit in the X-ray machine (mine didn't, at 70 cm tall or so) -- in which case you will have to unpack the whole thing for a hand-search. You will have to recheck bags -- possibly lugging them to a different terminal -- before crossing the Pacific. Once you get to the other end, expect your derauiler to be out of alignment and for the whole thing to be in general need of a tune-up. Oh, and youth hostels won't store things for you, so you'll have to lug that pedal wrench all over the island, and buy a new box when you ship out.

Much better is to hire a bicycle in Christchurch. I hired a touring bicycle from Hedley at "Natural High Cycling", and it was perfect for the job: triple chainring, dropped bars, solid racks, cycle computer, well-sized, and in excellent condition -- just as nice as my fancy bicycle at home. Not only is it far more convenient, and barely more expensive than bringing-along, but you will also be patronizing local business instead of tossing your money down the throat of United Airlines.

Hedley will also supply you with a multi-tool, so in fact you don't have to check any baggage at all. Very nice, since with at least three flights to get to Christchurch, along with the strong possibility of an overnight weather delay in the Winter, your luggage might get lost (mine did!)

To Camp or Not to Camp

I originally planned to do the tour with a tent and sleeping bag, staying in campgrounds. I pulled my gear for the first three days, and decided it was for the birds; I mailed it poste restante back to Christchurch.

There are three reasons I would recommend against doing New Zealand with a tent on your bicycle. The first is that the gear is very heavy; when I mailed it the total was 10 kilograms, and compared to others I met on the road I was travelling light. The days lugging the tent and bag were unpleasant. It seemed romantic at home planning, but on the road I felt less like a cowboy with his saddlebags and more like an ox under the lash. Once I dumped the gear -- leaving only a change of clothes -- my bicycle felt nimble and responsive, and hills were a challenge, not a grueling misery.

As you get to the alps, the riding gets very tough going. I met a German couple that looked as fit as string beans, and they were having a rough time. We were doing the same distances each day, and I'd arrive two hours before they did and watch them roll in while I had an early dinner. Many other camping cyclists who were less fit were planning to cover some of the passes by bus -- which seems a terrible shame, because these are the most beautiful parts.

The second is that you are not going to get to camp anywhere particularly nice for most of the trip. There is gorgeous camping all over New Zealand, but you have to hike out to it for at least an hour or two most of the time; what is available on your bicycle are the "official" campgrounds -- a patch of grass next to a bunch of campervans filled with people watching Sky television on their generators, or, a backyard behind a hostel. I don't doubt that there are some nice places to camp, but if you are thinking you'll pitch your tent in isolation from civilization on a majority of days, you will be disappointed.

The third is that you won't save very much. Campgrounds will charge between $6 and $12.50 (per person) for the night (personal experience.) On the other hand, there are hostels literally everywhere on South Island; they are clean, cosy and dry, and their prices range from $23 to $30, averaging out around $26. There is nothing sadder than watching a couple pitching a tent in the rain, but it is made picturesque when you're watching it from the porch with a cup of tea.

You might think to do "freedom camping" -- pitching a tent in an unobtrusive location for free. This is really not possible on most days. The population density is very low (excepting Christchurch, less than Maine or Colorado and about that of Kansas or Utah), but everything is either a national park, with strict rules, or fenced off for pasture. In many places, especially in the middle and East, there is not much cover and a tent would be seen for miles. I suppose you could camp on a farmer's land if you ask permission, but farmhouses are very far apart and ownership is hard to guess.

Hostels are, as I said, absolutely everywhere. If you're not travelling in the peak of the peak season (late December to mid-January), you will have no trouble getting a bed solo if you book the night before or, very often, before noon the day of. The only stretch without a hostel I rode is between Haast and Franz Josef; I stayed in a Bed & Breakfast which was expensive ($120), but very nice. Do not roll into town at four pm without a booking, because things do fill up.

If you're still set on camping, go for it; you have my great respect -- you can always change your mind and mail the stuff back after a few days; or mail it further along if you have a particularly nice spot you'd like to do.

Books

There are two essential books. One is Pedaller's Paradise, by Nigel, and the other is the Cycline guide, by Nigel and his German friend Dr. Thomas. These are all you need. Nigel's book doesn't have maps, but it has gradient cross-sections and a complete list of facilities on all the routes. The Cycline guide covers exactly the same rides, has less detail on facilities, and comes with maps -- which are very handy to have. You can get both online from amazon, and they're sold cheaply all over Christchurch (try the map store next to the downtown YHA.)

Neither guide gives phone numbers for the hostels to book. Either go on the internet when you check your e-mail, or stop by the "i-site", the tourist information centers, where they will give you the lists (and often have information about who has beds.) They are friendly and eager to help. The i-site numbers are all listed in Nigel's book.

These two guides will give you total freedom to "plan as you go." I can't praise them enough. There are some minor errors, but definitely nothing that will ruin your trip, and it's nice to feel like you're blazing a bit of a trail. There are two errors I'd remark on. One is that they claim hostels require you to bring your own sleeping bag or sheets -- I saw this only once, at the Unwin lodge in Mt. Cook, and everywhere else explicitly forbid the practice. Two is that Dr. Thomas puts little arrows on the maps to show uphills and downhills -- ignore them; they bear very little relation to reality, and can discourage you ("what's this hill? Dr. Thomassssss!")

Don't bother with the usual travel guides. They don't cover half the towns and villages you'll be staying in. There are two other cycling guides, one called "Cape Renga to Bluff" (not useful as it is a "one way" guide with few sidetrip options) and the Lonely Planet guide (apparently ripped off entirely from Nigel!)

Food and Drink

This is the place to save money instead of camping. There aren't really diners here; more restaurants, and you will pay upwards of $17 for a hamburger! Do what the Kiwis do -- go to the grocery store and prepare your own food. Every single place I stayed had magnificent kitchen facilities, fully stocked with pots, pans, dishes, cultery and knives.

Despite all the farms, the beef here is not American quality (although it's better than Britain.) This is not boutique farming country, this is industry, and the beef gets shipped off to your Los Angeles McDonald's. For that reason, beware of buying packaged or canned meats -- it very often tastes very bad to spoiled Yankee palates.

If you do eat out, go for the fish (even unsexy fish like cod.) Very often it's been pulled from a stream that morning and it tastes absolutely wonderful. Sadly, sushi is new here even in Christchurch and folks are unclear on the concept -- expect half the rolls to have meat and mayo!

Sunstroke

I found that the guides did not warn sufficiently of the dangers of sunstroke. The light down here is very intense, and the UV is particularly strong. It is very easy to give yourself sunstroke even on a cloudy day and thirst is not a good guide. If you wait until you get thirsty, it may be too late -- your body just doesn't know what's going on. Especially on your first few days, be very strict with yourself: start off the day by drinking two (2) liters of water, and be ruthless about draining and filling up your waterbottles at every tap. Two waterbottles will last you at a maximum of 30 kilometers.

If you do give yourself sunstroke, you'll feel nauseated and like you have a really bad hangover. The only solution is to drink lots of water, stay indoors in the shade, and rest. Don't try to "push through it"!

Unless you've been very very good about hydrating, do not end your day with a pint of beer at the pub. You will feel dizzy and sick. First, seek shade. Second, drink water (or tea if you're getting sick of it.) Then, and only then, have a drink.

Kiwi Culture

To the minor annoyance of the locals, New Zealand tourist officials have been excellent at convincing the world that everyone here is friendly and eager to please. After three weeks, I'd say Kiwis are "New England friendly" -- a bit guarded at first, but easy to warm up -- as opposed to Southern ("More hash browns, honey?") or California ("Let us share our spiritual journeys together") friendly. The culture here is British, so a heavy ladling of please and thank you will get you very far; on the other hand it does mean that if you need something that's against the "rules and regulations" it's very unlikely to happen.

Outside of the tourist towns -- where you'll spend most of your time -- you will find people to be extremely honest and very often trusting. Not once (even in tourist towns) did I encounter someone trying to scam me as a tourist. Relax. If you're in a jam not of your own making you will find help, and this is definitely not a place that will ignore someone in serious trouble. But I would say it's better to plan well, act sensible and be pleasantly surprised than to count on invariable help.

As for culture with a capital-C, there is nothing: the country is mostly younger than the American Civil War, and the Maori built in wood, so there are no historic things to see. There are no old churches or castles, and there's no theater, no opera, and no symphony, except in Christchurch. There is just the land, which is absolutely gorgeous, but it can get a bit oppressive, so bring a book (I suggest Jane Austen.) Culturally, I'd say it's a bit like going to, oh, Montana -- perhaps an amateur theatrical, or a government-sponsored chamber music concert on rare occasion, but nothing like, say, the Santa Fe opera. I found very little evidence of Maori culture, by the way -- just one Marae, for example, behind a fence and looking grotty.

Planning

Plan a few days ahead, but don't plan your whole trip. Remain flexible, and have that feeling of "blowing in to town" -- very nice and relaxing. Unloaded, you will find a 60 km day pretty easy, a 75 km day standard, and a 95 km day hard and long. Do not try to push beyond a hundred kilometers -- the last few ks on a 95 day are really not much fun.

There are two kinds of rest breaks: voluntary and involuntary. The goal is to take enough of the former that you don't need the latter. Time is on your side -- the sun won't set until nine pm! -- and never be in a rush. Every terrain has a natural speed, which can be anything between 6 and 25 kph; find it and stick to it.

Ignore every gradient that doesn't have a name ("Knight's Point", "Mt. Hercules".) The main factor is the wind, which can turn a 5% downgrade into a 5% upgrade, and do not plan to do 110 km because it happens to be a slight downhill according to Nigel's maps. Some days you will feel fit and energetic, others sluggish and slow, and it has little to do with terrain and everything to do with wind. If you cycle "clockwise" -- heading South-West from Christchurch -- you will find the winds on your side, but not always.

These numbers may sound a little crazy to you -- I used to average 18 mph on my rides in the Princeton area, which works out to 27 kph, and an 80 mile ride, which I survived a little worse for wear, is 129 km! But in addition to the terrain and the wind, both of which I've discussed, and the fact that even light loads of a few kilos will affect you, there are the New Zealand roads. Kiwis do not do "blacktop" -- the smooth surfaces you're used to in the States. Instead, the surface, even when paved (or "sealed", as they say), is rather rubbly and at times downright bumpy. After discussion with other cyclists, we ended up agreeing that it was the surface that cut our speed 10 kph or so -- i.e., under weather and terrain conditions that would allow us to go 25 kph in our native lands, we'd be stuck in New Zealand at 15.

Plan for rest days. I would strongly suggest taking one after the first four days of riding -- your body needs to heal after all that work, and you don't want to get sick. You cannot reap the benefits of all that training without giving your muscles time to heal! After that, take days when you want; if you roll into a town that's particularly pleasing, stay an extra night.

Equipment

Hedley will set you up just fine. What you need to fit are fenders (for the rain -- most of which you splash up from the ground.) If you go with a different rental, or bring your own, please be sensible and bring wide (but not too wide) smooth road tyres -- not mountain knobblies -- and dropped (not straight) handlebars.

In terms of clothing, Kiwis have a magical fabric: Merino wool. It is light, soft, and works wonderfully in the sun. Get a long sleeved t-shirt and longjohns, and you're set for riding. The solution to the sun is cover, not sunscreen. You can get all of this cheaply in Christchurch (indeed, at the Sydney airport) -- a good quality long-sleeved t-shirt ran me $60. Merino wool is amazing: it doesn't stink after a long day of sweating (hang it up to air), and doesn't soak up water in the rain. Merino socks are more comfy than cotton!

I think the rain here is overestimated. You do not need to spend $300 on wacky GoreTex raingear, as I saw plenty of people doing. I found merino wool just fine to wear in a light downpour -- you won't get chilly or cold, it holds its heat -- and brought a poncho ("rain cape") for heavier rain. Along with fenders, it's an excellent solution to keep you dry and happy at 15 kph, and you just don't want to be riding in heaver stuff.

Miscellaneous

Traffic can get heavy at times, and there are rarely shoudlers. Ride a foot and a half to the right of the white line. This is enough to convince drivers behind you to slow down, cross into the oncoming lane, and pass you -- and for the rare times they don't, you have extra room for emergencies. I got a lot of thumbs-up and "good onyer mate" toot-toots, and was never honked at in anger.

Psychologically, the first days can be hard. Bring your iPod (the one thing I missed -- music to psych yourself up in the morning, and to relax to at night), and steer clear of watching television (if you don't own one, like me, you will learn that it is an addictive depressant -- you will feel worse after watching it.) Go outside, and gaze at the views or the stars (Orion upside-down!), or have a cup of tea, or read a book.

Sandflies on the West Coast are horrible: their bites will keep you up night after night. The only solution is to cover up completely (which you should be doing anyway because of the sun.) Aloe Vera does nothing to soothe the bites longer than a few minutes, but Tiger Balm helps a little. Speaking of heavily-marketed hippie cures, I can attest that Bees Wax Lip Balm does nothing for your lips, and Lanolin does not heal sunburn any faster.

"Kiwi" (as an adjective or noun) is considered neither cutsey nor offensive, and it's a lot easier than saying "New Zealander."

There is no tipping in New Zealand -- none at all, and everyone's quite happy about it. Attempting to tip (even just twenty cents loose change on the table) will cause either confusion or offense. There is no coin smaller than 10 cents, and prices are rounded, so don't stick around waiting for your five cents back.

If you are buying a lot of equipment, go to the same place and let them know ahead of time -- you'll often be offered at 10-20% discount. If you rent your bike from Hedley, do your bicycle shopping at "Bicycle Business" and let them know -- they may cut you a 10% break as well. MacPac is a New Zealand camping brand, and -- I am told by the experienced -- is very good value for the money.

Get travel insurance. I went with Southern Cross, $150 for a month. It will cover $500 worth of travel delays -- very likely because you are flying in Northern Winter and it's easy to miss the last/only plane to New Zealand that day -- and medical, which can be expensive and will not be covered on your health plan unless you are very special or travelling for work.

I have tried to steer clear of specific advice on where to go and where to stay, because the fun is in making your own choices and discoveries. That said, I will suggest you spend a night at the Old Church Backpackers in Kakapotahi. It's a gorgeous hostel, Frank puts on a driftwood fire every night, there's no television, an excellent record collection, and folks are quiet and friendly. Kakapotahi is 6 km North of some serious weirdos in Pukekura; the number there is 03-755-4000 and when I was there it was $23 for a bunk, $56 for a private double.

You will remember more what happens off your bicycle. Get off at every lookout point and rest stop and soak in the scenery. Don't power through the day -- you will always have plenty of time. Amble along, take it easy. This is a vacation! For that reason, I would advise against going to New Zealand to "get fit" -- you will unavoidably, but if you are planning on it, you might push yourself to hard and find the last 20 ks a misery. The golden rule is don't kick your own ass; let New Zealand do it for you. And it will, in spades, but you will survive! Nobody had to heli-evacuate me, at least.

the apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg

The Fashions, the apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg, is now live on The Continental Review, Nicholas Manning's Paris-based journal of videopoetics. If you haven't been to TCR yet, you should: Nicholas has pulled together some amazing material from familiar gurus (Joshua Clover, Linh Dinh, Susanah Gardener) and voices new to me (Scott Glassman, Jean-Michel Espitallier.) It's like T.V., but awesome.



I'm very happy about how this turned out — I've been a bit of a Drama Queen with Nicholas, previously sending him a triptych, The Violence Apostrophes of Cate Blanchett to Thomas Jefferson, Joan of Arc to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Queen Boudica to Jacques Lacan, intercut with, indeed violence, footage from helmetcams taken recreationally by the American soldiers currently occupying Iraq.

I am about to hop, via a highly circuitous (Vancouver?) route to New Zealand, for a cycling-camping tour starting out of Christchurch. If you happen to be a New Zealand rhubarb reader on South Island, drop me a line at simon[at]kicp.uchicago.edu. I'll be heading South, West, and then to Christchurch via Arthur's Pass. (I will also be in Sydney for a ten hour layover 1 February.) If you are super-excited to follow the journey in a virtual fashion, "friend" me on facebook; I hope to post occasional updates there (and not on rhubarb, where everyone is super-serious poetry-only.)

After much debate, the book I will be carrying with me is Moby Dick (narrowing beating out A Voyage to Arcturus.)

We are not yet ready to release for absent magazine issue three. If you have sent us work and cannot wait until 28 February, we totally respect that; contact us at glas[at]freeshell.org to withdraw. We do have a lot of amazing material lined up, including translations and essays from St. Petersburg (Russia, C.I.S.), manifestos from San Francisco (California, U.S.S.R.), and work from red-blooded American states as well.

what blogs does rhubarb read?

My updated poetry-blog RSS file (OPML format) is available for download here (right-click "save as" if it does not download automatically.) I provided a brief RSS introduction last October. Updates this January include culling a few broken feeds, dropping a few blogs that have turned away from poetry matters, and adding a few that have caught my attention.

You can always subscribe solely to rhubarb here, but I encourage you to take the whole file. From John Latta's pretty photos and apostroph'd angers, to the New Criterion armavirumque's hilarious reactionaries, to Mark Wallace thinking again, to Nicholas Manning YouTubing the revolution, it's a heady dose of awesome.

If you've never used RSS before, it is quite a wonderful way to "get the news" from the more infrequently-updated blogs such as rhubarb — like a charming Liverpool urchin, your reader will pass along what new comes up. Statistics tell me that google Reader is the most popular, followed by bloglines, followed by client-side readers such as Shrook (for Mac OS X, which I use.)

To add the OPML file to google Reader, see here; to do so for bloglines, see here.

If you do go ahead and add this to your reader, you will probably be confronted with an avalanche of posts. I suggest "marking all as read" and starting anew — I find that on any given day I'm presented with about five new articles from the poetry blogosophere, which is very managable.

Timothy Liu : AND TO DUST THOU SHALT RETURN

(from Slope #24 [Winter 2007])

The field was finally sown.

The evening fallen.

Perhaps some sweetness in the air.

So he began to read.

His woman in the other room.

Adjacent to his solitude.

Neither in despair nor free to roam.

Caught as yet in the about-to-be.

It would take some time.

The book he held approximating field.

Of course the consequences.

Unseen mouths to feed.

As seasons changed from room to room.

Winter here. Spring over there.

It would take some time.

The woman he held.

Their emptiness already in full bloom.


*


Had you been so adept through a series of polished hoops?

All of your training amounting to this.

Countless titles and certificates affixed to a wall.

That sort of thing.

Halos you couldn't pass through now.

Working out salvation by the sweat of your furrowed brow.

The shape of your body afflicted with what it is.

What you were becoming all along.

Could regimens really keep the future at bay?

Suffering, death, etc.

All of the usual calamities that kept you employed.

Congress with whomever sought your care.

Now left benighted on pastures where you had once put out.


*


Who told thee thou wast naked? the story goes.

We had to begin somewhere.

Even in disbelief.

As the veil was rent in infant sleep never having known it.

I can feel it in my bones but I cannot see it.

A mother refusing to give suck.

If not this day if not her voice then even so.

Inhalation. Exhalation.

Was the body only messenger to the message?

This milk will cost you.

You ask the world for bread but are given stone.

Systole. Diastole. A Sisyphian stone.

With all the dead around you now coming into view.

Each with a stone not of their choosing.

Nor of their making.

The eternal journey from heart to mind less than three-feet long.

I relax my shoulders, my shoulders are relaxed.

I relax my liver, my liver is relaxed.

And so on.

With our tailbones anchored to the center of the earth.

@

If there were such a position to hold, Timothy would be the obvious choice, along with D.A. Powell, I think, for the Queen of Queer Response to elliptical poetry — a group largely dominated by heterosexual women. Where elliptical work tends towards a desire so abstracted as to be absorbed, like tea in a towel, back into language, the residue of these more aggressively sexual writers lies more on the surface.

All that said, the poem I've chosen from the series presented in Slope is perhaps — in contrast to others — squarely in the elliptical tradition of deferred desire. The series that presents the possibility of sex in this work is one of distance, space, "congress" — a sort of Shaker dance. When it comes to contact, space dissolves into estrangement: veils are "rent", "livers" relaxed. It's not that the poem is beyond desire — thinking of relaxing one's liver does generate a strange kind of sensation somewhere near sex — but that it does not come out, in the assertive Propertian style that D.A. Powell used so well, as a speech act.

I generally collapse double-spaced lines when I reprint things on rhubarb because it's one of the most over-used techniques to lend weight to the weightless. But here this languid white really does aid the poem, giving it a post-rock sense of droning time [*]: enough space to look around, look down at the invisible crotch, look back up and allow the poem to think further through.

What is most beautiful about Timothy's poem is the sense of coming-after that is never enunciated; a feeling, from the reader's point of view, that the speaker is so belated that he's the proverbial fish who doesn't know she's wet.

There's an old joke — I don't remember its origin — about a professor who taught a course on the fin de siècle. At the end of the last class, a student raises his hand and explains: things went wonderfully, we read a lot of beautiful material, but do you keep calling it a "fantasy echo."

In Timothy's long pauses one almost hears the fantasy echo one's self: systole. Diastole. Whether what we get are the echos, or the words that generate them, is an ambiguity of the poem. What is resounding, in an undriven fashion, is a kind of religious detritus, a theological catalog far past its prime. In the 21st Century, when one Wakes Early Sunday Morning it's more likely to encounter church if you stay home and read.


[*] Quite a bit like that that's playing on the Slope website. Readers should know I absolutely love this kind of music, and am going to an Explosions in the Sky concert in Chicago come April.

Julie Doxsee : Two Dears, Two Tours

(from January 2008's Unpleasant Event Schedule)

Dear Fountain

Your waterfront is so
like a day's supply of

satellite. You sonar my
wishes & molehill them. I find

a monocle on your cupid
& the smudge of a rubbed-

off antenna. I take
your stepladder all the way

to the middle where
algae sprouts in moon-

scapes to prevent showers
from splashing your sides. You

point up to the papers
waterfalling from

my coat & show them
the bends in your water.

@

It has been a long while since I've gone down into the online journals seeking rhubarb material. In general, I can be a bit triumphalist about the increasing importance of the online, relative to the print, venue. And so it's important to note that the real need we have in the poetry world is not better writers, but better editors. Excepting recent crush-list endorsements from Julia Allison, my guess is that the readership on rhubarb is interested mainly in the brute fact of selection, and less my own discussion.

Paging through the various online journal lists, one finds a great deal of what I'd call "third way" work — things neither "post-avant" or "School of Quietude", but something in between. The former shows in the syntactic devices and a trend towards prosey, sprung (if at all) rhythms — iambs appear no more frequently than a statistical noise — and the latter shows in a general shared belief in the universality of "story".

That's not the only way it could go, of course; there's a complementary third way, that one might imagine, of received forms and disjunctive content. But it's the first kind that holds sway, as in this piece, from the magazine Void, by Carolyn Srygley-Moore:

How many times have you been saved
from yourself as if evicted
out of a filthy all-night truckstop.
     Once and again.

It's not as if you lived inside
the perimeters of history, rather in its echo,
beaten about the eyes by an infinite
     pulsing of soundwaves.

Today my daughter brings me a blade of grass
she has believed into a flower
and I believe it. It will be ages until
     she is forced to be born.

The belief that "evicted from truck stop", or "charming daughter story", have some kind of universal valence, that they can be cited without explanation: these are (to me) the trademark failings of a certain kind of highly conservative writing, the same kind that provides a heft to epiphanic experience on a hillside and other long-emptied cultural touchstones. [*] Such moments, in a third way work like Carolyn's are then roughly merged with a sort of abstracted, imaginary, syntactical world [**] one associates with more radical work.

Faced with such material, it's heartening to see the kind of take-no-prisoners style of Julie here appearing in Unpleasant Event Schedule. What Julie can do that Carolyn can not is generate story "behind", instead of presenting it in asides throughout the work.

It's Julie's faith in the invocative power of lanugage — as opposed to story — that gives things a kinetic lunge; things "sonar", "splash", "point", "bend" in a way that allows what I would call the peculiar institution of the poem to create without reference. "Sonar" hooks in to all sorts of things: a physical ping from our memories of World War Two movies, a lyric assonance from the word in our (twitching) throats, a seeming strangeness of invisible radiation.

What it doesn't do is demand the sharing of any particular content. It's a kind of satellite poem itself, content to orbit somewhere above the daily life of language. It's a lift-off that the third way can not accomplish.


[*]. When was the last time you had an epiphany? I mean, seriously, not as part of the liturgical calender. I am guessing — just about as long ago as you read Portrait of the Artist. Can we all, as a culture, move on?

[**]. Meaning: the catachresis of living "inside" an echo creates a conflict with the more literal, spatial story of "inside a perimeter", leaving the image failed and reducing it to a linguistic moment — a standard and appealing device from the last, experimental forty years.

iowa poetry workshop walkout

File under awesome. Well placed rumormongers inform the rhubarb bureau (last heard from here) that poets at the now-appropriately acronymed Iowa Writer's Workshop have refused to sign up for workshops this semester. Protest centers around internet residuals a lack of classroom focus, and "student homogenization."

In other news: I picked up a copy of Goethe's Faust (Walter Arndt translation — more rhymes than the Princeton edition), am working on a new apostrophe (Robert Oppenheimer to Araki Yasusada), and am soon to find out if I will be in Tokyo or the California desert come September.

a journal bill of rights

We — Elisa, Joanna, Irwin and I — are wrapping up the selection and solicitation process for issue three of absent magazine. This is really going to be not only a tremendous issue but also a particularly innovative one.

There is still time to send us material; please read the guidelines for the specific way to do this. Acceptances and passes will be sent out 20 January. While you hastily ring the New Yorker to withdraw work to send to us, I wanted to lay out (below the fold) some thoughts I had on the moral aspects of publishing within the many overlapping communities we inhabit.


I am in an important set of ways an anarchist, but on the other hand I do believe in attempting, in a provisional sense, to make explicit the moral rules that underlie a community. Perhaps the best example of this online is wikipedia, which has, over the years, generated a number of acronyms — e.g., NPA, AGF, ISNOT — that, in explaining things allow also for their growth.

One thing should be clear: while by-and-large the journal world respects the spirit of the bill I elaborate below, the book-publishing world does not, and the major reason for that is the emergence of the pay-for-play contest.

1. authors have the right to be read

Authors who submit work in an acceptable fashion (broadly construed — follow the guidelines and perhaps read my previous remarks) have the right to expect to be read by those taking public responsibility for the editorial direction of the magazine. What that means is that if someone isn't listed on the masthead in an editorial capacity, they should not be in the position of rejecting or accepting your work.

My guess is that a large number of the "mid-list" magazines — the flotsam of Minor MFA-Program Review and no I'm not talking about yours — break this rule with alacrity. My list of backchannel (keep them coming, folks) on the massive pre-screening done by un-named "interns" grows year to year. I don't think a twenty-two year old is necessarily going to be a bad reader (the opposite may well be true), but it seems clear that a lot of interns are selected for reasons other than editorial acuity. If you are not willing to acknowledge an intern as exercising editorial judgement, you should not be asking them to do it sub rosa.

[Because of this, I should add, I would recommend against sending to a mid-list publication without having a personal connection to a name on the masthead. It's certainly possible to break the prescreening other ways, but I find the notion that I should have to — when there are, see below, many places that don't require it — either silly or insulting depending on how much I've had to drink.]

An additional guess is that a large number of publications on either side of the mid-list follow this rule well. Those of us who fly by night do this kind of work with the hope in part that we'll find new writers with only their work to recommend them; those with the clout to assemble a long list of "contributing editors" can farm it out.

In a sense, I have (in past years) formed a relatively good weightless, inertialess test mass. The places that published my work w