Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark with Sugar

Today I was going to work in the garden, take an extra long walk with my dog, and start doing yoga. Uh, but I started watching the Cardinals-Red Sox game, which ended up being a really great game, 13 innings, and so while I vegged out for hours, I did manage to finish, in between innings and such, Brenda Shaughnessy’s book of poems, Human Dark with Sugar, published just this year, actually.



You can tell, as you read along, that Shaughnessy has a high-powered intellect, something I usually like in women writers. Honest. This was all pretty much confessional poetry, Shaughnessy spilling her guts all over the place in twisty, quirky language. But the thing about confessional poetry is, if you find the poet appealing in some way, it can be terrific. If not, it’s like being stuck on a Greyhound bus with an over-bearing pain in the ass on a three-day trip across Canada.

Being sexy is so important to humans, it’s repulsive
but what’s not to love? The way you pay in warm
soft cash, erasing cigarettes so cooly. Plus you’re so big.

I warned you people, never sleep with the one you love.
Sleep with the others, make ‘em want you,
and you’ll love ‘em soon enough. Just use the body.

These words are spoken by a dying moth on the windowsill. (In, um, “Moth Death on the Windowsill”)



Brenda Shaughnessy

A lot of her poems, maybe most, are written to some lover, husband, or other poor shnook (one of whom she makes a rather large point of having cheated on):

As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,

when it would be truer to say nothing.
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.

But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.

To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.

This is just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.

--from “One Love Story, Eight Takes”

She’s clever. While there’s a lot of decent writing in these poems, much of it comes off like what happens after a Phi Beta Kappa says, “Let’s talk about our relationship.”

Orbital Sciences to resupply the International Space Station with launches from Virginia

Orbital Sciences, a Northern Virginia company (I own no stock--wish I’d bought it in 2002...), is making Virginia a key player in the space program. Built in Virginia, the company’s Taurus II Medium-Lift Launch Vehicle (um,rocket) while lift its Cygnus Maneuvering Spacecraft into orbit from the MId-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, perhaps as soon as 2010, the year the shuttle program will end.

The NASA facility on Wallops Island is just across a little inlet from Chincoteague, off Rte. 13 on the Eastern Shore. The beach you see behind the rocket (which is an illustration) is not Chincoteague, but south of it.



Over 15,000 rockets have been launched from Wallops since 1945, but until the state of Virginia agreed to fund necesssary improvements, the launch of larger rockets was not feasible.

In the illustration below, the Cygnus Maneuvering Spacecraft, carrying one of the Interchangeable Cargo Modules, approaches the international space station.



The company plans to be launching 4 to 6 of the Taurus II rockets a year from Wallops, including commercial satellites as well as theh NASA flights.

None of this involves manned missions, though. NASA is returning to the space module concept--using a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) called Orion, to be launched by the Ares I rocket--for probable lunar missions, perhaps around 2015. Probably won't be launching from Virginia....

Orbital Sciences to develop space station cargo ship (space.newscientist.com, 2/20/2008)

Orbital Sciences adds 125 jobs in Virginia (Washington Business Journal, 6/9/2008)

Deal for resupply rockets seen as chance for Wallops Island site to take off (The Virginian-Pilot, 6/10/2008)

Papoon for President! He's still not insane!

From the Firesign Theatre:

Republican propaganda website endorses Papoon

Infamous Republican propaganda website www.talonnews.com, which
used to employ Republican closeted gay prostitute Jim Gannon as
a journalist and send him to White House press conferences to
pitch softballs at Scott McLellan, has endorsed George G. Papoon
for President!



http://www.talonnews.com/news/2008/june/0609_papoon_blasts_off.shtml

The character of George Papoon originated on the Firesign Theatre’s 1972 "Not Insane or Anything You Want To" album, and also appears on the 2002 “Papoon for President” CD, which is available at:

http://laughstore.stores.yahoo.net/firtheatpapf.html

There’s a sample from Not Insane! at http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/album.php?album=pfp and the CD is available at:

http://laughstore.stores.yahoo.net/firtheatnoti.html

Daniel H. Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need

Started another computer class tonight and then dozed off early, so now I'm up at 4:38 a.m., listening to Coast to Coast Am....

Earlier, I read Daniel H. Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, which is out this year.



It's sort of a 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in manga form, and as such was a bit of fun, but again, like most of these things, not exactly novel in its advice. All of these self-help books feed off each other, often explicitly. For instance, at one point, Pink mentions Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, whose book Flow I recently blogged about.



It's not every psychologist who appears as a cartoon in a manga, but as you can see above, there's Csíkszentmihályi!

Anyway, Bunko is a young (looks about 13, actually) accountant who is one because his father told him to have a plan, go into a field where there are plenty of jobs, like accounting. Only Bunko really wants to be something else, art, etc.... He's very unhappy, and a cute young sort-of genie appears when he opens some magic chopsticks. Her first advice: 1. There is no plan. Eventually, there are six lessons:



Along the way, there are some thoughtful little gems:







Makes sense to me, but probably, if you're going to shell out some bucks for a career book, you need some more specific help--for instance, on interviewing--than what you get here.

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Blackwater Buys Bombers

Here’s something disturbing: Blackwater USA, the right-wing Christian mercenary company that Bush-Cheney have employed in Iraq has taken to buying bombers from Brazil. This showed up in my morning paper today, but actually, it’s not news at all. Military related blogs were reporting on this last summer.



The planes they are buying are no great shakes. They look like P-51s, like the old Flying Tigers. In fact, these Super Tucanos are propeller craft. But they are bombers, and even though Blackwater has already been using armed helicopters in Iraq, somehow this strikes me as carrying the right to bear arms a bit too far.

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Tonight on CNN.com I came across a story about how Peter Gabriel was involved with this company that had created some software for your iTunes called The Filter. It creates playlists from your iTunes songs along the lines of, if you like this, you’ll like this. I dunno. Maybe I’d download it if I weren’t down to less than 2 GBs on my hard drive. I sort of create my own playlists, but...

Anyway, this led me to a pretty cool blog called Bruce Eisner’s Vision Thing. Eisner talked a bit about The Filter.

Now, Eisner started out writing for underground papers back in the day, later for High Times and Omni. Later, IFYBW (if you believe Wikipedia), he was a leader of Linkage, a group that “brought Albert Hofmann to UC Santa Cruz in 1977 for his first public lecture in the US at a conference called "LSD: A Generation Later." The conference was attended by both counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary Ph.D, Alan Ginsberg, Ram Dass,” and others.

So I surfed on to another Eisner blog in which he posted a video from a 1996 episode of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Originally, Timothy Leary had been scheduled to appear. He was dying. If you recall, Leary treated his death as a sort of Happening. But, as happens with the dying, he had a bad day and couldn’t make it. Among those who did were Robert Anton Wilson, the lovely former Mama Michelle Philips, and Bob Guccione, Jr., and they talked about Leary. One delightful highlight came from Wilson:

Well, technically he went to prison for one joint of marijuana, fow which he got 37 years--a very strange penalty, considering it was six months in those day. The judge, on sentencing him, said his ideas were a danger to society, which is why the Swiss government gave him asylum after he climbed over the wall....They gave him the Leary Interpersonal Diagnostic Test, which he had designed back at Stanford. It’s a test to measure 64,000 personalities, and he answered all the questions so that he came out as docile, easily led, looking for leadership, so they put him in a minimum security prison, and he climbed a rope and went to Switzerland.

--Robert Anton Wilson, on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher



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