I was thinking about this recently:

Let's say I got in a time machine and went back to 1999. The economy is booming, the government has a surplus, and people take for granted that things are rosy and getting rosier. 1999 me supports Ralph Nader for president and accepts his notion that Bush and Gore are essentially the same person. Who you vote for doesn't really matter.

Let's say 2008 me was going to tell 1999 me about the nine years that were to follow. For the first time in over a hundred years, the person who wins the popular vote does not win the electoral vote, an electoral vote that is further won amid widespread accusations of voter fraud, and a recount that was stopped prematurely by a politically biased supreme court.

Then in 2001, less than a year after Bush takes office, terrorists fly airplanes into both the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Bush launches a "War on Terror," sending troops into Afghanistan, and then lies to the American public in order to invade Iraq, a country that has nothing to do with the attacks. We occupy Iraq and give rise to a morass of insurgency which we will still be neck deep in in 2008. The mastermind of the 2001 attack, a cartoonish Muslim fanatic, is still at large and releasing threatening videos, and his organization continues to commit terrorist acts all over the world, including bombings in London and Madrid.

Bush opens a detention center off Cuba where where prisoners can be held and tortured without due process or recourse to the tenants of the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention or habeas corpus. Prisoners are also held in secret prisons around the world that the government will not admit exists. A scandal emerges around torture and abuse of prisoners at a US-run prison in Iraq.

Meanwhile the deficit skyrockets to unheard of levels, and Bush implements disastrous policies in education and health care. Yet somehow, he wins again in 2004, banging the war-president drum, and again there are widespread accusations of voter fraud.

A hurricane hits New Orleans, and complete incompetence on the part of federal organizations, whose heads were appointed by Bush, leads to both the city flooding and to rescue efforts being catastrophic failures. The whole city is virtually wiped off the map.

Iraq wears on as Afghanistan starts falling apart. America loses all credibility on the world stage. Then, progressively greater economic deregulation and tax cuts pushed through by Bush and the Republican majority in Congress creates a housing bubble with extremely excessive speculation, which then leads to an unprecedented burst. The stock market plunges like never before, banks close left and right and even start being nationalized and suddenly people are talking about a second Great Depression.

Would 1999 me believe 2008 me? Would 1999 you have?

How did George W. Bush single-handedly turn the world into a bad science fiction novel?

Did I mention vote Obama?

From John Scalzi:

An author and former campaigner for John McCain says in the Baltimore Sun what actually does need to be said, out loud, in public:

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence… you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

I wonder if McCain is actually thinking about the consequences of what he’s doing at his campaign stops right now, and the unease it give the people who do think about consequences, both on the right and the left. I don’t want John McCain to win the election, but I also don’t want him to actually lose his soul, either.

When people start shouting "Kill Obama," as they have been at certain McCain/Palin rallies, you know something deeply troubling is going on, and McCain, a man whose integrity I once admired, doesn't seem willing to do anything about it.

One of the things that has had the lit blogosphere all abuzz is the Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl's remarks that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature," indicating that an American writer would not be getting the big prize this year. People are up in arms, saying that the Nobel Prize committee has "no clue" about American literature. However, to me the whole thing begs a larger question. Why do we care who wins a Nobel, anyway?

Over and over again, we hear the litany of great 20th century writers who never received the prize; Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, etc. The implication in this list is that the Nobel has to go to writers who really matter and when it doesn't it's some kind of great tragedy. Yet, looking back on the list of laureates past, does it really seem like the creme de la creme is always represented? Sure, you've got Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Mann, Eugene O'Neil and Gabrial Garcia Márquez. But you've also got dozens of names that even the extremely well-read will have never heard of, and also writers, such as Rudyard Kipling, whose star has long since fallen. There's even the occasional touch of the ridiculous, as with the award to Winston Churchill.

Why are we so hung up on awards? If you win one, you have it appended to your name; Jack Nicholson is now Academy Award-Winner Jack Nicholson. Likewise, José Saramago is really Nobel Laureate José Saramago, as if the award conferred some kind of divine rechristening like God changing the name of Abram. Yet, at the same time it's common to debate whether someone deserved an award, whether there were politics involved, whether the award-givers were trying to make some kind of statement. And when someone disagrees with an award, out comes the declamation "Awards are meaningless," to be widely agreed with by all within earshot.

Why do we care if the Nobel people don't understand our American literature? Most of America doesn't understand American literature at this point. Don't we have bigger things to worry about?

Spoiler alert: don't read this if you haven't watched the latest episode of Heroes.

Is it just me or has Heroes gotten really very bad? It's like the writers have no sense of character integrity or character development at all, and everyone is just slaves to a plot that barely makes sense. Which was a problem in season 2 that only seems to have gotten worse.

Problems:
So Syler's "hunger" is a product of his power and not of his psychosis? Doesn't that take away all of his character development, the whole point of his wanting to gather power so he could finally be special? Now he's just someone who would be a nice, normal guy if he wasn't inflicted with a sort of disease instead of a deeply damaged individual who lusts for power and recognition.

After everything Maya has been through, killing all those people, being manipulated by Syler, having him kill her brother, why does she now come off as a normal, stereotypical girl who seems to be around just to react in obvious ways to Mohinder's transformation? You'd think she'd have issues at this point with aggressive, super-powered individuals and not want to just jump in bed with them. You'd think she'd be a lot more freaked out and jumpy.

Mohinder's transformation is a direct and uninteresting retread of The Fly. Why?

So a bunch of scientists working for the Company created three super-powered identical twins and then split them up (why?) with random families and let them grow up without any supervision from the people who created them? Huh?

Why in the world would you have a man-sized vent in a prison cell?

Is it just me or did Molly not age at all in four years?

Wouldn't Adam have at least grown a beard after being in a coffin for several months?

The climatic fight seen in Costa Verde makes no sense at all. Peter and Syler are SO much more powerful than the three they're fighting it's ludicrous that they would even try to go head to head with them. Peter and Syler could have pinned them all up against the wall the moment they showed up. At the least it would have been very easy for Syler to pull his son away.

Also, is EVERYONE related to the Patrelli's now?

So now we have an injection that can give you super powers, as well as a magic desert paste that can make you see the future. These powers really aren't all that special are they?

"Totem" is a native American word, so why is it being used by an African mystic? In fact, the whole journey with your spirit animal thing is very native American and not very African at all. This is lazy writing.

And that's just off the top of my head. It's really getting to the point where I might not bother to watch this stupid show anymore.

So a couple of guys named Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter have created a new poetry Journal called Issue 1. It's nearly 4000 pages long and is available in PDF form here. It's been creating quite a stir among certain poetry circles lately, mostly because a quick survey of the contributors shows it to be possibly the most significant collection of poets ever assembled. With work ranging from the likes of William Shakespeare, my own 13th Great Grandfather Geof Chaucer, to Contemporary figures like Ron Silliman and Susan Howe, to less widely known but still enormously talented poets like Anny Ballardini, Amy King, and, um, yours truly.

Now, of course, none of us actually wrote any of the pieces attributed to us in the book, but frankly i kind of wish I had written my three contributions. "A Cat of Countries" (page 1248):

A cat of countries

The sympathy of darkness
Singleness
Beardless and eternal
A room of countries
Of progress
Reluctance and fun
Firing beside a cat
Like a considerable sweeping
Feeling love

"Whole as a passage" (page 2646):

Whole as a passage
Into a swept whisper a fascinating trader
   arrived
The passages mumbled
Those were whole
A rapid rib, cheap rib,
   useful rib of an impossible thieving
Was he impenetrable?
Let her stare
Should he have been silent?
From his difficult arm he hungered for
   one, having, from his throat demoralization
     waiting
That was the creek’s wilderness
Sorrow, you were
   not there, making like a head
Fascinating and enthralling
He would sooner
   be different,
Big and little
”I save brass,” he whispered
He was lived by a
   mutter
He was thinking of the ghastly lives
   of bailiffs, knocking silently beside reckless conceptions
Now the thievings filled in the breeze

And my favorite, and the one that sounds the most like me, "Changing news like intelligence" (page 3573):

Changing News Like Intelligence

To burn descending on an art
A person
His anodyne news

Beginning beside a tree
More minor than a beggar

Now, of course there are some people who think this is lame. Others who take issue, like Silliman who made some vague mention of legal action in his blog about it.

To such people, I say chill out. It's a nice piece of something. There's no damage to your reputation taking place here. Clearly the list of authors was gleaned in someway from Buffalo poetics/the kinds of magazines folks like us get printed in. And frankly, taking Rita Dove at one end, and myself at the other, of a spectrum of fame, none of us are all that well known to the point that anybody outside our little poetry world will care about this one way or another. Take it as a compliment and relax. This thing is the best piece of flarf I've ever come across and frankly, like Anny Ballardini said on the Buffalo list today, I wish I'd had the idea.

Happy Jewish New Year everybody!

Sculpture across the street from the Choral Synagogue in Moscow

In Kitai-Gorod in Moscow, we came across two sets of protesters, at either end of a long park. One set was made up almost entirely of middle-aged men from the Republic of Kalmykia, a subject of the Russian Federation on the Caspian Sea. They were only a small handful of people, handing out photocopied pamphlets and oppositionist newspapers, and generally protesting the Russian government, Putin's United Russia party, the invasion of Georgia and the general oppression of the people of Kalmykia.

Kalmykian protesters. There is one lonely police officer in the back, watching them. I don't know who the person next to him is.

The paper this man is holding up shows a picture of him being arrested for protesting.

One man in their group claimed to have been in Abkhazia during the invasion of Georgia, protesting the whole time. He said that Abkhasia is full of Russian tourists who go there and lie on the beach and completely ignore the protests that are going on and the politics all around them. He said you couldn't even buy a real newspaper in the area he was in, only tabloids, because that was all the Russian tourists wanted to buy.

1. Russia is cold, England is wet
2. There exists in this world such a thing as an Uzbek restaurant/sushi bar.
3. People in Moscow do not know how to drive, and do not care about personal safety or the safety of others while driving.
4. Hot borsch and hot tea will warm you up, no matter how cold it is outside or in a given room.
5. Do not try to mail things in Russia or to Russia.
6. Meat pies + cask ale = Crazy Delicious
7. Russia has the best metros, England has the best cabbies.
8. There's no place like home.

I'm back in New York! I have lots more blogging to do about my trip, but was too busy to do it at the time... stay tuned.