Talking to my father last night, I learned he had just bought the new Billy Collins book. Now I have been known to occasionally indulge in some Billy Collins, and despite suggestions from certain quarters that he's a hack (which I'm not arguing against), I don't find anything particularly wrong with this indulgence. To my mind, it's like The Da Vinci Code. When I see someone walking down the street carrying the latest Dan Brown novel, I try not to be judgmental; it's a nice thriller, like watching an action movie. However, when that same person starts ranting to their friend about how wonderful the book was, and that they have to read it, it's the best book they've read in forever - then my snob persona kicks in, and they might as well have painted "I watch NASCAR while drinking Bud and listening to Britney Spears" on their back.

Now. I don't feel my Billy Collins reading has reached this level. I don't recall trying to foist him on others, or crowing about his preeminence among contemporary poets (Though my snob persona could be repressing these memories - correct me if I'm wrong here. I can handle it). But. I'm still feeling a little guilty, here, and I'm worried I'm cutting it a little close. I don't have the time or the inclination to really know my poetry, but if I'm going to read a little poetry, at least some of it should be quality. And flipping through the Norton isn't really that exciting. But I'm not entirely sure where else to go. So I'm asking for recommendations: rather than buy the latest Collins myself, what should I get? I'm thinking more recent, but I'd take other recomendations as well. Then, after all 3 of you have given your recomendations, I'll go get me some poetry. I can always read the Billy Collins when I'm home for Christmas.

UPDATE: Vic points out - form your answers before reading the comments. Eyes on your own paper, please.

1) Order the following Halloween parties in descending order of "Hoppingness." Explain your ranking. Be careful not to mistake mere drunkenness for "Hoppingness"

a) Math grad party, @ 9 on Friday
b) Undergrad volleyeball party @11 on Friday
c) Computational Biology grad party @ 8 on Saturday
d) Weird Undergradish/friends of a recent graduate party @ 9 on Saturday
e) The same weird mix party @ 11:30, after everyone has danced down State Street playing Grandmaster Flash's White Lines from a boombox.
f) German grad student party @ 12:30 on Saturday

2) Sitting in your local indie-seeming-but-really-a-chain-coffee-shop, you hear the word "petticoats" in the lyrics to the CD the staff is playing. Using only this information, to the nearest 5%, estimate the odds that they were playing the Decemberists. How do the odds change if you also consider that the song contained what sounded like an accordian, and changed from 2/2 to 3/4 halfway through?

3) (Extra Credit) Speaking of song lyrics, True or False: finding the lyric "I don't want a second chance/ to turn my stuttering reluctance into romance" deeply touching and compelling is a sign of regression to high school levels of self-absorption and mawkishness. Do the actual lyrics have anything to do with your answer?

The topology seminar speaker just now gave a wonderful talk that hinted at some complicated stuff, but that was extremely easy to follow. Afterwards a guy in the year behind me asks me, "So, was that talk too accessible?" He's grown so used to the usual dense, dry, awful presentations that listening to a good one seemed wrong somehow. Sigh.

After spending the first half of the semester slowly hacking my way through John Barth's bizarre Giles Goat-Boy, which I finally finished last weekend, I whipped through the Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness in two nights this week and am now a chunk of the way into Housekeeping. Reading had been slow, usual amount of studying, more being social than usual, and a healthy dose of "I'm just not that into this," so the sudden spurt has felt nice. Some thoughts:

GGB was the 4th book by Barth I've read, or at least read part of, and I don't think I'll pick up another. I don't know what to say about GGB it's a weird combination of a cold-war/academic satire, with some man-on-goat action thrown in for good measure (because our referer spam wasn't weird enough already). But for the cold war feel you can read Gravity's Rainbow, for academia stick with Pale Fire, and now Albee's taken away the goat angle. The Sot-Weed Factor was better, and I remember really liking The Dunyazadiad, the first third Chimera, named for Scheherazade's sister. Remember the student written version of Arabian nights Ziba was in for UT? It was the inspiration for that, largely. But none excited me that much, so I'm ready to chalk Barth up as another one of those writers who were influential but don't really do anything for me - Delillo, anyone?

I enjoyed the Le Guin much more - "What if there was a race that were completely asexual except for a few days a month? And what if they lived on an ice planet?" summarizes it pretty well. I can't quite decide whether it didn't explore these questions well enough, or whether it touched on them nicely, getting you to think about it without sounding like a policy wonk.

It feels a little weird to comment about a book I'm only halfway through, but two things to say about Housekeeping. First, I really like the cover picture, but I'm kind of worried about it. My first thought is that whoever designed the cover read the first 10 pages, sees that the narrator's grandfather dies when a train flies off such a bridge, and never picked the book up again. But the bridge has been mentioned once or twice since than, and so I'm also a little worried that the bridge is going to become a major focal image for the story, which for some reason I feel would be cheap. The more important point, however. I generally don't pay much attention to typographical niceties - I like to get lost in the story, and not surface until the end, when I probably won't even remember half the character's names, more or less some detail about the font. But it jumped out at me that the book uses two different kinds of indentations - little ones just to break apart your average paragraphs, and bigger ones, in addition to a blank line, to show larger jumps. You can see for yourself here. Is this common? Also, that line setting off the author/title on the top of each page from the text? That line sucks.

So someone has to recognize...

Seen on the Wrigley Field message board: "Congratulations Chicago White Sox".

Awesome.

I didn't know how to celebrate here in Wisconin. I had a big midterm today so I couldn't get wasted and burn anything. If I was at home I would have shot off a gun in the street. It was too late to go get a gun here, plus that would have been a little out of place. I'm glad to hear there wasn't any rioting in Chicago. We may have the smokiest bars, but at least we're classy when it comes to sports. What did you guys do? Did anyone go to The Cove? I would have loved to see what happened there after the win. I'll bet someone had a heart attack.

I've been looking for a picture of the expression on George Bush Sr.'s face after that last out but I can't find one yet. I hope everyone saw it. For some reason I think it's truly hilarious to think that the White Sox could induce such a reaction of surprise and disappointment in a former president. So great. I can't wait to run into a Cubs fan. Never again can the superiority of the Sox be disputed, for that would require the Cubs to win something important. I may have bombed this midterm because I watched the game instead of studying, but I think overall the quality of my life is so much better now it doesn't even matter.

One would think that a bunch of good young artists covering possibly my favorite album of all time would be really exciting. But somehow, I still shiver when I hear virtually any Beatles cover. Not even Tatu's cover of The Smiths' "How soon is now", or Britney's cover of "Satisfaction" inspires this kind of reaction.

Objectively, I think that if I heard any of the songs off This Bird Has Flown, I'd probably like them a lot. But I can't listen to this album. What a strange block.

You can stream four of the songs here.

I just wanted to point out that the recent New Yorker has an article on almost the exact field that I am working in. Aside from describing it by a term I've never heard of before, using an extremely strained analogy and generalization in the introduction, and implying that controversy or difference of opinions exists where it really doesn't, the article is a fairly eloquent and accurate description of the field.

Unfortunately, it's not online, so this is only relevant for those of you that have the print edition.

Edit: Of course it's online, you idiot.

I haven't done another music post yet, so it's probably time.

I saw Gogol Bordello last weekend. A few minutes before they came on, I ran into a guy that I'd met in Italy, who strongly recommended earplugs. Laughing at this suggestion was perhaps rather silly in retrospect, since 48 hours later, my ears still felt like they were in a vice.

They describe themselves as gypsy punk, which is probably accurate enough, but to me it just sounds like a parody of Russian punk music. Maybe I have everything out of order again, and Eastern Europe is just now getting into decent punk. In any case, they clearly have a lot of fun with the ridiculous lyrics and occasional throwbacks. They make full use of a violin and an accordion, which I've discovered is a pretty good litmus test for how much I like a rock band.

The best thing they did: The girl threw the bass drum into the crowd and proceeded to surf on it while playing it. Maybe it's standard procedure, but it's the first time I'd seen it. I laughed for a solid 5 minutes.

The worst thing they did: The lead took a violin and played his guitar with it. Why do people insist on doing this? When Hendrix did this, it was new and cool. It is no longer new. It doesn't look cool. It sounds absolutely terrrible. Why bother?

Immigrant Punk

Start Wearing Purple

As always, for sampling purposes only. Hey, I actually own this album. You should too.

Link: http://sports.espn.go.com/wnba/news/story?id=2204322

So today, in case you've been living under a rock, or just plain old don't care about sports for some reason, reigning, multiple league MVP, multiple gold medal winner, and multiple WNBA champion, Sheryl Swoopes became the most famous openly gay team athlete in the world.

Swoopes, who has been with her partner for 8 years, is amongst other things, one of the only female players who can dunk a basketball, and I believe the only one who's done it in a game. While she's not the first athlete, American athlete, or even WNBA player to come out, she's easilly the one with the most star power, earning potential, and success. Other players had a lot less to lose (or gain?) with their announcements, at least financially.

While this is all well and good, my question on the subject is basically why is it taking so long? Not that I'm not sure that Ms. Swoopes has plenty of good reasons for taking until now to make her announcement, though I am puzzled by how she was able to date someone monogomously for 8 years without it having hit tabloids of all types. In fact my question doesn't even have to do with her at all.

Why is it that, to my knowledge, ZERO active male American team sport players are openly gay? ZERO. There have been a couple of players who have "outed" themselves, but they have done so in the process of retiring.

Is it money? Fear? I'd assume that say, a baseball player who came out would get a few looks around the locker room, but would also get totally ridiculous endorsements. For certain players, even though the minimum and average salary in MLB is quite high, I'm sure such endorsements would be over their salary as a player. I think that though it would take some time for their team, their city, their sport, to get over it, they would, and that the world would basically be a better place for it.

Link: http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-smoke25.html#

For our own Chicago brand of terminal-illness-peddling, I thought I'd post this article brought to my attention by Beni. Can anyone think of a place smokier than Jimmy's? If so, it probably isn't in the city of Chicago, as the article below proves. The best part is the "hazardous" rating, "the EPA's worst category that's rarely seen these days except in the event of forest fires or volcanic eruptions."

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-smoke25.html#