Caption Contest #54

What? Already? Well, yes, it is time for the last monthly round of the Caption Contest for the year. After this, all we have is the Caption Contest Throwdown: the semi-finals, the finals, and then the Caption Off when we get down to the final two. As always, our Judge extraordinaire for the monthly contest is Jacob. If you are new to The Muse and, therefore, new to this contest, the winner of the monthly contest gets bragging rights, entry into the Year-End Caption Contest Throwdown (which has a $100 grand prize), and may or may not receive a monetary prize (usually a $25 gift certificate). The award of a monetary prize for the monthly caption contests is decided before each round of the contest opens. You know, another level of surprise. Previous End of the Year Overall Contest Winners (Aaron, RJ, Stacey, and Luke) can play, but if they win one of the monthly contests, they will not receive entry into the End of Year Throwdown (though they can win the $25 gift certificate if it is one of the monthly prizes).

So far for the year, our winners include:

#45 : Shann Palmer

#46 : Aaron Smith

#47: Aaron Baker

#48 : Ivy Alvarez

#49 : Steven Schroeder

#50 : Collin Kelley

#51 : Charles Jensen

#52 : Ivy Alvarez

#53 : Benjamin Scott Grossberg


Which of you will join Shann, Aaron Baker, Ivy, Steve, Collin, Charles, and Benjamin to compete in the Year End Caption Contest Throwdown? Aaron Smith, as our first Cycle overall champion, cannot be part of the Year End Throwdown as a contestant. And of course, should one of this year's winners win more than one monthly contest (like Ivy has already!), they would have an advantage in the Year End Contest. And the photo? It is none other than this one:




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For captions to be counted as an entry, leave them in the comments section below, and let the games begin... You can enter as many times as you wish. Jacob's decision is final. And, remember, your entry must be left as a comment below to be counted. Email or Facebook doesn't count. So, go ahead, enter.


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A Brick

"A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy."

(via the NYT)


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"Dundee-based historian Dr Norman Watson, in a book, Poet McGonagall: The Biography of William McGonagall, says that the "Bard of the Silv'ry Tay", may have had Asperger's Syndrome, a disorder on the autistic spectrum.

Dr Watson cites as evidence the poet's indifference to public humiliation -- he spent much of his career being pelted with flour, fish and eggs at public readings and on one occasion was knocked out by a brick -- and "an astonishing repetition of phrases" in his doggerel."

(via the Telegraph)


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Over the next two days, I need to get my 2nd pass galleys proofed a few more times. I guess I know what I will be doing at lunch, if I get lunch today.


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Because November will involve traveling, and because December is often difficult, Jacob and I have decided to do the Year End Caption Contest Throwdown in late October. So, the final monthly caption contest for the year will be soon, very soon, and then in October we will move on to semi-finals and then finals.


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Clue: Integration


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The Ordinary Bewitches Him

“Human Chain” is far from Heaney’s best book — the short and short-winded sequences rarely smolder like a peat bog afire underground. He’s still good at the character sketches from the Irish hinterlands, the deft evocations of common objects (the evidence of the ordinary bewitches him), the elegies and funerals that increasingly have dominated his work. Troubled by the losses memory is heir to, most moving on his father’s decline and death, the poems are evocations of a life now past.

Heaney still has the great virtue of never saying too much, of letting the poem do so much work and no more. He can make buying a copy of Book VI of the “Aeneid,” that sturdy companion of young Latin scholars, as haunting as the visit to the Underworld within. For a poet of such ambition, Heaney has long given modesty a good name."

(William Logan reviews Heaney's latest book, via the NYTBR)


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"Extravagant promises and bluster are the stuff of campaign rhetoric, but the House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” goes far beyond the norm.

Its breathless mimicry of the Declaration of Independence — the “governed do not consent,” it declares, while vowing to rein in “an arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites” — would be ludicrous, if these were not destructively polarized times."

(via the NYT)


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"The phenomenon of adults reading literature targeted toward younger readers is nothing new, Nel said. He pointed to Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which were read by both children and adults when the books were published in the late 19th century.

"Adults will read a book even if it's boring after the first 50 pages if the reviews say it's a good book. I don't think children will. I don't think they should either," Nel said.

Nel said this demanding characteristic of younger readers helps authors create some of the appealing qualities of young adult and children's literature: attention to narrative, a powerful story, a sense of wonder, efficient story-telling and developed and credible characters."

(via Sify news)


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Clue: "Poppin' bottles in the ice..."


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One Long Epic

"Bernard Sauvet and Roman Morris, budding poets, are enrolled in a seminar taught by Miranda Sturgis, the school’s “brightest star.” At 31 — slightly older than his classmates — Bernard couldn’t care less about publishing his poems, applying for fellowships, winning prizes or finding a teaching job. To him poetry is a religious calling; he will devote his life to writing and rewriting one long epic. Roman, however, craves a more worldly recognition of his gifts. Vigilantly, he submits his verse to literary magazines and keeps meticulous files, noting that “strategy was said not to matter, only talent; and yet strategy must matter.”

(Lan Samantha Chang's latest novel reviewed by Brenda Wineapple, via the NYT)


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"LAGOS, Nigeria, Sept. 25 (UPI) -- Renowned Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has founded a political party, months before the presidential election, the BBC reported.

Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African to do so, was elected chairman of the Democratic Front for a People's Federation in Lagos, the British Broadcasting Corp. said."

(via the UPI)


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Clue: Flabbergasted


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Blood on Its Hands

"Christianity could use more humility. Their religion has blood on its hands. It’s a poorly thought-through tribal fairytale filled with empty, comforting words for its followers, and hate and death for its enemies. That said, I don’t object to Christians exercising their freedom of religion; that’s what this country is all about. That freedom, however, extends to Islam—and to me also, who doesn’t care for any of the Abrahamic religions."

(Meakin Armstrong discusses NYC and Christianity, via Guernica)


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"For 18 years, Daniel Poliquin worked as an interpreter in the House of Commons. As politicians sparred in Canada’s two official languages, it was his job to ensure everyone understood one another, so that a conversation, however loud, could take place. Poliquin’s career as an interpreter, from which he retired in 2008, has much in common with his other job as one of the country’s foremost English-to-French translators. Just as unilingual politicians require an interpreter to understand one another, it is the job of literary translators to ensure that a conversation can occur between the country’s two literatures and their readers."

(Mark Medley, via the National Post)


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"Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

(Paul Krugman, via the NYT)


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Whacked

"When this weekend’s Wall Street Journal hits stands, those in publishing will be quickly flipping to the new stand-alone book review section, called Books, which appears in the paper’s revamped weekend edition, now named WSJ Weekend. Robert Messenger, the new editor for Books, talked with PW about what he plans on reviewing, the importance of keeping long-form book coverage intact, and how he’s not competing with the Times’s Book Review."

(via PW)


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"The Democrats ought to stand up and fight," Clinton said in an interview for Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital with Al Hunt," airing this weekend. "The Democrats have 30 days to sort of stand up, embrace the challenge, and offer a worthy alternative," he said. "If they lay down and let it be a referendum, our side is going to get whacked."

(Bill Clinton tells it like it is, via Bloomberg Businessweek)


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"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Hamilton College $800,000 in support of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), a research and teaching collaboration in which new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based research, scholarship and teaching, including curriculum development, across the liberal arts."

(via newswise)


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Clue: Junk shop


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Brazen

"Independent app developer Dante Varnado Moore today is pleased to announce the release and immediate availability of Poet’s Pad(TM) for the iPhone and iPod touch. Poet’s Pad is a professional poetry writing app that allows poets to create, arrange and store all of their writings and poems in one app. It includes a digital audio recorder for capturing vocal ideas for those who express their art via Spoken Word or Def Poetry. It also contains “powerful idea generating tools that are designed to inspire creative expression and eliminate writer’s block”

(via Appmodo)


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"Break out the Champagne and the deposit slips. The PEN American Center has announced the 14 winners of its annual literary awards. Don DeLillo won the $25,000 Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, while Paul Harding, who earlier this year received the Pulitzer for his novel “Tinkers,” won the $35,000 Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers."

(via NYT)


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Yes, I know I am silly here sometimes. Yes, I know that Ernie and Bert are puppets and, therefore, they are not a gay couple. Good God. People. A joke. Funny, ha ha. Just shoot me.








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"Alice Munro's latest collection of short stories includes themes that have long been present in her work - the complexities of family ties, the constraints of marriage and motherhood. But the older she gets, the more brazen her short fiction has become.

Stitched into these shocking stories of murder and infanticide are smaller acts of casual misogyny. Young women prove most at risk. In the semi-pornographic tale, "Wenlock Edge," a sophomoric student invited to dine with her roommate's elderly lover is forced to take off all her clothes, leaving only her "most flagrant part" hidden beneath the table."

(Emma Hagestadt discusses Munro, via The Independent)


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Clue: "Donger's here for five hours, and he's got somebody. I live here my whole life, and I'm like a disease."


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Important Degree

"Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page?," [Don] Delillo asks. "Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?"

(via the LA Times)


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"THIS is the 12th book of poems in about 50 years of writing by a great Northern Irish poet who is now in his eighth decade, and who recently recovered from a serious illness. Ageing and that brush with death have profoundly marked this new collection by Seamus Heaney. The change has stripped the poetry back to spare concentration on the small things of life—an old suit, the filling of a fountain pen, the hug that didn’t happen—which then open up to ever fuller significance, the more closely they are examined."

(via the Economist)


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I have now gone through the second pass at the galleys for my new book twice. I might feel comfortable enough sending it back after going through another 4 times or so. I proof it backward line by line. Sounds weird, but it is the only way I can proof it and not read it.


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Clue: Trick


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Deathly Hallows

I have a giant child in my house who is going to now be counting days until this is out:

The Really Important Stuff

TIME reports:

"Sesame Street has pulled a song parody featuring Katy Perry after parents complained about her low-cut ensemble.

In the song, Perry wears "dress-up clothes," which include a veil and a tight green dress, while singing a version of her song "Hot 'N Cold" with Elmo. Though there is a skin-toned mesh fabric covering her chest, Perry's cleavage is still very visible — and parents recoiled at the revealing outfit."

But here at The Muse, we decided to do our own investigative reporting: we sent out a reporter for on the ground coverage. Our own Charlie Linkletter spoke with various actors at Sesame Street:

CL: I spoke briefly with Grover. Grover, what happened?
Grover: Parents went crazy. Katy was amazing! AMAZING! on Sesame Street. Elmo really loved working with her.

Bert and Ernie walk up.

CL: Bert? Ernie? Could I have a few words with you?
Bert: Just a few.
CL: What can you tell us about this whole Katy Perry incident?
Bert: I just don't even know what to say!
Ernie: She was outrageous. Cleavage everywhere!
Bert: She seemed unclean.
Ernie: I mean, she just showed waaaaaay too much skin.
Bert: So true.
Ernie: Don't get me wrong, censors are awful. We have been dealing with them for years.
Bert: Years...
Ernie: But this, this was just ridiculous, all that boobage.
Bert: We have to run. We need to drop off our Jetta for service and run by Whole Foods.
Ernie: Yeah, we have a lot to do tonight before a dinner party we are hosting.
CL: Thanks Bert and Ernie.

So, there you have it.


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PBR and Skinny Jeans

"The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are proud to announce the winners of nine awards for contributions to Poetry over the past year. The prizes are awarded for poems and prose published during the past 12 months, from October 2009 to September 2010."

(Among the winners, Ron Silliman; via PF, hat tip to Whimsy Speaks)


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"Oprah Winfrey is truly a magician. She's a billionaire and yet she makes us feel like we are her best friend. And friends like to recommend each other books, right? So it's really no surprise that when Oprah tells us about her latest pick for Oprah's Book Club or when we see her seal on a book at a bookstore or library, we feel an undeniable urge to get a hold of the book and see what all the fuss is about."

(via Inside Beat)


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"What's fucked up is that I really like this," she said. "I know what you mean," I said. The song has the words of Tao Lin (which feel like they were cut and pasted from a gmail chat between two young, therapeutically educated people breaking up) over electronic beats, and the whole thing screams PBR and skinny jeans. But I like it - does that make me a hipster?"

(via LA Weekly)


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The second pass of the galleys for the new book have arrived. I can't help but feel really nervous whenever I get galleys. I am always afraid I am going to miss something. Galleys plus OCD equals joy and heartbreak in the same breath!


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Clue: Los Gigantes


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More Than a River in Egypt

Back when I was straight... Um, well, anyway... Back when I was straight, in college, I loved this song. No, I adored it. I played the cassette so many times on my Walkman that I destroyed it and had to buy it again. Hahahahahaha. Now when I listen to it, I still love it but hello? Oh my God. "Next time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin."




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Filthy and Innuendo-Laden

"Despite the fact that Ezra Pound wrote him off for his "asinine bigotry" and "the coarseness of his mentality", John Milton is usually celebrated as the politically radical, high-minded author of that great English epic Paradise Lost.

So Dr Jennifer Batt, an English lecturer at the University of Oxford, was somewhat surprised when she came across a filthy, innuendo-laden rhyme "by Milton" while reading a forgotten, early 18th-century poetic anthology."

(Charlotte Higgins, via the Guardian)


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"Grunge icon Courtney Love has at least one thing in common with any aspiring young writer: she really, really wants to get her short story published in The New Yorker.

And with her admission she joins ranks with Kanye West as one of the most surprising celebrities to be paired with the venerable high-brow magazine."

(via the Atlantic Wire)


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"Who is number one?" asks Blake Morrison in his Guardian Review essay on Jonathan Franzen. Morrison was recalling the poet John Berryman's question after the death of Robert Frost. Answer: (to Berryman's chagrin) Robert Lowell.

Morrison goes on to write that since the deaths of Bellow, Mailer and Updike, the "number one" question is one that "inevitably comes up in relation to American fiction."

(via the Guardian)


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Clue: Flip Flops


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Expectations and Surprises

"Someone left a nasty comment on gay rights blogger Joe.My.God's popular site. It read: "All faggots must die." Joe posted the IP address and asked readers to trace it.

Joe posted the IP address along with the fact that the ISP was "United States Senate," and it appeared to come from the Atlanta office of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia)."

(via gawker)


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"Female authors have taken five out of six slots on the shortlist for this year's Dylan Thomas prize, which is awarded to a writer under 30 in honour of the Welsh poet."

(Alison Flood, via the Guardian)


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First, we have this:

"Long frequently denounces homosexual behavior. A 2007 article in the Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine called him "one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement."

So, you know what is coming, right? We get this:

"Two Georgia men have filed a lawsuit claiming that prominent Atlanta, Georgia, pastor Eddie Long coerced them into sex.

The suits, filed Tuesday in DeKalb County, Georgia, allege that Long used his position as a spiritual authority and bishop to coerce young male members and employees of his New Birth Missionary Baptist Church into sex."

This kind of story is becoming too predictable. Homophobia in extremis seems to be a cover for closeted homosexulaity so often, it is no wonder straight men now, even if uncomfortable with gays, are not demonstrating homophobia!

(links to CNN)


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This is brave? Brave?

"It was a brave thing the committee did, choosing poetry for this year’s Common Book at the University of Washington.

Brave, that is, and enlightened.

The selection committee decided on poetry for the first time after four years of selecting prose for the annual Undergraduate Academic Affairs initiative. The Common Book "introduces freshmen to the college-level process of academic inquiry."

(via Crosscut)


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Clue: Solo


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Alpha through Zed

If you ever wondered about my childhood and why I am the way I am, look no further:

"N is for Neville who died of ennui"


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What We Think We Know

"With Congress increasingly paralyzed by the partisan fury of the midterm elections, the Senate on Tuesday voted against taking up a major military bill that includes a provision allowing the repeal of the "don’t ask, don’t tell policy" regarding gay soldiers.

Senate Republicans voted unanimously blocked debate of the bill — the huge, annual authorization of military programs — after the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said he would attach a number of the Democrats’ election-year priorities to it while also moving to limit the amendments offered by Republicans."

(David Herszhenhorn, via the NYT)


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"Because the better part of my poetic output has occurred late in life I have often contemplated its nature. Do I write for recognition? I don't despise it. I wish I did. But more and more I see that I write to transform myself, to understand my materials, my experiences, and to make something of them as a kind of gift to the gods. There are writers who dazzle us and there are writers who enlighten us and there are writers who enable us to live another day, and they're not always the same. And whenever we think we know something we're actually in grave danger, which is how I've come to think of American society-in grave danger because of what we think we know."

(Djelloul Marbrook, via newsblaze)


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""New Stories From the South: 2010: The Year's Best" is a riveting collection of short fiction that marks the 25th anniversary of the series showcasing the work of writers connected to the South.

Edited by author Amy Hempel, it offers a range of compelling voices, some from established writers such as Rick Bass and Elizabeth Spencer, but more often from lesser-known talents whose work appears in little magazines, reviews and periodicals."

(Kendal Weaver, via Courier Post)


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Clue: Mai Tai


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Indulgences

"7. Publish

Nowadays you don’t need a publisher unless you want one. You can publish your own work on sites like Amazon and indulge in your own publicity with a few press releases. The sky’s the limit - go for it!"

(Trevor Johnson relays the 7 Essential Steps to Writing Your First Novel, via Films and Books)


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"Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.

No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich."

(Paul Krugman, via the NYT)


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"A thief broke into my car. I used Craigslist, a dating site, MySpace and a fast food joint to track him down"

(via Salon)


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Clue: You can never win...


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