Not so fast

Recent developments over the weekend have thrown my fall plans into a tizzy, but now that the dust has settled (and official confirmation has been sent down from the deans), I can share that I won't be editing West Branch this fall.

Instead, I'll be interim editor in the spring. All is well, all is well: instead of three courses this fall, I'll have two; instead of one in spring, two. So if you were planning to send me work after August 15, please go right ahead and do it. We always contract on an either/or basis (your poem, "Child Drowned in Breast Milk" [thank you Meg; I have never forgotten that] will appear in either 60 or 61--that sort of thing). I'm editing #61. For #60, I'm fiction ed, as usual (but still read about 20% of the poems that come in).

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We have a car. With air conditioning. For two weeks. I arose at 5 AM yesterday to accompany Betsy to the Harrisburg airport and bring her car back to Lewisburg. She's in Minnesoh-ta. I'll pick her up the day after I turn in summer grades. She says we can go anywhere we like in the car. Baltimore? I asked. Uh-huh, she said. (I'm taking Randy out for a memorable meal as soon as my summer pay hits the checking account; he so deserves it.)

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Our campus e-mail system (Eudora) filters spam in a fairly efficient manner. Stock picks slip through, as well as the occasional line of gibberish: it looks like text lifted from several sources and spliced together. Something like, well, actually, here's one from the other day:

remember. When the panic began he and all his neighbors ran to the bridge in
search back to Alice's tea party to find a scene as mad as the chamber of
without question. If someone starts fumbling or asking questions I'll hit
details were blurred - something about fighting for food, and being

This got me to noticing the subject lines in the filtered spam (one has the option to check over the list of nabbed messages, in case a "real" person is trying to get through), and I found some quirky, energetic language that seems accidental or perhaps the result of mistranslation, but nevertheless got me copying a few into my notebook. Nothing yet has come of this, but I feel something beginning to gel. All you hip language poets out there are prolly way ahead of me on this; for the rest of us I say check it out.

Here are three examples of intriguing (to me) spam subject lines: internal tiebreaker, mope-eyed, and (my favorite) mutual wow.

I love that one. I think it's going to replace "happy ending" in my sexual vocabulary.