Meine Tochter Anna-Lena ist am 27.01.2003 in Lienz/Osttirol zur Welt gekommen. Sie war 52 cm lang und 3070 Gramm schwer. Zu ihren besonderen Merkmalen zählen mit Sicherheit ihre großen blauen Augen. Sie ist ein unkompliziertes Kind, das eigentlich im frühen Alter schon gewusst hat, wie man die Leute um den kleinen Finger wickeln kann.

Hier ist sie mittlerweile schon über 3 Jahre alt und das Foto entstand beim Abschlussfest des ersten Kindergartenjahres. Irgentwie macht sie den Eindruck, als wäre sie sehr scheu und verlegen, aber der Eindruck täuscht: sie hat es "Faustdick" hinter den Ohren. Von morgens bis abends ist sie ein Wirbelwind! Es kann oft ziemlich anstrengend mit ihr sein und: Sie ist mein größter Schatz !!!!!

"All the feminist movement needed to do was bring on someone who had the balls to do something about this glass ceiling business," said McGowan, who quickly closed the 23.5 percent gender wage gap by "making a few calls to the big boys upstairs."

...more at, you guessed it, The Onion. Via WomPo, the women's poetry listserv, which is well worth checking out itself.

Tralala, it's Buy Nothing Day! If you're in the US or Canada, that is; in other countries it's November 24. Buy Nothing Day was founded in 1992 to help us think about how we consume; it's no accident that it falls on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. There's a lot of potential for preachiness with something like this, so I reckon it's best to approach it in the spirit of having fun and raising awareness. Adbusters has some good ideas for stuff to do, as well as posters you can print out.

Adbusters also makes ads for BND every year, and then tries to get big networks to run them—with varying success. I like this one, which involves mittens (though the music, well, ...).

Lots of places will have skillshares and other events, so if you want to get involved, check your local weekly to see what's happening near you. And if taking your folks to the potluck at the anarchist bookstore sounds implausible, consider designating a surrogate Buy Nothing Day for yourself later in the week--that's what I'll likely end up doing.

For more info, consult Treehugger. Everybody now:

Oh stuff is handsome, stuff is charming
And stuff is pretty when it's new
But so much stuff is made of plastic
And unlike money, it will never go away even when it is no longer useful or appealing or lovely to view

Happily, there's a cure for such listlessness, and it even involves the mail. You can support the people of Burma by sending your panties to the SPDC! Dunno about you, but the image of hundreds of pairs of panties, lacy, frilly, variegated, winging their way through the postal system carefully packaged in envelopes and boxes, destined to freak out officials worldwide, just puts a smile on my face.

Andrew Buncombe writes in the Independent:

Activists seeking to pressure the Burmese regime are targeting the superstitions of its senior generals by asking for people around the world to send women's underwear to the junta.In what may be a first, campaigners based in Thailand have called for supporters to "post, deliver or fling" the underwear to their nearest Burmese embassy. They believe the senior members of the junta – some known to be deeply superstitious – could be made to believe they will lose their authority should they come into contact with the lingerie.

"The Burma military regime is not only brutal but very superstitious. They believe that contact with a woman's panties or sarong can rob them of their power," says the website of the Lanna Action for Burma group, based in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. The group says that Burmese embassies have already received underwear from people in Thailand, Australia, Singapore and the UK.

Lanna Action for Burma kicked off this campaign on October 16. You can find the nearest SPDC embassy here. Read more about ongoing protest efforts here. Happy panty-flinging!

...now let's all sign it again! To ensure that those hearings have the biggest possible impact, you can sign the new petition—and simultaneously have a message sent to your congressperson—to repeal the new rates. Also at freepress.net, you'll find an excellent essay by Peter Rothberg, reprinted from the ActNow blog at The Nation. We've got to stop this bad idea before it's too late and the pages of dead periodicals start fluttering from the backs of mail trucks like sad little elegies.

If supporting small journals isn't enough to convince you that this is an issue, remember that, if those journals go out of business—which many will surely do under the new rates—that means less mail volume and, as a result, fewer decent-paying post office jobs. Also, remember love notes. Subscriptions to Ranger Rick for 4th graders. The postcard your friend sent from vacation, where she couldn't remember your address so she just wrote the street but misspelled it, but it arrived in your mailbox anyway. The time you put stamps and an address label on a coconut and sent it to your friend—and it got there. Be warned! You know once you let TimeWarner make the rules, it's gonna cost fifty bucks to mail that coconut.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle, b. Manhattan a long time ago, currently living on the edge in the border city of Texarkana, TX, an accidental Texan and a self-defined southerner, author of one book, Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda), and one chapbook, After Happily Ever After (2River Chapbook Series). Her poems are anthologized and available online.

What are the materials you prefer for writing first drafts of poems?

A quiet mind, some other poet's essays or poems or letters from/to anyone, some words other than my own for a jump start; one of those cheap Mead notebooks—the kind with the mottled covers, preferably black and white although I've been known to use a purple one when feeling juicy; a Pilot P500 pen or, occasionally, a superfine P700. Is this helpful? I can't see how anyone could care about Mead notebooks.

We care, yes we do. What's one of your favorite poems that has appeared in any online journal in the last year, and why?

The web is forever, so I don't much keep up with the 'when' of publication, but I am always drawn to the work of certain poets, Jo McDougall (who, alas, doesn’t appear much online) and Lola Haskins, for their pith and concision and grace. These qualities are on display in Haskins's "Six Ways," and "Youth," and "Why Performers Wear Black," and "The Laws of Women", all of which appear in the Alsop Review, and in McDougall's "At Frog's Trailer Court" and "The Guest", both in Periheleon.

Any other favorite poets?

I am hopelessly in love with C D Wright, who is inimitable, although I keep trying to imitate her anyway. Her poem "Personals" tells it all without giving anything away—now that's a skill.

And Phil Dacey, for his absolute mastery of the sonnet, his humor, his wisdom and his rogue heart. "New York Postcard Sonnet #10" is one of my fave sonnets. I am also enamored of "Letter to his Daughter," for its sweet center, and "Form Rejection Letter," because it is wonderfully funny. All of these appear on http://www.philipdacey.com/poems.html.

It's been over a year since your work appeared in the first issue of Fringe. Looking back on the poems, do any new ideas about them occur to you?

In general, I keep worrying poems until they die of being overhandled. "First Labor" and "Third Labor" have not been so abused. These poems are part of a group of twelve, which I never completed—actually I got five written and lost my way in the mythological forest. This may not be the end of my labors, but they stand for now—although when I look at "Third," I can see…But no. That way lies madness.

As for "Small Gratitudes," this is what's become of it:

Small GratitudesThe morning sun troubles the back fence,

translates leaves to parchment on the hill. Winter
facts are black and white.

Our own gratitudes must include that and glaciers,

although they are thinning like a smile.
It could be worse. I'm grateful for the way it is:

a freeze first, then at last, a thaw.

As you can see above, I've jettisoned a great many metaphors to gain the core idea—gratitude for the cycles of death and rebirth. The poem was inspired by a death in the family, but it could have been any loss that requires live through and then living with. How does one integrate that absence into one's life? I wrote quite a long draft, then kept taking more and more away. The version in Fringe is somewhere in the last run-up to this past spring, when the poem revealed this (I hope) final form.

What would you say in a letter to the person you were when you wrote those poems?

Oh dear, I wouldn’t correspond with that person.

What prose work(s) have you enjoyed most in the last year?

I don’t know if "enjoyed" is the word, but Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem and Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn have engaged me in close reading again and Muldoon has, as usual, both amazed and tickled me—who knew you could be a pre-pre-post modernist? (And don’t give me away but Harry Potter is what I read for pleasure most recently.)

If anybody begrudges you a little HP, we'll take em down. Do you know any poems by heart? If so, describe how you came to know one of these, and tell us whether it's a favorite or a least-favorite.

The poems in AA Milne's When We were Very Young and Now We Are Six. I learned these by reading them to my boys when they were babies (in the Cretaceous period). I have those by heart still, and some Psalms (other than 23), and some Shakespeare (Hamlet’s speech, a sonnet or two, #18—the usual suspects), a bit of Yeats. But memorizing whole poems isn't my parlor trick; I'm much more likely to absorb and remember syntactical twists or forms or ideas.

Were you forced to memorize any of these in high school?

The Shakespeare, yes, the psalms by osmosis, the Yeats for love.

Is there any form or mode of writing that you haven’t tried recently but would like to try in the next year? What is it, and why?

I occasionally write essays, but I'm pretty much committed to poetry along the lines of my mother's ordinance, "You’ll do it 'til you get it right."

If you could conjure up the perfect snack to be enjoyed while working on poems, what would it be?

Coffee and the cigarettes which, alas, I gave up some 17 years ago (and miss to this day). There are actual foods that I love, but I think, when writing, the less et the better.

Are there any other questions about poetry that you have been longing to be asked?

The question I continually ask and hope someday to answer is how do I get to Rilke's "ten good lines." If I had the answer to that one, I'd be, as we say here, in high cotton.

*

This little survey is designed to wring all the juicy information there is to get out of our unwitting authors—ehr—I mean, this survey will allow writers revisit the work they published with Fringe a year (or more) ago. We've used extensive market research to come up with some other essential questions as well.

Watch for Wendy Taylor Carlisle's survey, containing good thoughts, favorite poems from other online journals, and a revision of one of her poems from Fringe 1. And if there's a question you feel we should add to the survey—something you've just got to know from our writers—tell us and maybe we'll add it.

The Husband Tries to Write to the Disappearing Wife.

On her blog, Jeannine says: "This is one of the few persona poems where I tried to write in a male voice, so it was a little risky for me."

I reckon it's good—potentially good for the poem, most def. good for the mind—to mess around with gender in this way. Seems like, now that the distinctions between genders are blurrier than ever, it should be easier for us to do. But having tried writing from the boys' side of things, I find it still does feel risky, or at least difficult. Brava!

The regularly scheduled programming of millions of Internet radio listeners will be temporarily interrupted tomorrow when tens of thousands of U.S. webcasters observe a national Day of Silence. Protesting the recent 300 percent royalty rate increase for online music webcasters, the aim of the industry wide daylong blackout is to raise awareness of the threat these new rates pose to the future of Internet radio and rally support for legislation pending in Congress."Webcasters of every size and from every corner of the country will stand united tomorrow to protest a very real and fast approaching threat to their livelihood,” said Jake Ward, a spokesperson for the SaveNetRadio Coalition. “With nearly a half million emails and phone calls from webcasters, listeners, and the artists they support sent to Congress in just the last two months, this national grassroots campaign has certainly captured the attention of lawmakers, but there is more to be done and time is running out....

Internet-only webcasters and broadcasters that simulcast online will alert their listeners that "silence" is what Internet radio may be reduced to after July 15th, the day on which 17 months' worth of retroactive royalty payments—at new, exceedingly high rates—are due to the SoundExchange collection organization, following a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision.

Grump! How many ways are there for big companies to steal entire markets from little ones? Write your congressperson and let em know how you feel. Today's the day to do it!

Foto's voor de persmap en sfeerbeelden tijdens de voorbereidingen van de European Youth Media Days (EYMD) in Brussel. Ik help mee met vanalles. Gisteren zorgde ik dus voor de foto's.
Meer info op: http://www.youthmediadays.eu/

Pics for the press file and some pics during the preparations of the European Youth Media Days (EMYD) in Brussels. I help with several things. Yeserday I took care of some pics.
More info: http://www.youthmediadays.eu/

Betty's a flight attendant who puts together a fabulous little podcast about flying the friendly skies. She's upbeat and frank, and great at capturing the strange, irresistible, sometimes gross details of the job (like the mysterious "water" that dripped on a couple of passengers for an entire flight. Only after they'd landed did the flight attendants realize that someone had put their two pet ferrets in the overhead bin.).

The background music is occasionally a tiny bit repetitive--but other than that, the show is well-made and entertaining, and it gives you that satisfying feeling of having just heard a good bit of gossip.

For those of you who like it analog, this new book by Kathleen Barry talks about the history of the profession from its ambiguous beginnings to the present. For more info on Femininity in Flight, and an interview with the author and with Betty, check this episode of the Diane Rehm show.

Some folks say we'll soon live in an online-only literary world, but we all know they are wrong. We need the dual forces of print and online. They're like Superwoman and Supergirl. Like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Like ketchup and mustard, whiskey and ginger ale, peas and honey.
I need both the leisurely, tactile pleasure of print journals and the quick fix of online journals that can deliver a hot new poem any time I want one. And I don't think I'm alone on this one.

So what's a gal or guy to do? Well, first, you might scrape together your spare change and renew a print journal subscription or two. Who knows--your puny little subscription could be the difference between life and death for a journal. Or you might sit down on your lunch break and write a letter. Perhaps if the P.O. got a bit more business, it would be less tempted to sell its soul to corporate America. And most importantly, sign on to the petition at Free Press, and let our friends at the P.O. know how you feel. The window for public comment was ridiculously small, but maybe it's not too late to raise a ruckus.

For about five months, I would go to the site and attempt to get a subscription, and every time I was too late. Even so, I loved the Sampler in theory. Finally, last fall, I hovered over my keyboard the minute subscriptions went on sale, and I got myself one. Every month for the past three months, a package of surprises--some great and some so-so--has arrived in my mailbox. Hooray! The good things have included: fabulous fabric swatches from Repro Depot; vintage button earrings from tomate d'epingles (I wear em all the time!); random new music. Not so hot: a preponderance of one-inch buttons. I mean, how many of those can one girl use (unless they're Fringe pins, of course!)? But overall, I love the Sampler.

The best way to get one, I think, is to barter. Get crafty and send them some samples (check their submission guidelines first!). It's like trading friendship bracelets in grade school, except the stuff you can make now is probably a lot hotter, and you get to trade with all kinds of folks. You get a one-month subscription when you send in a certain amount of stuff, and it's good incentive to pull out the sequins/ribbon/wood scraps/whatever.