Though “scrobbling” sounds like something that can’t possibly be healthy, I’m doing it again. I hadn’t really considered when I bought my new computer that I finally had the computing power to manage my 35,000-song iTunes library and run other applications, so for months afterwards I didn’t bother with a number of applications that I once tried to use. My last go-round with Last.fm was last year, when I scrobbled a couple of weeks worth of music before realizing that the software was absolutely killing my machine’s performance.

So, if you’re my friend and you’re using Last.fm, go ahead and friend me, but be prepared to see some horrifying tunes come up in my playlist, which basically runs 24/7 on random. (Also be prepared to see the new Portishead album a couple of times. I’m really enjoying that.)  My username there, unsurprisingly, is rosswhite, because either I have no problem with leading a very public life or I am too lazy to come up with a cool username.

Next up, I’ll finally be playing Civilization IV. I’d play Sim City 4, but somewhere along the way, I lost disc 1.  (If you want to maybe burn me a copy of disc 1 of Sim City 4 for Windows, I would reciprocate with some music, which you may pick out by looking at my playlists.)

I think it’s well-documented that my vote in the upcoming presidential election will go to William Shatner.  Over on Twitter, @WilliamShatner brought up the notion that he should have his own meme, similar to the Chuck Norris jokes meme.  Users are responding.  Here are some of the best:

• William Shatner doesn’t overact; it’s the rest of the world that’s phoning it in.
• William Shatner doesn’t have an oversized ego. He has a bigger identity than yours.
• William Shatner knows singing to music is just a fad.

Oh, my stars and garters.  This could be the greatest meme ever.  Follow @WilliamShatner on Twitter.

Two attempts to reach Jeannine Hall Gailey through her web site have failed.  I can leave her a comment on a blog post, but the anal-retentive part of me hates it when the comment isn’t directly relevant to the entry it comments on.  Is that entirely batshit crazy?  But yeah, I can’t bring myself to use that forum for a personal message, or even a general, “Hey, please contact me, even though you don’t know me.”  Is writing this entry in my own blog, which of course carries the implicit message that if you know Jeannine you should e-mail me her e-mail address or direct her here that she may contact me directly, even more batshit crazy?

Other mild compulsions which I would like to overcome but cannot: I have to fold potato chip bags into a neat rectangle before I can throw them away.  If I’m at the top of the stairs and the cat is at the top of the stairs, I have to make him go down first.  I cannot write in books.

It’s Friday afternoon and I am feeling 100% snarky.  (Before you ask: no reason in particular.)

Somehow I just don’t think I’ll like my co-workers’ updates about conferences they attended any better when they’re in sonnet form: Arts conference speaker urges more poetry in the workplace

Thank God he was the only white male poet ever to experience body issues, lest we be bombarded with hundreds of poets by middle-aged men about their flaccid penises (oh, wait): Larkin: “I’m Ugly”

I don’t see what all the fuss is about since 99% of VQR submitters have never seen the magazine.  Hell, 99% of all submitters anywhere have never read the magazine: VQR apologizes for publishing reader comments on manuscripts

48% of poetry readers find poetry through television… which either means that I’m watching all the wrong television or the 9 people who admitted to reading poems for a University of Chicago survey don’t have 500 channels to choose from:  Survey takes a closer look at fans of verse

The part that doesn’t shock me is that Shel Silverstein’s verse is indistinguishable from that of a 10-year-old: KidsPost contest winners are plaigarists

After months of not hearing a single response to a single submission (I couldn’t even get responses to several queries for submissions that have been out for over a year– should I go ahead and assume they’re not taking the work?), I’ve had two responses in the last couple of weeks.  Both acceptances.

Rawk. I’m gonna send more stuff out.

Trent Reznor wins.  Nine Inch Nails, finally freed of its record contract, released a new album, The Slip, for free today, without DRM.  It was a classy move, and it’s potentially a very important one for digital rights and the future of music.  And here’s the best part - it’s good!  Go get it from nin.com.

I remember someone saying in a Warren Wilson class that the line has trouble sustaining itself upwards of sixteen syllables, which I found to be a curious observation at the time but which I have come to believe as fairly correct; if the line is representative of a unit of breath, one which can be subdivided with pause and caesura, the lungs get tighter and tighter after about sixteen syllables.

But not every syllable is equal; the tongue and brain have more work to do with “floral embroidered” than “I ate six whole eggs” for several reasons: the imagistic but not perfectly concrete nature, the concordance of sounds, the multi-syllabic words. Essentially, you might see most of the words in the latter in a five-year-old’s vocabulary, while the words in the former are more complex.

Most of my recent reading has involved long, long lines, either through whole poems (Lynda Hull’s Star Ledger, T.R. Hummer’s Walt Whitman in Hell) or interspersed with short lines in compact spaces (Christine Garren’s The Piercing), so I thought I would give long lines another whirl. Previous experiments with them had turned out poorly.

So, for today’s grind poem, I wrote in exceptionally long lines. Or, so I thought, but when I went back and did some counting, I found I was still nowhere near, say, C.K. Williams’s average line length.

But the lines were long for me, and I could feel them buckling even as they were being written. They look like prose on the page and I found myself fighting against a normative urge to make them sound like prose. Prose communicates meaning and, by and large, doesn’t care where the breath of the words occurs– I think that’s true for even most literary prose, which manages tone, diction, and syntax the way poems do but fails to compensate for the aural. I found myself wanting to resort to that convention in ways that I manage to avoid even working with prose poems– looking for the line break for so long, and denying it to myself, was uncomfortable and bizarre, which probably means that I should try it again, continue trying it until I can get it to click. But for now, I’ll simply say, “No sir, I don’t like it.”

I had cause to quote this poem today.  Dan Albergotti turned me on to it last weekend.  It is the first poem in Jack Gilbert’s first book.

In Dispraise Of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

–Jack Gilbert

I’ve had the horrible feeling this evening that my domain name is about to expire, at which point I’m reasonably sure it would snapped up by pornographers. Then there would be lascivious pictures and videos of a man purporting to be Ross White, but who would, in fact, not be named Ross White. It would all be a clever trick by the makers of the pornography.

If you consider this a far-fetched, futuristic fiction, consider the case of HeidiWhite.com, a domain I have tried to buy for my beautiful wife several times only to be foiled.

In 2001, it was operated by a blonde actress who looked like she had been turned into a clone of Brigitte Nielsen, circa 1992. And, be still my heart, this Heidi White wrote poems. link

In 2002, the clone was replaced by a normal-looking girl who, unable to come up with a new logo or back-story, used the clone’s back-story as her own. Her poems, however, became much shorter, though no less trite. link

On August 8, 2003, the clone captured the normal-looking Heidi White and resumed control of the web page. link

Presumably drugged with clone-altering substances, the clone let the domain, and perhaps her own body, fall in the hands of pornographers. Follow this link to the Wayback Machine, and click on any of the 2004 links. You’ll be presented with a “you must be 18 to enter” page, following which you will see one of any number of porn sites. Presumably, if you were to pay these archived sites using some of your own archived funding, you could see shockingly graphic representations of the clone engaged in lewd acts. You might also find the normal-looking girl in some sort of bondage, since presumably the clone, having kidnapped her to resume control of the domain, and the pornographers who subsequently took control of both the clone and the site, would not have released her for fear that the site would once again change hands and the poetry featured therein would become even more trite.

In 2005, GoDaddy assumed control of the site, and neither the clone or the nice-looking girl were anywhere to be found. This was, I believe, the same year GoDaddy bought Super Bowl airtime and filled it with boobies. So we’ll assume they were in cahoots with the pornographers. link

It appears that clip art took over the site in 2006. link

Finally, in 2007, GoDaddy once again took control of the site, and the clip art was vanquished to 1992, where presumably, it will send a clone of Brigitte Nielsen forward into the future to purchase the most important domain in the history of mankind: HeidiWhite.com. link

Jeez, by the time I’d finished mapping out that horrific sequence of events, I finally found my login for my registrar, and discovered that BullCityPress.com was set to expire in 20 days. Thankfully, I caught it in time, so you won’t find surprising bull-porn at your favorite press web site for the next 5 years.

If you don’t teach online for a while, you forget how time- and energy-intensive it is. My organization, LEARN NC, employs a lot of online teachers, and they’re pretty great. You should see the evaluations they get. They’re awesome.

I’m filling in as an online instructor for a little while, and it’s exhausting. But I really like it– almost immediately, I’ve been able to learn about the students and try to forge a personal relationship with them. It doesn’t happen this way in a face-to-face classroom… some students can be with you for a month before you really know anything about them. I’m not saying that’s good teaching, I’m saying that’s a reality sometimes. In the online environment, they tend to share a little more personal information at the beginning of the course because they don’t see their peers… no immediate feedback.

I don’t know if it’s kosher for me to say this, since I work in online learning, but I don’t know if I like face-to-face teaching or online teaching better. When I teach in a classroom, I have a strong sense that teaching is an art, and one I enjoy. I don’t have that as much online. Which may mean teaching is more science than art, and any gratification I get in the classroom is more my own edification than actual evidence of student learning. I had a boss who used to say, when asked how we knew our program was successful, would reply, “I see that look in their eyes, and I know.” I’ve used that logic myself. And it’s a surprisingly non-measurable metric.

Ah, but that look. That excitement. You don’t see that as much in an online course. Is that look, that excitement the best proof I have that I’m doing a good job? Because, if so, I might really suck at this…