I just downloaded Minefield, which I guess is the clever way of saying “Hey this is Firefox 3.0 but it doesn’t really work yet.” I’m not really having any problems thusfar, but is anyone else out there using it, and if so, are you having problems?

My only beef is that most extensions haven’t yet been updated. I can live with it. though.

The Ferris clan invites us for a cookout on a Sunday night. Though this is a packet weekend, which means I am a little more studious than normal, we go for a couple hours. We take marinated steak. It is well-prepapred by Doctor William Ferris, and we sup nicely.

Jon Fabris, who could not be better nicknamed than “Johnny Fabulous,” and I spend plenty of time tossing a Mark Jacobson frisbee. Nugget the dog mangles and slobbers upon the frisbee. Malice the black cat comes and goes, is at one point treed, and displays his kitty-grandeur quite nicely.

The Ferris clan are becoming some of my favorite people in the world.

It wasn’t so long ago that I felt like I had hit a wall, but last weekend I began translating a Neruda poem and it changed my whole outlook. I have been in revision mode for the past few days, struggling with a long long long poem that I have been working on. I feel I am making headway. I also feel that when I publish my notes on all of my poems and the world sees just how much of my poetry has been pulled from comic books, I will be called a magnificant failure, a magnificent joke.

So, maybe I won’t publish the notes. I will, however, be tempted to sell my books on my website (if and when I publish them) and tell folks that if they can correctly name 10 or more individual, intended comics references in the book, I’ll send them their money back. Then the fanboys will get free poetry, which I would happily support.

I like to think that writing poems that obliquely reference poems isn’t too hack. I reviewed a book for the Carolina Quarterly some years ago called Monster Zero, which was a book of poems about Godzilla. Some of the poems were fantastic, but ultimately such a grand idea could not hold itself aloft through a whole book. The author, whose name I now forget and am too lazy to Google, tried to make it a cautionary tale for the atomic age, which of course I respect, since I love poems rooted in the real-world concerns of science-fiction-becoming-science-fact. But some of it was just mediocre poetry.<

As I work on Personality Test, Mary has warned me that I need to be careful-- some material will seem like it's flying just because it's on the plane. Monster Zero, you are my cautionary tale, indeed.

Ok, I amazoned him: Jay Snodgrass wrote the book. And you should buy a copy, just to see what it’s all about. Really.

Amazon has all of those “#455,956 today in books” rankings. What is the ranking if a day goes by and no one buys the book? Because hell, I know that happens.