Wednesday

I'm finally getting over the Giants loss to the Eagles. It was just an awful game. I'm sure it was said previously, but Walter Matthau in The Bad News Bears sums it up: "When we win, it's a team win. When we lose, it's a team loss." With so many players, you can't blame it on Eli, or Gilbride's play calling, or anyone or anything else. Some plays went their way. Others didn't. But damn it hurts to lose to the Eagles.

Now there's talk of giving Eli millions to seal the deal. I'm OK with that. Like many have said, he has as many rings as Favre or his brother, and he still has many seasons to go to have a shot to do what few quarterbacks have done in winning more than one.

And will Plaxico be back? Who knows? Would we have gone further and not lost four out of the last five games with him in the line-up? Maybe.

It's going to be a very interesting off-season and a very few interesting months as the NFL in 2009 unfolds.

Needless to say, I'm now a Cardinals fan for the rest of the playoffs. I'd like to see Warner throw for about 500 yards, and hopefully Boldin is healthy.

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Got the word that three out of my eight Ph.D applications are complete, which is nice to know. I sent quick emails to the other Graduate Coordinators to see when I'll find out they're complete. I'm anxious to know a decision, of course, but before that can happen, they have to have everything, and after all the work that went into all of them, knowing that they have everything is fine for now.

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I recently traded manuscripts with a fellow poet whose work I've been a huge fan of these last few years. It's nice to see so many poets and writers recently have been very generous about showing their work to pretty much a complete stranger.

But his manuscript's an ass-kicker, it's been a finalist a bunch in the last few months for contests, and it's a manuscript I hope to see come out soon. There are many people who would flip over this book.

This has happened a few times in the last year or so, and everyone either has since found out their book is coming out, or I know they will be soon.

I almost find it more rewarding to delve into a "book" that may not be finalized with its full-color cover and ISBN on the back. There's something about poetic purgatory that's inspiring to me, and it makes the process much more interesting, knowing all of these poets (and hopefully myself) are getting closer and closer to their books getting the word that publication is happening imminently.

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Two records that I've been enjoying lately: Tim Hecker's An Imaginary Country and Loney Dear's Dear John. Entirely different styles for different moods, but it seems that each artist has produced their most focused album to date. Tim Hecker's doing amazing, amazing things.

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New issues in the mail lately that I'm excited to read:

- Ninth Letter
- Hayden's Ferry Review
- Zone 3
- The Journal

There's not enough time in a day.