I haven't done anything at the Huffington Post in forever, and I miss your feedback: I'm going to experiment by cross-posting these updates both at accommodatingly and in modified form over here.
Taking a cue from Mrs. Coulter, some bullets of recentness, and a couple of links:
+ Our son Nathan, who is nine months old, said "hi" this morning and seemed clearly to know what it meant (also that it goes together with a wave). Does that make "hi" his first word? Could be. But words for babies seem to coalesce gradually out of protolinguistic babble: how can anyone be certain what a baby's first word (that is, the first phoneme in a native language to carry a referent) is? But Nathan's may well be "hi."
+ Silliman blogs Project Runway, supports Uli over Jeffrey, points out that reality television has scripts too. Silliman watches the same television shows we watch. (Most of the readers whose taste in contemporary poetry more nearly resembles my own seem not to watch television at all, or else they don't admit it.)
+ Tons of poetry activity in the blogosphere deserves a notice here of some kind, starting with poetry-activity in and around the Twin Cities: we missed Sarah Fox and John Colburn's reading. I bet it ruled. The more of you read this interview with Sarah the less bad I'll feel about having missed the reading.
+ We also missed the Micawbers reading with Alex Lemon and Amanda Nadelberg. You can go see Amanda in December if you live in Nebraska.
+ Over among poets on the East Coast, Ange Mlinko's blog is back.
+ In comics, the new volume of Finder isn't as good as the others, but if you like the series as much as I do you will want it anyway-- there are cute sequences, fun Jaeger-characterization moments (it's almost all about him and his sex life), and an eye-opening set of endnotes having to do with author-artist-creator Carla Speed McNeill's having had her second baby. Future issues of Finder will apparently exist only online (that is, no more single comic-book-format issues), though the trade paperbacks will still be trade paperbacks. Want an intro to Finder? Here's the first intro page.
+ I think I have finished a poem about Breaking Circus.
+ If Democrats don't in fact take back the House of Representatives, people will blame Howard Dean, or give up on the party, or throw up their hands in despair, all of which would be really silly reactions: if we don't in fact take back the House, the fault will lie either with Republicans' decade-and-a-half's worth of infrastructure-building state by state (the same process Dean has started belatedly for the good guys) or perhaps with the New Jersey Supreme Court.
+ If you don't have election day plans, or you want to spend just an hour or two helping Dems, consider MoveOn's Call for Change. You might not even have to leave your house! (Or: get in touch with your state democratic party. In Minnesota, that's the DFL.)