Sherry Chandler

at Silliman’s Blog:

I was never a big fan of Thompson’s writing. It struck me as too undisciplined, the wrong lesson to have taken from the work & life of William S. Burroughs, Thompson’s other obvious source of inspiration. Yet I felt that Thompson, more than any other single individual, was responsible for Jimmy Carter becoming president in 1976. Thompson was covering the campaign for Rolling Stone back when Rolling Stone still mattered. It was obvious that Thompson felt that all the other Democratic candidates were professional weasels, or worse. And yet here was this one-term Georgia governor who seemed to be the squarest human being on the face of the planet. That was the person who struck Thompson as an honest human being. Thompson’s reporting catapulted Carter into becoming something like the Howard Dean of his day in an era when the combination of “early capital” and cable news didn’t exist to overwhelm any outsider candidacy the instant the candidate made one mistake. What a weird model of Diogenes Thompson made.

Lest we forget (well lest I forget anyway) – this from the Mark Cook poem, “To Capitalize the Ungodly,” over at The Writers Almanac:

Remember that painting, that Gilbert Stuart painting of Washington?
Sure you remember that thing, everybody does, the really famous one–
Seriously, I used to like that picture a lot, But then I realized that everything Stuart ever did looked like Washington.
I saw this self-portrait Stuart made of himself– It looked exactly like Washington.

at Lance Mannion and at Rox Populi

Georgia Green Stamper says:

Yes, dead, and before we even got to see Beyond the Sea. … Secretly, I think we all hoped we looked like her - at least all the blondes. I guess the brunettes wanted to look like what’s her name. [Sherry's note: I think this must be Annette?] And she seemed to have more opportunities than we to find “the good life.” After all - did we even get to meet Bobby Darin and try to charm him? The effect of our charms was constrained by geography

Often Hargo’s “The Somerville Gates” has been compared with Christo’s “The Gates“, Central Park, New York City. These comparisons have been unfair; sometimes the media has exaggerated — even lied — about the similarities. Differences abound…

Thanks to Donna Marder for the link to The Somerville Gates and to Ruth Bavetta for the link to The Gates.

[I got hit by spammers today and, trying to get rid of the spurious comments, I accidently hit the wrong button and deleted this post. So I am trying to reconstruct it here and it will be a bit different.]

You will find here an interview with Sam Hamill, who in January 2003, as an act of protest against the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, refused to attend Laura Bush’s poetry symposium. As the wardrums were beating for the invasion of Iraq, Hamill formed Poets Against the War, which received and published 7000 poems of protest. Now Hamill has resigned his post with Copper Canyon Press to devote his whole energy to Voices in Wartime. The interview is from their film.

Poets tend to be humanists and they tend to see things from angles that other people don’t pause long enough to look at. I think that one of the major functions of poems in particular is to develop sensibility, and I think that means sensitivity to those who are oppressed, to those who have no voice.

One of the most important things I have done in my life as a poet is the twenty years I spent working with battered women and children, and the years I spent teaching in American prisons. Not because it puts me in a position to speak for children or on the racist role of law that that treats people so differently in our judicial system, but rather because it is made me understand who has the power and who sees and knows what and how it gets handled

The poem I posted this week, “Bombed Wedding,” was written during that first, now apparently forgotten war – the one with Afghanistan. It was originally posted on Poets Against the War and will be included in Pax Christi’s forthcoming Poetry for Peacemakers.

That infamous Gonzo Kentuckian, Hunter S. Thompson, has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, appropriate perhaps to his love of guns. Oddly enough, he got his start in journalism writing about sports for an air force newspaper. Like ZAP comics and peyote-induced mysticism, Thompson took the counterculture to places my inner farm girl couldn’t go. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the only movie Johnny Depp ever made that I couldn’t watch.) I was once told, back in the halcyon 70s, that I was entirely too sane. Not praise, perhaps, for an aspiring poet. Nevertheless, I mark the passing of this “counterculture icon” with regret.

Dewy-eyed Sondra Dee also died this last weekend. The two icons of American media share the current NYTimes obituary page. You know, I’m not even sure that they are opposites.

Update: Well, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that Thompson started as a sports writer for the Air Force – he currently had a column for ESPN, which shows what I know. Anyway, Beatrice has some nice Thompson links if you’d like to read more.

Update 2: Just found this nice eulogy over at Have Coffee, Will Write. Fellow Green River Writer Jeff Hess is obviously much better qualified to appreciate Thompson than am I.

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order tomove up, you have got to move on.
      from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

Not fair to hold an author responsible for the musings of his characters, especially Hannah Coulter who is grieving for her lost children. And yet this attitude turns up other places in Wendell Berry’s writings. Jayber Crow, for example, rejects upward mobility, the city, and the university in such a panic that he braves the 1937 flood in order to get back to Port William. Once there, he becomes a sort of barber priest for the “membership’s” white male farmers. Eventually he lives a Harlan Hubbard existence in a primitive cabin on the Kentucky River, with barbering as his art instead of landscape painting. The happiest people in Hannah Coulter are the Branches, who view schooling as an inconvenience and education as learning how to cobble together farm equipment, to makedo, and subsist. The most miserable is Hannah’s son, who makes a fortune in Silicon Valley but loses his soul.

I have trouble differentiating this anti-modernism from that of people who take their kids out of public school so they don’t have to learn about evolution. Or sex. I spend a lot of time arguing when I read Wendell Berry, and I usually fight myself to a draw.

Meanwhile, Chris Offutt has remarked (and I paraphrase because I can’t remember where I saw the quote, maybe in Ace magazine) that I-64 was supposed to bring the world to the mountains, but in fact, has emptied the mountaineers out into the world. I think most of them are living in housing projects in Scott County and working for Toyota. A better place?

The Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice is having its annual peace fair and dinner on Saturday, February 26. Nikki Finney is the featured speaker. Click here to view the PDF for details.

Bird Feeder Installation by TR Williams.

We call it (anti-squirrel) Gate – in reference to Cristo, not the apartment building in Washington, D.C.

Though it might also be called the Williams family missile defense system — the missiles in this case being the squirrels themselves, launched from the tiniest branches of the nearby trees. Having been thwarted in their ground assaults, the squirrels adapted an aerial offensive. But our missile shield didn’t work any better than the one that has been abuilding for years in Washington. Just like the Pentagon, we found we needed a bigger snow saucer.

Instead, we took it down and added a squirrel feeder.

For those of you who know my unpublished work, this is our North Yard.

The quotation is from Janet, who shows up in my poems from time to time and now here she is on my blog. (This is a fictional Janet, by the way. The real Janet would never say “yall.”)

Addendum. Are The Gates really “Laura’s New Curtains?”