Sherry Chandler

and now it’s in the NYTimes — from “Bless Me, Blog for I Have Sinned,” under the byline Sarah Boxer:

Online confessors are like flashers. They exhibit themselves anonymously and publicly, with little consideration for you, the audience. Browse some of the confessionals on the Web: grouphug.us (a simple log), notproud.com (organized by deadly sin) or dailyconfession.com (where you can barely find the confessions for all the promotional stuff). You can see for yourself.

One online confessional, though, breaks the mold. At PostSecret, found at postsecret.blogspot.com, the confessions are consistently engaging, original and well told. How come? The Web site gives people simple instructions. Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself. That one constraint is a great sieve. It strains out lazy, impulsive confessors.

…

No fakeness? Oh, but there is. And it is the fakeness, the artifice and the performance that make this confessional worth peeking at. The secret sharers here aren’t mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don’t want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that’s the secret of PostSecret. It isn’t really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.

I picked this up from Stick Poet Superhero:

Some of Britain’s earliest leading women writers have only just beaten 400 years of sex discrimination by the publishing industry.

Researchers from the University of Warwick, and colleagues from Birmingham and the University of London have ended this 400 year blight and published an anthology of 14 neglected women poets and writers. The book, entitled Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, brings together the work of 14 women who were writing between 1589 and 1706.

Social pressures effectively barred many of these women from any opportunity of getting their writings to a printing press.

Read the entire article here. Sort of a nice companion, this lovely spring day, to the new biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. More foremothers recovered. The book is available from Palgrave Macmillan and sells for about $75, so I guess I’ll read my copy in the library.

The NYTimes is a little more cautious:

A visit to the project, deep inside Oxford’s handsome Sackler Library, shows that work is proceeding much the same way it always has - that is, slowly. Scholars surrounded by fat, obscure reference works sit outside the main office, poring over minute scraps of dirty, frayed material that to an outsider appear wholly undecipherable. Inside, more than 800 boxes are used to store the whole collection. Fragments are mounted on glass when they are being worked on and once they have been published.

The first task is to translate the work into English, usually from ancient Greek. The next is to try to place it somewhere - perhaps within the existing literature, perhaps as something that stands on its own and has yet to be categorized, perhaps as part of a lost work by a known author. The plays of Sophocles would fall into the last category. Though he is known to have written 120 of them, only 7 have survived intact; many of the rest appear in bits and pieces scattered throughout the collection.

Researchers try to date the work from clues like spelling and the way certain words are used; they analyze the writing style to discern whether it is prose or poetry, old or new, history or oratory, and who may have written it.

But the technology can go only so far. “You have to put all your knowledge of language and literature to put a story together and provide a context,” Dr. Nikolaos Gonis, the administrator of the project and curator of the collection, said in an interview. “There has been a boom in technology, but it doesn’t replace the knowledge of the language and the eye that has to focus on the details.”

AND you can go directly to the source here, visit their virtual exhibit, and read their take on the new imaging technique, which was developed at Brigham Young University to read texts from Herculaneum, here.

A technique of multi-spectral imaging developed by NASA to penetrate space debris has proved useful in reading old and damaged writings. This article in the Washington Post describes how the technique is helping recover lost bits of literature from a 2000-year-old dump in Egypt:

Buried in the dump were more than 400,000 fragments of papyrus — bits of documents, pieces of scrolls and pages from old books written between the 2nd century B.C. and the 8th century A.D. and preserved ever since in the hot, dry climate.

For years, scholars have been trying to decipher these texts, which include property records, epistles from the New Testament, writings from early Islam and fragments of unknown works by the giants of classical antiquity.

The pace of discovery has been painstaking, but this year scientists brought an innovative imaging technology to the fragments, enabling them to peer though the grime of centuries to see previously invisible script while leaving the crumbling papyrus undamaged.

Our grandparents called this Decoration Day (and I refer you to Georgia Green Stamper for a description of that ritual). Our little world here in Bourbon County is decked out with the more flamboyant annuals — cascades of mock orange and azalea, peonies and flags (my grandmother’s name for iris). Even the invasive old fence roses look glorious and the honeysuckle smells almost too sweet. Right now the birds are singing a rather obstreperous aubade: I hear the cardinal, the wren, the robin, and others that just sort of run together in a general hallelujah chorus for a new day. Ursula the raccoon has brought her cubs out and it is my devout hope that she’s teaching them how to go away and be independent and not how to eat dogfood in the old garage.

I’m not big on holidays. I have to grit my teeth to do Christmas. And I am very cynical when the government waxes sentimental over fallen heroes. I remember my dead daily and try to honor them in my way of living. So I will spend this day in reading and contemplation. It’s the best way to spend any day.

On Friday, I had lunch with Ernie O’Dell in Midway. Midway is in the middle of a Main Street [and Railroad Street – they flank the railroad track] Renaissance so it’s a bit of a mess but the shops are all open for business. We had lunch at Quirk Café and Coffee, which despite a slight redundancy in its name is a very charming place with lots of light and chessboards. The red-brick terrace out back is a perfect place to linger in this glorious May weather. They were doing very brisk business on a Friday noon, serving light lunches, southern-style sweet tea, and coffee in a French press. Each table had a clever timer to time the brewing. Ours was a big red apple. On the next table over, the timer was shaped like a cup of hot chocolate with a big dollop of whipped cream on top. I’m a sucker for cinnamon in coffee, which no doubt marks me as a real amateur, so I had the cinnamon hazelnut and found it good enough for seconds.

This is not a café in the way Jeff Hess would give high marks, more like a tea room with bright painted china and scrumptious desserts. I didn’t even think to check for wireless; Ernie and I were talking poetry.

In the basement under Quirk, we found Odyssey Books, a cozy shop with red-brick walls and easy chairs for reading. We had a nice conversation with book seller Walt Mutes, who said he’s been in business since last October or so. He has a nice collection of local authors, a little short on poetry perhaps (but we hope to remedy that), though he did have James Baker Hall’s New and Selected, Total Light Process, winner of the 2004 Kentucky Literary Award. And Wind Publications’s Tobacco anthology, so Ernie and I are represented on his shelves. (That’s a great collection, edited by Ed August. with all manner of reminiscences about the tobacco culture that sustained Kentucky’s economy for so many years.)

Quirk and Odyssey have music programs regularly. After the Main Street Renaissance is finished, Walt will be staying open until 7 every night and he seemed very enthusiastic about the idea of having people in to read – heads up, poets! If you get over that way, be sure to look for Odyssey.

Good news by e-mail from Michael Czernacki of FootHills Publishing:

Monday, Memorial Day, our Amish neighbors are having a “Frolic” at our place – 20 to 40 Amish men will be here to raise our house out of the 2,000 foot elevated air of Wheeler Hill! … For years we have lived in housing that could very much qualify as “Appalachian, far-below-poverty-level, rural poor, how-can-this-be-in-20th/21st century America.” What was that influential book written by Michael Harrington??? (somebody help me here) that brought to the forefront the condition of America’s rural poverty? We could be a modern update of that book. But in a few days a house will rise a little further back from where this leaky-roofed mobile home sits. I can not adequately put into words the importance, the immensity of this upcoming frolic, this “house” that is being built for us. 21 years on Wheeler Hill – finally a house that is what we want it to be. Not that first trailer and 16 acres. Not the house on the corner that was not at all what we dreamed of. Not the trailer we’ve lived in for most of the last 10 years on this spectacular 50 acre hilltop land that we have almost paid off. Those other pieces of land on Wheeler Hill that we somehow worked out deals to purchase were not what what we really wanted, but what we could work out in our limited financial situation. This land, these 50 acres atop Wheeler Hill, are what we envision spending our aging years on.

If Michael can live poor for art’s sake and achieve this house (FootHills will be 20 years old next year), then perhaps we can at least achieve a roof and a raccoon-free attic (if Ursula has not by then become a cherished member of the family).

Lyndall Gordon has published a new biography of Mary Wollstonecraft entitled Vindication (HarperCollins). This from the NYTimes review by Toni Bentley:

In late 1790 Wollstonecraft’s ”Vindication of the Rights of Men,” the first counter to Edmund Burke’s treatise on the dangers of the French Revolution, was published anonymously; ”all the best journals of the day discussed it.” But when she produced ”The Vindication of the Rights of Woman” just 14 months later, her name was on the title page and all hell broke loose. It was the most immodest emergence of a woman’s voice in memory and the 32-year-old Wollstonecraft became famous. While the American statesman Aaron Burr declared ”your sex has in her an able advocate . . . a work of genius” (and John Adams teased his wife, Abigail, for being a ”Disciple of Wollstonecraft!”) Horace Walpole’s reaction was more typical. He called her a ”hyena in petticoats.”

We touched on Mary Wallstonecraft’s life briefly when I was studying the Romantics. It was a brief life, she died after childbirth.

Deciding to have her baby at home with a midwife — hospitals were rife with infection — Wollstonecraft produced, after an 18-hour labor, a girl child on Aug. 30, 1797. But the placenta had not fully expelled itself and a doctor was called in to rip out the rest — for four hours — without anesthesia. She said afterward that she had not known pain before. The botched operation left her with an infection that killed her 11 days later. She was 38.

This daughter is best known to us as Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. At the time, I was more interested in the daughter and over time the two women sort of merged in my aging memory. In my own defense, I will say that the names got confusing: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Nevertheless, I am pleased for this opportunity to correct my education and the errors of my youth.

You can read the first chapter of the biography here.

[Note: I need to check with Joanie DiMartino at what is soon to be The Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, but I wonder whether this event may have taken place during the time that doctors (men) were taking childbirth away from midwives in the name of science. Science has not always been kind to women.]

I guess this is catblogging to the nth degree. Here’s the explanation:

Like to put stuff on your cat while it snoozes? So do we, send us a picture with you and your cats name to stuffonmycat@gmail.com and we’ll put it on here as soon as the site launches

No cat poem today. As you may infer, I’m running on empty. I do have an update on Ursula, the raccoon in the attic. Yes, she’s still in the attic—

Another of those vague unattributable quotations that float around in my head is this – that poets either die young or live to a grand old age. Stanley Kunitz is approaching his 100th birthday. From today’s NYTimes:

Of all the commanding inventions from Mr. Kunitz, few are as instantly accessible as the haven he created down in SoHo so that poets and readers could have a special place of their own - Poets House. In the 20 years since Mr. Kunitz co-founded it with Elizabeth Kray, the place has become one of the quiet treasures of the city. New visitors can confront, browse and savor 45,000 volumes of poems stacked nine shelves high. It is one of the grandest open-stack collections of poems available to the American public, glowing unpretentiously in a wood-floored setting one flight up at 72 Spring Street.
…

Poets House generates scores of literary events, including a showcase gathering of more than 1,300 books of poetry published annually across the country, so that bards sung and unsung can rally in a lyric-mart of mutual encouragement.

There is much more blooming at Mr. Kunitz’s place, including a program to teach city librarians how to overcome “the poetry anxiety” that shackles readers’ imaginations. Poetry circulation is reported tripling at the nine city branches involved so far.

I suppose poetry circulation could triple and still not be all that high: three times three is nine. Nevertheless, a remarkable achievement for a man who has had nearly a century’s worth of remarkable achievements.