Sherry Chandler

I noticed I hadn’t been doing many graphics lately, so here’s a pretty picture for you. The blue line is negatives, the red is positives. Click the image for details.

AND I just drove through downtown Lexington. Triangle Park seemed pretty much filled with supporters of Cindy Sheehan, doing their candle-light vigil.

Maybe Garrison Keillor isn’t so harmless after all. From today’s Salon (you have to sit through a commercial to read the whole thing):

…There is no fighting these boondoggles and politicians know it. The stuff gets passed and signed into law and taxpayer groups fire off a barrage of press releases and a week later it’s old news. The sensible thing is to fight for your own boondoggle.

I belong to an enormous special-interest group that, unlike Alaskans or hobby pilots, has never exercised much clout, and that is the English-major community. For us, the equivalent of the Gravina Island bridge is the public library equipped with leather sofas and an espresso bar and librarians who are trained in pressure-point massage. Greek columns would be nice, and a pair of stone lions, and a rare book collection and a three-story lobby with marble floors so your footsteps echo as if you were in an Edith Wharton novel. And a statue of Minerva.

I imagine that a super-library of that caliber might cost $223 million if you add in the books, the banks of computers with high-speed Internet connections, the movie theater, the Children’s Room, the Steam Room, the Nap Room, the Hobnob Room where English majors can gather for a libation, the underground parking garage, and the kindly reference librarian with the bun, the faint mustache on the upper lip, the navy-blue knit dress, the sensible shoes, and the glasses on a chain around her neck. Those ladies have become rare and do not come cheap.

Ouch! Satire! A dangerous weapon. But as an English major (MFAs were not so thick on the ground back when), I’m all for it.

I’ll have to admit, though, that Lexington, Kentucky has a pretty nice public library. If we have no statue of Minerva, we do have a Foucault pendulum and some comfy cloth-upholstered chairs. Where I actually live, the Paris Bourbon County Library is not quite as flashy, but it has a pretty nice Carnegie Library building built in 1904. It’s roomy; it could probably accommodate an espresso bar and some cushy leather sofas.

Thanks to Jeff Hess for the heads-up.

I have decided, since it looks like Daylight Savings is to become the dominant time of our year, to go ahead on and adjust WordPress’s software to reflect EDT. For those of you who worry that I keep ungodly early hours, well, I do. So does my entire family, that is to say my sibs. It’s either genetic or the result of having been raised on a farm. Morning is the time when my brain works – though I’m not altogether sure all my blog posts reflect that. But I don’t always get up as early as the time signature makes it appear.

So why didn’t I do this before – it’s easy enough to do? I don’t know. Some holdover from my grandfather’s refusal ever to recognize anything but sun time, I suppose. If you ever decided to go to the field with my Dad-Dad, you would be really glad to get that cold fat bacon on biscuit – or sometimes what we called vi-een-y sausages and crackers – because he didn’t break for lunch until the sun was well past zenith. Or so it looked to my hungry young eyes.

Also there’s a great op-ed by Thomas Lynch in today’s NYTimes in which he quotes lines from Yeats’s poem “Remorse for Intemperate Speech.” Here is that entire poem:

Remorse for Intemperate Speech

I ranted to the knave and fool,
But outgrew that school,
Would transform the part,
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.

I sought my betters: though in each
Fine manners, liberal speech,
Turn hatred into sport,
Nothing said or done can reach
My fanatic heart.

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.

— William Butler Yeats

I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about the Georgetown Review for 2005, but I’ll tell you what, that little devil is nearly 400 pages long and what with retreats and workshops and such, I just haven’t had a chance to take a good look at it.

Now they’ve announced their 2006 contest with a December 20 2005 deadline. It’s a mixed genre contest, with a $10 entry fee for first submission, $5 for additional submissions. No limits. Runners up will be published.

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Heartland Review is taking regular submissions for the Fall 2005 issue and also for their short-short fiction contest. Limit is 1000 words, $5 fee for each entry. Postmark deadline for both regular and contest submissions is August 26, 2005. E-mail Mick Kennedy for full guidelines.

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And of course, the Green River Writers contest submission period is drawing to a close. That deadline is August 30. Guidelines are here, a pdf file of the contest brochure is here (Adobe Acrobat required to open).