Sherry Chandler

The text of this one is particularly corrupt.

Amabo, mea dulcis ipsimilla,
meae deliciae, mei lepores,
iube ad te veniam meridiatum.
et si iusseris, illud adiuvato,
ne quis liminis obseret tabellam,
neu tibi lubeat foras abire,
sed domi maneas paresque nobis
novem continuas fututiones.
verum si quid ages, statim iubeto:
nam pransus iaceo et satur supinus
pertundo tunicam palliumque.

Please, please, please my sweet little
mistress of the house
delights of mine, my downy cony,
let me come to you about midday.
And if you should so order, start at once to help,
don’t set the bar on your outer portal
but stay home and prepare for us
to enjoy an epyllion of love
in nine contiguous fitts.
A seminal work.
’streuth if you’d do’t, set to stat
here I lie, prandial and supine,
[harder than chinese trig]
piercing both tunic and kilt.

DFS Thompson, an extraordinary Catullus editor, theorizes that this poem was addressed directly to the mistress of a bawdy house, which theory he buttresses with a parallel reference to a similar character in the SATYRICON. Whatever the case, Catullus never proposed doing anything by halves even if novem continuas fututiones seems a bit optimistic.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that it’s the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. Here’s the list of the 100 Most Challenged Books for the 1990-2000.

Some you would expect, like The Catcher in the Rye (which probably just lives on the list), The Joys of Gay Sex, and Howard Stern’s Private Parts. (The very thought of Howard Stern’s private parts is enough to make me shudder but not to reconsider my stand on censorship.) Judy Blume gets several hits, as does Stephen King and Toni Morrison. Some that strike me odd:

41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford

Silverstein is the only poet on the list. Is that fortunate or a sign that nobody but Tom Godell pays attention to the dangerous content of poetry? Which reminds me that most challenges are for sexually explicit content. We are so afraid of sex in this country. Guns are so much safer.

You can find a breakdown of challenges and challengers on this page.

Conservative friends in Texas are offended by the charges of racism in Katrina relief efforts. They feel that Americans in general and Texans in particular have reached out very generously in a color-blind way. And I think we/they have done so. I feel pretty sure that both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita have disrupted Texas society in ways that we can only guess at here in Kentucky, where most of us are virtually untouched by these tragedies.

Few in America would turn away from suffering such as we saw in New Orleans, but that does not absolve us from the charge of racism. I think the nation still struggles with racial prejudice, especially against African-Americans where perhaps our greater guilt plays a role. I know it’s still a struggle for me.

Because Kentucky’s troubled racial history has been a theme of this blog, this seems a good time to bring out a quotation from Robert Penn Warren that I’ve been saving for an appropriate occasion. It’s from his interview in The Paris Review. Note that this was 1957, well before the cataclysmic events of the 1960s.

My essay in I’ll Take My Stand was about the Negro in the South, and it was a defense of segregation. I haven’t read that piece, as far as I can remember, since 1930, and I’m not sure exactly how things are put there. But I do recall very distinctly the circumstances of writing it. I wrote it at Oxford at about the same time I began writing fiction. The two things were tied together — the look back home from a long distance. I remember the jangle and wrangle of writing the essay and some kind of discomfort in it, some sense of evasion, I guess, in writing it, in contrast with the free feeling of writing the novelette Prime Leaf [Ed. Note: the story that formed the core of Night Rider], the sense of seeing something fresh, the holiday sense plus some stirring up of something inside yourself. In the essay, I reckon, I was trying to prove something, and in the novelette trying to find out something, see something, feel something — exist. … Well, it wasn’t being outside the South that made me change my mind. It was coming back home. In a little while I realized I simply couldn’t have written that essay again. I guess trying to write fiction made me realize that. If you are seriously trying to write fiction you can’t allow yourself as much evasion as in trying to write essays.
–from The Art of Fiction No. 18

Interviewed by Eugene Walter
The Paris Review
Issue 16, Spring-Summer 1957

[Addendum: I'll Take My Stand is a collection of essays written by some of those poets and thinkers who made up The Fugitives. The group called themselves The Agrarians, and the collection is a defense of southern agrarianism, but as this Warren quote indicates, the worm at the heart of the rose is slavery and segregation.

It was The Agrarians that Jesse Stuart hoped to join when he went to Vanderbilt in 1931. Hindsight says this may well have been a fortunate fall for Jesse. ]

[Update: from today's Lexington Herald-Leader: Pence splits with Fletcher on gambling.

I hadn't realized when I made this post how timely it would be.]

Here’s an op-ed in the NYTimes online against building a casino at Gettysburg. Gettysburg? Brooks Carver, why didn’t you tell me Civil War buffs are such high rollers?

I keep thinking all this gambling must be a bubble, that the pool of gamblers must be finite, and yet from local bingo parlors to Las Vegas, gambling just grows like kudzu, blessed by civic groups with dollar signs in their eyes. I’m sure you noticed the number of floating casinos blown ashore by both Katrina and Rita. Conversely, when the midwestern drought lowered the water level on the Ohio, some small cities were turned into ghost towns because the riverboat casinos had to shut down.

All this gambling is done on water to salve the tender consciences of the religious, who want the money but don’t want to condone the perceived sin.

The casinos are eager to rebuild on the Gulf Coast, don’t even want the tax breaks the Bush administration seems to want to give them anyway, as long as they can build on land this time. And now a casino at Gettysburg, of all places. Surely somebody somewhere is being suckered.

Yet, as my brother pointed out recently, all the people he knows who go to the riverboat casinos come back with tales of big winnings.

Geof Huth’s f-r-o-g-p-o-n-d

The Southern Arts Federation is now collecting money for its Emergency Relief Fund [PDF] to assist the Gulf Coast states arts organizations and artists. This link will take you to a PDF donation form.

According to the Voices in Wartime newsletter this fund:

…collects money and sends it to the state arts councils in the region who are distributing it to individual artists who have been displaced. The state arts councils, with the help of people in the arts communities, are compiling lists of artists who are in need. If you are interested in specifically helping poets who have been displaced, some of whom have lost both their jobs and homes, just indicate on your donation form

And, by the way, when I clicked through to the Southern Arts Federation to check this out, I saw a front-page announcement that our own Gerri Combs has been named their new Executive Director. Most of us who get Kentucky Arts Council mailings already know this, but it was fun to see it, nevertheless. Our loss the gain of the greater arts community.

from around the world.
A phoon is a person standing in a still pose on one foot – see the Huli warrior from New Guinea at left. People take these photos all over the world and send them to Phoons.com.

The thing is, as absurd as the idea may seem, some of the photos are astounding. (I’m a poet. I use words to mean what they say.)

Why am I always the last to know?

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

      — Emma Lazarus (1863)

This sonnet was written before construction was begun on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1869 , hence the “air-bridged harbor.” It was written, as you probably know, as part of an effort to raise money for a pedestal for Liberty.

I can remember singing those last 4 1/2 lines in a 4-H Club pageant when I was in 7th or 8th grade (’57-’59). The overblown skit had a lot of drill-team style marching, and I cringe now to think how jingoistic it was. And yet those words went a long way toward forming my concept of this country.

Still the sonnet deserves better, just as the statue deserves better than to be turned into a backdrop for one of George W. Bush’s pageants of leadership.

from the Washington Post:

“You adapt to the circumstances and the circumstances are different,” said Mark McKinnon, Bush’s political consultant and friend. But he added he detected no loss of confidence within the Bush team. “I get zero sense of that. This is an administration and a president that are like the Marines — they’re used to taking the beach, they’re used to getting shelled. But they dig in and they do their jobs.”

McKinnon said if anything Bush thrives under the pressure. “I’ve never seen the president burdened by the presidency,” he said. “He’s built to deal with really big events. It’s in his DNA.”

Rumsfeld to Katrina: “Thanks!” by William Arkin on the Washington Post online

For the Poor, Sudden Celebrity by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher in the Washington Post online.

Evacuating New Orleans at Washington Monthly (more about those schoolbuses)

Plath and Hughes: Good Times, Bad Times, and All the Rest of It by Michael Frank in the NYTimes online.

Writers Sue Google, Accusing It of Copyright Violation by Edward Wyatt in the NYTimes online.

Touched by his Noodly Appendage by Jessica Thierman in Gelf Magazine

Bush’s Bathroom Break: The Photographer Speaks by David Goldenberg in Gelf Magazine

Okay — this one is actually something to do but there’s a free download:

Virtual Lego