Sherry Chandler

Maybe thirty years ago, when I was still pretending to be a literary scholar, I came across an essay by Leslie Fiedler entitled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’n, Huck Honey.” The theme, as you may infer, was homoeroticism in Huckleberry Finn. The article, first published in 1948, provoked a good deal of huffing in the academy, if I remember correctly.

When I found it a quarter of a century later, I thought it was a hoot.

Any culture that produces as many buddy tales as ours has, well…

Now we have “Brokeback Mountain.” But it’s old news, fellas.

So here’s a fun article from the Washington Post online, “Out in the West: Reexamining A Genre Saddled With Subtext” by Stephen Hunter:

In fact, what’s remarkable about “Brokeback Mountain” is merely that for possibly the first time, homoeroticism is the text, not the subtext. But it’s not like homosexuality has been unknown in the western. Like any art form, the oater represents not only the conscious of its creators, but also their subconscious. Ideas — particularly forbidden ones among heterosexuals, like male beauty and grace, male love, male bonding and really tight blue jeans — creep in and haunt the edges of the most mundane and straightforward macho tales about horseback he-men. Gay subtexts in westerns have been nothing special and everything ordinary for decades.

Beautiful men in tight blue jeans. Us girls like ‘em too. Read the whole article. It’ll bring a smile.

For two years now, I’ve done Christmas on my own terms – very simply. I haven’t darkened the door of a department store or a major chain. I haven’t charged anything on credit cards. I haven’t festooned my home with glittering plastic. I haven’t put pressure on my kids to “come home for Christmas.” I find it very liberating. And it’s getting easier.

I guess I have a very contrarian streak but I don’t like crowds and I don’t like parties, unless it’s half a dozen poets with a bottle of wine. My preferred celebratory meal is bread and cheese and olives. And most of all, I don’t like the frenzy of spending that Christmas has become. When my children were little, I was appalled at the greediness Christmas bred in them. They didn’t get that at home. They picked it up at school, from the culture, from the very air, I suppose. Now that they are grown and see what the American way of Christmas can do to a budget, they understand a little better.

Now there’s all this “war on Christmas” nonsense, a total construct of the chatterers, that has even my poet friends apologizing for saying Merry Christmas. Or not saying Merry Christmas.

So here are some contrarians words from Northrop Frye to contemplate on this Christmas eve:

…Christmas, as the Puritans kept insisting, never was primarily Christian. Its Germanic Romantic framework expressed a pastoral myth centripetal in shape, the large family installed in a big home eating huge amounts of food, which seems oddly in contrast with this very centrifugal civilization.
…

Our society lacks festivals: our Christmas is an introverted German Romantic affiar, & its Dickensian propaganda assumes a retreat into the cavernous depths of the middle-class family.

— from Northrop Frye Unbuttoned. Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries (Gnomon 2004)

If you doubt Frye’s assessment, consider that the megachurches are not holding services on this rare Sunday Christmas but are dismissing so that their members can spend time with their families.

God bless us every one.

Puss

Puss loves man’s winter fire
Now that the sun so soon
Leaves the hours cold it warmed
In burning June.

She purrs full length before
The heaped-up hissing blaze,
Drowsy in slumber down
Her head she lays.

While he with whom she dwells
Sits snug in his inglenook,
Stretches his legs to the flame
And reads his book.

—Walter De La Mare

Androgynous You scored 60 masculinity and 56 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

I picked this up at Rox Populi. As she says, more than a little sexism in this quiz. Especially since her photograph at 70 masculine/40 feminine came up Ward Cleaver. Better to be Iggy Pop/Ganymede, I guess. At least there’s a hint of danger.

The days will get longer now, little by little and inch by inch, but colder for a while. I hope not, though. It’s been cold enough here already for one standard Kentucky winter. Ten degrees or so below the average.

I read in The Fated Sky that Samson is associated with Leo, no big surprise I suppose, what with that honey in the belly of the dead lion and all. A nice sunny warm character to contemplate on this short day. The surprise (to me) is that Delilah is associated with Aquarius, Leo’s opposite. Makes me sort of the villain of that piece, a bit of a blow. Still, I guess if it’s a matter of subtlety against brute strength, I’d rather be the subtle one. Samson did win one of the more pyrrhic victories in literature. I’ve always wondered whether he prevailed or just destroyed everything in his wounded wrath.

from the NYTimes last week, a clue to what the rebuilt New Orleans will look like:

The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government’s main disaster recovery program for both businesses and homeowners, has processed only a third of the 276,000 home loan applications it has received.

And it has rejected 82 percent of those it has reviewed, a higher percentage than in most previous disasters, saying that many would-be borrowers did not have incomes high enough, or credit ratings good enough, to qualify. The rejections came even though the Federal Emergency Management Agency has referred more than two million people, many of them with low incomes, to the S.B.A. to get the loans.

To a large degree, that high rejection rate appears to reflect a mismatch between existing government aid programs and the large number of low-income people affected by this year’s hurricanes. Despite the widespread poverty in the most damaged regions, the Small Business Administration has not adjusted its creditworthiness standards, which are roughly comparable to a bank’s.

In fact, the loans that have been approved appear to be flowing to wealthy neighborhoods in New Orleans but not to poor ones, according to a list of loans released by the government and mapped by The New York Times.

Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning has announced it line-up of classes for Winter 2006.

Follow the link to find the schedule or download a PDF here.

I am reading a history of astrology – no really, it’s a serious history by a serious historian, Benson Bobrick – called The Fated Sky (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

Astrology/astronomy, like so much we call western civilization, seems to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia, the area that we now call Iraq. Those famous walls and towers of Uruk that Gilgamesh loved so well were used to make observations of the planets and the stars and to map their patterns. There were also towers in Ur (of the Chaldees) where Abraham came from.

By 700 B.C.E., astrologers in ancient Nineveh (Mosul) had, according to Bobrick, “more or less traced the ecliptic; divided it into four parts according to the seasons; drawn up a list of constellations whose heliacal rising corresponded to the various months; distinguished the planets from the fixed stars; followed their course; and ‘approximately determined the duration of their synodic revolutions.’” They could predict lunar and solar eclipses. If they thought they could predict human events too, well, I’m not going to say they couldn’t. There may be more to a wise prophet than is reflected in his star charts.

All this with the naked eye. Of course, they didn’t have “House” and so had to be content with the slow spectacle of the seasons for entertainment. Also, the stars were probably brighter then, the earth being so much darker and less populated.

The ancients determined four fixed signs/constellations, the four corners of the year: at that time, the vernal equinox was in Taurus, the autumnal equinox was in Scorpio, the summer solstice was in Leo. The winter solstice – which is arguably the real reason for the season, the early church having decided to co-opt rather than compete – was in Aquarius.

In almost three thousand years, the solstice has moved out of Aquarius and the Greeks, ever cynical, reduced the constellation that had been the mighty controller of the Tigris and Euphrates and the floods of the Nile. They identified Aquarius with Ganymede, cupbearer to the greater gods. (I think he may have provided other services, too.)

The better, I suppose, to bring you wassail.

Now Aquarius moves closer to the vernal equinox and when it gets there, in say 50 – 100 years, we will be at the “dawning” of the Age of Aquarius.

Whatever your mid-winter rites, I hope they succeed, as they always have, in bringing the sun back into a warmer constellation. And, because I was born in Aquarius, I wish you

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more forces of derision
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelations
And the mind’s true liberation …

And let us hope that Nineveh survives its liberation.

about Billy Collins and Dana Gioia?

Jude Morgan has novelized Byron, Keats, and Shelley in a tome entitled Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

A passage from the review by Yvonne Zipp, from Powell’s, originally in the Christian Science Monitor:

Instead of the head-on approach, Morgan instead explores the lives of four of the women who loved the poets (Byron, of course, gets more than his fair share): the high-strung Lady Caroline Lamb, who has an affair with Byron; sparkling Fanny Brawne, who was engaged to Keats before his untimely death; generous, sunny Augusta Leigh, half-sister and lover of Byron; and Mary Shelley, Percy’s teen bride and author of Frankenstein.

Morgan opens with the attempted suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft, protofeminist and author. And Wollstonecraft, with her radical idealism and defiance of society, serves as matriarch to all, not just her famous daughter. After Wollstonecraft dies as a result of childbirth, the novel catalogs the childhood of the four women.

Some readers may find the early pages slow (Bring on Bryon!), but the wealth of detail and Morgan’s amazing ability to re-create what these women might have thought and felt are worth savoring. The novel is meticulously researched, but scholarship never outweighs storytelling.

…

The men might have the fame, but they never quite come to life in the same way as the women, particularly Augusta and Mary. Shelley, despite his espousal of free love, somehow seems a prig. Byron and Keats get plenty of clever witticisms (a running gag has both men making fun of Wordsworth) but sometimes their genius feels stated rather than observed.

But these are minor quibbles. For lovers of literature, Passion more than lives up to its title.

Just in time for Christmas. Here is another review from The Guardian.

The editors of Tears in the Fence, whose Kentucky connection I have featured here, have opened a new kind of travel agency. thewordtravels.com offers:

—Walking weekends
—City breaks
—Guided and self-guided literary tours
—Writing breaks and holidays
—Trekking adventures

In fact any type of holiday or short break with a literary connection.

I’m not sure I’m ready to swim the Hellespont on their Gods, Heroes, and Romantics tour. Nope, Yorkshire: The Brontës and Beyond sounds more my cuppa, especially if they could be persuaded to throw in something about Reginald Hill to lure my hubby.

[Disclosure: I have a poem in the forthcoming issue of Tears in the Fence. More on that later.]