Sherry Chandler

Once, some years ago, I suggested to my husband that we might want to sell up our Bourbon County farm and move to say, Shelby, where we could probably get some more wooded land, more secluded, and also, just coincidentally, be closer to Louisville where so much of our artistic life centers.

I expected all kinds of resistence along the lines of “this land has been in my family since Michael Stoner was a pup.” But no. What he did was ask a question. “And leave the owls?”

End of argument. The hoot owls in question have been on our farm as long as I can remember, which is at least a quarter of a century. It is always a joy somehow to hear them in the hour just before dawn, calling probably to scare up prey, maybe talking to one another. We see pellets from time to time. I saw one of them, once. They sound like this.

We are not the only people in the world who like owls. I find endless fascination in The Owl Pages , where you can find everything from owl mythology to a gallery of owl tattoos.

This is a very interactive page. Folk around the world send photos, some highly dramatic. You can also sign up for a variety of newsletters and fora to keep up with the latest owl activity. The latest owl news, for example, tells me that

Australian Sound recordist and wildlife ecologist Ed McNabb has produced a new Compact Disc of Nocturnal nature sounds called “Nightlife of Australia - South-eastern Forests”. Among the 53 sound recordings you will find the Powerful Owl, Barking owl, Southern Boobook owl, Greater Sooty Owl, Masked Owl, and Barn Owl. For more details and an order form, you can visit his website at http://www.ninoxpursuits.com.au

Or you can just visit the Owls News aggregator.

Some aspects of globalization are more attractive than others.

(What ever became of the term “global village”?)

192. A friend, a member of the Old Left, challenges my aesthetic. How, he asks, can one write so as not to “communicate”? I, in turn, challenge his definitions. It is a more crucial lesson, I argue, to learn how to experience language directly, to tune one’s senses to it, than to use it as a mere means to an end. Such use, I point out, is, in bourgeois life, common to all things, even the way we “use” our friends. Some artists (Brecht is the obvious example) try to focus such “use” to point up all the alienation, to present a bourgeois discourse “hollowed out.” But language, so that it is experienced directly, moves beyond any such exercise in despair, an unalienated language. He wants an example. I give him Grenier’s
     thumpa
     thumpa
     thumpa
     thump
pointing out how it uses so many physical elements of speech, how it is a speech that only borders on language, how it illumines that space. He says, “I don’t understand.”

— from Ron Silliman’s The Chinese Notebook

Holly M. Brockman: I’ve heard you use the term “useful” in some of your talks, and it certainly permeates all your essays and other writing. What does usefulness mean? Who is somebody who is useful and why?

Wendell Berry: There’s a kind of language that obscures its subject. Such language makes it harder to see and to think. By the word usefulness I mean language or work that enables seeing, makes clarity. Wes Jackson’s work and language have been wonderfully useful to me in that way. Harry Caudill too, by his books and his conversation, helped me to see and think and make the radical criticism.

— from Wendell Berry’s Thoughts on the Good Life, an interview by Holly Brockman in The New Southerner

The only reason I have for putting these two quotations up in proximity is that I happened to run across them at about the same time – another of my meaningless coincidences (?). I was struck by the contrast. I don’t mean to be setting them up in contradiction, one to the other. I find the second statement more comfortable but as a poet, as I want to be a poet, I must also live in the first, even though, like the lefty friend, I don’t understand.

Years ago, reading a Robertson Davies novel, I came across this statement:

Everything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.

The great wheel. The golden mean. The Davies statement struck me then as a rare truth, and I have thought of it often in these days of red and blue, black and white. Every human endeavor needs checks. Our government needs checks and balances and so does our freedom. So does religion. So does capitolism.

Ponder, for a moment, this passage from Laura Miller’s review of The Cold War: A New History by John Geddis.

Having persuasively shown us how the Cold War shaped and dismantled communism, he doesn’t consider asking how the absence of the Cold War and a viable communist alternative is changing democratic capitalism. Early in the book, Gaddis describes 20th century capitalist elites as so worried about a popular groundswell of communism that they instituted a series of reforms. The result was the social welfare state, an effort to “preserve capitalism by mitigating its harshness.”

Now that the fear of communist revolution is gone, why should the harshness of capitalism be mitigated? Sure enough, the protections offered by the social welfare state are slowly but steadily being trimmed back across the industrialized world. People are starting to complain, and even the once comfortable middle class is feeling the pinch in housing, retirement and healthcare costs. The world seems an increasingly ruthless place for those who aren’t lucky enough to be rich.

So did Ronald Reagan, or George H. W. Bush, or even Western democracy, win the Cold War? I am a pacifist in large part because I’ve come to think nobody wins a war.

Mind you, no sane person could argue for totalitarianism of any stripe. But totalitarianism can come from the left or the right, as it did during the early parts of the 20th century. Those who believe capitolism should now reign unrestrained should read Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck to see what life was like before the social welfare system was put in place.

I have thought that the greatest punishment for being George W. Bush is being George W. Bush. Given the the absence of any ultimate court, do I still believe that?

Consider Northrop Frye here (from Northrop Frye Unbuttoned):

My principle that what we believe is what our actions show that we believe is only a definition of functional belief. It’s the first step in getting rid of ideology, and ideology is, I suppose, most of what Jesus meant by hypocrisy.

I’ll grant that I’d like to see the man publicly repudiated, humiliated in some way, but I have also said that I don’t believe in justice. Justice is never achieved and is too difficult to separate from revenge.

What happens if I turn that statement around: The greatest reward for being George W. Bush is being George W. Bush.

Is that what a reward looks like?

If I don’t believe in justice, I do believe in mercy. Do I have mercy in my heart from George W. Bush? Only insofar as I believe that the greatest punishment for being George W. Bush is being George W. Bush.

A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logyk hadde longe ygo.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe, and therto sobrely.
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
…
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
But al that he myghte of his freendes hente,
On books and on lernynge he it spente,
…
Of studie took he moost cure and moost heede.
Noght o word spak he moore than was neede,
…
Sownynge in more vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.

— Geoffrey Chaucer

CAT–One hell of a nice animal, frequently mistaken for a meatloaf.

- B. Kliban

cat, n., A soft indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

from After Subpoenas, Internet Searches Give Some Pause

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a “rent boy.”

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. “I told him I’d Googled ‘rent boy,’ just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night,” she said.

from War and Piece

Perhaps this is the whole point of the Bush administration invasion of Americans’ privacy through things like demanding Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. turn over *all* search records, monitoring phone calls without warrants, etc. Not to root out illegal activity. … No, it’s to make ordinary Americans who are not breaking the law feel like they’re being watched, so they curtail their normal behavior, so they are less political, less inquisitive, less vocal, less active, so they feel less free. Typical feature of the surveillance state.

98. Good v. bad poetry. The distinction is not useful. The whole idea assumes a shared set of articulatable values by which to make such a judgment. It assumes, if not the perfect poem, at least the theory of limits, the most perfect poem. How would you proceed to make such a distinction?

99. Those who would excerpt or edit miss the point.

— from Ron Silliman’s The Chinese Notebook

A correspondent writes:

Have been reading Larry McMurtry’s book on frontier slaughters. Wounded Knee massacre stemmed from white’s fears of the Ghost Dance–a religious cultural movement of the native Americans not dissimilar to other 19th Century Millenial belief systems such as the 7th day adventists. Cultural thuggery &n ignorance seem to be on the move again in a big way now whether in Iraq or with these British louts who steal their cultural heritage to sell for scrap.

The thefts the writer refers to are explained here in The Guardian:

A huge, modernist sculpture has disappeared from a university campus in west London, heightening fears that monumental bronzes are being targeted by thieves cashing in on booming scrap metal prices. One of The Three Watchers, a set of figures created by Lynn Chadwick in 1960 and estimated to be worth £300,000, was stolen from the grounds of Roehampton University after being snapped off at the feet.

The theft occurred less than a month after a gigantic Henry Moore figure was driven away from a sculpture park in Hertfordshire. Both statues were taken at night.

The Metropolitan police’s art and antiques unit said yesterday that as many as 20 similar thefts of bronze artworks had been reported in and around the capital within the past year. The officer leading the investigation urged sculpture owners to protect them or move them indoors last night.

Soaring scrap prices have opened up an opportunity for gangs to pocket a quick profit. The Henry Moore sculpture, taken in mid-December, was believed to be worth around £5,000 if melted down; the Chadwick may fetch as little as £1,000.

A couple of articles from The Guardian about the destruction of the world’s cultural heritage in Iraq. Mostly this stuff makes me too sad to be able to make much of a comment.

from Tomb Raiders

Even more serious, perhaps, has been the damage to Iraq’s archaeology. In this cradle of civilisation, more than 10,000 sites of interest have been identified, of which only 1,500 have been researched. These sites are currently undefended from looters. Willy Deridder, the head of Interpol, has said that these sites - particularly those in the south, such as the 4,000-year-old ziggurat at Ur - are almost impossible to protect.

Babylon and Ur were requisitioned by the coalition and have had military camps constructed within their ancient sites. At Babylon the US forces flattened 300,000 sq metres and covered the area with compacted gravel in order to create parking lots for military vehicles next to a Greek theatre built for Alexander of Macedon. A dozen trenches, each up to 170m long, have been cut through archeological workings, destroying the evidence that they might have yielded.

A helipad was constructed in the heart of ancient Babylon. For this, ground had to be bulldozed and thousands of Hesco sandbags (made by the US-owned Handling Equipment Speciality Company) filled with earth to provide fortifications. The soil in these bags, dug up from the site, contains archaeological material now ripped out of its context, deracinated for all time. Worse, when more Hesco containers had to be filled, soil was brought in from other sites. The Hesco containers are biodegradable and are already beginning to collapse, leaving a stew of archaeological material that will eventually have to be sifted at vast expense if it is to be of value.

The military have now moved on, but while the helipad was in use the daily flights shook the foundations of Babylon’s ancient walls so severely that the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the 6th-century-BC Temple of Ninmah collapsed.

In the south, the remains of the ancient city of Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, is still a military camp, while the sites of neighbouring Sumerian city-states (Lagash, Uruk and Larsa) have been so badly damaged by looters that observers have described them as resembling devastated lunar landscapes, with craters 5m deep. These craters have been dug by Iraqis who, now that the sites are not guarded, are “farming” them at night for portable antiquities that can be sold.

and a response: The US could have saved Iraq’s cultural heritage

In the preparations for the first Gulf war under Dick Cheney, then defence secretary, the Pentagon brought together detailed advice on the cultural heritage of Iraq and Kuwait from around 80 international experts and institutions. Several hundred specific sites, archaeological zones and monuments, and important historic buildings - including the National Museum in Baghdad and the Babylon and Ur archaeological zones - were identified for protection from direct acts of war such as air and ground attack, and from any postwar situation,

The protected sites were then identified on military maps used for both aerial targeting and the ground campaign. The system worked extremely well, with only one or two apparently genuine mishaps due to missiles going off target. A postwar evaluation of these measures was reported to Congress by the department of defence in January 1993, in response to a Congressional inquiry into the war’s environmental and heritage impact. In the concluding section of the report, the Pentagon gave an assurance that “similar steps will be taken by the United States in future conflicts”.

…

It is simply inconceivable that, during the planning of military action in 2002-3, the Pentagon did not turn up the detailed heritage-protection rules and maps applied so relatively successfully in the first Gulf war. Almost the first move of military planners in preparing for a possible conflict is to dust down records and maps, perhaps many decades old, and build on these. In this case, many of those responsible for developing and implementing the Desert Storm policy were still in the Pentagon. Someone or some group must have taken a positive decision to scrap the US’s established protection policies and ignore the January 1993 assurance to Congress given by the defence department, still under Dick Cheney at the time.

Who made that fatal decision? Who back in Washington refused to allow the Baghdad commander to move a tank 200 yards to protect the National Museum from looting - despite pleading by the museum and international experts - and who authorised the building of a gigantic military base in the middle of Babylon’s archaeological zone and allocated an adjacent area of the site to the Kellogg, Brown, Root subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice-President Cheney’s old firm?

Juan Cole has the link and a comment.

And so does Gilgamesh, our earliest epic hero:

What can I find (to serve) as a marker(?) for me!
I will turn back (from the journey by sea) and leave the boat by the shore!”
At twenty leagues they broke for some food,
at thirty leagues they stopped for the night.
They arrived in Uruk-Haven.
Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi, the ferryman:
“Go up, Urshanabi, onto the wall of Uruk and walk around.
Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly–
is not (even the core of) the brick structure of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plan!

Here’s a link I picked up from Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers newsletter.

It’s the LuLu Titlescorer that lets you pit the title of your novel against those of best-sellers and gives you a score.

I tried my Dance the Black-Eyed Girl – admittedly not a novel but I’ve always thought it was a pretty neat title. Not so, says LuLu. Only a 44.2% chance of becoming a best-seller. The goal is a score over 83%.

Here’s (sort of) how it works:

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

The fruit of this work is presented here, in the form of the Lulu Titlescorer: a program that you can use to gauge the chances that your own title will deliver you a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

So now I know why all those copies are still sitting in the warehouse (metaphorically speaking).

On the other hand, Cujo only had a score of 45.6%.