Sherry Chandler

According to Survey USA, Bush’s approval rate in Kentucky stands at 39% with 57% disapproving. His disapproval rate is not far from the proportion by which he won the vote in Kentucky in 2004.

Surveys were done by WHAS-TV and WCPO-TV.

Have Coffee Will Write will show you how Bush has turned those red states blue.

“Where is this cat?” asked Rodney Scollop. “Is that the animal?” he said, pointing out of the window to where, in the yard, a tough-looking Tom with tattered ears stood mewing in a hardboiled way out of the corner of its mouth.

“Good heavens, no!” said Lancelot. “That is an alley cat which comes arund here from time to time to lunch at the dustbin. Webster is quite different. Webster has a natural dignity and repose of manner. Webster is a cat who prides himself on always being well turned out and whose high principles and lofty ideals shine from his eyes like beacon fires…” And then suddenly, with an abrupt change of manner, Lancelot broke down and in a low voice added, “Curse him! Curses him! Curse him! Curse him!”

Worple looked at Scallop. Scallop looked at Worple.

“Come, old man,” said Scollop, laying a gentle hand on Lancelot’s bowed shoulder. “We are your friends. Confide in us.”

“Tell us all,” said Worple. “What’s the matter?”

Lancelot uttered a bitter, mirthless laugh.

“You want to know what’s the matter? Listen, then. I’m cat-pecked!”

— from P. G. Wodehouse, “The Story of Webster”

Print by Barbara Medford.

in honor of our newest National Historic Landmark:

…Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

— from Federico Garcia Lorca “Ode to Walt Whitman”

Mainstream success and Oscar nominations don’t seem to have robbed Johnny Depp of his quirky genius or his ability to deadpan the most outrageous stuff while charming you with his gamin face, his androgynous black eyes. So far, his remake of “El Mariachi” notwithstanding, he shows no signs of wanting to bulk up and channel Bruce Willis, though I see he’s falling into the sequel trap with “Pirates of the Carribbean 3.”

Whatever his future, however, I will always treasure his strange performances in cultish and independent films like “Cry Baby” and “Benny and Joon.” Peter Jackson may give you expensively computer-enhanced elves. Depp personifies the fey in sweet and dangerous mode.

“Dead Man” may be the strangest movie Depp ever made. Released in 1995, this black and white movie, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, runs through the Kafka-esque into Native American myth and a kind of 1960s Don Juan mysticism and a Mike Finkish exaggeration. That may not sound like much of a recommendation, but strong performance by Depp and Gary Farmer, a Canadian actor of Native American heritage, with support from Lance Henrikson, John Hurt, Billy Bob Thornton (as a really bent fur trapper), and Robert Mitchum in one of his last film roles. The whole thing is driven by a metallic guitar solo score performed by Neil Young. Oh, and I need to mention that it’s a comedy, sort of.

Depp is William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant from Cleveland travelling west in a plaid suit and eyeglasses to claim a job at the Dickinson Metal Works. Arriving at the town of Machine, Blake finds his job already taken and is driven from the factory at the point of owner’s (Robert Mitchum) gun. He spends his last coin on a bottle of rotgut and behaves chivalrously to a whore turned flower girl (her flowers are paper). He and the girl are caught in flagrante by the factory owner’s son who shoots them both with a single bullet. The girl is dead, Blake mortally wounded.

He escapes on a pinto pony that also belongs to the factory owner. In the wild, he is discovered and ministered to by Nobody (Gary Farmer), an outcast Indian who was captured as a boy and taken to England as an exhibit. Educated in English schools, he discovers William Blake whose words are “powerful. They spoke to me.” So here’s the setup — a dying William Blake and an outcast Indian whose life was saved by a long-dead William Blake.

The rest of the movie is a sort of vision quest in which Nobody takes William Blake on a journey into death and a sort of negative Manifest Destiny during which Blake slowly sheds all vestiges of civilization – his eyeglasses, his plaid suit – and identifies more and more with the dying natural world around him. Meanwhile, he is pursued by everything the factory owner can throw at him: law men, bounty hunters, and most dangerous, a trio of hired killers.

As with any successful work of art, there’s a lot going on in “Dead Man” that can’t be tied up in a neat little package labelled message. It is a violent and graphic movie. As William Blake journeys further and further into death (West), the vestiges of European civilization become more and more depraved. Nobody seems to view this reincarnation of William Blake as a spirit of vengeance – his gun becomes his poetry and he uses it to shoot white men. At the same time, Nobody sees it as his mission to return Blake to the spirit world he came from. The visuals are as delirious as William Blake and Young’s over-amped electric guitar growls and screams and gets into your very nerves.

“Dead Man” is true, in its way, to Blake’s poetry. After all, Blake was a visionary and a revolutionary. “Dead Man” is more like poetry than something inspiring and sentimental, like “The Dead Poet Society.” I recommend it.

2006 Women Who Write Tenth Annual Poetry and Short Prose Contest
RULES FOR ENTRY

• Submissions must be received or postmarked by April 17, 2006.
• A $5.00 entry fee must be included with each piece of work submitted.
• Submission should be no more than 10 double-spaced pages.
• Each submission must include a cover page with the title of the work, authors name, address, and home phone number. The title only should appear on each page of the work.
• Entries are not accepted from current members of Women Who Write.
• Send entries to Women Who Write, P.O. Box 6167, Louisville, KY 40206. Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you would like your materials returned.

If you have questions, email Women Who Write

I would be remiss if, before Women’s History Month is over, I did not point you to a small collection of poems by Joanie DiMartino at Wicked Alice.

Joanie is one of the best poets I know who writes about women in history. She is currently working on a biography-in-poetry of Alice Paul and a short collection of poems about women as freaks and geeks that grew out of our Sideshow project last year.

from Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

The Afghan authorities have released Abdul Rahman, a convert from Islam to Christianity who was facing a death sentence for apostacy. Apparently the grounds for the release were procedural– questions linger about the man’s mental health, and there are gaps in the prosecution’s evidence.

That this travesty is being ended is a great good thing. But it is unfortunate that it is being ended on these narrow grounds. The next convert will face the same charges.

The episode underlines the falsehood of the Bush administration’s empty boast that it is spreading democracy in the Middle East and that “50 million” persons have been liberated. In fact, Bush has been spreading Muslim fundamentalism….

The doctrine that apostacy deserves the death penalty comes out of medieval Islamic canon law rather than from the Quran itself. …

The Quran is forthright that the wages of unbelief and idolatry in this life are damnation in the next. But it does not permit coercion of the conscience in this life.

This excellent post deserves your full attention. It is best never to make sweeping assumptions about a culture or a religion.

The Other Voices International Project has been working for two years now to bring together a cyberanthology that erases the boundaries of nations, ethnicities, religions, cultures, and age to bring you some of the world’s best poetry. It is their way of fighting the paranoia and polarization that has grown in our world since 2001. They describe themselves thus:

The Other Voices International Project is made up of a small dedicated staff whose desire is to bring you the best poetry possible from around the world in the form of a cyber-anthology. As the project grows so does our belief that the bottom line for this project is the poets and their voices as they look upon the world and attempt to find some way for us to meet and understand the consequences of what it means to be human…

I am pleased to announce that I have a small collection of poems, October Grass, up at that site now. Some of you will recognize a few of them.

After you’ve read my poems, I urge you to look around and read some others. The anthology has brought together a wonderful collection of poets, writing in English, from around the world. Read their bios, too. I am proud to be included in this list.

from The Guardian:

Baghdad Burning, by a 26-year-old author who has won an international readership under the pen name Riverbend, is longlisted for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award. In the list, announced today, she is up against 18 other books including Alan Bennett’s latest bestseller, histories of the cold war and the great wall of China, and a biography of the 19th-century cookbook author Mrs Beeton. The Guardian carried an extract from Riverbend’s title last summer.

The small literary publisher Marion Boyars brought out Baghdad Burning last year, classifying it under biography and memoir. The publishing house says it knows Riverbend’s identity but respects her wish to remain anonymous.

It has already come third in the Lettre Ulysses prize for Reportage, winning £14,000, and was shortlisted for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award.

Riverbend began the blog with the words: “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.”

If you’ve read here long, you know I’ve linked to Baghdad Burning several times over the last year. Although I wish the circumstances that produced this blog had never happened, I am pleased to see that the writing is getting attention.