Sherry Chandler

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand
at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
“He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
“He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”?

— Thomas Hardy

Before Langdon could even ponder what ancient password the verse was trying to reveal, he felt something far more fundamental resonate within him—the meter of the poem. Iambic pentameter.

Langdon had come across this meter often over the years while researching secret societies across Europe, including just last year in the Vatican Secret Archives. For centuries, iambic pentameter had been a preferred poetic meter of outspoken literati across the globe, from the ancient Greek writer Archilochus to Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Voltaire—bold souls who chose to write their social commentaries in a meter that many of the day believed had mystical properties. The roots of iambic pentameter were deeply pagan.

Iambs. Two syllables with opposite emphasis. Stressed and unstressed. Yin yang. A balanced pair. Arranged in strings of five. Pentameter. Five for the pentacle of Venus and the sacred feminine.

“It’s pentameter!” Teabing blurted, turning to Langdon. “And the verse is in English! La lingua pura!”

— from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Good to know Milton was deeply pagan.

I have good friends, friends whose intelligence I respect, who like this novel. But I must agree with Ron Silliman, who says “The Da Vinci Code is to great literature what Indiana Jones is to great cinema.”

Though I have to say I enjoyed Indiana Jones and I did not enjoy The Da Vinci Code.

Silliman is good on this subject.

One should never take one’s eyes off the blog roll.

I reckon.

Here it is Mayday, and everybody’s into language tests. Raven’s Shadow has up a link to a quiz called Are You a Rebel or a Yankee, a service of alphaDictionary.com. This test purports:

To find out how much Southern blood your speech shows, simply choose the words you use below, then press “Compute My Score!” at the end. The Alpha Dictionary will compute your score and tell you where you’re coming from: are you (all) speaking Bubbaese or are you(se) a Yankee Doodle Dandy? The higher your score, the deeper from the South you are coming.

And where she may be a lil ol Doodle bug, I reckon I’m a sowbug, a generic American term, but I might as well be Queen of the May because it didn’t change my score one bit. I came out 85% Dixie. And was asked “Do you still use Confederate money?” The part of Kentucky I’m from, up within spitting distance of the Mason/Dixon Line (otherwise known as the Ohio River), I doubt that Confederate money was ever much in circulation, but I do feel a certain affinity for Bubba, especially when he’s POTUS.

Wanna hear a podcast version of the term May Day? Click through to the link. You’ll see the podcast button in the upper righthand corner. Been a while since anybody asked me to transfer my fertility to their crops, though I thought there was more to it than merely wandering over the fields.

Go read Wanda’s post on this subject of regional language. As always, she waxes eloquent.

With a few minutes to call my mind my own this morning, I was reading through my blog roll and discovered The Greeking Machine at Poesy Galore. They really seem to want to do Classical Latin for you, but I’m not too fluent in that language. Emily chose Marketing, and that was fun with its “much bonus creamy chocolatey recommended.” But all things considered, I thought I’d try their Hillbilly option. This is the outcome:

Shot hogjowls chitlins bible whoopin’ chew mashed rustle gritts. Overalls lyin’ lament shotgun backwoods shed. Wirey, yippie slap, spittin’ fiddle, promenade good ails cousin poor. Havin’ drinkin’ barefoot wild drunk give frontporch country gimmie smokin’. Jumpin’ sittin’ gal stinky tar backwoods sherrif cold darn hauled.

Plumb cooked and preacher her fishin’ bull diesel out rustle drive. No deep-fried shootin’ sam-hell co-op cheatin’ slap huntin’ took, hardware quarrel. Go mud eatin’ guzzled rat rat, jest. Cipherin’ java, commencin’ foreclose knickers, rockinchair fixin’ hoosegow thar fell.

I’ll make no further comment, except they can’t spell grits.

Below you’ll find a list of blogs that have touched my blog, and so my life, lately. These, of course, in addition to the blogs and websites and e-mail correspondents that are already part of my electronic neighborhood.

I made this list and then reading over it I was struck by its wide-ranging nature – geographically and intellectually, these are people I would be highly unlikely to encounter in the regular routine of my life. It’s why I keep writing and reading blogs. It’s why we need to keep the internet free and accessible to all.

Meredith Sue Willis is a Blogger now, with a redesigned page about: Notes on Books, Culture, Politics, Weather, my Personal Weather, and the Garden.

Sour Duck is another Blogger of interest. We share a sort of limited interest in Bubble Yum and Dubble Bubble — though my years working for the Wrigley Company sort of muted my interest in chewing gum of any kind — in indie music and poetry. She takes me visiting the Bay Area.

Shamash Says so many interesting things and her blog is visually as lush as the country “Somewhere in Asia,” where she is teaching. An odd place for a woman of Pennsylvania Amish extraction to wind up perhaps but she brings a wonderful perspective to her experiences and lets us see glimpses of life we will never get from the big media.

Robin Kemp has a re-designed WordPress blog page. I give her kudos for blog title: Every Poet Needs a Patio. She has strong New Orleans connections and is very active blogging about poetry, so I suggest you give her a click through.

My post on the Judy Sizemore benefit got picked up by the Breast Cancer Treatment blog: “Breast cancer treatment, breast cancer information, breast cancer symptom, breast cancer awareness.”

Save the Internet I’ve already mentioned. If you’re interested in network neutrality, give them a visit.

And hey, I guess you all know by now that you can listen to all of Neil Young’s “Living With War” at his website,
Neil’s Garage? I’ve been a bit miffed at Neil since he said, soon after September 11, 2001, that we could give up a few of our civil liberties. “We can always get them back again.” And then there was that “Let’s Roll” song. On the other hand, there’s that brilliant soundtrack to “Dead Man.” And now this album, which may not be great rock and roll, but it does contain a song entitled “Let’s Impeach the President.” Neil as bellwether?