Sherry Chandler

A message from Mick Kennedy:

If you use magic in fiction, the first thing you have to do is put barriers up. There must be limits to magic. If you can snap your fingers and make anything hapen, where’s the fun in that? …The story really starts when you put limits on magic. Where fantasy gets a bad name is when anything can happen because a wizard snaps his fingers. Magic has to come with a cost, probably a much bigger cost than when things are done by what is usually called “the hard way.”

— Terry Pratchett from The Wand in the Word, Conversations with Writers of Fantasy (Candlewick Press, 2006), edited by Leonard S. Marcus

I feel this way about the current crop of fantasy and action movies done with computer animation. When the characters can “perform” any kind of physical stunt, the film becomes a cartoon without the laughs.

Pratchett continues:

In A Hat Full of Sky, …I have [Tiffany] learning what might be called “the hard end” of witchcraft, which is being a combination of village midwife, wise woman, and nurse. It means that you are giving all the time, that other people are taking, and that you don’t get much rest, and it isn’t what you think witchcraft is going to be when you set out. There’s an awful lot of dirt and bandaging and looking after people, and not very much broomstick. Disc world is amagical place, but very little actual magic happens. When Tiffany magically turns someone into a frog, it turns out to be a very horrifying moment because of the law of the conservation of mass. You get about two ounces of frog and all the matter that’s left over takes the form of this kind of big pink balloon floating up against the ceiling, making “gloop, gloop” noises. It’s all very messy.

This is why I love reading Disc world novels.

Uncertainty about word origins can be fun:

Catullus 94

Mentulla moechatur, moechatur mentulla? Certe
Hoc est quod dicunt: ipsa olla olera legit.

Dickweed adulteritizes, adulterates Dicky? Yo.
Just as They say: an herb bottle decocts its own.

Moechor is a deponent verb derived from the Greek for Adulterer. But the real quibble here is the root of the word mentula. C. implies here that it is the diminuitive of the mint plant menthum/mentum.

I was puzzled for years about why there was any wit to this poem until I looked up some etymologies.

But in poem 115 he caps a catalog of M.’s possessions with

….omnia magna haec sunt, tamen ipsest maximus ultro,
non homo, sed vero mentula magna minax.

…All these thing being great, yet the greatest thing is he himself,
Not a man but a huge overhanging menace-prick.

C. here plays with the concept that mentula derives from the deponent minari “to jut forth, overhang”– by way of “chin” mentum–literally that which overhangs. A mentula would be like a “little chin” in this case.

Odd how poets always seem to know how to have archaic and eat it as well.

When I was a girl, this was a throwaway comic line, heard everywhere from Crosby-Hope Road pictures to Pepé Le Pew cartoons. I knew I was supposed to laugh at it, I knew the Casbah was some exotic, romantic place, but I had no idea what it was.

So I turned to this NYTimes article, “The Crumbling of the Casbah,” this morning with considerable interest. Now that I have a pretty good idea of what the Casbah is I learn that it soon may be no more:

Casbahs, from the Arabic for “fortified place,” exist across North Africa, and many have been beautifully restored. In Algiers the word once referred only to the citadel built above the old city, but it came to mean the old city itself. When people speak of the Casbah, they are referring uniquely to this crowded hillside between the fortress and the sea.

A Phoenician trading post called Ikosim occupied the point of land as early as the sixth century B.C. The Romans arrived 500 years later, and the arc of an amphitheater can still be traced in the walls of the buildings in the lower Casbah.

The Vandals eventually chased the Romans away, and a Berber tribe was living there when Buluggin bin Ziri arrived in the 10th century to found a new city on what was left of the old one. He called the new city El Djazair, which means the islands in Arabic, referring to the string of islets off the coast that form a natural breakwater for the harbor. From El Djazair came the anglicized name Algiers and later Algeria.

The Berbers built a wall around the city. Five gates closed it off from the world, and gates also closed each end of the city’s narrow streets, although both the wall and the internal gates have long since disappeared.

After the Barbarossa brothers captured the town in 1516, Algiers became a fabled redoubt of Barbary pirates who plied the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In 1575 Miguel de Cervantes was taken captive on his way back to Spain from a military campaign and spent five years in Algiers before he was ransomed and sent home.

In those days the fortified city was filled with more than 100 fountains, 50 hammams, or public baths, 13 large mosques and more than 100 prayer halls, one for almost every street, so that residents could perform the last of their five daily prayers after the gates were shut for the night. A flutist circulated playing a Turkish melody called a coupe jambe — French for leg cut — to announce the evening curfew.

Colonialism was hard on Algiers:

When the French arrived to colonize the country in 1830, one of the first things they did was cut the city in two with the “rue du Centre” to allow their troops easy access in the event of insurrection. They surrounded the Casbah with colonial-style buildings, destroyed the walls and tore down much of the northern quarter to build the colonial neighborhood of Bab al-Oued.

So was the battle for independence, which basically seems to have turned the Casbah into a slum:

In 1958 the Casbah’s 175 acres were home to only 30,000 people. Those numbers swelled as the battle for independence gained strength, and people crowded into the city to escape reprisals by the French. More than 80,000 people live in the Casbah today. Each house, intended for a single family, now holds as many as 10 poor families.

Earthquakes have taken their toll. And so has fundamentalism, which whether Christian or Moslem, never seems to have much concern for culture. The Casbah has been a major hiding place for terrorists.

There is a movement underway to restore/rebuild the Casbah but

“More than a third of the houses have collapsed, and at least another third are in an advanced state of deterioration,” said Abdelkader Ammour, secretary general of a foundation that is trying to save the crumbling swatch of hidden courtyards and winding narrow streets. “We don’t want it to disappear.”

Mr. Ammour said the problem isn’t money. “It’s a question,” he said, “of political will.”

Or as Nabila Oulebsir, an Algerian architect who has written extensively on Algiers, says, “The question is whether you reconstruct or construct something new.”

Historic preservation is a luxury for steady times, and Algeria is still feeling its way toward the future from a dark and turbulent past. It has only just righted itself from a decade of fundamentalist Islamic violence. The nation’s focus is now on economic development. But tourism, the great engine of preservation in so many cities, is low on the list of Algeria’s concerns. Algeria doesn’t really need tourists. It has oil.

Although I struggle with the idea of a “poetry of witness” and/or confessional poetry, I don’t see use of the “I” in poetry as much of a problem. I figure a poem has a point of view that is more or less mine, an observer that is more or less me, whatever way I use pronouns. Self-consciously avoiding “I” isn’t so much a challenge as a hobble.

Still the question is debated in poetry groups I inhabited and periodicals I read, so I find myself more or less forced to consider it and so am drawn to aphoristic pronouncements about it, such as this one I share with you today:

The autobiographical gesture negotiates between self and subject; that is, the poet is never just a unique person speaking honestly about her individual life, but rather, someone subject to social codes such as class, race, nationality, and gender. Morevoer, because the poet uses language, which is also subject to these codes, saying “I” is doubly vexed. No self is primary, untouched by culture — and poets acknowledge this to varying degrees.

— from Natasha Sajé, “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems” in The Iowa Review, Fall 2005.

Speaking of point of view, I have spent the last week with mine considerably impaired. My routine cataract lens replacement got complicated by a small benign cyst on my iris. Short version is that attempts to avoid the cyst failed and it bled and shed pigment into my pupil, so that I was essentially blinded in that eye for several days. Disturbing and tiresome, even though one knows it’s temporary. Disappointing when the expected “I can see!” is transformed to “Oh my God, I’m blind!”

My regimen of eye drops has been a full-time job: steroids for the inflammation, glaucoma-type meds to counteract the pressure build-up caused by the steroids, antibiotics. I think this is the most medical attention I’ve ever required in my 61 years, including postnatal care after giving birth to unexpected twins. I’ve been a slave to the clock, having to plan any activities around the drug regimen. Any of my readers who have to do this kind of thing regularly have my deep sympathy. It’s very difficult to always have to be so self-aware.

Being a metaphor maker, I have thought of this experience as first, looking through the windshield of one of those big-ass mudsling trucks, then as looking through a turbulent surf filled with seaweed and sand (the stuff floats around in the eye fluid, hence floaters I suppose), and now finally as looking out on the world through one of those dainty black hat veils such as femme fatales used to wear in 1930s noir movies.

Even so, I don’t have much impulse to try to make a poem of any of it. A week spent staring at the inside of my own eye has not been all that inspiring. I did see (ahem) a small private irony in getting a comment this week from my favorite visual poet, Geof Huth. As a visual experience, Geof, this is the pits except that I do have a much more viseral grasp of how binocular vision works: spots before one eye = spots across most of the field of vision.

As of yesterday afternoon, my eye began to feel somewhat normal in its socket and I began to get glimpses of the improvement I was promised. Best, it no longer hurts to spend more than ten minutes or so reading a book or looking a a computer screen. So I think I’m back in business.

Thanks to Poppysmatus for pinch hitting. My hit numbers have actually gone up this week. I may need to think about that.

from this morning’s NYTimes:

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

I got my undergraduate degree at Georgetown College, a decent liberal arts education including six hours of Bible history that, though I dreaded them, turned out to be among the most interesting courses I took there. These were classes in Bible scholarship in which I first learned how the phenomenon we call “the Bible” came to be written and by whom. It was in these classes that I first learned that Genesis tells at least two creation stories because it had a least two “authors” and it was in these classes that it was first pointed out to me that the New Testament Gospels don’t agree with one another.

The classes broadened my mind but they did not undermine my faith. Whether my faith has been undermined, how, and by whom is a question I’ll reserve for myself but it was not these Bible history classes that did it. They only made me eager for more knowledge. I love learning, especially about how humankind tells stories.

Georgetown has educated a lot of teachers in north central Kentucky — it is within commuting distance for many (as it was for me) and it also offers distance learning via internet. Its enrollment is not strictly Baptist and although their motto is “education in a Christian context,” they are not narrow in the way denominational schools can sometimes be. So I am proud of Georgetown College, proud that they are not going to yield to pressure to become narrow. They gave up a lot of guaranteed moneys for this decision.

The article continues like this:

…efforts to rein in what many Southern Baptists see as inappropriate departures from religious orthodoxy have looked to many professors and college administrators like efforts to limit academic freedom.

“The convention itself in its national and state organizations has moved so far to the right that previous diversity on the faculty and among the trustees is no longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest. “More theological control of the curriculum and the faculty has been the result.’’

David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.’’

The state conventions do not own the colleges, but in most cases they approve trustees and provide annual subsidies.

[Note: the article talks about Georgetown's efforts to become a Phi Beta Kappa affiliate. I would have dearly loved to have had that when I was there in the late sixties.]

Hummingbirds love these perfumed old-fashioned phlox that have persisted under our bedroom window in spite of drought, heat, and all manner of neglect since before I came to live here nearly a quarter century ago.

My mother’s phlox all bloom in neat round balls. They would not dare to do anything else. Mine are always a little frowsy.

17th Century wit & wisdom:

        On Maids and Cats

A nimble cat and lazy maid,
Breed household feuds and are no aid;
But lazy cats and nimble maids,
Beyond all doubt, are greater plagues.
Once, now and then, the cat may eat,
But snoops the maid in ev’ry plate,
And makes the purse and cellar low.
How e’er it hits, there is no dough.

–Henricus Selyns 1636-1701

An exchange between the headmaster of the Old School and Ayn Rand:

…If you had to name the single greatest work by an American author, what would it be?

Atlas Shrugged.

Your own novel

Is there another?

And after that?

The Fountainhead.

Is there really no other American author whose work you admire?

…There is one, she said, I am interested in the novels of Mr. Mickey Spillane. His metaphysic is perhaps rather instinctive but quite sound nevertheless…I would particularly recommend I, the Jury. In Mike Hammer, he has created a true hero, one who doesn’t torture himself in the current fashion with decadent niceties. Mike knows evil from good and destroys it without hesitation or regret. Most unusual. Most satisfying.

— Tobias Wolff, Old School (Vintage Books, 2003)

I must point out that this portrait of Ayn Rand is fictional and I have no idea what her actual opinion of Mickey Spillane might have been. This passage gives me cause to wonder, howver, whether our current president may have read, when he read at all, much of Mickey Spillane.

Nah. Probably caught the movie.

I might question the pronoun reference in the antepenultimate sentence in the quote.

I noticed yesterday that Mickey Spillane has passed, of whose writing Raymond Chandler observed “[p]ulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff.” Spillane was the Hardest of the Hardboiled pulp authors, and the most successful, and he dominated drugstore newsracks in the 1950s. The great unwashed seems to have a vast appetite for the Simple, the Violent and the Quick. Swift vengeance satisfies our body politic as nothing else can. Our government supposedly has given the green light to the Israelis for at least one more week of Massive Destruction in Lebanon before we apply some Condi-linguis. This indiscriminate bombing may or may not destroy Hizbollah but it is violent and swift.

Looking Competent obviously trumps Being Competent, which is why Porgey was flanked by all those Defrosted & Adopted embryos during his photo-op. Our First Embryo had just signed his Very First Veto against stem cell research. What kind of World Leader allows himself to be upstaged by a small blonde waif while thousands of dark-haired Israeli and Iraqi and Lebanese and Palestinean waifs suffer and die 7 or 8 timezones away? A very canny and cynical one?

Politics, like the writing of mystery novels, requires a degree of careful consideration. Don’t well-crafted proposals produce the longer lasting solutions than slapdash fixes? Our Fearless Reader obviously favors the latter, stuffing his mouth full of a dinner roll while eructating a glib and vulgar aphorism. Juan Cole has an observation on just how well George understands the situation in the Middle East. Duhhb is Cowboy Lawman, carved from the same banana as the Duke and Mike Hammer, who never hit a woman when he could kick her. Were any of these characters the Red Sea, Pharoah’s army would barely get their feet damp.

Well nil nisi malum de fututuis or summat.

It is with some trepidation that I contemplate the forthcoming Dalziel and Pascoe novel at the Amazon.co.uk site. It is to be published in March 2007 and is titled The Death of Dalziel.