Sherry Chandler

Wanna see some Dylan?

Speaking of image, if you haven’t been to Gin’s Place for a while, I’m here to tell you she’s learning to do watercolors.

Being skilled at any art she turns her hand to, Gin is doing a great job with the watercolors and she has picked a subject of considerable interest to me.

Find out the wheres & whyfores in her August journal.

BTW, I recommend reading the journal. The tale of Gin’s adventures in craft is fascinating and fully illustrated.

There’s a blog I love to visit called BagNews that takes as its mission the deconstruction of image and how pictures are used to create a metamessage. The Bag is run by a psychologist who is smarter about these things than I am by far — and he has a dedicated group of commenters who are also very sharp. Still, I can’t help but try my hand a little at analyzing this photo of Ernie Fletcher, (on the left) appearing in today’s NYTimes online alongside the story of the plea bargain struck yesterday.

This AP photo, taken by Haraz N. Ghanbari, does not show us the bright and grinning young pol we’re accustomed to seeing here in Kentucky. Note the heavy Nixonian beard, the shadowed eyes, the pursed mouth and rather petulant expression. Notice also how Fletcher is isolated, a dark man against a dark background, storm clouds around those American flags.

Contrast the photo the Lexington Herald-Leader ran (on the right [I'm on the hunt for this photo, lost in the great blog crash of October]) with the same story. Taken by staff photographer Frank Anderson (not so much diversity in Kentucky), it shows Fletcher working the crowd at the Kentucky State Fair, famous grin and swept-back wave in place, the “public” staring up at him with friendly, if not adoring, eyes.

I would not call the Herald-Leader a Fletcher friendly paper. Still, their photograph was much more what we’re accustomed to see here in Kentucky. I was actually somewhat,well, shocked I guess, by the Times photo.

A little bit of a reality check?

At the very least, a man more troubled than we are usually allowed to see around here.

Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her “wings,” which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?

— Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, chapter 12 “Brute Neighbors”