Sherry Chandler » 2006 » August
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.
This post was written by sherry
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.
This post was written by sherry
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”
This post was written by sherry
On-line registration is now open for the Ohio/Kentucky/Indiana Writers’ Roundtable on October 6-8, 2006. The OKI Writers’ Roundtable website, www.riversinstitute.org/events/OKI, contains information regarding the keynote, workshops and workshop faculty, scholarships, one-on-one critiques, and much more.
Of interest to my poet friends, Nikki Finney will be leading the poetry workshop. Other faculty listed on the Meet the Faculty Page.
This post was written by sherry
Rating the Governors at Political Wire:
In Kentucky, Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R), never seen in positive territory in 15 months of tracking, has fallen 27 points in the past six months. Fletcher is at Minus 49.
Why is this man running for re-election? [Note: I need to add an explanation that -49 is the difference between Fletchers positives (27) and his negatives (73).]
[Update: Charges against Fletcher dropped:
“The governor acknowldges that the evidence strongly indicates wrongdoing by his administration with regard to personnel actions within the merit system,” according to the court order filed today.
“Further, the governor hereby states that these actions were inappropriate and that he regrets their occurrence and accepts responsibility for them as head of the executive branch of state government.”
I love these careful parsings of the language.]
From Trudy Rubin’s op-ed in the Baltimore Sun:
When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, it upended a regime whose Sunni leaders repressed a predominantly Shiite population. U.S. leaders thought Iraq was dominated by a secular middle class. They believed an Iraqi democracy led by elected Shiite officials would encourage Iranian Shiites to overthrow their regime.
Reality bit hard. Iraq’s Shiite majority was predominantly religious. Shiite political leaders, who had spent their exile years in Tehran, would not drop their ties with the Iranians.
By removing Mr. Hussein, the United States made Shiite Iran the strongest power in the region. Urged on by their ayatollahs, Iraq’s Shiite majority voted in the second Shiite-led government in the region, dominated by religious parties. This Shiite revival helped other minority Shiite movements in the region, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, to strengthen their position.
R. J. Eskow on What Dylan Said:
A lot of people have commented on music piracy, including me, but nobody’s done it as succinctly as Bob Dylan in his latest Rolling Stone interview. After knocking modern records for their bad sound, he said:
“I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not?It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”"
That boy better be careful. He’s spent forty years refusing the title of “voice of a generation.” If he doesn’t want to be a spokesman he shouldn’t talk so much sense.
The full quote:
“Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today. We all like records that are played on record players, but let’s face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ‘em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.’ “. . .
This post was written by sherry
Free Lunch # 35 hit my mailbox last week. As usual, it provides a chapbook-sized collection of accessible poetry, including the Free Lunch Mentor program in which, in this issue, Denise Duhamel introduces Ysabel Fernandez-Acuna. Fernandez-Acuna gives us three mother poems that are edgy, comic, and fresh. “Unemployed,” for example, a prose poem in one long tumbling sentence begins like this:
When I tell my mother I need a job she says just don’t write obituaries because you will think a lot about death and dying and me dying and you will grow sad, wear even more black than you already do and for fun you will write your own obituary, you know you will, like you did in sixth grade…
Other poets included in this issue are Philip Dacey, Simon Perchik, Carol Hamilton, and Ron Koertge. Koertge’s “The Birth of Cool” is one of my favorites and typical of what you might call the Free Lunch mood:
The Birth of Cool
I liked it when somebody pulled a gun,
a car careened toward a precipice,
a circus train flew off the tracks.But I loved the usherette. Her white
jacket and slacks. Her little white cap.
Her crossed arms and tapping foot.When Charleton Heston rushed to save
the sexy aerialist, my usherette tinkered
with her flashlight.Even after the house lights went up,
the way she strolled toward the red Impala
while her boyfriend pampered his hair,she seemed to me like a city protected by snow.
— Ron Koertge
I love that last line. It makes the poem.
This post was written by sherry
I have great pity for JonBenet Ramsey. She was exploited during the brief years of her life. She was brutally murdered. (How can such a small child have a twelve-inch skull fracture?) And she has been exploited in death for longer than she lived. It’s the United States at its ugliest.
It begins to look even uglier when you consider the racist nature of this frenzy and all such frenzies over beautiful white girls in sexual danger.
As Juan Cole points out this morning in his post JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi :
That is frankly because the victim was not a blonde, blue-eyed American, but a black-eyed, brunette Iraqi. Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi’s death is not treated obsessively in the same way. In the hyperlinked story above, CNN even calls the little girl a “woman” at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less overed up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.
Members of our army raped and murdered this 14-year-old “woman” and killed her entire family to cover it up. What our army does it does in our names. George W. Bush would have us believe our army is there to protect the Iraqi people, not to prey on them. Where’s the furor and the outrage?
Here’s another take on Beautiful Dead Girls.
This post was written by sherry
From Chris Colin’s article “Just Be” in Yoga Journal:
…following six straight hours of work, and preceding six more, I devote 30 nonrefundable minutes to Judge Judy. For but a moment—the length of a Ziploc bag commercial—I wonder if this is the best way to spend my work break. Then the 30-second spot is over and Judy is back.
The abiding and self-congratulatory myth regarding Americans and relaxation is that we’ve got too much on our plates to partake. But as a culture, clearly we have underdeveloped ideas about nothingness. While we’re indeed busy, we’re not too busy, not by a long shot, not by at least four hours of TV a day, according to Nielsen reports, plus Web surfing, excursions to the mall, and so on. We have, strangely enough, enormous reserves of ostensible leisure time. That we choose to use so little of it to actively combat the various ravages of stress suggests a relationship to downtime that wants rethinking.
…“The majority of Americans are doing what I call default relaxation activities, which yield lower levels of process benefits,” says [Juliet Schor (author of Overworked America)], who’s also a professor of sociology at Boston College. Process benefits are the pastimes correlated with higher levels of human satisfaction. “Watching TV and shopping, for example, are shown to have low process benefits,” Schor says. Mathur, the meditation teacher, says, “In modern society, when we say we’re tired, we usually mean our mind is tired.” Often, though, we fail to listen up and give it a rest. Instead, we hunker down on the couch with the remote in hand. “With TV, you’re adding input rather than clearing out or cleansing. In a way, your mind is going to be even more tired when you’re done.”
Liz Newby-Fraser, academic dean at the California Institute for Human Science, explains this in physiological terms. “Watching two hours of television is not relaxation. With TV, there are stimuli that activate the sympathetic nervous system, rather than the parasympathetic, which is associated with real rest.”
…If our default relaxation activities do us little good, and a more thoughtful mind-body awareness makes us more effective, why do we still choose Survivor over meditation or yoga or just a few minutes of real quiet? One line of thinking suggests that we can’t bear to face the cluttered barrenness of our hollow, online, box-store, early-21st-century lives; we don’t dare glimpse the abyss. Schor, for her part, sees it more simply: Television’s easy. “Meditation requires a skill,” she says. “TV requires none”.
This post was written by sherry
Heraclitean Fire has a thoughtful post today about the nature of e-zines:
Don’t try to be a print journal. The real print journals do that already, and you’re never going to look like anything other than a low budget knock-off. That means questioning your assumptions about how a poetry magazine should work. For example: why have periodic ‘issues’? Speaking for myself, my tolerance of reading lots of stuff onscreen at once is lower than reading it in print, so if a large issue of your ezine appears, I’m probably going to read a couple of poems then move on to something else. That happens with print as well, but at least if I have a physical copy of the journal lying around my house I’m more likely to pick it up again and read some more. On the web, it’s that much less likely.
The pattern Harry describes is exactly my pattern in reading e-zines. There’s something about text on a screen that brings out the attention deficit disorder. Predictably, I suppose, I can stay much longer if I’m producing the text than if I’m passively consuming it. But a piece of online writing has to be really good to keep my attention — and even then I will often make a printout to read.
Harry has some other practical ideas about e-zine design that I suggest you read — even if you aren’t planning to publish one, these thoughts may help you decide why some e-zines succeed better than others.
I like the idea of an RSS feed for a magazine to let you know when new content has been added. The only problem is that I am already way oversubscribed and I don’t know whether one more in-box item would make a reader of me or not. Perhaps it would depend upon whether my click-through found good poems. Well, no, maybe better than good…
And I will add one very basic notion about design: please oh please oh please don’t use colored type on a black background. I just cannot read it and will not even try.
While you’re at it, check The Rik Files, too, for thoughts about what leads you to submit to an e-zine.
This post was written by sherry
