Sherry Chandler

Before we leave February’s dark chill for March’s bluster, I want to mention one last delight that came to my winter mailbox: Jane Kretschmann’s chapbook. Number 63 in FootHills’s Springfed Chapbook series, Imagining a Life is a gift of 21 poems in Jane’s deceptively quiet voice. Filled with wonderfully realized details of ordinary life, the poems are small stories told in plain language without verbal or metric pyrotechnics. And yet, there is often an edge (quite literally), as in “October Sadness”:

A woman coming home
reaches for a sweater
before beginning supper,

then stands at the counter,
as though reluctant to feel
the refrigerator’s chill.

…

The doctor’s report weighs
on her mind. In the darkening
room, she avoids slicing

the raw meat, anesthetized
by the cold light
invading the kitchen.

Jane often brings a wry smile, as in “Sweet Relief,” where the speaker finds a rustic form of pay toilet while walking in the woods, or “Eve Teaches Adam About Naming,” where a culinary lexicography (who knows what a gilhoolie is?) ends with a twist:

Come on, brother/lover/husband, have
some fruit, whatever you call it.

Some of the poems I would call quietly raucous, if you’ll forgive me the oxymoron: “Psalm for the Full-Figured Woman,” “Wedding Reception at the American Legion” (which gives us that southern tradition, the biker wedding), and “Return Policy:”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a marriage,
considering that we lived together
longer before the wedding than after,”
she says, setting down her beer mug.
“It was like buying something
you can take back if it doesn’t work.”

“Yeah,” she says with a nod, “more like
a vacuum cleaner than a marriage.
Sweaty, spermy nights—easy to suck up…

But this little book is not all Southern charm. It takes on hard subjects, too, like slavery, homelessness, and the hard child labor that is farm life.

Imagining a Life is, like all FootHills chapbooks, a handsome handstitched volume on heavy cream paper. It’s a bargain at $6.00.

I recommend it to you.

I didn’t know they used this kind of language down in Wilmore. From the NYTimes article on the supposed discovery of Jesus’s tomb:

“A lot of conservative, orthodox and moderate Christians are going to be upset by the recklessness of this,” said Ben Witherington, a Bible scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. “Of course, we want to know more about Jesus, but please don’t insult our intelligence by giving us this sort of stuff. It’s going to get a lot of Christians with their knickers in a knot unnecessarily.”

A Hindu I work with went to see “The DaVinci Code” and returned gleeful at its send-up of Christian pomp. You have to understand that this is a man who has been given what he calls a “passport to hell” by fundamentalist Christians in our establishment, people even more ignorant of Hindu tradtions than I am.

“Is that stuff real?” he asked me. Well, yes, I had to reply. Those organizations in the film do and did exist — there really were Knights Templar, there really is Agnes Dei. But the novel and the movie are fiction.

And it’s going to take a lot more than a film put together by James Cameron to convince me otherwise. I agree with Lawrence E. Stager, also quoted in the article:

“This is exploiting the whole trend that caught on with ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” said Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot professor of archaeology of Israel at Harvard, in a telephone interview. “One of the problems is there are so many biblically illiterate people around the world that they don’t know what is real judicious assessment and what is what some of us in the field call ‘fantastic archaeology.’”

Or, in the words of the poet Todd Swift:

Easter comes each year. It should never cease, on the basis of medical records or dusty discoveries. Indiana Jones is no match for the Sermon on the Mount.

Another Salon article of interest: Andrew Leonard’s Freedom to choose: Organic alfalfa

In a decision that is being hailed by anti-GMO activists as precedent-setting, a U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco delivered a stinging rebuke to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Feb. 14, ruling that the USDA had erred in not conducting a full environmental impact statement (EIS) on the possible consequences of introducing genetically modified “Roundup Ready” alfalfa into commercial production.

The 20-page decision makes for fascinating reading. Judge Charles Breyer (the brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer), shreds the USDA’s rationale for skipping the EIS with a level of precision that puts to shame any number of press releases from advocacy organizations.

The key issue was not whether GM alfalfa, modified by Monsanto to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, might be unhealthy for human consumption. Breyer noted that legal precedent required him to respect the decision by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that Roundup Ready alfalfa was “harmless” to humans. Instead, Breyer drilled down on the crucial issue of how the introduction of GM alfalfa was likely to affect the economic livelihood of organic farmers whose crops would risk being contaminated by GM alfalfa. The likelihood of such contamination is inevitable, as the government conceded during its testimony.

In our current political climate, the wants of agribusiness trump all. I’d say it’s worth sitting through a commercial to read the rest of this article and Leonard’s argument that this wide-spread use of GM materials takes away our basic freedom of choice about what we eat.

In a related story, the NYTimes notices that honeybees are disappearing in a phenomena called “colony collapse disorder.” I find their headline telling: Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril. Bees may be in a little trouble too. Some telling details from the article:

Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.

Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.

…investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.

They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees’ innate ability to find their way back home.

It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.

Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.

While we’re on this subject, be sure to mark your calendars for the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture’s two-day seminar on Land, Food & Culture: Creating Sustainability Where You Live. Wendell Berry will be among the speakers and readers, as will Bobbie Ann Mason.

As a follow-up to my post on paranoia among bloggers, I’d like to call you attention to this post yesterday at The Carpetbagger Report:

For those just joining us, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a struggling Republican presidential hopeful, named South Carolinian Henry Jordan one of his campaign co-chairmen late last week. Duncan called Jordan, unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor last year, “a great, conservative Republican leader” who agrees with him on immigration and national defense.

This is the same Henry Jordan who, in 1997 as a member of South Carolina’s Board of Education, wanted to impose Christianity on public school students. When one of his colleagues on the board alluded to concerns about religious minorities in the state, this board member said, on tape, “Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims. And put that in the minutes.” Calls for his resignation were ignored and the GOP establishment in South Carolina stood by Jordan.

I found this significant, not just as an indictment of Hunter and the South Carolina GOP, but in the context of the “controversy” surrounding John Edwards’ former bloggers. A Democratic candidate hired a couple of fairly low-level staffers who’d written some intemperate blog posts about religious fundamentalists, and outrage was everywhere for a week. A Republican presidential candidate gives a high-level position to a man who once publicly announced his belief that Buddhists and Muslims should be “screwed” and “killed,” and it’s barely noticed.

I found this link at Washington Monthly, where commenters point out that Duncan Hunter doesn’t have a prayer (my choice of words) of being elected president whereas John Edwards is a legitimate candidate. So the comparison may be somewhat unfair. Nevertheless, I think it is possible that we hold the right to a different standard. They also point to Why I refused to blog for Edwards, a Salon article by Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise. If you’re interested at all in the relationship of progressive blogging to political campaigns or in the inner workings of the Edwards campaign, this essay is a good read, though maybe a little bit I-told-you-so. Says Beyerstein:

Unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action. They call it “scalping” — they pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye.

…

Unfortunately, as the Edwards campaign learned the hard way, the right wing has a large network of surrogates, like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Donohue, who can propel virtually any story into the mainstream media. These professional blowhards are supported by a lavish infrastructure of publishers, partisan media outlets, think tanks, grants, lecture circuits and more.

Republican benefactors lavish funds on the conservative message machine because they recognize the value of a good surrogate. Candidates don’t pay their surrogates or give them orders. Instead, they rely on them to say all the outrageous things they can’t say themselves.

So far, the left doesn’t have much in the way of institutionally supported partisan counterweights. We’ve got Bill Moyers, they’ve got Bill Donohue. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Canadian Court Limits Detention in Terror Cases

Defense Calls Padilla Incompetent for Trial

Dismissed Attorneys Praised in Evaluations

Why Have So Many U.S. Attorneys Been Fired? It Looks a Lot Like Politics

And Hurray for Al Gore!!

Man! I really should read my KAC newsletters. Here’s a small item from February 20:

Jane Gentry Vance becomes new Kentucky Poet Laureate

Governor Ernie Fletcher has appointed Lexington poet and University of Kentucky, English Department Professor Jane Gentry Vance to serve as Poet Laureate for Kentucky during 2007 and 2008. She will be inducted at a public ceremony and reception tentatively scheduled for April 24, 2007 in the Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort. The Kentucky Arts Council coordinates the nomination and selection process for Kentucky’s Poet Laureate.

Jane Gentry was my first creative writing teacher — I was a nontraditional student, I think she’s actually younger than I am — and I couldn’t be more pleased that she has received this honor. She has been a quiet force for excellence in this state for a long time.

Here is a RainTaxi review of her new collection, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (LSU Press, 2006)

There’s still time to sign up for Green River Writers’ 17th annual Novels in Progress Workshop to be held March 11-18 at Spalding University in Louisville.

Conference activities for 2007 will include faculty-led breakout sessions, individual instruction with faculty mentors, small-group critique sessions, a panel discussion with agents and editors, and opportunities for one-on-one meetings with agent and editor guests.

Writing conference participants will be able to choose from three enrollment options based on their instructional needs. Workshop Basics will offer a full week of seminars designed to help aspiring novelists learn about the writing craft and the publishing industry. Personal Instruction will add the opportunity to zero in on the writer’s own work of fiction with the help of a faculty mentor and other participants, as well as visiting agents and editors. One-day Workshop Blocks will allow those who cannot attend the entire week to register for individual days of the writers’ conference.

Novels In Progress Workshop always provides a great opportunity to get to know other fiction writers from across the region in a mutually supportive atmosphere. Participants come together in a creative community while studying, writing and living together. Housing for the week is available in an on-campus residence hall as well as several nearby hotels and bed and breakfasts. Located near Louisville’s beautiful Central Park, the Spalding University campus is within walking distance of several restaurants and shopping locations, including Fourth Street Live, the city’s new entertainment and retail nexus.

we all lose. Consider Ted Kerasote in the NYTimes:

IN the debate over how to prevent illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States — armed patrols, electronic surveillance, prison time for first offenders and a 700-mile-long 15-foot-high fence — few politicians have voiced concern over the last option’s profound effects on wildlife.

Authorized by the Secure Fence Act of 2006, this barrier (83 miles of which have already been built) will bisect a border region that has some of the most ecologically diverse landscapes in the hemisphere. It is here — in a land of deserts, mountains, conifers and cactus — that bird species from North and Central America share territories and cross paths during migrations. It is here that endangered wildlife, like the jaguar and gray wolf, have an opportunity to reoccupy lands from which they were extirpated during the last century.

The list of other beautiful common or rarely seen animals that live along the border is long. A small sampling would include cougars, desert bighorn sheep, ocelots, pronghorn antelope, road runners, white-tailed deer and hundreds of species of birds and insects. The fence would physically prevent both large and small mammals as well as reptiles from traveling across the border, and the lights atop the fence would attract insects, making them easier prey for birds that feed on them. Some of these insects pollinate the plants of the region, including cactus.

Remember how everybody cheered when Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But fences are all the fashion now. Too bad they don’t work.

Oh dear, I do seem to think in sixties song lyrics. Can’t say much for the depth of my intellect, I suppose.

Anyhoo, what I started out to say here is this:

No matter what the outcome of John Edwards’s run for president, his campaign has certainly started an earthquake that has sent tremors throughout the (shudder) blogosphere. Start with Atrios’s defense of Amanda Marcotte — a post that I’ve been trying to put up here for weeks.

So I guess you might start with me, because I keep censoring myself over this one, and I censor myself because, no matter how much I defend the faithful in this blog, I do seem to stir controversy when I criticize, and so I find myself saying to myself, “no sense in prodding the bull” (take that as a pun if you will):

I tend to try to have a “don’t be an asshole needlessly” attitude when it comes to dealing with religious beliefs that no one is trying to impose on me, but there’s no requirement for people to share that attitude. Beliefs cloaked in religion shouldn’t be granted automatic immunity from scrutiny, and nor should the sometimes powerful institutions run by people, not angels or saints, around which the various religions are organized. While genuine bigotry exists against people of various faiths which is the equivalent to the kind of bigotry which exists against gays or African-Americans (involving unfair symbols or stereotyping rooted in historic oppression, assigning unshared beliefs to an entire group, etc…), mocking or having contempt for actual religious beliefs isn’t by any reasonable definition “bigotry.” It’s simply heated disagreement, and as with disagreements about politics, or sports, or whatever, sometimes people who disagree with each other use mockery and insults in their discourse. Religious people may think that their beliefs about religion are on a different level than these things, but, you know, I don’t really agree with that.

But Atrios is a political blogger. He cut his teeth on opposition and controversy. Other political bloggers/writers have spoken out on this controversy, notably Katha Pollit (Your Blog Will Come Back to Haunt You) and Amanda Marcotte herself.

On a related note, my friend Jeff Hess of Have Coffee, Will Write posts this chart based on a recent Gallup poll and asks “Why do you think Americans view Atheists as the least desirable (in the poll’s universe, at least) of possible candidates?”
Read the rest of this entry…

Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Salon, on the theater that was Scooter Libby’s defense:

The prosecution and the defense appeared before the jury with more than two contending accounts of the Libby story. Indeed, the defense did little if anything to counter the prosecution. Poor Libby’s errors were just attributable to his bad memory. While the prosecution operated on the plane of reason, the defense retreated to high emotion. Libby’s case began with accusations of a dark plot within the White House to feed Libby to the wolves to save the skin of Karl Rove — a conspiracy that was never mentioned during the trial — and ended in tears with the sudden and choked sobbing of defense attorney Theodore Wells.

…

Wells, a 6-foot-2-inch African-American, approached the jury members, standing directly in front of them, and urged them to help each other avoid prejudice. “If someone says, ‘He’s a Republican, he worked for Cheney, let’s just do him,’ help that person. Don’t sacrifice Scooter Libby for how you may feel about the war in Iraq or Bush administration. Treat him the way he deserves to be treated … Fight any temptation for your views if you’re a Democrat, whatever party. This is a man who has a wife and kids. He’s been under my protection for the last month. Just give him back.” Wells’ voice cracked and he spoke his final words through sobs. “Give him back to me! Give him back!” He rushed back to his chair at the head of the defense table, covered his face and then stared at the floor.

The O.J. trial comes to mind — though I think that O.J. may have had more of a defense than Libby.

Libby’s defense seems to depend pretty much on discrediting the reporters that the Bush administration had used to get the story out. So we see a double manipulation of the public — first using a compliant press to sell the war and discredit Wilson and now using Libby’s defense team to totally discredit that press. Added to that is their constant push to strip journalists of the right to protect their sources. This is the most frightening aspect of the Bush administration: even when they appear to be defeated, they continue their attack on our institutions and our freedoms. They’re like some shape-shifting science fiction monster.

And the bottom line seems to be that they have no respect for our Constitution or our government and they certainly don’t care jack about the ordinary citizen. They’re willing to destroy it all.

Blumenthal is an unabashedly partisan reporter but, however he may color the story, he hasn’t invented the facts of the Libby defense.

Whatever happens to Libby —and I half expect him to be acquitted (though I can’t imagine anybody shedding tears for the man) — the country loses because we have lost our free press.