Sherry Chandler

The Oxford American Southern Movie Issue is in, complete with DVD of film clips, including a stellar bit by William Shatner as an anti-segregationist rabble-rouser in an obscure (to me anyway) 1962 film called The Intruder. Shatner is so creepily detestable in this role that I almost regret that he had the (mis)fortune to catch the world’s imagination as James T. Kirk. The man could act. And not a sign of a pot gut.

There is also a longish article by Tom Carson, “The Ideal Imposter,” about all the Southern misfit roles Hollywood gave Paul Newman before his own sweet bird of youth flew away. Carson is delicious on the synthesis of the dapper Cleveland-born Newman, who is quoted as saying “My thing is Ivy League,” and “Hollywood’s … view of the South as a repository of American pathologies in their most charismatic form.” Carson made me laugh a lot with his gossip and effrontery. He’s good on my particular pet peeve, The Long, Hot Summer:

As the adaptation of Faulkner’s The Hamlet it intermittently affects to be, the movie is an abomination—set in a 1950s Mississippi whose modern amenities turn the book’s hardscrabble class antagonisms into Cinemascope taffy while euphemizing predatory Flem Snopes into chipper Ben Quick (Newman). Quick’s triumphs in snaring the girl and the loot aren’t malignant; they’re rowdily celebratory.

It’s a film in which Newman, Orson Welles, Lee Remick, Tony Franciosa, and (of all people) Angela Lansbury “are working up bumptious pot-likker dialects to beat the band,” but Georgia-born Joanne Woodward “just has to talk.”

But what I came here to tell you is that I was tickled pink to find that one among the “Thirteen More Essential Southern Documentaries” picked by the OA editors is Shakespeare Behind Bars that I talked about here a while back. Mike Powell’s review begins like this:

In a medium-security Kentucky prison with decades to piddle, wile, suffer, and eventually atone, acting seems like a better way to spend time than moving drugs or getting shivved. But the prisoners in Shakespeare Behind Bars attend rehearsals like a church congregation—for them, the theater becomes a place to sweat out their troubles rather than project for the benefit of an audience. Because they have nothing. A library card and time with the Natuilus machine out back. Maybe parole but probably not. For someone whose therapy is to have their existence wrung-out and zeroed, the submersion that comes with Method Acting is less an artistic choice and more a canny attempt at self-preservation.

Other documentaries of Kentucky content that made the list are Country Boys, Harlan County, U.S.A, and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia. I’ve seen Country Boys but couldn’t get engaged in it. The other two will go on my Netflix list, especially the one about Adams, whose photography stirs some controversy, even here on these quiet pages.

The newstand price of this issue (#56) of the Oxford American is a steepish $9.95. Worth it.

read these collections.

Christine Stewart-Nuñez, Unbound and Branded (Finishing Line, 2006)

James Baker Hall, The Total Light Process, (University Press of Kentucky, 2003)

Brian Turner, Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005)

William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New Directions, 1948)

Joanie DiMartino, Licking the Spoon (Finishing Line, forthcoming)

I was tagged by Helen, who was tagged by Sam .

I tag Erin, Terry, and Shamash.

But also, I have a number of readers who are poets but not bloggers. It’d be nice if you all could make some recommendations in the comments.

Update: I’m going to have to add Anne Shelby’s Appalchian Studies (Wind, 2006) to my list. Anne read a few poems from this collection at the Carnegie Center last night and I found them just delightful.

In this decision, once again, the “justices” prove that they are what they were appointed to the Supreme Court to be: political hacks.

Otherwise, I’ll let the NYTimes speak for me on this one:

Denying the Right to Choose

Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men, reflects notions of a woman’s place in the family and under the Constitution that have long been discredited, said a powerful dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer.

I’ll give the last word on guns to Charlie Whitt, who has generously shared this poem with us:

The Dealer

Don’t compare this with Europe,
Or me with the poet who traveled abroad
To find ruin enough to write about.

On the highway to my town
There is time plenty to remember those
Who will not complete the journey.

The dealer leaning against the brick fence eyes us.
He doesn’t know if we are customers,
Or just two people caught by the light.

He doesn’t know if we are police,
He doesn’t care, he’s ready for anything,
And ready to leave his life in a bloody pool

On that cold sidewalk; ready to leave mine.
The light turns green, “the police know it”
We agree. “They are afraid, or bribed”

We agree. “They say we have to fix this ourselves”
What are we paying them for?
We agree, we don’t know.

We react, tell the broker, “this is a nice automatic,
It balances perfectly in my hand,
And those bullets,”
“Whatever they hit is dead,”
The broker cuts in.

I hate the waste thrust in our faces daily,
I hate knowing the dealer has made me his equal.

—Charles M. Whitt

The Carnegie Center’s Next Great Writers Competition

• Writers should submit manuscripts of fiction or nonfiction prose (up to 12 double-spaced pages) or poetry (up to 5 poems).
• THERE IS A $10 ENTRY FEE, payable to the Carnegie Center.
• Entries should include a cover sheet complete with writer’s name, address, email address, and phone number.
• Names should NOT appear anywhere on the manuscript itself
• Deadline for submissions is MONDAY, APRIL 30. Entries must be postmarked or received by that date.
• Winning authors and those selected to read will be notified by JUNE 1.
• The Carnegie Center’s NEXT GREAT WRITERS READING will take place Friday, June 15 at 7: 00 pm.
• The CASH PRIZE is $100 for First Place and $50 for Second.
• Up to 12 writers will be invited to read on June 15.

Send Entries to:
The Next Great Writers Competition
The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning
251 West Second Street
Lexington, KY 40507

The Next Great Writers Competition and Reading will culminate the 2006-2007 New Books by Great Writers Literary Series, which is made possible by generous grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Knight Advisory Fund at Blue Grass Community Foundation. Be sure to mark your calendar for the remaining events in the series:

H/T Brooks Carver.

Keep a space clear on your calendar for Kentucky Writer’s Day, which this year is also inauguration day for our new Kentucky Poet Laureate, Jane Gentry. The ceremony is set for 10:00 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, April 24, at the Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort.

The event will include readings by past Poets Laureate Richard Taylor, James Baker Hall, Joe Survant and Sena Jeter Naslund.

Recipients of the Kentucky Arts Council’s 2007 Al Smith Individual Artists Fellowship in Literary Arts will be recognized.

And you’ll have a chance to hear Kentucky’s Poetry Out Loud winners, Trimble County High School student Dean Muir and Ohio County High School student Erica Martin. Poetry Out Loud is a National Recitation Contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

The ceremony, followed by a reception on the mezzanine level of the Capitol, is free and open to the public

Much is going on this week and next here in Kentucky in celebration of National Poetry Month. I suggest you keep an eye on The Kentucky Literary Newsletter for a full list of events.

I hate to say this but my reaction to the first news of the shooting at Virginia Tech was mixed. Yes, horror and sorrow. But also dread of the media circus that is sure to follow. The New York Times this morning captures the way in which these high profile tragedies have become ritualized:

There must have been a time — maybe back in 1966 before live news coverage was common and Charles Whitman opened fire from a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and killed 16 people — when witnesses, officials and news announcers would find themselves at a loss for words.

The shootings at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999 defined how mass shootings are handled — and publicly mourned. There have been similar tragedies since then, too many. Now everybody knows the drill.

But I don’t want to hear the cellphone recordings of gun shots, the teary on-the-spot tales of escape and terror. I definitely don’t want to watch Katie Couric shed her crocodile tears all over everything.

We wallow in the emotion of it; we’ve become voyeurs of violence. But no one will do anything about it.

To quote George W. Bush’s press spokeswoman, “the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms.” That trumps everything.

Update: I have been taken to task a bit by a correspondent for being too harsh about people’s need to talk after a violent incident such as this. I would like to clarify that it is not the victims or the survivors I’m talking about here. Nor is it even the straight news reporters in the immediate aftermath. It’s that element of vampirism, and it will go on and on… And it ramps up our paranoia and our fear of one another.

Anyway, after five years of war and devastation, I am just emotionally exhausted.

So I’ll let Todd Swift offer a little perspective on the situation:

Yesterday’s gun massacre at an American university is a terrible act of violence; it has certainly set fingers wagging in the UK, where many commentators in the media (and elsewhere) have been quick to blame America’s “gun culture” and its “history of violence”. While it is true that there are over 200 million firearms in the US, and each year over 3,300 teenagers are shot and killed there, it is not clear that America, or the gun, is the main or only problem. The central role of violence in human experience is too complex an issue to be simplified. The pointing finger of blame is also the itchy trigger-finger, too often.

Europe, too, is, and was, violent. Mr. Ferry’s recent exploration of Nazi iconography (for which he was pilloried, as if the glamour of evil, its dreadful beauty, was not half the reason for its force, and the reason to resist it) should remind us that the 20th century had its epicentres of violence based not in America, but in Europe. Europe, of course, brought violence to the Congo, and through the slave trade, to the wider world. Europe’s destruction of indigenous peoples, its genocides, was a violent slaughter of epic proportions.

Read the rest.

Update 2: One more try at beating this dead horse. Because, I suppose, of the complexity of my reaction and the level of the noise, I keep getting off track about what is at the base of both that New York Times article and my sense of dread about what’s to come.

My discomfort is caused by the fact that the narrative is set. We have our stock characters, the innocent victims, the monstrous villain, the heroes. These are elements of melodrama and they do not require us to think beyond our assumptions about ourselves and everybody involved. All the players are turned to cardboard cutouts. All the right strings are pulled to evoke our hearts and not our brains.

And as I said yesterday, it ramps up our fear.

Update 3: Harry Shearer:

…what is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho’s self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? Cho’s pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from–in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it’s easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live.

Thanks to Poppysmatus for the link.

Natasha Trethewey has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third volume of verse, Native Guard.

Cormac McCarthy won in fiction for The Road, about which we’ve had a lively conversation (for us anyway) here on this blog.

The NYTimes has a full list of winners in Letters, Drama and Music

H/T to Terry, who’s a sonnet.