Sherry Chandler

from a NYTimes editorial, Witness for the Prosecutors:

Ms. Goodling was an odd witnesses. She was one of the most powerful officials in the Justice Department, but claimed to be a minor player who barely knew what was going on around her. “At heart, I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way,” said the 33-year-old Ms. Goodling. She presented herself as an innocent, yet testified only under immunity and admitted to apparently illegal practices.

This girl is thirty-three years old. Mutton trying to disguise herself as an innocent little lamb.

But with a name like Goodling, she belongs in a fantasy.

I am bemused by the hard right’s ability to front these good-looking girl warriors — from Michele Malkin and Ann Coulter (who may only seem good-looking because she is thin and blond) to Goodling and Rachel Paulose, and perhaps even to Con doh! leezza herself.

Update: Read Dahlia Lithwick, whose work is always excellent. Link courtesy of Political Animal.

It’s not just that Goodling comes across as better, smarter, and more honest than Gonzales, Sampson, and McNulty put together, although she does. It’s that the committee, in expecting to question the Great Exploding Idiot Barbie today, is completely underprepared and overmatched.

Update 2: Read also Lance Mannion, who was as struck as I was by Monica’s calling herself a “girl:”

A 33 year old girl is only two years away from being Constitutionally able to become President of the United States. She is 8 years older than she needs to be to run for one of the seats of the men and women grilling her on Wednesday. There’s probably no point in reminding anyone in the Bush administration that a 33 year old is 15 years older than a lot of young women we are sending over to Iraq.

And who draws a sharp conclusion about the right’s notions of womanhood:

From Justice Kennedy’s weird affirmation of the women aren’t adult enough to know their own minds or make morally correct decisions for themselves school of thought that underlies the entire anti-aboriton movement nowdays to the very, very creepy chastity balls, the Right has infused itself with the notion that a woman’s place isn’t in the home, or the kitchen, or even the bedroom, it’s on daddy’s knee.

Update 3: Read also this review by Purnima Mankekar from Ms. Magazine (available at Powell’s) of Zillah Eisenstein’s Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy :

As women gain more seats in public office, why is the world not a safer place for women (or, for that matter, for children and men), Zillah Eisenstein asks in Sexual Decoys. She suggests this is because some of these women, as well as some people of color, are sexual and racial decoys: They mask the damage caused by sexism, racism and avaricious forms of capitalism while also contributing to it. Pointing to the (in)famous examples of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, she describes how the appointment of women and people of color to positions of power neither reflects a just social order nor results in one.

I have thought myself that the right is using the liberal idea of diversity very cleverly to divide the left and to give the appearance of equality. If Bill Clinton had a government that “looked like America,” so does George W. Bush. In fact, that may be the only aspect of the Clinton administration that the Bushista’s didn’t shun like the plague.

What puzzles me is why these people play along. And where the right finds so many players who are “blond.” (By which I mean, attractive in a white middle-class sort of way.)

Update 3. Read also Christine Stewart-Nuñez’ Finishing Line chapbook Unbound & Branded., a series of poems on the image of woman represented by Kate Moss, “inventor” of the waif look.

She Who Gazes

I pin her on the wall so Kate
and I are eye to eye, raise

my arms, grasp opposite elbows
as she does… I want

to say that Kate and I are sisters:
bodily, female, gazing out from a page,

but I’m no closer to knowing her
than when I first traced my name

across her lips.

Formal dynamics in a poem create content through shapes, feelings, attitudes, and structures that compose the poem. Content is more an attitute toward the work or toward language or toward the materials of the poem than some kind of subject that is in any way detachable from the handling of the materials. Content emerges from composition and cannot be detached from it; or, to put it another way, what is detachable is expendable to the poetic.

— Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Oddly enough, I find this marriage of form and content, which Bernstein likens to the body and the soul, most noticeable when working in form. If the idea of “prose broken into short lines” is that the “story” is more important than the form, then I find that working in formal constraints pushes me away from the narrative line, makes me, in the infamous words of Frost, surprise myself. A formal poem in which the narrative dominates the language is a very bad poem indeed.

I wonder whether it is this kind of thing that separates the novelist’s imagination from that of the poet. But I can’t bring myself to dismiss the importance of form for the novelist, else what difference between Hemingway and Faulkner.

I’ve long been wont to say “style is content.” People then ask me what I mean and I am stumped because what I’ve always thought I mean is that style is content. What you say and how you say it are inseparable.

Perhaps, after all, what I’ve meant all these years is that form is content.