Sherry Chandler

Sorry for the awful pun, but have you heard? Tara—the real one, not the Margaret Mitchell knock off—is in danger of disappearing in the slipstream of speeding vehicles. In short, the Irish government is building a superhighway through it.

Paul Muldoon explains the implicatons of this decision in the NYTimes — Erin Go Faster:

Princeton, N.J. TOMORROW is the anniversary of the Battle of Tara Hill, fought on May 26, 1798, between 4,000 United Irishmen and 700 British yeomanry. The British carried the day. More than 200 years later, the hill of Tara, a little over 30 miles north of Dublin, is the scene of yet another battle, between the forces of modern Ireland, represented by the advocates of the M3 motorway, and those of us who believe that the routing of a busy road slap bang through the Tara-Skryne Valley represents an act of vandalism with not only national, but international, ramifications.

…

What makes the Tara-Skryne Valley so special is not only the battle once fought there, but a remarkably high concentration of ceremonial monuments including the Hill of Tara itself, which was, and is, the seat of the High Kings of Ireland.

Archaeologists calculate that the oldest of the monuments, the Mound of the Hostages, was raised in about 3000 B.C., thus making it roughly contemporaneous with the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. This monument contains a chamber in which, at the festivals of Imbolc (Feb. 1) and Samhain (Nov. 1), the rising sun is perfectly aligned, just as at the winter solstice in the great passage tomb at nearby Newgrange, a shaft of sunlight penetrates the inner sanctum of a massive mound whose white quartz facade is glisteningly reminiscent of the Portland stone of the Parliament buildings in Belfast.

Read it all.

This situation effects us all because it is our shared human heritage that is being destroyed.

How sad it will be for all of us if this road goes through.

The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. Voices were fading, cars were starting, goodbyes were bouncing around like rubber balls. I went to the french windows and out onto a flagged terrace. The ground sloped towards the lake which was as motionless as a sleeping cat. There was a short wooden pier down there with a rowboat tied to it by a white painter. Towards the far shore, which wasn’t very far, a black waterhen was doing lazy curves, like a skater. They didn’t seem to cause as much as a shallow ripple.

— Raymond Chandler, from The Long Good-Bye, text from The Midnight Raymond Chandler (Houghton Mifflin, 1971)

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.

No runoffs.

I’m not sure what to make of Fletcher’s win in the Republican primary. Politial analysis is not my forte. Could be that Northup doesn’t play well outside the Louisville metropolitan area that she once represented in the U.S. Congress. Maybe, after the death of her son last year, she is still off her game. Or maybe it really was all those millions of dollars of highway money that Fletcher handed out around the state just before the primary.

Here is some analysis from Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball (via Political Wire):

Fletcher’s 50 percent may appear more impressive than Beshear’s 41 percent, but looks are deceiving. There were only three GOP candidates, and the third, Billy Harper, was a minor force. Moreover, about half of his own party voted against Fletcher for renomination–an extraordinarily high total for the first Republican Governor since Louis Nunn served from 1967-1971. Northup’s second major defeat in six months stings the state party’s anti-Fletcher faction, which had been led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell behind the scenes. Northup trounced Fletcher 2 to 1 in the Louisville media market, but the region accounted for less than 30 percent of the GOP primary vote, and she languished at 26 percent in the rest of the state. She posted even poorer percentages in Northern Kentucky, home of her major public endorser, junior Sen. Jim Bunning.

Also from Kos, who points out that only 36% of the turnout was Republican (202,131 of 550,890 votes or, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader 21% of the population), of which only 36.5% voted for Northup:

The vaunted McConnell “machine” could only scrape 36.5 percent against an indicted, unpopular governor? Hilarious!

Meanwhile, Central Kentucky’s perenniel candidate Gatewood Galbraith did pretty well in his home counties:

Galbraith got some happy numbers, such as when returns showed he won Nicholas County, where he was born. He finished second to Steve Beshear in Fayette County, with 16 percent of the vote.

And Bluegrass Reports says he finished ahead of Jody Richards (Speaker of the Kentucky House) in Franklin.

Beginning

I carried my lunchbox proudly
through the main gate
absorbing sounds and smells
of the twentieth century.
Basic steel—cars, buildings, appliances,
beginning here, before my very eyes.
I’m going to be a millman.
I’ll smelt the red ore,
and roll the yellow, hot ingots
into giant wheels of blue, coiled steel.
I’ll buy a fine house in the suburbs
and my brass company badge will be a symbol
that brings special treatment downtown.

How well I remember that April evening
as I began my working life on midnight turn.
Older men I passed on walks
smiled and spoke to me; nearly every one.
Only now, do I understand
what they were telling me.

— Charles M. Whitt, from Working Steel. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Charlie Whitt has set another identification problem for readers. Sez he:

For years I overlooked this pretty little plant. It first caught my eye while walking a trail on the Jesse Stuart land.
Now I spot it in many places. I took this picture in our hay field.

For those of you who aren’t Kentuckians, I think Charlie is probably talking about the Jesse Stuart State Nature Preserve, 714 acres of re-forested land in Greenup County.

Update: Rebecca at Pocahontas County Fare has posted some great photos of Blue-Eyed Grass.

…The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller’s and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species. How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt? …Perhaps the specific trait of these last decades is that negative attitudes have become so widespread that the poets have been overtaken by the man in the street. As a youth I felt the complete absurdity of everything occurring on our planet, a nightmare that could not end well—and in fact it found its perfect expression in the barbed wire around the concentration camps and gas chambers. Brought up on Polish romantics, I obviously had to search for the causes of that contrast between their open future and our future laden with catastrophe. Today I think that, while the list of dreaded apocalyptic events may change, what is constant is a certain state of mind. This state precedes the perception of specific reasons for despair, which come later.

—Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983)

First comes despair, then we find the reasons? Is this so? Has despair become a habit of mind of poets? I’ve always thought not. Real despair means not writing at all. Writing is a way of taking action.

My rate of posting has been a bit slow over the last several days and may continue to be so for several more. No problems. Just a couple of projects that have to be taken care of immediately.

Meantime I would remind my Kentucky readers that we have a gubernatorial primary tomorrow. I heard on WEKU a prediction that they expect only a 15% turnout this year. Also, we will have a run-off if none of the 7 Democrats or 3 Republicans running get as much as 40% of their respective primary votes.

Forty per cent of 15% is something like 6% so it’s possible that our next governor will be determined by less than 10% of the population.

Get out there and vote people!

Here’s the Secretary of State’s rundown of all candidates. Sample ballots, county by county, here.

Lexington Herald-Leader endorsements.

Courier-Journal full coverage.

Survey USA.

P.S. I recommend PBH’s post on Disproportionate Representation.

Here’s a seasonal poem from my FootHills chapbook: My Will and Testament Is on the Desk.

May and December

A boy runs
among rain-wet buttercups
that dot the grass
like stains
left by a kissing sun.

The shavings of my life
lie scattered at my feet.
I drink clouded wine
from chipped glass,
regard the child splashing in the rain.

I place my hand on his neck, lick
the drops from his cheek,
tears upon a yellow flower.

— Sherry Chandler