Sherry Chandler

Neahle Meara had pulled the covers up over her face, body stiff and straight, pretending to be Dracula. It was difficult with the kitten rising and falling with every breath. It would be nice to be able to sink long fangs into Molly MacBride’s neck. It was dark. Dawn was just breaking outside the dormer window nearly strangled in creepers, but no light filtered through the covers over Neahle. It was also cold. Sally made Neahle wonder if death might come in bat-form and pick you up with its talons (Sally’s were long and lacquered) and take you off.

But it would have to drop you in a wooden box. That’s the way her father had been buried.

…

Neahle sighed. And under the covers when Neahle sighed, the kitten rose and fell. The kitten was very small and probably not interested in what coffins were like and slept on, darkened over by covers thought it was.

—Martha Grimes, The Deer Leap (Litte, Brown and Company, 1985)

This summer I have been re-reading twenty years of Martha Grimes’s Richard Jury novels. (See Wikipedia also.)

The world Grimes creates is as much a fantasy as anything you’ll find in Tolkien or Peter S. Beagle, and like Tolkien and Beagle, the fantasy world she creates is fully realized. It is all high fun but it can take a very serious turn.

Grimes manages both to emulate and to parody the English manor house mystery of doyens such as Agatha Christy, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Her Melrose Plant, the erstwhile Earl who has shed his titles but remains to the manner born, is a sort of postmodern Peter Wimsey, while Richard Jury himself, that catalyst in whose steps the roses of healed lives grow, is a nod both to Dame Ngaio’s gentleman policeman Roderick Alleyn and the Baroness James’s rather dour hyper-sensitive poet cop Adam Dalgliesh. Her supporting cast of characters is drawn from Dickens, Wilkie Colllins, Dashiell Hammett, and no doubt many more.

Grimes is clever and literate and it’s all done with a wink and a nod to pretty much the entirety of English and American letters. The Dirty Duck*, just to give one example, is a revenge drama set in Stratford with a set of characters constantly trying to see the entirety of the currently playing “Hamlet.”

She can take her theme from Dickens or Dickinson, Robert Browning or Hoagie Carmichael.

All of which preamble leads me to this quotation taken from the blurb on the back cover of I Am the Only Running Footman, the eighth in the series, and what seems to me its equation of greater violence with greater seriousness:

Early on compared ad nauseam to Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and other “Golden Age” experts, Grimes clearly harks back to that tradition but nevertheless seems to be developing more consistently along the lines of American models, among them Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, so that the disparity in social class and attitude between the detective and his subjects is increasing. Moreover, her puzzles are becoming more graphic and violent and less tidy-English-houseparty-ish, just as her explorations into the psyche become more and more haunted and, for the reader, haunting.

—Houston Chronicle, taken from the backcover blurb for I Am the Only Running Footman (Little, Brown, 1986)

Well, The Dirty Duck, which was #3, had murder victims slashed from sternum to pelvis. I’m not sure violence can get much more graphic. And I would question whether Robert B. Parker and/or Raymond Chandler are necessarily more serious than Dorothy Sayers. Or that one has to turn to the American detective novel to find a higher seriousness. P.D. James is pretty serious.

Oh well, this blurb was written for #8, and we are now up to #21, so maybe it’s not fair to pick on the poor Houston Chronicle.

And I’ll have to admit that I Am the Only Running Footman is one of my least favorite Grimes novels precisely because it is less tightly plotted. And it does not have her usual allotment of well-realized cats, dogs, and wise children. Though it could be argued that it’s a transitional work, novel #9, The Five Bells and Bladebone, puts us right back in Long Piddleton, the Miss-Marple-type village. It’s a novel wherein one of the characters takes her pseudonym from Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise.

I think the idea is to run the entire gamut of the genre, a series of virtuoso performances. While it is true that with the last two novels present Jury with nemesis, a villain who cannot be caught, I’m not sure that this so much a growth (except insofar as every craftsman grows in his/her craft) as it is a continuation. Even Sherlock Holmes had his nemesis in Professor Moriarity, with whom he plunged over Reichenbach Falls. Jury’s nemesis also strikes me as a nod to Reginald Hill. And of course Americans will think of Hannibal Lecter.

Grimes has always had a serious streak, could always be haunted and haunting, when it comes to orphans and endangered children.

One might say she weaves the grit of Marlowe with the glitter of Wimsey.

*Grimes’s titles are all the names of English pubs, and at least one pub features in each of the novels.

“You put your right wing in, you pull your right wing out
You put your right foot in and you rub it on a cop….”

There is an unmistakable odor of mendacious hypocrisy, to paraphrase cousin Tennessee, about all of these sudden self-righteous calls for the resignation of Senator Craig. Back before the ‘06 election, when rumors of his suspect sexual activities could have hurt other Republican candidates’ chances in their races, many of the rightwing noisemaker cadre dismissed the relevance of reports of his bathroom hijinks or of the exact orientation of his penile compass. Now they can’t wait to shove him overboard to join the rest of those crippled rodents dogpaddling away from a swiftly foundering ship of state. Guess that’s because he is up for re-election next year, so their ethics have become situational. Craig should take a page from that lewd, naughty, nasty fellow, Bill Clinton, and defy the lot of them. God knows, the good Senator would not like to portray himself as some weak little girly-man, not, not, not!

Ari & Co.’s Noisemaker Cadre have begun running those Gonzalazian TV ads here in central Ky.: paraplegic vets and Iraq war widows begging the great unwashed to contact our congresscritters to order them not to politicize the Iraq & Afghanistan wars, especially not by forestalling the creation of more crippled vets and war widows. These ads are so smarmy and deceptive that they make my skin crawl. Nothing but political concerns–and lies, LOTS of those– got us into Iraq–where there were so many more attractive targets for our sophisticated weaponry to destroy in splashy photo-ops. But we found damn few of our justifications for waging a war of aggression: no yellowcake, massively destructive weapons or mobile germ labs, & al Quaida only showed up in force after we had been there a while. Karl must have wanted to make sure there was enough war on terra left to guarantee the [re]election of his Waco Simulant. Haven’t we largely left Afganistan with the mission there unaccomplished?–the Taliban is growing back and the opium crop flourishes and Osama is uncaught, but that last item does not concern the Simulant.

Anyway, when I saw the first of these ads I had the merest frisson of a hint of what it must have felt like to see a well-shod foot on the end of a well-tailored leg come smarming into one’s own private cubicle.

Sounds a lot like Nixon’s “I am not a crook!” Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

But…

Joan Garry at the Huffington Post has a good point:

The problem is, as I see it, is that Larry Craig is talking about the wrong “problem.”

No one is accusing Craig of being gay. They are accusing him of being a pervert.

He doesn’t have to answer to the American public about being gay. He has to answer to the American public, the Idaho voters and the police about being a pervert in a public restroom.

It would be a good thing if the nation at large saw it that way but I fear a good portion of Mr. Craig’s voters think the problem is homosexuality.

Postscript: From Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:

From the opening line of his statement yesterday, Sen. Larry Craig was in trouble. “Thank you all very much for coming out today,” he began.

“Coming out” was perhaps not the best phrase for a guy who had pleaded guilty to some rather un-senatorial conduct in an airport men’s room — and now stands accused in his home-state paper of a homosexual encounter in Union Station.

…Craig didn’t get into trouble for being gay; he got into trouble because he “engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment.”

Though he has been writing laws for the past 32 years, the senator spoke yesterday as if he lacked the most basic grasp of the legal system.

Somehow I don’t think George W. Bush has the right to get on his high horse because somebody’s name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.

Putting aside Alberto’s conduct, the Bushes are some of the dirtiest campaigners I’ve ever seen.

Added: Juan Cole thinks Gonzalez was “hounded out of office” for the wrong reasons:

The great shame of it all is that Alberto Gonzales was confirmed as Attorney General despite it being widely known that he had played a central role in attempting to authorize the use of torture on prisoners in US custody. He had tossed aside the US Constitution’s own prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” (such a wimpy bleeding-heart liberal document). It is an index of the corruption of the Republican Party, which then controlled Congress, that they made this man attorney general in the first place.

The great shame of it all is that Gonzales was hounded out of office not because he authorized torture and assaulted the basic principles of the US constitution, but because he fired US attorneys who wanted to investigate both Republican and Democratic voter fraud. Torture people all you like, is the message he sent, but if you’re even-handed as between Republicans and Democrats, you are fired.

In the dentist’s waiting room this morning, dentist delayed, I finally got a chance to read some of the July/August Poetry that I’ve been carrying around for two months.

Was it my mood? For some reason, the issue seemed jam packed with aphoristic lines of the type that may someday show up on my sidebar here:

The problem with calling our leader a bugger,
she insisted, was her special fondness
for buggerers…
—Robert Wrigley from “Little Prick”

And so we drift off to an unformed prayer…
—Brad Leithauser, from “Furnishings of the Moon”

Some were jubilant;
others were broken-hearted.
I have always been both.
—Edward Hirsch from “Late March”

and

Nothing means what it says,
and it says it all the time.
—Tony Hoagland from “Big Grab”

And you must read all of Hoagland’s poem “Barton Springs,” especially if you are a human of a particular age, as am I:

When I get my allotted case of cancer,
let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs,
in the outdoor pool at 6 AM, in the cold water
with the geezers and the jocks.

…

It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves,
to feel breeze through the fur on my arms
to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.

I don’t think I’ll try to memorize this poem — it’s 28 lines long and my brain is a little hardened up with amyloid plaques — but I will remember it.

The Herald Sparrow is sponsoring a Significant Finds Contest to benefit New Southerner. The winner will receive $500.

A significant find is a natural object or an artifact not originally intended as art, found and considered to have aesthetic value. Some examples: A cool rock; the symbolism of an extension cord plugged into itself; milk jug rings found under the refrigerator; what Lincoln Logs reveal about life. (See www.heraldsparrow.com for more examples.) According to Herald Sparrow editor Fred Miller, “Significant finds are the kinds of discoveries that can change the way we see ourselves and the world we live in. Or, not. But they can still be fun.”

GUIDELINES:

Contest entries should include the following.

1. a headline
–there is a separate prize of $50.00 for the best headline.

2. a find
–images are not required and finds may be entirely conceptual. An image can be included but photographic images of persons will not be considered in support of any contest entry.

3. a brief report about the significance of the find, any theories, speculation, and maybe the usual calls for further study.

4. Entry fee of $10.00.

DEADLINE: October 1. Awards will be announced in November and in the winter issue of New Southerner.

HOW TO ENTER:
Send your entry by mail, with checks made out to Swallowtail Press, to:

Herald Sparrow
Box 4006
Louisville, KY 40204

Send your entry by e-mail (you will be prompted to pay your entry fee electronically via a secure Paypal link) to:
sparrowentries@newsoutherner.com

HOW TO WIN:
There are no rules, but keep it clean. The dumbest thing you can think of has about as good a chance as the most brilliant, so don’t try too hard. Show or tell something you’ve noticed and what you guess it means.

JUDGES:

* Fairleigh Brooks, the first Kentuckian to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and author of Notes Of A Would-Be Astronaut
* Chuck Swanson of Swanson Reed Gallery and Swanson Reed Contemporary
* Lynn Winter of Lynn’s Paradise Café

QUESTIONS: editor@heraldsparrow.com.

I’m pretty sure I have some readers who have the humor to do well in this contest. It’s in a good cause. The New Southerner, the mainstream magazine of alternative thinking, is a wonderful undertaking that’s been going for about two years now. They’ve been known to publish work by yours truly.

This photograph, taken by Jim Young of Reuters during our president’s now infamous VFW speech this week, pretty much sums up the Bush mystique for me:

Making it clear he will resist Congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled US troops will be in Iraq as long as he is president and said the consequences of leaving “without getting the job done would be devastating”.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum points the way to Jeff Henley’s speculation of one way to declare victory:

Most civil wars eventually end, so the Beltway Consensus intends to ride the Iraqi one out. Assuming it concludes, whoevers in charge can declare victory, as if the whole point of invading Iraq was to eventually “end” the civil war that would break out as a result of the invasion. … Which is to say, if we end up with a basing agreement after an eventual armistice, the real purpose of the war will have been served. It just happens that they could never have convinced the country to waste thousands of American and millions of Iraqi lives (counting the refugees) and hundreds of billions of dollars on building some new forts where they’re not wanted. Which is why they didn’t sell the war on that basis.

To which Kevin adds:

True enough. The civil war has to end eventually, and George Bush’s plan seems to be to hold on and hope that maybe it burns itself out on his watch. You never know, after all.

And, on more or less the same theme, this from Josh Marshall:

And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.

By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on. Whatever happens, we’ll recover from it. And whatever might happen, there are things that matter much more to this country’s future — like whether we have a functioning military any more, whether our economy is wrecked, whether this country tears itself apart over this catastrophe. But we’ll go on and look back at this and judge what happened.

Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He’s not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq. Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like. For the president a one in a thousand shot at some better outcome is well worth it, no matter what the cost. Because at least that’s a one in a thousand shot at not ending his presidency with the crushing verdict history now has in store. It’s also worth just letting things keep on going as they are forever because, like Micawber, something better might turn up. Going double or nothing by expanding the war into Iran might be worth it too for the same reason. For him, how can it get worse?

And when you boil all this down what it comes down to is that the president now has very different interests than the country he purports to lead.

And from Atrios:

As we round the corner (towards the light!), and head towards the beginning of the 6th year of the great and glorious war in Iraq, it’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves that for students entering college this Fall, the war begin in Spring of their 8th grade year. For those entering their freshmen year next year, the war will have been going on since they were in 7th grade.

For a growing chunk of the population, war has been a normal state of affairs during their formative years.

For commentary on the photo of St. George confronting his dragon, see BAGnewsNotes.

It’s Women’s Equality Day:

August 26 of each year is designated in the United States as Women’s Equality Day. Instituted by Rep. Bella Abzug and first established in 1971, the date commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920.

And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it or to spend a Sunday evening than by going to Peace Work, an interactive program of poetry & music about cultivating peace with George Ella Lyon, poet, & Roberta Guthrie, cellist.

The program’s title “Peace Work” comes from quilting. It echoes the quilting bee as a community event where women gathered to stitch fragments of their lives together in beautiful patterns. Piece by piece the quilt emerged. Our hope is that, through listening to poetry and music and writing whatever response they call up, participants will experience peaceful hearts. At the closing of the program those who wish will place their peace words on a large poster with a quilt border.

The event takes place at 4 pm at the Quaker Meeting House, 649 Price Avenue, Lexington (map).

The event is free and open to the public. Donations will benefit the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.