Sherry Chandler

May Sarton, from The House by the Sea (Norton, 1977):

Friday, February 27, 1976

I wonder why it is that “inspirational” writing such as appears in The Reader’s Digest and in religious magazines so often, far from consoling or “uplifting,” makes me feel angry and upset. Most of the platitudes uttered are true after all. But the fact is that this kind of superficial piety covers the real thing with a sugary icing meant to make it more palatable. It makes me feel sick. And the sickness is because I feel cheated. It debases God (by making him a kind of universal pal), and sentimentalizes Jesus, and—what is most dangerous and unchristian—it makes its communicants feel superior, part of an élite club where the saved can gather, shutting everyone else out.

Open Shutters: Iraq is an art exhibit put up by Index on Censorship in London. In this exhibit, ordinary Iraqi women were asked to take pictures of daily life under occupation. The Independent supplies a sample of four of these photo diaries. From the artist’s statement by Lu’lu’a, whose photos show dark interiors:

My husband distanced himself from me for a month after I was kidnapped and my mother still blames me for ruining the family. I open my eyes. I see the gun by my bed. My husband and I no longer talk, nor do we laugh together. We worry someone will attack us. I used to watch out of the window and feel alive. Now I make sure my face is hidden by the curtain. I look with longing at the street that was alive once upon a time.

Link from Informed Comment.

From Peter Linebaugh’s The Secret History of the Magna Carta at The Boston Review of Books:

The story of the extraction of natural resources and limiting indigenous people’s access to land is repeated around the world. Last summer hundreds of women seized the Chevron Escravos Oil Terminal in Nigeria (the word escravos means “slavery” in Portuguese). Its engineers have widened the Escravos River in the Bight of Benin, destroying the mangrove forest and the village of Ugborodo. Women can no longer hew wood for fuel or draw clean water for drink. Prostitution is the only “decent-paying job.”1

In the upland hamlets of Vietnam, where women collected firewood, bamboo shoots, medicinal plants, and vegetables, forest reserves have recently been enclosed by metal fence. Men can no longer legally climb trees for honey, nor cut timber for house repairs. The women of the hamlets suffer especially.2

These stories reflect three global trends: woodlands are being destroyed in favor of commercial profit,3 petroleum products are substituted as the base commodity of human reproduction and world economic development, and commoners are expropriated. “Life comes from women and food comes from land”—these are axioms to the critique of globalization, liberalization, and privatization made by recent advocates of a subsistence perspective.4 Michael Watts has dubbed as “petro-violence” the terror, dislocation, separation, poverty, and pollution associated with petroleum extraction. The United States has intensified this pattern with war.

Indigenous peoples are invoking the Magna Carta. Read the article to find out why.

Link via Heraclitean Fire.

In conjunction with the University of Kentucky’s Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Women Writers Conference, Sedika Mojadidi brought her film, Motherland Afghanistan, to Lexington’s Kentucky Theater on Thursday. Here’s an excerpt from the PBS website:

A 2004 study showed that most Afghan women were forced into marriage before they were 16, with some as young as nine. The consequences are steep, impacting the young girl’s physical development and general health as well as her chances for education.

Pregnant women must cope with poor nutrition and scarcity of food in Afghanistan. Weakened by malnutrition, they are vulnerable to anemia while lactating, and this puts their bodies at higher risk for hemorrhaging. Vitamin deficiencies lead to scurvy, while iodine deficiencies cause goiters in mothers and a thyroid condition called cretinism in their babies.

Underlying these challenges is the fact that few Afghan women know how to recognize danger signs during pregnancy. For those who do, lack of money and transportation make getting to a hospital all but impossible. If she does manage to recognize the signs, acquire transportation, survive the broken roads and reach a hospital, the care and facilities a pregnant woman would find would almost certainly be inadequate, if not downright dangerous.

To read these statistics is bad enough but to see the women, beautiful and strong, in this film is heartbreaking.

From “Time Out of Motion,” Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

For the present, I value eccentricity in poetry for its ability to rekindle writing and thinking, for the possibility of sounding an alternative to the drab conformist fashion-minded thinking that blights our mental landscape full as much as the nineteenth-century mills poxed the English countryside. Not eccentricity as opposed to centrism—there is no center, only the hegemony of homogenizing processes—but particularity and peculiarity of place and time and person acknowledged as such. The alternative to “art for a few” is not one art for all, which tends to degrade and level as it comes under the sway of commercial incentives—but many arts, many poetries. The possibly good intentions of “one art for all”—and the related agendas of clarity, plainness, accessibility—unfortunately tend to merge with the oligarchic marketing imperatives of modern telecommunications, “Keep your message simple and repeat it many times”—a formula that dominates not only American commercial advertising but also political and aesthetic discourse. (The “simple message” is the visible effect of a series of hidden agendas—call them ideologies—that remain obscured.) The cultural segmentation, complexity, and communicative refractoriness of much contemporary poetry, which excludes it from major-media dissemination, are in fact the kernals of its intertwined political and aesthetic value. (p.119)

At that moment, Sally Warboys scudded across the dining room like gray clouds hurrying before a storm and carrying a brown bag full (Melrose supposed) of the dinner spuds. “Before the storm” was accurate, too, because her father rode fast on her heels, his arms windmilling, unmindful of his clientele. Sally smacked her way into the kitchen, and Nathan apparently didn’t think he needed to improve upon the bedlam (a thunderous fall of pans, a rain of cutlery), for he came straight out again. A dusty-looking cat just managed to flash its way through the door and around Nathan’s foot before it got mashed by one and kicked by the other. Melrose watched its lightning progress across the room and its skid to a stop by the arched doorway, where it hissed at the porcelain leopard that it had, apparently, never accepted as a cousin.

—Martha Grimes from I Am the Only Running Footman (Little, Brown, 1986)

Just to let you know, I’ll be doing the First Friday reading with Leslie Shane at the Kentucky Coffeetree Café in Frankfort on October 5, 7:00 p.m. Singer, songwriter, guitarist Samuel Tyrone Cotton and bass guitarist Danny Kiely will provide the music. Cover is $10. Cover is divided among the evening’s presenters.

You all know who I am.

I hope.

Leslie Shane is a fine poet who lives in Monterey and does book binding and typesetting for Larkspur Press. She will be reading from her first book, a collection of haiku, Point of Rock, published by Larkspur.

Larkspur has operated for over 30 years in rural Montery producing fine hand-set, hand-bound editions for many local writers.

Cotton’s guitar stylings combine classical techniques and blues, using classical right-hand arpeggio runs with blues chords. I don’t know his work, and I’m looking forward to closing that gap in my education.

Hope to see you there.

What we always called Golden Garden Spiders, Bev Wigney of Burning Silo calls, more accurately but less poetically, Black and Yellow Garden Spiders. She has posted a classic photo of such a spider in the center of her web up in Nova Scotia (scroll down).

Down here in Central Kentucky, we had one on the raspberry canes out by the pumphouse but I missed her on Tuesday morning. When I looked around for her, I found her guarding her enormous egg sack under a nearby leaf.

I tried to get a photo but the light was low and she didn’t like my being there and was not about to sit still and pose. My skills aren’t that great either. This is the best shot I got:

You can also see the drought damage on the raspberry leaves. It sprinkled here yesterday afternoon but no real rain.

I get really confused sometimes when people, especially politicians and the news media, start talking about “the American dream.”

Right now, “the American dream” seems to be defined as having a house in the suburbs with a thirty-year mortgage, hopefully Allan Greenspan tells us now it’s too late, not at a variable rate. It seems to mean husband and wife both working to pay for the house and its furnishings, the SUV and the gas needed to bus the kids to daycare. It also seems to mean having the kids booked up from the cradle to college graduation, after which they will all fly off the nest and become “successful.”

Coupled with “the American dream” is the American “work ethic,” which seems to hold that work is good for its own sake, no matter how demeaning or underpaid. “Work” is also defined as something with an hourly wage. Not to have work is deemed a great failure. The powers that be, it seems to me, have convinced us that if we all work long and hard, somehow we’ll get that lucky break (or maybe win the Lotto) and be rich as Bill Gates. But the rich don’t work for wages and those who get rich don’t work for wages, not for long, though they all want to tell you how they started out poor and worked their way up.

In the late twentieth century, somehow all this version of the American dream and the work ethic got mixed up with the idea of righteousness, so that this upright middle class life became the visible manifestation of God’s sanction and people who failed at it were automatically unworthy. They were deviants. They deserved what they got.

I never quite got the hang of this version of the American dream. Maybe that’s why I get nostalgic when I read passages like Charles Bernstein’s description of the 19th Century Pre-Raphaelite poet and architect William Morris:

The pleasure of life is art, according to Morris; and the greatest enemy of art is the system of Commerce and Fashion that produces both unnecessary things and a slavish compulsion to possess them. Work for art’s sake was his sense; the pleasure in daily work that he imagined lead… to his commitment to handcraft and his polemical critique of the deadly drabness of nineteenth-century English industrial design and architecture; to revolutionary socialism; and, significantly, to a militant environmentalism… For Morris, leisure and idleness, as well as pleasure, were central components of any civilization worthy of the name. His insistence that there must always be “waste places and wilds in it” suggests most acutely the originality of his position and his rejection of more utilitarian forms of social progress. Morris’ refrain in The Earthly Paradise, “the idle singer of an empty day,” has been taken as oddly inappropriate for so prolific an artist. But idleness and emptiness are crucial notions for Morris, and his immensely popular early poetry was meant to serve as a respite from the toil of alienated labor; both the reading and the writing of poetry were to be an activity of pleasure…

— Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard 1992)

Morris was a Socialist and so, by definition, evil. And he was English, not American, so he’s irrelevant. But as the great wheel of ideas turns, I am hoping that I see a bit of a return to this kind of thinking.

My review of Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s chapbook Unbound & Branded is up at Rattle E-Reviews. This Finishing Line chapbook, like Joanie DiMartino’s Licking the Spoon, is a good example of how to use this short form for a tight collection of poems on a single subject.

I hope you enjoy the review and I would recommend the chapbook. As are all of Finishing Line’s books, it is well made and attractive.

While you’re over at Rattle, read the other E-Reviews. They range from A. R. Ammons to d’bi.young.

On September 4, 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock Nine were turned away from Central High School by a mob and the Arkansas National Guard. On September 23, these nine students actually got into the school before they were run out by the mob. On September 24, Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and on September 25, the Little Rock Nine successfully entered Central High School under military escort by the same guard that had turned them away weeks earlier.

In Through a Lens, Darkly, Vanity Fair’s David Margolick gives us a retrospective article on the two girls in Will Count’s iconic photograph above: Elizabeth Eckford, the African American, and Hazel Bryan, her white taunter. I’ve sometimes wondered how the whites in some of these old photographs feel, fifty years later, about having been the face of race hatred. This article goes some way toward answering that question.

Five years later, in 1961, Roger Corman made a film based on a Charles Beaumont novel. Film and novel are called The Intruder. In the film, ten black students are attempting to enroll in the all-white high school of a generic southern town called Caxton. Adam Cramer, an outside agitator, member of the “Patrick Henry Society,” has come to town to rile up the locals and see that the integration doesn’t happen.

This movie was considered so incendiary when it was released in 1962 that theaters wouldn’t show it. Corman had mortgaged his house to make the film because he could not get backers. He made it for $80,000 and it lost money. The film was shot in Missouri, and the locals weren’t friendly.

By happenstance, I watched this movie on the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock integration, and it is appalling how little has changed. Now, even as we celebrate the Little Rock Nine, we also play out the drama of the Jena 6. And the current Supreme Court in its last term took a great step toward reversing Brown v Board of Education.

Although I consider myself culturally southern, I have difficulty understanding how it is that the region continues to allow its darker side to be exploited by opportunistic politicians, power seekers, and hate-mongers. It comes, I think, of being under-employed and under-educated. Politicians have been very skillful at displacing class resentment into racism. Still, whenever I read a liberal diatribe against “The South” as nest of all the country’s ills, home of religious bigots, elector of George W. Bush and his ilk, I just have to cringe. Even though the Supreme Court that put him in power has a mostly northeastern face, we in the South can’t seem to rise above our stereotype. As Quentin Compson said, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t hate the South.”

(As these comments imply, I get reactionary in response to preachments about the evil south. It’s hard for me to separate my cultural self from the so-called Southern Strategy — and here &mdash: of politicians, I suppose. It’s a visceral reaction and not perhaps my most attractive trait. However, it leads me to the conclusion that self-righteousness is not a good proselyting technique. The south is not monolithic, and after all there are southern politicians who’ve done the country some good, even the hated LBJ.)

The film actually works its characters against stereotype. It’s shot in black and white but that isn’t its world view. Although, in the form of an achingly handsome pre-James-T-Kirk William Shatner, the Adam Cramer character is pure irresistible evil, a man whose lust for power is inextricably mixed with his lust for seduction. (He has a playful way of tipping men’s hats over their eyes that struck me as very much in the George Bush cheek-pinching, bald-head rubbing mode.) Frank Maxwell is excellent as the local newspaper editor who isn’t sure he wants integration but is willing to stand up against his townspeople for the rule of law. But though he takes a stand, he is not heroic in Jimmy Stewart fashion. That role is given to Leo Gordon, who plays against type as the man who unexpectedly saves the day (deus ex machina perhaps). Charles Barnes, who only made two movies in his lifetime, is adequate and likeable as the black student who is nearly lynched by the mob.

One small side note, the black actors who play the residents of “niggertown” are mostly country types whose facial architecture is very much like that of the white actors who play the angry mob. (One of the white thugs kept reminding me of Dana Gioia, a silliness for which I apologize.) I noticed this because I think I had come to put an urban face on black America: the face of Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy, Colin Powell. These faces were more Morgan Freeman and they showed how black and white in rural America are the same people.

Shatner apparently turned aside from his brilliant Broadway career, playing roles such as Henry V and Tamburlaine, starring with Julie Harris in A Shot in The Dark, to make this edgy, chancy film, and I applaud him for it. Watching him almost makes me regret his success in Star Trek. He was a fine actor. And he was brave to put his beautiful face out there as the face of American racism.

In the end, Adam Cramer meets his nemesis not in the sheriff, who is a sort of neutral character, or the newspaper editor, who is rather symbolically half-blinded by the mob, but by another pitch man. Seeming almost brutish at the film’s beginning, the travelling salesman Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon) turns out to have the kind of quiet confident masculinity that can forgive his wife’s infidelity and see Cramer’s inner cowardice. It is Griffin’s quiet speaking of truth that calms the mob and turns it back into individual human beings.

Would it were so easy in real life.

A last anecdote: When Cramer was going through his rant about how the “niggers” given a little equality will take over the entire world, I turned to Poppysmatus and asked “Why are they so frightening.”

“Because,” he answered, “they have so much more talent.”

Last Friday was the U.N.’s International World Peace Day, a well-kept secret.

The International Day of Peace, established by a United Nations resolution in 1981 to coincide with the opening of the General Assembly, was first inaugurated on the third Tuesday of September, 1982. Beginning on the 20th anniversary in 2002, the UN General Assembly set 21 September as the now permanent date for the International Day of Peace.

Upon learning of this day, through I See Invisible People, for some inexplicable reason I just felt too depressed to deal with it. Can you imagine that?

At a time when the Blackwater scandal was all the news and the Senate had just failed to vote the troops sufficient rest.

Now there’s this from the Washington Post: U.S. Aims To Lure Insurgents With ‘Bait.

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

Well, it’s only 363 days until the next International Day of Peace.

H/T to Have Coffee, Will Write.