Sherry Chandler

Another option for your post-Thanksgiving shopping is the Larkspur Press Open House, taking place November 24 & 25 (Saturday and Sunday) in Monterey, Kentucky. Well, in the environs of Monterey, Kentucky.

Larkspur is a fine letter press that has been publishing Kentucky authors for over 30 years now. Books are all hand-printed, hand-bound, and locally designed. They also do cards and hand-bound journals.

Because the press is back across Cedar Creek, the event will be cancelled in case of heavy rains.

It’s a nice drive straight north on Hwy 127 out of Frankfort and you’ll see some lovely country. I know. I was born and raised in that briar patch.

While you’re up in Owen County, you might also visit the open house at Seigel Pottery, a few miles further north on 127. And then you could loop around to Hwy 330 and the Elk Creek Vineyards. My sources tell me that the food is excellent in the Café and, though the county is dry, you can buy their wines by the glass. Live music and a nice arts and crafts museum in the Lodge.

My husband, T. R. Williams, will be exhibiting this Saturday and Sunday at the Keeneland Arts Fair in Lexington. Held on the picturesque grounds of the Keeneland Race Course, this juried art fair will feature over 90 of the region’s best artists and craftspeople. Shoppers can expect to see the highest quality handcrafted ceramics, painting, metal works, glass works, fiber works, photography, fine jewelry, woodcraft and more. Concessions also will be sold onsite for those who need a break from their holiday shopping.

Williams is still the third most common name in the United States but my husband is an artisan of uncommon skill. He has been a juried exhibitor with the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen since 1981. He was in the first class of exhibitors to be juried into the Kentucky Craft Marketing program when it started back in the 80s. Parenting duties made it impossible for him to produce wholesale quantities of goods, so he had to drop out but he juried in again last year. This year he was chosen to be a showcased artist at Southern Artistry. His work is known throughout the country and in 1993, he contributed a tiny wood spoon to the White House Christmas tree. That was in those awful prosperous Clinton years, theme was “The Year of the American Craft” and the tree featured hand-crafted ornaments from all states, territories, and possessions (who says we’re not an empire?).

We were sent a souvenir photo, which I share here in the spirit of the season.

T. R. makes gorgeous turned ornaments now, of which I regret to say there is only one sample on his web page at the moment. This web is a work in very slow progress. You can also see a few here on our considerably less over-decorated avacado plant that stands us in stead of a pine. You can see also a representative sampling of his distinctive spoons here.

The other artisans at the Keeneland Fair will be just as skilled. If you want to find some beautiful distinctive gifts and are tired of the hurly-burly of the malls, why not give Keeneland a shot.

Hours are 10:00 AM - 6:00 5:00 PM Saturday and Sunday 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM.

I’m knocking my head against some code today, trying to get a page designed.

Meanwhile, you can amuse yourself playing Bloxorz at The Frown.

Or, if you’re a Tetris fan, try Stack the Cats. And that can count as my cat blog for the week.

Thanks to Morgan Williams for the link.

and what defines a Democrat in Kentucky from today’s Lexington Herald-Leader:

But, despite the grumbling of some rank-and-file lawmakers, Democrats said, they don’t plan to remove Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, as chairman of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee, where he has defended the coal industry and stopped environmental reforms for years.

Gooch, 56, and his brother own West Kentucky Steel Construction Co., which sells mining equipment to Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and other coal companies.

Gooch, who consistently wins re-election in his district with about 75 percent of the vote, has taken at least $11,750 in coal-related donations for his modest campaigns since 1998.

Environmentalists said Gooch habitually blocks their attempts to limit destruction caused by coal mining, refusing to hear bills that would establish waterway protections or restrict mountaintop removal mining. In fairness, they added, Gooch is only the latest coal-connected chairman chosen and supported by House Democratic leaders to head the environmental committee.

The committee’s current Democratic vice chairman, Keith Hall of Phelps, also owns a business tied to coal, Benetech Mining Materials.

“Historically, that committee has been chaired by individuals who have strong ties to the coal industry,” said Tom FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council. “The coal industry prefers to have an ally in charge of that committee, and the House leadership does what it can to appease them.”

To give the Dems their due, coal pulls a lot of purse-strings in Kentucky, provide a lot of jobs in a state that is job hungry.

I spent last week-end on retreat with the Green River Writers at the Kavanaugh Life Enrichment Center in Oldham County. Here is some of what I saw there. It was a lovely November weekend, a little overcast sometimes, a bit nippy, but the place was still gloriously lovely. There were writers everywhere, walking, taking photos, scribbling away at the picnic tables.

may be the key to why it is I’m so disenchanted with computer animation (see below).

As defined by Stephen Hunter in his Washington Post review of Beowulf:

In “Beowulf,” director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called “motion capture” to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn’t mastered and what the technique can’t do is this: emotion capture.

The nuance of the dilated nostril, the licked lip, the involuntary swallow, the unwilled tear — all gone. Is that a loss? Hard to say.

What you are seeing is the process by which actors’ movements are recorded electronically, transformed into imagery, then inserted into a meticulously realized, computer-generated Dark Ages (it’s A.D. 506 on the screen). Zemeckis, of course, has used this technology before in “The Polar Express.”

This is the increasing reality of movies, this is the ‘wulf that’s at the door. Old dinosaurs like me can rant about pointy-headed issues like the diminishment of performance, the absence of chemistry in the cast (can electrons have chemistry? wouldn’t they have valence?), but this is the future and it smirks.

Neil Gaiman or no, I have no intention of seeing this movie. I’ll stick with Seamus Heaney’s 1999 translation. To quote Manohla Dargis in the NYTimes:

For the poet Seamus Heaney, whose gorgeous translation of the poem became an unexpected best seller after it was published in 1999, Grendel “comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark.” The reader’s imagination, of course, has long been one of the banes of cinema.

Dargis doesn’t care much for performance capture either:

Neither wholly animation nor live action, it is a sophisticated visual technique, and true believers see it as the future of movies, though really the most interesting thing about it is that it’s not intrinsically interesting.

To be honest, I don’t yet see the point of performance capture, particularly given how ugly it renders realistic-looking human forms. Although the human faces and especially the eyes in “Beowulf” look somewhat less creepy than they did in “The Polar Express,” Mr. Zemeckis’s first experiment with performance capture, they still have neither the spark of true life nor that of an artist’s unfettered imagination. The face of Mr. Hopkins’s king resembles the actor’s in broad outline, in the shape and curve of his physiognomy. But it has none of the minute trembling and shuddering that define and enliven — actually animate — the discrete spaces separating the nose, eyes and mouth. You see the cladding but not the soul.

Although the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home this morning, the temperature is frosty and the gloomy rain of the last two days have just put me in the mood to steal this fragment of a Thomas Hood poem, November, from Lance Mannion.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member–
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

If you have any interest in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, you might want to check out Lance’s post on the subject of My dark materials.

The only person in my family, as far as I know, who has read Pullman is my son, who is a fantasy writer himself and who finds Pullman well-nigh unreadable. As does Mannion, apparently. For myself, all I know is what I see in the trailers of the upcoming movie adaption of The Golden Compass, and they lead me to believe that I won’t be able to tolerate the computer animation.

Still the recent kerfluffle over Pullman’s Dark Material has aroused my curiosity somewhat and, if you’re interested at all, you may find Mannion’s take refreshing. Here’s just a taste:

The movie adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first in the His Dark Materials series, is coming out in time for Christmas and the fake Catholics of the Catholic League are thrilled because it gives them a chance to rant and rail against another secularist assault on religion and to feel discriminated against and persecuted while they go about the business of bullying folks into shutting up and accepting the League’s Right Wing authoritarian heresies.

It’s probably people like Bill Donohue that Pullman had in mind when he made God the villain of his novels.

Before we go any further, a note to any members of the Media who may be reading. The Catholic League is not a religious group, it is not a Catholic group, it is a political pressure group pushing a reactionary political agenda that has virtually nothing to do with the teachings of the Catholic Church. If you feel you need a Catholic to give you a good quote for your story, the Church has people on their payroll who’ll be glad to talk to you, and none of them is Bill Donohue.

Alternately, you can call up the theology departments at one of the many Catholic colleges and universites and ask somebody there to explain things to you.

You don’t need Donohue and his minions for anything.

But that’s just an appetizer. You need to read the whole post to get to the main course.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a fantasy novel that deals with man’s need for a bit of the dark side and that isn’t “muddy with failed attempts at lyricism,” I recommend Hope Mirrlee’s Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926. But I must point out that Lud-in-the-Mist is adult fantasy, so the comparison perhaps isn’t fair. Still, I have to wonder why it is that those who write these young adult fantasies are such poor stylists.

Here’s one from John Cheves at Pol Watchers:

FRANKFORT — Global warming is a myth concocted by former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, Hollywood and the news media, Kentucky lawmakers were told yesterday.

The interim joint Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to dispute the idea that the Earth is warming, at least in part because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere produced by industrial activity.

Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to testify.

“You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times,” said Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats’ chief environmental strategist. “We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from Hollywood.”

Neither of Gooch’s invited panelists was a scientist.

So, Al Gore may be screaming like Chicken Little but Jim Gooch seems determined to bury the collective heads of our Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in the sand.

One of the speakers, the Viscount Monckton (!), in addition to denying global warming, recommends that people with HIV and AIDS be locked up for life. Gooch really does seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Chives says:

Survey USA reported in September that 69 percent of Kentuckians believe in global warming.

I love that “believe in.” As though it were the difference between being a Baptist or a Methodist.

As one of the commenters at Pol Watchers points out, my tax dollars paid for this nonsense.

P.S. Clean coal is sponsoring tonight’s Democratic presidential debate.

Blackwater: bulging biceps fueled by ideological purity, from Floyd J. McKay in the Seattle Times (via Informed Comment):

BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America’s war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.

Military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater are the brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A major goal of Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration was to privatize as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient. He commissioned a study by Halliburton, which predictably liked the idea and wound up as America’s largest military contractor. Cheney was hired as Halliburton’s chief officer, awaiting the return of a Republican administration.

When that occurred, Cheney and Rumsfeld enthusiastically promoted privatization, and went so far as to include private contractors in the “Total Force” of the American military, standing never before given to contractors.

…

Blackwater is the private empire of billionaire Erik Prince, a major Republican fundraiser and bankroller of several fundamentalist Christian organizations. His private army employs some 2,300 active gunners and boasts a register of 21,000 ready to serve on call. He has the largest privately held arsenal in the country and the expertise and firepower to bring down a small country.

In 2006, Prince expanded internationally, forming a new subsidiary in Barbados, outside American taxes and regulation, to train foreign forces, often funded by American military aid. Elite Blackwater soldiers have conducted secretive “black jobs” for the CIA or other spy agencies.

…

Blackwater’s lawyers assert it cannot be sued because it is part of the “Total Force.”

…

In Prince, the Republicans’ radical Christian base is wed to the war-machine base, the one providing votes and manpower, the other providing campaign funds.

The resulting combination is one of rigid ideology and eagerness to solve any problem with overwhelming force.

Now let’s see — what’s the definition of a terrorist organization? Doesn’t it have something to do with being an army without a state? an army outside the law? an army espousing some fundamentalist cause?

Read all of this excellent article.