Sherry Chandler

HOW like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near

— William Shakespeare (text from The Oxford Shakespeare via Bartleby)

Happy New Year to you all and may our summer and his pleasures return.

David Payne, “Writing on Writing,” in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American, a column entitled “Carrying America’s Shadow:”

The first hint of an explanation for the marginalization of Southern writers appeared for me in the work of Barbara C. Ewell and Pamela Glenn Menke, feminist scholars of Southern lit. In their introduction to Southern Local Color, a volume of nineteenth-century short stories, they apply feminist and postcolonial theory, which holds women as “Other” to men, and colonized people as “Other” to their colonizers. Ewell and Menke point out that after the Civil War, the Northeast established itself as the center of American literary and cultural production (publishing houses, magazines, newspapers), as well as of political and economic power (Wall Street, etc.). As a result, the North took on the role of “Self” in America’s collective psyche; Northerners became the “we.” The South, by consequence of its defeat, became the “Other”—Southerners, the “they.”

Farfetched? Then ask yourself why those Boston and New York accents—which sound as “colorful” to Southerners as ours do up North—rate standard orthography, while our speech is rendered as phonetically spelled dialect.

Self and Other in the outward and political realm correspond to ego and shadow in the inward and psychological one, which brings me to my hypothesis—the bias against Southern writers is an example of a lingering Northern bias against the South itself, which has historically played the role of shadow in America’s collective psyche.

Long ago, C. Vann Woodward said that American character was formed on the basis of three factors: a national pattern of material abundance, the tradition of success, and a conviction of innocence. The South—an impoverished land that had suffered a crushing defeat at arms, and had committed, in slavery, one of history’s greatest, most protracted crimes—differed on all counts.

The South presented—and presents—a counternarrative that contradicts the official story America likes to tell the world—and tell itself—about its righteous exceptionalism among nations. For Americans, Woodward said—and he meant Northerners—history was something that happened someplace else, to someone else.

But we’re a “someone else” it happened to, the South a “someplace else” where history occurred.

The shadow, psychologists tell us, is the repository of what we hate and fear as well as of urges difficult to reconcile with self-regard. Thrusting these down into the unconscious, we then project them outward onto others.

This argument gets into some dangerous territory for me because it feeds into a certain defensiveness I feel as a cultural Southerner, a person whose forefathers fought on the wrong side of the Civil War. Nevertheless, I don’t think Southern defensiveness invalidates the argument.

And even though arguments that the North got rich from slavery, too, smack of rationalization for inescapable sin, the fact remains that it is easier to blame the South for all the national sins than to face up to the fact that the country was built on slavery and genocide.

The Political South, of course, never misses an opportunity to live up to its reputation, and yet the South is not monolithic. It’s as culturally diverse as any other area of the nation, with as many shades of opinion and as many shades of prejudice.

This argument seems to me to speak to Ritwik Banerjee’s comment at Windows Toward the World that those who judge never learn.

If I remember my Jungian psychology, the Shadow is not only a source of darkness, but also of creativity. It is instinctive, intuitive, and empathetic.

Payne goes on to argue that it is not the South’s racism that makes it suspect but its very blackness. The relationship of blacks and whites in the South has been exploitive but it has also been symbiotic. No other region is so influenced by African-American culture in language, diet, music, and literature. And so you have layers and layers of racism in the nation.

It seems we’re always ready to adopt the culture while exploiting the members of that culture.

It’s very controversial and complicated territory but so the truth often is.

Pocahontas County Fare points the way to this ZAP Reader

a web based speed reading program that will change the way you read on your computer. Current beta testers report reading twice as much in half the time–that’s a 300% increase in reading speed, without any loss in comprehension! There is nothing to install, it works with most popular browsers, and it’s totally free!

So you plug in the text you want to read, or an URL, and it feeds the text back to you one large-type word at a time at a reading speed of 300 words per minute. I just discovered that you can reduce the speed as low as 25 wpm and increase it but I don’t know how fast. I got tired and quit clicking at 1,050 wpm.)

The speed wasn’t a problem but I felt a bit like a harried robot trying to read the text. Impossible for the eye to skim or pick up a whole phrase.

Also I discovered that, if you plug in a blog URL, it’ll read the left sidebar first. Better to cut and paste.

However, as Rebecca points out, it might be a solution to some of the web sites that use odd font faces or blue text on a black background or some such eye straining nonsense.

Plug-ins are available for WordPress blogs, as well as Blogger & Typepad, but I think I’ll wait a while on installing it.

David Payne, “Writing on Writing,” in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American, a column entitled “Carrying America’s Shadow:”

While it’s true that a half-century ago a galaxy of celebrated Southern writers—Capote, Welty, Faulkner, Williams, Harper Lee, and others—enjoyed cachet in the North; and though once a generation or so along comes a Gone With the Wind or a Cold Mountain, the fate of a writer like Lee Smith remains more typical. Author of the masterly Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith has a large, devoted audience in the Southeast, yet after a dozen novels, her reputation and readership continue to plummet north of Washington, D.C.

Smith’s latest book sets the pattern: Upon its publication in 2006, On Agate Hill, a novel situated in and around Hillsborough, North Carolina, shot to No. 1 on the Southern Independent Bookseller Alliance (SIBA) bestseller list and remained there for weeks. During that time, it never appeared on any of the seven other regional lists around the country. By contrast, Anna Quindlen’s concurrently published Rise and Shine, with a Bronx setting, appeared throughout its run in high positions on all eight lists, including SIBA. Both trajectories are typical for established writers from their respective regions: that is, Southern writers are “regional”; Norther writers are “national.” And what’s true of Smith and Quindlen today was also true of Faulkner and Hemingway in their primes.

Why?

Is human experience in the South a specialized and limited affair, relevant only to other Southerners, while life in the Bronx is “universal” and relevant to all, including Southerners? And, if not, what accounts for the confinement of Southern writers to the region?

There may be some conflict of interest in Mr. Payne’s picking Lee Smith as the exemplary novelist for his column. Smith’s husband, Hal Crowther, is also a contributing columnist to The Oxford American. However, I thoroughly agree that Smith is one of the best novelists writing in the United States today and if you haven’t read Fair and Tender Ladies then you’ve missed out.

It also may be true that Smith, along with Ron Rash (another neglected writer mentioned in this column), is operating under the double whammy of being not just Southern, but Southern Appalachian. We all know what exotic inbred creatures dwell in the southern mountains.

Possibly also, compared to a Southern novelist like Cormac McCarthy, Smith suffers from writing of women’s issues—the home and hearth. You’ll find no shoot-outs in Smith’s world.

Besides, as Payne points out, in order to achieve his popularity, McCarthy had to leave the South and begin writing Westerns. Maybe Texas is the one Southern state everybody in the country can identify with?

To return to the Southeast in The Road, McCarthy had to create an area so burnt-out as to make Sherman’s scorched-earth March to the Sea look like a weenie-roast.

Still, it’s an interesting question: why is the Bronx considered more normative for the United States than Hillsborough?

From The Human Flower Project:

Clement A. Miles, an authority on English Christmas customs, has declared in an ominous passive voice, “Holly is hated by witches.”

Name one! We have never met a witch, or anyone else, who hated holly, certainly not at this time of year. Ilex is the season’s glory: leaves that shine, berries that cheer, height that humbles. The prickle of holly’s leaf at the season of Christ’s birth portends the thorns of Holy Week.

With greater equanimity elsewhere, Miles also writes: “In some old English Christmas carols holly and ivy are put into a curious antagonism, apparently connected with a contest of the sexes. Holly is the men’s plant, ivy the women’s, and the carols are debates as to the respective merits of each. Possibly some sort of rude drama may once have been performed.” There seems loads of drama still, and plenty of rudeness to go around in this competition - we’d call it a draw.

Julie also provides a link to this rendition of “The Holly and the Ivy” by the King’s Chapel Boys Choir (listen at YouTube):

Here is an example of a lesser known carol (15th century) from Miles’s publication Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912):

“Holly and Ivy made a great party,
Who should have the mastery,
In landës where they go.

Then spoke Holly, ‘I am free and jolly,
I will have the mastery,
In landës where we go.’

Then spake Ivy, ‘I am lov’d and prov’d,
And I will have the mastery,
In landës where we go.’

Then spake Holly, and set him down on his knee,
‘I pray thee, gentle Ivy,
Say me no villainy,
In landës where we go.’”

Now that Christmas Day is behind us and New Year’s Eve is practically over, you might be looking ahead to plan your Valentine’s Day festivities.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth would like you to consider signing up for their third annual I Love the Mountains Day rally in Frankfort.

For the last two years, KFTC brought hundreds of people to Frankfort on Valentine’s Day to celebrate our love of the mountains and lobby in support of legislation to stop the dumping of mining wastes into streams (the Stream Saver Bill). On Valentine’s Day 2008, Thursday February 14, we hope to take the unprecedented momentum we have against mountaintop removal and bring 1,000 people out to push legislators to do the right thing and pass this legislation. We hope to have an exciting day of lobbying, music, and action.

What is Kentuckians for the Commonwealth:

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth is a statewide citizens organization working for a new balance of power and a just society. As we work together we build our strength, individually and as a group, and we find solutions to real life problems. We use direct action to challenge—and change—unfair political, economic and social systems. Our membership is open to all people who are committed to equality, democracy and non-violent change

The link will take you to a sign up page.

Lance Mannion has a good idea:

I’m one of those I think all too rare people who like Scrooge’s nephew Fred is determined to keep their Christmas humor to the last, the last being the stroke of midnight on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, also known as Little Christmas or, if you’re Greek Orthodox or Avedon Carol, Christmas.

There are Twelve Days of Christmas plus one and I wish that people would celebrate them all. I try to, which is why you’ll hear me disconcerting people all this weekend when we’re visiting the relatives at Mom and Pop Mannion’s homestead by wishing them all a Merry Christmas and why I’ve been fitfully and so far ineffectively trying to make Twelfth Night parties a Mannion family tradition.

I think it’s a crying shame that most people let the retailers determine their Christmas season for them and not the Church calender and that we’re all expected to be done with the best of all the holidays when the last present is opened on December 25 at which point it’s time to get ready for the worst of all holidays, New Year’s Eve, the annual national rubbing it in of too many people’s desperate loneliness.

Though I am spiritually more a Baptist than a Catholic, I’m all for this extended Christmas if only because I just can’t get in the Christmas spirit until about December 24 anyway. And I hate to tell the department store people this, but those canned carols don’t help in the least.

I know people who do their Christmas shopping in October but that just strikes me as strange. (Though when they do it at a Guild Fair, I love them for it.)

I certainly don’t want to start rushing for Christmas on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I’d like a little time to digest my turkey and ruminate, thank you.

But a slow long Christmas season might give me time to do something besides fret at all the things I’m not doing.

But then I’m an introvert and we in the United States have made of Christmas such an extroverted season.

While on the subject of the Christmas spirit, I’d also like to draw your attention to a fine Henri Nouwen quote that Helen Losse is featured yesterday:

We are not sent to the world to judge, to condemn, to evaluate, to classify, or to label. When we walk around as if we have to make up our mind about people and tell them what is wrong with them and how they should change, we will only create more division. Jesus says it clearly: “Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate. Do not judge; … do not condemn; … forgive” (Luke 6:36-37).

In a world that constantly asks us to make up our minds about other people, a nonjudgmental presence seems nearly impossible. But it is one of the most beautiful fruits of a deep spiritual life and will be easily recognized by those who long for reconciliation.

And a corollary from one of her commenters, Ritwik Bannerjee:

Those who judge never learn, They are as blind when they leave as they were when they were born.

I’m not sure that we can ever be completely free of judgment but these thoughts resonate with me.

I have long since ceased to hope for justice, that is so often confused with revenge. But mercy is still possible.

“You strike me as a cat of parts,” says this young man when I’m arrived at his window-sill. I made him a handsome genuflection, rump out, tail up, head down, to facilitate his friendly chuck under my chin; and, as involuntary free gift, my habitual smile.

For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quiet Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains.

— Angela Carter, “Puss-in-Boots” in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Penguin, 1979)

Watch at YouTube.

And check out the resophonic ukulele.

Thanks to Donna Rhae Marder.

At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek picks the Movies that Mattered in 2007. I don’t always agree with her picks, though I agree that by and large the American public no longer watches “movies that matter.” What I want to enlarge on here, however, is this statement:

I recently met a young writer who, having decided he didn’t know as much about movies as he wanted to, put together a film course for himself via his Netflix queue, a way to work through the likes of Godard and Chaplin, Fellini and Hawks, Hitchcock and Renoir. We talked about Netflix queues not just as lists of titles but as dream outlines of the people we’d like to be — you, or I, might be a person who watched “Masculine Feminine” three times before returning it; who had every intention of getting through “Hiroshima Mon Amour” but ultimately sent it off in the pouch, unwatched; who is glad to have seen “The Passion of Joan of Arc” but also relieved at the prospect of never having to watch it again. Through movies, we collect bits of ourselves, and sometimes we reject parts of ourselves, too.

So what is the shape of my Netflix queue? Nothing, I’m glad to say, quite so earnest as a course in film history, though I do have an interest in historically significant films. It doesn’t seem to reach as far as Robert Mitchum’s fifties noir, however. In the last two years we’ve watched two highly touted Mitchum films: 1947’s Out of the Past and 1952’s Angel Face. We found both of them a little silly.

But I love Mitchum in films like Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter. Even Thunder Road.

Looking at my (our, really) rental history, I see that we’ve rented 90 films since November 29, 2005. That comes out at not quite one a week, so I suppose we don’t really qualify as cinamatophiles.

Social conscience caused us to rent some earnest documentaries like Shakespeare Behind Bars and Gunner Palace.

But mostly I think it’s a fan list: a lot of Kurosawa and Terry Gilliam, several Johnny Depp films, a bunch of Shakespeare, behind bars and otherwise. We did some comparative Hamlets, including Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead.

We went on an Erroll Flynn kick for a while. And we enjoyed old silent comedies with Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

At one time I set out to see every movie for which Ry Cooder had done the sound track, which led us to a lot of Walter Hill movies we wouldn’t ordinarily have watched. But also to Wim Winders’s Paris, Texas, which I loved.

I haven’t achieved that goal yet, though. Not all of these movies seem to be available on Netflix.

The list is maybe a little bit snobbish, as you might expect from a houseful of writers and classics scholars. But not really film buff snobbish.

Mostly we just follow our noses. One film leads to another. Like The Seven Samurai leads to The Magnificent Seven. Like Yojimbo leads to A Fistful of Dollars leads to Last Man Standing. A terrible film, that one, but we’ve made a circle back to Walter Hill.

Thus it’s all a great wheel: life, time, and my Netflix queue.