Sherry Chandler

This fellow, also known as Melanerpes carolinus, shows up at our suet feeder every winter and every winter I have to look up his name. As this nice photo from Wikipedia will show, he is not all that obviously red-bellied, though the crown of the head is quite strikingly scarlet.

Anyway, trying to relocate him today, I happened on this video at Photobucket and couldn’t resist sharing it.

The “he” I’m using here is generic. The particular woodpecker in this video is not the one that comes to our feeder.

Finishing Line Press has announced their tenth annual New Women’s Voices chapbook competition. Deadline is February 15. Click here for guidelines.

The Heartland Review has announced its third annual short-short fiction contest. Deadline is January 1. Click here for guidelines.

Photo by Tom C. Williams

I got 205 spam comments for Christmas, offering drugs and porn. I expect to get hundreds more before the day is out. Gives you some idea how lonely Christmas must be for many people.

If you are looking for color and a smile, go work Santa’s Jigsaw.

And whisper a prayer for peace, mercy, and a small measure of prosperity for all.

of the poster for Taxi to the Dark Side, from No Caption Needed:

There are two sides to the normalization of violence in the US. On the one hand, fictional protrayals of beatings, rape, torture, and murder are standard fare in the culture of popular entertainment (TV, film, video games). The viewing public is constantly rewarded for suspending disbelief and ethical revulsion about the conduct of violence; just play along and you get all the pleasures of the show. On the other hand, actual violence being perpetrated by the government is minimized, sanitized, or outright censored. Let it not be said that the MPAA does anything in half measures.

Here’s the poster in question:

According to Variety:

The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay.

ThinkFilm opens the pic, which is on the Oscar shortlist of 15 docs, on Jan. 11.

The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them.

An MPAA spokesman said: “We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration.”

Oh, how precious we hold the children. Unless they’re like this little boy:

The photo, from AP/Jean-Marc Bouju, is also featured at No Caption Needed.

Go and read that post and the Variety article about the MPAA’s history of censoring these images of hooded prisoners.

From the NYTimes:

This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the season of spirited shopdropping.

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.

Devious is sort of an unfriendly word. Audacious might be better.

I know about shopdropping from the point of view of poets, who sometimes slip copies of their books into bookstores that otherwise refuse to stock unknown poets, or anybody much later than Walt Whitman. (And it is not, as the article states, just “self-published” poets who do this.) But this article highlights a wide range of strategic product placement.

One of the first reports of shopdropping was in 1989, when a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization sought to make a point about sexism in children’s toys by swapping the voice hardware of Barbie dolls with those in GI Joe figures before putting the dolls back on store shelves.

…

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down, plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said “‘I got to get a dress for Cindy, get a stereo for Uncle John, go buy canned goods for the charity drive and get back home.’”

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

“What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor,” he said, pausing to add, “That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?”

If you’re an independent artist, you might find some marketing tips:

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

“Everyone else is pushing their product, so why shouldn’t we?” said Jeff Eyrich, a producer for several independent bands, who puts stacks of his bands’ CDs — marked “free” — on music racks at Starbucks whenever the cashiers look away.

…

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising their own works in books on similar topics.

I sort of like that one. A nice bookmark is a bit of a gift and always handy. I tend to use whatever comes to hand — a bit of junk mail, a cash register slip. I would be pleased enough to find a bookmark provided for me. Though I’d be inclined to think the store put it there.

As for those shopdropped poetry collections, let me applaud Mac’s Backs:

At Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.

Mac’s Backs is a very poet-friendly independent book store. I’ve read there myself, with help from Jeff Hess. If you ever find yourself in Cleveland Heights, drop in and spend freely.

Letters to the World, edited Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, Lesley Wheeler, is an anthology of poetry by members of the Wom-po (Women’s Poetry) Listserv (founded by Annie Finch). The anthology, which includes work from 258 poets from New Zealand to New York, was created entirely through internet collaboration. A volunteer editorial team shaped the project in cyberspace, from soliciting contributions to editing, arranging, proofreading, and finalizing the manuscript.

Several local poets are included including me, Joanie DiMartino, Ann Lederer, and Margaret Ricketts.

Available at Red Hen Press for a discounted price until January 1.

If any of you plan to go to AWP, the launch party for the book will be held at the Bowery Club on February 2, 6-8 p.m. It will also be the subject of an AWP panel discussion with Anne Hostetler, Annie Finch, Lesley Wheeler, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Kate
Gale, Rosemary Starace

takes top honors as the most memorable quote of 2007. I don’t recall why Alberto Gonzales only came in at #5.

To see the rest of Yale’s Top Ten Quotes for 2007, follow the link.

I’m a little late with this posting — other items took precedence — but that’s worked out all right because that means I can also point you to Juan Cole’s defense of Caitlin Upton. Caitlin was a contestant from South Carolina in the Miss Teen USA pageant. Her inarticulate answer to the question why do you think one fifth of American teens can’t locate the USA on a map came in at #2:

Miss Teen South Carolina: “I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and…I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., err, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our…

Says Juan:

Although the answer was painful to watch just because Ms. Upton was so obviously stricken at that moment with stage fright, I actually think her answer had some merit.

First of all, I liked her diction, “U.S. Americans.” After all, everyone in North and South America could legitimately be called an “American”. That we in the United States have appropriated this descriptor for ourselves is quite unfair to Canadians, Mexicans and Argentineans, e.g.

Second, her answer about why one fifth of Americans cannot find the U.S.A. on a map is almost certainly quite correct. It is because they don’t have maps in their homes and have not been taught to read them. The bottom fifth of Americans in income goes to under-funded schools, and many of them are functionally illiterate. The rich in the US do not bear their fair share of education costs, because the main unit for school taxation is the local district. Since poor people can’t afford to live in wealthy suburbs, and congregate together in poor districts, their schools are starved of money.

Third, although she did not state it very eloquently, she was correct to point out that Americans do not only need to find the United States on the map. They need to know where South Africa and Iraq are, as well. In fact, that she chose those two is interesting. One, South Africa, is an example of fairly successful movement from an authoritarian state dominated by one ethnicity to a multicultural form of democracy. The other, Iraq, is also making a transition from authoritarianism and domination by a single ethnicity (the Sunni Arabs of Saddam Hussein), but its passage to multiculturalism and parliamentary rule has been violent and turbulent. The difference is South Africa’s attention to national reconciliation and also that South Africa’s movement was indigenous rather than imposed from the outside.

…

Some of the response to her answer surely derives from simple bigotry. She is a southerner, a blonde, and a beauty queen. But a southern accent is not, as most northerners mistakenly believe, a sign of ignorance.

Juan also includes a YouTube video of Caitlin Upton on the Today show that proves her to be bright, articulate, and compassionate.

Here’s a sample poem from Kelly’s forthcoming book, which will be called Casting Shadows:

Judgment Day

A tired man rests at the foot of his grave
To watch as the stone tracks the dying sun’s rays
And his back is arched and his tongue is dried as he shouts up to the sky

But a fiend in a sin shall exist in his rage
To ponder the pain of the choices he’s made
Now they’ve clipped his wings and blinded his eyes as he comes into the night

Ah the birds of July, he recalls, in the oaks
And the dance of the girls on the flowering slopes
And the words as they leapt up off the yellowing page
Now fading as they die

A feeble man lies at the end of his grave
On the dirt that he plied with a rusting spade
And he jingles his chains in the mists of the night as he prays up to the sky

But a fiend in a sin shall persist in his hate
And his judgment will come on decisions made
Now they’ve broken his wings and blistered his eyes as he welcomes in the night

Ah the birds of July, he recalls, in the oaks
And the dance of the girls on the flowering slopes
And the words as they leapt up off the yellowing page
Now fading as they die

At noon today, according to NOAA, the sun will reach its southernmost point in the northern hemosphere. After today, days will begin to get longer and the light will return. The sun will come back as it always has. And hotter than ever no doubt.

I feel as though our country has been travelling into a great darkness these last seven years, but now as another son has reached his lowest point, I think I begin to see a bit of light creeping in through the crevices.

One of those rays of sunshine was the e-mail I found in my in-box from Kelly Allen Vinal.

If you’ve been reading here a while, you may remember that Kelly and I met when we both read podcasts for Safe Digression. (You can listen to Kelly’s here and mine here.) That was in March of 2005.

In June of 2005, Kelly was in Balad in the infamous Mortaritaville. In July, he sent me the photo that I reproduce again here.

I’ve heard very little of him since then. Somehow I think I heard that he’d come back from Iraq and had been redeployed to Afghanistan but I had no details. So I am very pleased to know not only that he has survived his “latest deployment to Afghanistan” but that he has a new poetry collection forthcoming from LLumina Press.

The Roman poet Horace claimed that he fled from Battle of Phillippi (Cassius against Caesar) shielded from enemy eyes by a cloud raised by Mercury, the famous running messenger of the gods. His friend Pompeius Varus, to whom he addressed his Ode VII, was not so fortunate:

… Thee the reciprocating sea, with his tempestuous waves, bore back again to war. Wherefore render to Jupiter the offering that is due, and deposit your limbs, wearied with a tedious war, under my laurel, and spare not the casks reserved for you. Fill up the polished bowls with care-dispelling Massic: pour out the perfumed ointments from the capacious shells. Who takes care to quickly weave the chaplets of fresh parsely or myrtle? Whom shall the Venus pronounce to be master of the revel? In wild carouse I will become frantic as the Bacchanalians. ‘Tis delightful to me to play the madman, on the reception of my friends.

Like Horace, I will gladly play to fool on this solstice to welcome home my friend “wearied with a tedious war.” May Kelly live to a peaceful, laurel-crowned old age, as did Horace.

And for you, my readers, family, and friends, however you celebrate the solstice, I will raise a generous libation to the hope that the darkness may fade from your lives and the sun come back one more time.

from the NYTimes

Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.

When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish.

…

But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses.

…

In October, a health inspector fined Mr. Martinez $300 and warned him that if Junior was still there by the time of the next inspection he would be fined $2,000.

“He wants me to get rid of the cat, but the rats will take over if I do,” Mr. Martinez said. “I need the cat, and the cat needs a home.”

See also the blog Working Class Cats.

And this YouTube video that illustrates why cats are worth the fines: