Sherry Chandler

Burmese poet held

Via Have Coffee Will Write, the BBC News has this item:

The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country’s military leader.

Poet Saw Wai’s work – titled February the Fourteenth – was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal.

Taken together, the first words of each line read: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.”

Dissidents in Burma have used similar techniques before to get their messages past government censors.

At first sight it appeared to be a straightforward love poem looking ahead to Valentine’s Day, but eagle-eyed readers soon noticed what the Burmese government censors had missed.

It was not long before the authorities became aware of the poem and Saw Wai was arrested.

It is not clear what will happen to him now.

Another one bites the dust

Thanks to Rebecca Clayton at Pocahontas County Fare for finding out that another creationist museum seems to have financial troubles:

DALLAS, Texas (AP) — A Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction.

The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder.

“If it sells, well, then we can come another day,” Joe Taylor said. “This is very important to our continuing.”

Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000. The artifact discovered in La Grange in 2004 is believed to be the largest of its kind, Heritage spokesman David Herskowitz said….

Claims on the museum’s Web site include that Noah took dinosaurs aboard his ark….”We’ve struggled so long here just to keep this thing going,” Taylor said. “We’re kind of losing interest. You can just tread water for so long.”

As Rebecca said, it’s a case of natural selection. No ark in sight to rescue these drowners.

Though I hate to think of a mastadon head going on the auction block to keep this place open.

The unwisdom of age

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.

—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, (Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1922)

Freedom and power

There is much that you should see on the blog called No Caption Needed, including this post called Joy and Grief in Kenya. Not fair of me to steal the photos. Go look at them. But it is not only the photos but also the commentary¹ that clutch at my heart with a cold fist:

Instead of the usual backdrop of the demonstration along an otherwise busy city street, here we see real wreakage amidst what otherwise was already a slum. And instead of the stock characters of earnest citizens and bullying cops, or outraged citizens and cautious cops, or mob frenzy and state terror, or any other political scenario, here we see a man exulting in the sheer ecstasy of destruction. An obscene truth is being revealed: what is violence and burning and horror to some is for others an experience of raw freedom as it can be perversely but powerfully known only through violent revenge and ruin. The sound track should be the Ode to Joy.

We�re not supposed to see that truth, and many others appear once that Pandora�s box is opened. Violence persists not only because so many are denied so much by so few, but also because it remains the best shot some have at feeling powerful.

…

The joy in the first photo comes from hate. Hate is something harder, deeper, less changeable, and far more dangerous than other emotions. It also has no place in politics. Hate is in fact one border of the political: You can struggle to live with others, even to dominate them, or you can hate and kill them. Likewise, hate is felt toward groups, while anger is felt toward individuals (see Aristotle�s Rhetoric, 1382a). By seeing the senseless loss created by an individual laying dead on the street, the second photo returns us to a world of persons who deserve justice or protection but not violence.

Grief may be a deeply political emotion. Even though no one can reach the depths of pain felt by the individual stricken with grief, it calls forth empathy and can move us all to cross the borders of our estrangement from one another. It was grief, not killing or victory or glory that finally brought Achilles out of his rage against the Trojans to a moment of decency. Perhaps the recognition of grief can remind us that violence is not just another means for political expression. It is how we end up dancing in Hell.

We really must find ways to get around the big media, the packaged messages, the political campaigns, and to look directly at what is happening to our brothers in the world. We must find grief, even anger, but not blind hatred.

See also Kissing War and Tasting Victory, the slideshow Artists Against the War, and also the slideshow On the Road.

The whole idea of �No Caption Needed� is a lie.
Barthes, to Sontag, to Virilio� before and beyond.
All images conjure words and vice versa� whether we want it or not.
Interpretation is all too cheap and easy�
Rather it is the reflexive production of production�
read: Cameras are guns.
But then, what the hell do I know?

Hot and cold

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

— E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1922)

Robert Burns, his birthday

And so The Great Haggis Hunt of 2007/2008 ends at 3:00 p.m. local time.

To A Mouse

WEE, sleekit, cow�rin, tim�rous beastie,
O, what a panic�s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
                Wi� bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an� chase thee,
                Wi� murd�ring pattle!

I�m truly sorry man�s dominion,
Has broken nature�s social union,
An� justifies that ill opinion,
                Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
                An� fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
                �S a sma� request;
I�ll get a blessin wi� the lave,
                An� never miss�t!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It�s silly wa�s the win�s are strewin!
An� naething, now, to big a new ane,
                O� foggage green!
An� bleak December�s winds ensuin,
                Baith snell an� keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an� waste,
An� weary winter comin fast,
An� cozie here, beneath the blast,
                Thou thought to dwell�
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
                Out thro� thy cell.

That wee bit heap o� leaves an� stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou�s turn�d out, for a� thy trouble,
                But house or hald,
To thole the winter�s sleety dribble,
                An� cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o� mice an� men
                Gang aft agley,
An�lea�e us nought but grief an� pain,
                For promis�d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar�d wi� me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e�e.
                On prospects drear!
An� forward, tho� I canna see,
                I guess an� fear!

— Robert Burns, text from Poems and Songs. Vol. VI. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909�14; Bartleby.com, 2001.

Gray cat

Grey cat … strolls around the bed at night, choosing her favoured place, not under the sheet now, or on my shoulder, or on my shoulder, but in the angle behind the knees, or against the curve of the feet. Grey cat licks my face, delicately, looks briefly out of the window at the night, acknowledging tree, moon, stars, winds, or the amours of other cats from which she is now infinitely removed, then settles down. In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches with her paw. I open my eyes, say I don’t want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which she bounds off my bed and streaks downstairs—to have the back door opened if it is winter, to be fed if it is summer.

— from Doris Lessing, Particularly Cats …and Rufus (Knopf, 1991)