Sherry Chandler

Watch at YouTube.

I love it when Kevin Kline perches on one leg like some demented crane.

I am given to understand that Charlie Hughes celebrates his 16^th birthday today. Feliciations and many happy returns.

More sadly, it was on this date in 1992 that the poet Ruth Pitter died. Listen to a BBC interview with Ruth and her reading of “If You Came” here.

Afterthought: I just looked over at my “This Day in History” feature on the sidebar and had a moment’s frisson, thinking it must be broken. Then it clicked in. Counted in leap years, this blog has no history.

The first time I saw a cartoon of of George Herriman’s was in my High School American Lit. text. It had a few of his illustrations from the 1927-40 Don Marquis book collections of Archie and Mehitabel. The one I recall best was Mehitabel floating in the Nile in half a watermelon rind, bragging “I was Cleopatra once,” trying to show Archie up for his claim to have been a vers libre poet in an earlier incarnation. She looked a lot like Krazy Kat, which is fitting since the Kat was of indeterminate sex, changing at his/her creator’s whim. It was decades later before I could find reprints of Herriman’s greatest creation. The entire set of his Sunday pages has now been collected in a series of books, first in the early 90s by Eclipse Comics for 1916-24 strips and recently by Fantagraphics for 1925-1944 when the strip was cancelled after the death of the creator. W.R. Hearst decided that no one could equal Herriman’s genius so the strip did not continue with a ghostwriter, a first for a syndicated cartoon. Fantagraphics will go back and re-issue the earlier volumes in coming years.

* * * * * * *

Krazy Kat was never a popular success and owed its survival to the undying admiration of William Randolf Hurst. It spent a large part of its run on the Art and Theatre pages of his papers so the bulk of its Sunday pages are in black and white. It takes a lot of effort to read many of the strips since Herriman loved funny spellings, puns, Latinate inflated diction, Spanish, French, and even a bit of Greek, not to mention Yat, the argot of his native New Orleans. It was set in Kokonino Co. Arizona and featured a lot of Navaho-influenced rug and pottery designs and local topography flitting about the background. It is very like an Ode on an American Urn. It is sometimes even harder to interpret what the strips might “mean”. He was often at his best when he let the action of the strip tell the story–he spent a lot of time watching his L.A. friends make silent comedies. But he could wax lyrical and mock-epical without missing a beat.

* * * * * * *

In a typical stript Ignatz plans to throw a brick at the Kat’s head–whether he is annoyed by his optimism/joy in nature/music/ or if he saw a perceived threat/or for revenge or just because the mouse felt “evil”. Krazy Kat always experiences the coup as an act of love–a billet-doux, a transport of ecstasy, a mind-altering moment (a brick of hashish? mara huana?-she is a wistful widow resident of Kokonino Co.) or an epiphany of religious intensity. Staid Offisa Bullpup, with his billy-club, strives to prevent the assault and often locks Ignatz in jail whether or not any unlawful transaction has transpired. Much of the genius of the strip lies in endlessly clever variations of this plot. In an early strip Ignatz believes he has finally succeeded in drowning the Kat and he begins to grieve inconsolably, bawling his eyes out while he sits on a stone; but Krazy Katfish [in his debut performance] and Ignatz’ muskrat cousin have saved the Kat and shown him how to get back to dry land, so when Krazy pops out of the hollow tree behind him, Ignatz picks up his “cushion” and….

* * * * * * *

What gives the strip its enduring value is the unflinching view it gives of the contradictory nature of human relationships. Love and hate are inextricably bound in all friendships, marriages, families. It is Krazy who first notices that the Mouse family has been visited by Joe Stork and he sets out to get a stroller; he barrels it into Ignatz standing on a brick and Ignatz continues rolling along to his house where his long-suffering wife is charmed by hhe hubby’s “thoughtfulness”. I. takes the three babies to Kelly’s brickyard to start their “education” immediately.

Catullus in one short lyric marvels that he loves and hates all at once even though he can’t explain why. Kat and Mouse are asleep in an early daily strip, heads propped on a log. After Krazy wakes and chastely kisses a snoozing Ignatz on his forehead, the Mouse dreams of cupids and angels. There’s nary a brickbat in sight.

Late in 1780, a workman dug up some big molars on Robert Annan’s farm in New York. A few miles away at West Point, General George Washington was encamped with the Continental army and on one December day he and some fellow officers decided to take a sleigh ride over to get a look at this find.

As Stanley Hedeen reports it in Big Bone Lick (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2008), Annan describes the visit like this:

His Excellency General Washington came to my house to see these relicts. He told me, he had in his house a grinder which was found on the Ohio, much resembling these.

This rather terse account was enhanced by that of Washington’s aide-de-camp, Colonel David Humphreys:

he recounted that Washington had told the story of a man who had observed the extraction of molars from an incognitum skull at Big Bone Lick: “when they raised up the Head out of which they took the Teeth, …it reached up to the middle of his Face.”

I’m more than a little pained, reading these accounts, by the casual way these guys dug up these “relicts” and carted them away. Not only did they make their way back to the East Coast, so that Washington had a tooth and Jefferson had some samples, but they also found their way to England and to France. Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and these guys had no concept of evolution. Some thought the bones those of a giant human, others that it was some huge carnivore made extinct by Noah’s flood.

That the molars looked like those of a carnivore — having according to Annan

protruberances, rising in a pyramidical form, the perpendicular height of the highest of which was about an inch and one tenth

—confused these early scholars and curio collectors. Because they also found huge tusks at Big Bone Lick, many people argued that this creature was some big elephant but the molars were not at all like those of an elephant. Okay, they said, the tusks are from elephants and the molars are from hippopotami. But, said others, both elephants and hippopotami are tropical animals.

Then once upon a time the climate must have been much warmer here.

Still others thought that once they explored further on this continent, they were bound to find these giants, be they humans or elephants.

It took Thomas Jefferson to ask the obvious question:

Wherever these grinders are found, there also we find the tusks and skeleton; but no skeleton of the hippopotamus nor grinders of the elephant. It will not be said that the hippopotamus and elephant came always to the same spot, the former to deposit his grinders, and the latter his tusks and skeleton. For what became of the parts not deposited there? we must agree then that these remains belong to each other, that they are of one and the same animal, that this was not a hippopotamus, because the hippopotamus had no tusks nor such a frame, and because the grinders differ in their size as well as the number and form of their points. That it was not an elephant, I think ascertained by proofs equally decisive.

Similar skeletons having recently been found in Siberia, Jefferson posited a “cold-adapted, elephant-like animal with a circumpolar distribution,” a Wooly Mammoth.

By 1783, George Rogers Clark writes to Jefferson that all the fossil pieces that were lying around at Big Bone Lick had been carried away.

So popular was this idea of the Mammoth that it became a patriotic rallying cry for the young nation:

In contrast to the European nations that perceived their cultural legacy in the classical ruins of Greece and Rome, American nationalism soon came to be expressed by the relics of the mammoth in the New World’s unspoiled landscape …an early icon of American patriotism.

Says Avedon Carol:

…one really big reason why I regard the anti-abortion position as an anti-life position is that bans on abortion actually lead to more unwanted pregnancies and thus more abortions - but these are illegal abortions and therefore more likely to lead to the deaths of the mothers

What spurred her to say that? This post from George Mombiot in The Guardian (via Empire Burlesque)

A study published in the Lancet shows that between 1995 and 2003, the global rate of induced abortions fell from 35 per 1,000 women each year to 29. This period coincides with the rise of the “globalised secular culture” the Pope laments. When the figures are broken down, it becomes clear that, apart from the former Soviet Union, abortion is highest in conservative and religious societies. In largely secular western Europe, the average rate is 12 abortions per 1,000 women. In the more religious southern European countries, the average rate is 18. In the US, where church attendance is still higher, there are 23 abortions for every 1,000 women, the highest level in the rich world.

It still seems to me, as it always has, that the best way to reduce abortions is to teach our children, boy and girl, all we can about birth control methods, to make sure effective birth control is widely available. and to make abortions legal and safe.

Also, I think if everybody would read Avedon’s The Sideshow every day, I could just be quiet on political issues and get on with writing about stuff like poetry and culture.

For some reason, I had not seen the 1961 release of A Raisin in the Sun. I’m not sure why but I’d guess it was because I was sixteen years old when it was released, living in deep country a two-hour drive from any walk-in theater, and focussed on the burning issues that preoccupy most sixteen-year-olds.

And somehow, over the years, I did not go back and pick it up.

My loss.

The film has not dated. For good or ill, the issues it raises are still relevant. Some of them are timeless and applicable to those of any race who live in poverty.

The performances are gripping. Sidney Poitier’s is surprisingly athletic. For some reason I hadn’t thought of him as an athletic performer. In part, I think that’s because he belongs to an older generation of actors for whom physicality was more subtle.

For the most part, the film keeps to the single room set that the play uses but it really doesn’t seem like a filmed play. In part, I think this comes from the vitality of the performers and in part from smart camera work. But also, as my son observes, it is necessary that the play stay in the single room of the Chicago tenement apartment so that we can get the feel of just how cramped and hemmed in the Younger family is.

A plot synopsis here.

I have to tell you that I cried like a baby watching it, and I think there were some male eyes in the room that weren’t quite dry.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play out of some very bitter experiences in her own childhood:

“25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation’s ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German [L]uger [pistol], doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”

All of this is in the future for the play’s Younger family. The play ends with their decision to move into the all-white neighborhood in spite of the offer to buy them out and in the full knowledge that they won’t be welcomes. I am impressed by Hansberry’s ability to work out of this personal bitterness to produce a play that is at base positive and expansive.

To repeat: The function of prosody is to control attention.

— Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwest Univ Press, 1980)

In a comment to Rebecca about the Betty Boop Minnie the Moocher cartoon with Cab Calloway, I quoted this aricle

When the animation begins, Betty and her father, a Jew from Austria, perhaps based upon the Fleischers’ own father, are arguing. He insists that she must follow the family tradition and eat a traditional dish. Betty tearfully refuses. The scene is a thinly disguised parody of “The Jazz Singer.” Like Jakie Rabinowitz, Betty decides to run away. Like Jakie, she too runs toward jazz music. But, unlike Jakie, Betty runs toward the real thing. No “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” for her. With her boyfriend, the dog Bimbo, she runs off to the strains of “Minnie, the Moocher.”

…

These cartoons were the first opportunity many viewers had of seeing Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway perform. For some in the audience it was the first time they heard real jazz rather than the “jazzy” songs of Jolson.

“The Broadway Melody,” released by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer in February 1929, is another example of a movie with “jazzy” songs, though without the blackface. Advertised with the tagline “all singing, all dancing, all talking,” it was the first talkie to win the Oscar for Best Motion Picture. Although it retained certain features of the silent pictures, like flash cards to explain the scene, it included a very early technicolor sequence (now lost). It was the top grosser of its year, according to Wikipedia.

An impressive list. But beyond that, I see nothing to make me disagree with the consensus review at Rotten Tomatoes:

…interesting as an example of an early Hollywood musical, but otherwise, it’s essentially bereft of appeal for modern audiences.

It’s almost as though sound made these guys forget everything they knew about making a movie, or even putting on a show. See this review I found at Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Broadway Melody won the Academy Award for the best picture of 1929, but I am at a total loss to explain how or why. Looking at some of the other nominees—Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and In Old Arizona—all films otherwise forgotten, I am tempted to imagine that 1929 must have been a shitty, shitty year for motion pictures. I suppose I should make concessions to the fact that the coming of sound changed, from top to bottom, back to front, the way films were made, but this cannot possibly be an excuse for all of the flaws in this film. I will allow that it explains why, when actors move out of frame, the camera seems unable or unwilling to follow them, and I will allow that it explains why, even in scenes taking place in hotel rooms or backstage dressing rooms, the camera sits at an aloof remove from the action, threatening to reveal a theatrical proscenium arch at any moment. It does not explain, however, why the screenplay requires the actors to repeat the same conversations over and over or why the musical numbers feel so flat and forced. Surely centuries of theatrical tradition would have alerted the filmmakers to what would be acceptable in what is, in essence, a filmed version of a Broadway revue.

That last’s the thing. I mean, you don’t really expect a musical to have much of a plot, but this one doesn’t have much of a show either. There are some really impressive stage sets, but the chorus line is out of sync and the camera doesn’t ever seem to be in the right place. Sometimes it seems to be in the orchestra, where it cuts the dancers off at the ankle. Particularly egregious for the woman who did the tap dance en pointe. The novelty of that wore off well before her sequence ended. Even tapping en pointe should be interesting. IMDb reviewer lugonian describes her “constantly waving her arms as if she were prepared to fly away after getting the go-ahead for takeoff.” Would have been more fun if she had.

There is one extravagant production number (the one that was done in technicolor), “The Wedding of a Painted Doll,” in which some amazing stuff is going on, but the stage is chaos, more like a three-ring circus than the precision choreography of Busby Berkeley that will hit it big in just four years.

The sister act at the center of the film is pathetic (no dubbed vocals and Anita Page apparently couldn’t dance at all), and speaking of jazzy music, “Truthful Parson Brown” as performed by the guitar quartet Earl Burnett and his Baltimore Orchestra is twelve-bar blues as Presbyterian hymn.

Add to that, the leading man’s a jerk who leaves the older brunette sister for the younger taller blonde on the basis of one decidedly unsexy kiss, the sisters’ agent stutters, a schtick that seems to relieve him of the need for any funny lines, the costume designer is campier than Dom DeLuis doing “The French Mistake” (without the irony), and the sisters, whose love for each other is the real emotional center of the pic, are so busy sacrificing themselves for one another that they forget to put any tension into the plot. One evil, self-centered thought would have been welcome.

But then I never think the Oscar winner for any year is the best film. I’m seldom all that enthusiastic about any of the nominated ones.

P.S. The blackface may come in with The Duncan Sisters, famous for their performance of “Topsy and Eva in the 1920s. “The Broadway Melody” is said to be loosely based on their lives and they were originally slated to play the lead roles. “Topsy and Eva,” a musical play based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was made into a film in 1927, just missing its opportunity to be a talkie. D. W. Griffith was involved and

It has been said that Griffith’s reputation as a racist is actually based on this film and not The Birth of a Nation

Brooks Carver sends us this e-mail postcard from his farm in Illinois.

Things are more gray and muddy here in Kentucky, not nearly as picturesque.

Brooks sends news that he’s collaborating on a non-fiction book:

A friend, who is a statistics nut and an account, and I are writing a book on the history of Canton basketball and it’s absolutely chock full of old photos. It goes all the way back to 1904. The book will only be of local interest, but it’s turning out to be a lot of fun with all the interviews of old players and going through old scrapbooks. These are priceless.

from the Courier-Journal via WHAS

FRANKFORT, Ky. – Three state legislators are trying to overturn a nearly-quarter-century ban on nuclear power in Kentucky, as the nuclear industry vies for a comeback.

Two companion bills — one in the Senate, the other in the House — would remove a requirement stipulating that before any nuclear plant is built, there must be a permanent disposal facility to handle its radioactive waste.

Are we that desperate? Or is this just some cashing in on a crisis, a form of patrioteering?

This from War and Piece is also ominous:

Miriam Pemberton writes, that she has released a new study showing “that the U.S. government is spending $88 on military security for every $1 it spends to stabilize the climate. In FY 2008, as well as during the previous four years, we have allocated to climate change one percent of what we spend on the military. The report also finds that even the modest $7 billion in the federal climate change budget is badly targeted toward what ought to be low priorities, while major climate priorities get short shrift.”

Remember this old poster?

Well, it isn’t healthy for the environment either. Consider, when you consider the imbalance in spending, what all those bombing runs are doing to the air.

You can get a copy of that poster at The Peace Company.

By the way, Avedon Carol says Dennis Kucinich needs a little help financing his run for his seat in Congress, primary next week.

Afterthought: Rebecca, as she so frequently does, asks some hard questions about the pattern to which we cut our ecological conscience or what it means to be pukka sahib as an environmentalist:

What disturbs me is the distinction Ms. Bolgiano draws between her “careless” neighbors, who do manual labor, and her college buddies, people she thought were just like her. I’m reminded of Captain Brierly in Lord Jim, who is shaken to the core by the cowardly actions of an officer whom he knew as “one of us.” His first mate says of Brierly, “Neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much of ourselves.”

Perhaps she intends her readers to have mixed reactions to her essay, or perhaps my perspective is to blame. The social dynamics of the Blue Ridge are different from those here on the Allegheny Front. The Blue Ridge is more hard pressed by development, more regulated by land-use ordinances and more heavily-populated. In both places, though, people who consider themselves “environmentalists” condemn people who behave differently from them. Here, a neighbor’s well-maintained trailer is the ski chalet owner’s eyesore, but that trailer (bought second-hand and placed where the family’s old house used to be) is less wasteful of resources than the trophy-house. The loggers I know are intensely concerned with forest preservation because it is their livelihood, their home, and their recreation.

I wish Ms. Bolgiano were more friendly with her logging neighbors–she’s already had indifferent success in preaching to the choir of college-educated environmentalist believers. I wish environmentalism were just plain common sense rather than religion–it’s too easy to set religion aside when it becomes inconvenient. And I wish she hadn’t started me trying to visualize an “ecological footprint that casts a shadow even at high noon on a clear day.”

Rebecca is responding to this guest post at Via Negativa.

Oy! I’ve been meme-tapped by Mr. Lance Mannion and it turns out to be an offer I can’t refuse, because I don’t have to do anything original or clever or witty. All I have to do is look something up in a book.

I am so bad at memes.

Lance challenges me to the Meme of Page 123 and it goes thus:

• look up page 123 in the nearest book
• look for the fifth sentence
• then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

Here is why I was tapped for the meme:

because she is a poet and knows it and will therefore probably treat us to something lyrical, inspiring, and uplifting such as some verse by Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Andrew Marvell

So, imagine my despair when I realized that, by the rules, I was going to have to use Charles O. Hartman’s Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody, the book I happened to have at that moment in my hand with my finger tucked into page 97 to hold my place, where the fifth sentence is

By this simple device Williams gives the poem a plot, projecting its rhythmic shape into narrative.

Now I’m not going to say that that sentence lacks lyricism but it is a little bit like being back in English 653. At least its a fairly simple sentence. Most in this book are compound and/or complex.

Some on Lance’s list were allowed to cheat, but not I.

So it was with some trepidation that I turned to page 123 and did the math.

Lo! look what I found. Not Dickinson, Wordsworth, or Marvel, it is true, but something just as sublime if maybe not quite so lyrical: the first seven lines of fit the fifth of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton:”

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

My lucky day!

This is my year to be T. S. Eliot, you know.

I will tap

Rebecca Clayton because she’s always reading some arcane and fascinating bit of West Viirginia history and so is likely to give us something from the Historical Sketches of Pocahontas County.

Harry Rutherford, who just read Housekeeping and might give us a bit of something like Shelley: The Pursuit.

Tommy, because he’s just getting his feet wet at this blogging thing, and he’s got a decent wit, if I do say so myself.

Rabbitswift, who stumped me with his very own book meme, though at least I got Jane Eyre and finally The Metamorphosis.

Diane Lockward of Blogalicious, whose latest collection of poetry What Feeds Us may run t0 123 pages and if not, she can cheat if she’ll share. Diane shares her recent reading list here, and I’m glad to say we concur on Cormac.

And Terry of I See Invisible People, because she’s my fellow woman-blogger-to-watch-in-2008, and she’s likely to give us something from The Tinroof Blowdown — or from one of her own novels.

___

Be sure to follow this meme back to Lance’s find from Rumpole Misbehaves.

The Countess, who was allowed to cheat but didn’t and so gives us Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generational Space Ships, but provides some bonus smut. Speaking of bonus smut, Coturnix gives us sex in the monkey house, while the Vagabond Scholar goes Zen. Steve Hart builds the first superhighway in his own book, The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of American’s First Superhighway.

Meme responses from Harry, Tommy, Rabbitswift, and Blogalicious.

…and more as they appear.